Another Long Absence
I became interested in starting up my toy business after my near death experience with a brain tumor and its subsequent surgical removal. This sounds very dramatic, and it was! How close to death I really was is a matter for debate, but I was close enough.
During my recovery I pledged that in the time I had left, I would return to creativity after a decades long absence. I bought the web address Geppettosworkbench.com, I cobbled together a website, and I started the blog. As I began to feel better during the year-long recovery, regular life began to seep in through the foundation of my new resolve and I became once again distracted by the requirements of daily life.
Once in awhile I would poke my head up from the sand, visit my website, and write another blog post promising to get back to it. So far I haven't. Perhaps I never will. But I hope I will.
Now that I've moved into my new living situation (see my previous post), I will start building things again. First I'll build a tool-chest for the set of tools I will keep at my apartment. Then I'll build some furniture for the apartment. Then some Christmas presents for the Grandchildren. I will chronicle these builds. I'm sure not a single person will be interested in these things. But no matter. I will keep this as a journal nonetheless. Mostly so I can practice doing so, in case at some point I have something worth sharing one day.
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
So a couple of years have gone by since I started this blog. Though I write daily I am just not really in the habit of sharing what I write. But since I am posting this to my blog, I have decided to talk a bit about what is going on with me.
When I started the website and the blog, I was trying to goad myself into action creatively. I am an artist, I've always been an artist. As a child I always expected I would make my living as an artist. Once I left school I decided that since my needs for food, shelter, and the comforts of life were constant and immediate, and the financial rewards of painting pictures were not, then I would have to have a "job" and relegate my painting to an avocation. I figured I could do this, because my desire to paint was strong. Eventually I figured that I would begin to earn money selling paintings.
I was also interested in a lot of other creative endeavors, theatre, woodworking, puppetry, music, and the list goes on. Often my interest in these things (woodworking) was entirely artistic, designing beautiful furniture, for instance. But just as often there was a practical point to it as well, I needed a set of shelves and rather than buy one, I would make it. This type of creativity scratched the itch somewhat and the results were more quantifiable, in terms of the value of the produced objects to my life.
Eventually I turned, out of necessity, to home renovation because it allowed me to transform my living situation into something better. I started to undertake big long term projects. Much of my free time was spent doing things which were not very "creative" at all, plumbing and wiring, for instance. But I was developing and using skills that would serve me well over the years. But as I ventured deeper and deeper into home renovation, I was getting farther and farther away from Art.
Decades went by. Periodically I would be moved to paint and make wooden things out of necessity or just to flex my creative muscles, but "real life" would interfere and eventually I'd put these endeavors back on the back burners. But in the past five years a number of things have happened to me that bear on my desire to make things.
The first thing that happened is that after feeling poorly for awhile, I went to the Doctor, and after a long battery of tests, discovered that I had a brain tumor. It was on my pituitary gland, it was congenital (meaning I'd had it since birth), it was benign, not cancer, but was growing enough that it was beginning to press on my optic nerves. If it weren't removed, I would surely lose my eyesight. So I agreed to have brain surgery to remove the tumor.
The surgery was ultimately successful. It is a long, painful, and involved story, that I won't tell here. Suffice it to say there were several complications with the surgery and the recovery. As a result I wound up in the hospital for nearly a month, and it took me the best part of a year to fully recover. That was in 2015.
The other thing that happened recently is that I left a long standing relationship. This relationship came with a house that I've been chained to for nearly 20 years. Renovating this house became pretty much the sole focus of my life for the past two decades. Leaving both the relationship and the house has freed me to pursue other endeavors. The transition has been difficult and painful, but once things are a bit more settled, I will have more time for creating things with my hands.
So these are a lot of words to say stay tuned because good things are coming.
When I started the website and the blog, I was trying to goad myself into action creatively. I am an artist, I've always been an artist. As a child I always expected I would make my living as an artist. Once I left school I decided that since my needs for food, shelter, and the comforts of life were constant and immediate, and the financial rewards of painting pictures were not, then I would have to have a "job" and relegate my painting to an avocation. I figured I could do this, because my desire to paint was strong. Eventually I figured that I would begin to earn money selling paintings.
I was also interested in a lot of other creative endeavors, theatre, woodworking, puppetry, music, and the list goes on. Often my interest in these things (woodworking) was entirely artistic, designing beautiful furniture, for instance. But just as often there was a practical point to it as well, I needed a set of shelves and rather than buy one, I would make it. This type of creativity scratched the itch somewhat and the results were more quantifiable, in terms of the value of the produced objects to my life.
Eventually I turned, out of necessity, to home renovation because it allowed me to transform my living situation into something better. I started to undertake big long term projects. Much of my free time was spent doing things which were not very "creative" at all, plumbing and wiring, for instance. But I was developing and using skills that would serve me well over the years. But as I ventured deeper and deeper into home renovation, I was getting farther and farther away from Art.
Decades went by. Periodically I would be moved to paint and make wooden things out of necessity or just to flex my creative muscles, but "real life" would interfere and eventually I'd put these endeavors back on the back burners. But in the past five years a number of things have happened to me that bear on my desire to make things.
The first thing that happened is that after feeling poorly for awhile, I went to the Doctor, and after a long battery of tests, discovered that I had a brain tumor. It was on my pituitary gland, it was congenital (meaning I'd had it since birth), it was benign, not cancer, but was growing enough that it was beginning to press on my optic nerves. If it weren't removed, I would surely lose my eyesight. So I agreed to have brain surgery to remove the tumor.
The surgery was ultimately successful. It is a long, painful, and involved story, that I won't tell here. Suffice it to say there were several complications with the surgery and the recovery. As a result I wound up in the hospital for nearly a month, and it took me the best part of a year to fully recover. That was in 2015.
The other thing that happened recently is that I left a long standing relationship. This relationship came with a house that I've been chained to for nearly 20 years. Renovating this house became pretty much the sole focus of my life for the past two decades. Leaving both the relationship and the house has freed me to pursue other endeavors. The transition has been difficult and painful, but once things are a bit more settled, I will have more time for creating things with my hands.
So these are a lot of words to say stay tuned because good things are coming.
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