Rainy mornings generally magnify the creative flow that I awake with. Cold and Icy Winter mornings simply beg for quality studio time. Here in Richmond, VA we are experiencing our first ever official Winter Ice Storm Warning. We have about an inch of ice covering the snow that fell earlier in the week, it is damp and bone cold outside but our aging HVAC units are working overtime to keep our house warm and toasty inside. We have a quantity of leftover chili that we made yesterday to feed us for the next several days, red wine to wash it down and just enough whiskey to make it another day. This morning, just as the previous two, I eagerly grabbed my morning tea and headed straight to the studio to hunker in for a day of creative expression and potentially a bit of actual productivity.
Today I had the ambitious and misguided intention to completely redesign the official Christopher Thomas Limbrick website. The thought arrived as I was working to create a new logo graphic to replace the site title on the landing page. I created the graphic only to be totally disapproving with how it appeared. I then had the idea to change that logo graphic into a hero graphic that would unveil itself as the user scrolled down the page. After digging into the site template I learned that a different template would be required in order to make this work. Doing so would require that I migrate all of the existing structure and content from the live site to this new template. I started to get excited about this new look so I played around with it a little bit. In my world, something very simple can become complicated very quickly. For me, a simple and quick task can become an involved and drawn out production in absolutely no time. I akin this to how my deciding to sweep up the floors and doing a bit of tidying up around the house transforms into a full blown deep clean of each room that includes disinfecting the bathroom and kitchen. Two hours later I realize that my bright idea to change up the landing page on the website is turning into a complete site redesign that would take the next two weeks to complete. I decide that for now the newly created hero graphic is going to just have to be repurposed into something else.
In my effort to use this newly created graphic I decided to write this blog post that you are reading right now. In fact, I wrote the entire post and was doing some proofreading right as the power went out. No, I did not exactly save my work. I really need to learn to save my work more often while using the computer. I continuously tell this to myself. Perhaps one day I will finally learn my lesson. I was able to retrieve first two paragraphs of this writing, but for the life of me I haven’t a clue about what was written past that. I suppose it was just me rambling on about this damn graphic. I can report that the ice storm knocked out our power for most of the day. Rather than a creative day in the studio, I cleaned up the garage and put away all of the camping gear that was strewn over the house from our snow outing last weekend. As it turned out, a creative day was transformed into a productive day. My wife and I finished the afternoon sitting on our patio with a fire in the chimenea, feeding the birds and welcoming dusk as it fell across our neighborhood. All in all it was a good day, and I have this new graphic.