Living the Creative Life

In February, I'll be participating in a photo-a-day challenge. Chantelle, over at Fat Mum Slim , had a bunch of bloggers doing this last month, so this month I wanted to jump in too! If you want to join in, be sure and tag your photos w/ #FEBphotoaday on whatever social network you post them to. Leave me a comment below if any of you are posting them to Tumblr or Instagram so I can come look - those are the about the only social networks I'm using these days! Lol. (You can find me @ desertrose0601 on Instagram and @ livingthecreativelife on Tumblr.)

I'm gearing up for a big reader giveaway next month!! If any of you lovely readers have an Etsy shop or small business and would like to donate something for the giveaway, let me know and I'll add you in! It's a great way to gain exposure for your shop and helps you meet people in the meanwhile! Something handmade is best, although gift certificates and store credit is always a nice option as well. You can contact me w/ questions or for more information at desertrose0601 {at} gmail {dot} com.

What have you done to be creative today?

We made color swatches w/ colored pencils in class this week. I made a snowflake puzzle for our Women's Tea at church. Hand-drawn and hand-cut! Carlita always deserves a picture. ;) Once I got it in my head to giveaway some clothes, I had to go ahead and do it! My closet is much happier now that it only has things I actually wear in it!

Found this fascinating time-lapse video the other day. What the Earth looks like from outer space! I especially love the Aurora Borealis and the thunderstorm clusters. It's so fascinating to see how everything fits together into one large system. What's your favorite part of the video? Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo .

Delete any online accounts that demand more from you than they give back. Anything you feel obliged to check more than once a day counts. Check and reply to email only twice a day and never first thing in the morning or last thing at night . Be strict about this. Get rid of any streaming services you pay for. DVD's by mail are okay in moderation, but remember that anticipation makes viewing sweeter and too much choice makes all your options look dull. Limit your queue to less than a dozen movies . Really make an effort to do one thing at a time. Enjoy each moment for what it is. Do nothing for at least ten minutes a day, outside if possible. Lie back and look at the clouds. Don't think about your to-do list during this time. Turn off all non-essential notifications to your smart phone. It's hard to be present in every moment when your attention is constantly being tyrannized by the urgent. When in doubt, weigh the pros vs. the cons . Is checking Facebook five hun

After a day of partially  unplugging --- okay not even 12 hours --- I'm already going a bit nuts. The thing I miss the most is Twitter, oddly enough. I didn't even think I was that into Twitter. I found myself watching a little bird chirping on a tree branch outside and instead of being in the moment, I was thinking, "Okay, I need to Tweet so-and-so about such-and-such... oh wait... I don't have a Twitter account..." And there was this giant panicked feeling, like all the adrenaline in the world entering my body at once. This happened several times yesterday. Sleeping was strange too. I've gotten so used to reaching over and checking my iPhone whenever I think of something I'm curious about. Google. Wikipedia. YouTube. They're all my friends. But I figured part of the disconnect process was keeping them in their places. Nothing wrong with looking things up, just... not when I'm supposed to be sleeping. I did something else last night that I

Really good, but way too short! A professor gets his first Kindle and discovers that it contains newspapers from alternative timelines! What other histories will he discover? Fascinating book! Definitely makes me look at marketing and social issues differently. He takes a look at what "tips" a situation from just a once-in-a-while event into a sweeping epidemic. Very intriguing read and quite insightful. This book was much harder to get through than the first two in the series. I think this probably was because the depths of hopelessness were fully explored in it. I'm glad I read it though and I'm glad it ended like it did, but it was still a very sad and difficult book to read.  (For anyone not familiar) this is the 3rd and final book in the Hunger Games series. If you plan to watch the upcoming HG movie , I highly recommend reading at least that first book first. That's the best one of the series, in my opinion, and is a very powerful

I've begun the disconnect process this afternoon and boy does it feel good! Also a little anxiety-inducing. I switched my Netflix account to have NO streaming and only one DVD at a time. I'd almost forgotten what anticipation felt like! It'll be fun to await each new arrival in the mail. No longer is media instantly streamable for me. Strange but oddly relieving. I deleted my Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr accounts. As much fun as they were, they were also far too demanding of my time. The constant drug-like pull of them to constantly stay connected was too hard to ignore. I turned off all notifications on my iPhone (with the exception of texting, which I rarely use anyway), and switched Mail to be manually pulled. Now I'll have to intentionally check to see if I have new messages instead of being demanded upon to deal with them all as soon as they arrive. I plan to check email once or twice day, so if you don't get an instant response from me like you used

I remember distinctly the first time I had access to email. It was 1997 and I was a freshman in college. My roommate's parents were rather well-off and had gotten her a new computer to use at school. This was the exception on our floor. Most college students in those days didn't consider a computer an essential item. We each signed up for a Juno account. For those of you too young to remember, that was a free email provider that was not even attached to the internet. You had to launch the program and it manually dialed into the modem to retrieve your email when you told it to. Nothing was automatic or always on. I can still remember the beep-beep-beeping of the modem as it connected. Around 1998 or so, I started learning HTML and bumming around online in chat rooms. It was all so fascinating! My roommate's computer didn't go online, but we had access to some dorm computers that did. I signed up with angelfire.com and hand-coded my first website. No one ever visited

This has been such a weird day. I'm sick anyway, so that probably isn't helping things... Earlier this afternoon I got an eBay message from a guy I'd sold a DVD to. He said that the movie was not as described and that wanted his money back. He further elaborated that the item had arrived broken. My crystal ball apparently needs some tuning up. Maybe I should've stated in the item description that the post office was expected to damage this item in transit?? I responded that I'd be happy to refund his money upon receipt of the damaged item. Standard refund situation. This shouldn't be that big of a deal. This is where it got weird. He responded back saying how unreasonable it was that I expected him to ship it back, costing him even more money. (He only paid $1.99 + $3 shipping. That's actually $4 more than I paid for the DVD myself, but don't tell him that.)  He said he's kicking himself for trusting me in the first place since I have such

Congrats to Kalyndi! She won the  giveaway  this month. :) I'm gearing up for a big multiple-item giveaway in February, so get ready!!

I'm trying a new thing this year - I turned all the clothes in my closet backwards. As I wear them, I'll turn them forwards again. Whatever's not turned back around by June gets sent to Goodwill!! I suppose you might not be able to do this if you have vastly differing weather during different parts of the year, but here in Oregon it stays roughly between 40 and 80 degrees all year round. It does occasionally get  hotter or colder, but generally speaking, the same wardrobe works in every season! So anyway... here's a look at my closet (taken about two weeks ago when I started this). I'll take another photo when I clean things out in June!! Maybe I should buy more than black, blue, and gray??? What about you? How do YOU determine what you do or don't keep? Are you a ruthless de-clutterer or do you keep things around longer?

I've debated forever whether or not to delve into my tv/movie-watching habit on my blog. Every few months I'll decide to blog about it but then end up deleting the posts again in the hopes of culling my blog into the perfect, artsy-fartsy, blogger's blog. But alas... I'm a nerd. And part of being a nerd involves technology, books, and yes... tv/movie-watching. So... I've decided to embrace my nerdiness and incorporate two new sections to my blog -- What I've Read and What I've Watched. Hopefully you'll enjoy them! :) New Years Eve This movie got horrible reviews on Rotten Tomatoes - not sure why because it was great!  I'm a sucker for romantic comedies, especially ones created by Garry Marshall, so of course I had to check this one out -- I wasn't disappointed! It was funny, romantic, and even coaxed a tear or two. Whenever this hits iTunes, I'm definitely adding it to my movie collection! I give it 4.25 out of 5 stars.

Click here for more details!!

I'm a sucker for a good blog survey, as any of my long-time readers will know. Here's one I found over on Angie's blog: Living Aloha . I just couldn't resist taking it myself! 1. What time did you get up this morning? About 9:15am. Loud noises woke me up - I'm normally more of a sleep-in type of gal, especially on the weekend! 2. How do you like your steak? These days I'm trying to eat vegan. However... in the past when I've eaten steak, I liked it pretty well done - no pink!! 3. What was the last film you saw at the cinema?   New Years Eve  - great movie!! 4. What is your favourite TV show? (of the shows on currently...) Parenthood . I swear I cry during every episode. That show is so heartfelt and touching! Plus I love how the characters talk over each other - most shows don't do that, but it really adds to the sense that these people are family. 5. If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be?  Right now I'm k

I don't claim to know anything about fashion, but I keep seeing links to Polyvore all over the place, so thought I'd try it out! It's pretty fun actually -- kind of like cutting all the things you want out of the Montgomery Wards catalogs (remember those?). So anyway... here is my attempt at a fashion post. Just a sampling of an outfit I might buy if I had any money. I'm actually not much of a skirt person, but I'm trying to learn to like them! Paired with the right accessories, it could actually end up being rather comfy, I think! Rugged Chic by desertrose0601  

I ran across this interesting exercise on one of the blogs I read recently and thought it was a neat idea. It's fun to see what other people's handwriting looks like, don't you think? ;) If you want to play along, here are the questions. Let me know in a comment if you end up doing this too - I'd love to see what your handwriting looks like! What is your name and blog title? What is your blog's address? Write: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. What is your favorite quote? What is your favorite song? What are your favorite artists/bands? What is one random thing you want to say right now? Tag 3-4 people to do this next!

Earlier this month, Kristen posted a great music playlist over on her blog, Confessions of a Graphic Design Student. I absolutely LOVED the vibe of the music she'd put together, even though most of the songs were new to me. Then it gave me a great idea... what would happen if I plugged these songs in Pandora ? Have you ever used Pandora ? It's a great site! I highly recommend it. You can create your own personalized radio stations VERY quickly (& it's free!). All you have to do is seed it with one or more songs or artists and it builds a station around others songs/artists that have the same feel. You can even pick one of their pre-made genre stations to start a station even more quickly. So anyway, in this case, I seeded a new station with all of Kristen's playlist. What came forth was a beautiful NEW station, filled with music that fit my style but that I'd never heard of before! Wonderful!! I just love it when my radio seems to know me. ;) If you

As some of you probably remember , I've been working on a collage this past week in my Color class. It's been really interesting and fun to scour magazines for colors that grab my attention and then to work them into a meaningful composition. Obviously the Instagram filters I used on each of these photos is slightly different from each other, but I promise they are same color pieces in each photo! So I started out by finding a bunch of colors that just seemed to want to play together. My first attempt turned out pretty cool, but my teacher said it lacked composition. For you non-artists or designers, that basically means that my piece needed a focal point and some sort of structure to it. Last night I sat down and found a bunch MORE colors and started laying over the collage I'd already done. It just needed a little more color support in certain areas. What I needed up with is (hopefully) a pretty strong composition! I guess the moral of the story is, y

Good morning, lovely readers! If you're interested in sponsoring Living the Creative Life next month, shoot me an email @ desertrose0601 {at} gmail {dot} com Find out more here:  Ad Swap So anyway... it's time to meet my January sponsors! I just loved teaming up with these girls this month. :) Meet Putdar, Jamie, and Kristen! BLOG * TWITTER * FACEBOOK BLOG * TWITTER * FACEBOOK BLOG * TWITTER * FACEBOOK

THIS CONTEST IS NOW CLOSED!! 39 comments are entered - if there are any more at a later time added, they will NOT count. ********** Today I'm christening my new(ish) blog with an Etsy giveaway! I'm offering one lucky winner a cabled beanie of their choice ( pick your favorite color !). This giveaway will run for a week - so you have until next Monday, January 23rd, to put your name in the hat. 6 ways to enter: Comment below about which color beanie is your favorite. Subscribe to my blog on Google Friend Connect . Blog about this giveaway on your own blog. " Like " my Facebook fan page . Follow me on Twitter . Tweet about this giveaway. Please leave a separate comment below for each entry. At the end of the contest, I'll use a random number generator to pick the winner!! Here's a look at some of the color options available. Browse other color options over at  my Etsy shop ! ***** Thank you for enteri