rote work Archives | Carol L. Douglas

The forest primeval, ticks, and open-toed sandals.

My granddaughter demonstrates the importance of wearing Wellies to tick avoidance.

I’m in Rensselaer County, NY, at the home of my oldest child. This lies in that strip of New York that’s on the east bank of the Hudson, in the eastern Berkshires. It is often mistaken by non-New Yorkers for Massachusetts. I’m here because there is a large, open kitchen and all three of my daughters are present. That means plenty of hands to help me with last-minute rote work for Saturday’s wedding.

Julia has an ant problem. Ants are creatures of habit, and the mere presence of a new house sitting on their ancient pathway won’t deter them. When we built our first house in the woods, we had ants and snakes in abundance. Did our frontier ancestors constantly battle ants in the kitchen along with the more palpable dangers of wildcats and bears?

Ants are famous for their work ethic, a subject of some discussion as I slump into exhaustion. “More Mary, less Martha,” my kids tell me. The bride is a line cook at Olive Garden. She and I compared our capacity for repetitive, boring work by spending hours assembling favors. She’s faster than me.

My sons-in-law made me 24 maple tree cookies for the centerpieces.

I’m pretty tired, but my task list is steadily shrinking. That means I drive into Albany later to get glamorous, although my favorite activity with my daughters—a pedicure—is out due to my incisions.

Rensselaer County is in Ground Zero for ticks. The disease that made them famous was first identified in Old Lyme, CT, just about a hundred miles from here. Ticks are everywhere here and more numerous than anywhere else I visit. To give you an idea of the scale of the problem, almost every artist I know who works in the Hudson Valley has had Lyme Disease or one of its hideous cousins.

Part of a huge dog pack waiting to be spraypainted.

My grandchildren spend a lot of time outside in the woods. They’re assiduously checked for ticks every time they come inside. It’s sweet to watch their father hose them off in the shower, carefully checking them for parasites.

Wellies are the best protection against ticks, but I’m stuck in sandals until the incisions on my feet heal. That means no walking in the spring woods and careful tick checks.

Scottish shortbread wrapped in the groom’s family tartan. It’s a meeting of the clans.

I’ve heard that the explosion in Lyme is based partly on our “slicing and dicing of the forest,” but if you actually live in New York or Maine, that’s laughable. The forest is back in the northeast with a vengeance as agriculture becomes less economically feasible. Rebounding also are the white-footed mice, deer and other animals who host ticks.

In many ways, New York and New England are reverting to the forest primeval. We don’t know if our frontier ancestors had the deer tick problem that we do, but combined with a lack of indoor plumbing it would have been downright exasperating.

Tomorrow, I collect the flower order and deliver the tchotchkes (and the check) to the wedding venue. Meanwhile, my watercolor kit is sitting in the van untouched. Oh, well. There’s a season for everything, and this week’s season is for wedding prep.

It’s about time for you to consider your summer workshop plans. Join me on the American Eagle, at Acadia National Park, or at Genesee Valley this summer.

Sometimes the balance between creativity and routine gets out of kilter, and it never seems to be in favor of creative time.

Places I’d rather be right now: Headwaters of the Hudson, by Carol L. Douglas, which anyone who’s been to Lake Tear of the Clouds would recognize as a romantic personification rather than the real thing.

I’m sorry there was no post yesterday. Grandchildren are human petri dishes, and mine gave me their norovirus. (That’s the nature of children, and I would change nothing.) I’m feeling better today, but not 100%.

Ironically, I’d planned to write about action vs. reaction. Every job has moments of each designed into it. For example, the EMT who saves your life is mostly reactive, responding to what’s happening to you and the instructions he’s getting over his radio. The engineer designing a new system of 0s and 1s is mostly active. As he interacts with his team, though, he is reactive.

But that’s in the particular. Generally speaking, most successful people are reactive much of the time. They’re listening to their competitors, their peers, and their customers, and trying to give the people what they want.

Palm and Sand, by Carol L. Douglas

The self-employed artist is stubbornly individualistic, but that doesn’t save him from reactivity. We treasure our active tasks, like painting or marketing, that we initiate and drive ourselves. Then there are tasks that are in response to others’ initiatives. For example, at 2 PM today, I must send an email. I don’t know why this particular moment is important to the organization but I do know that a small part of my mental energy today will be spent wondering whether gmail’s delayed-send feature really works.

Painting commissions, while on the ‘creative’ side of our ledger, are fundamentally reactive tasks. This is why some artists don’t enjoy them as much as other work. The impetus, the spark of idea, didn’t originate with us.

All sole proprietors exist in this maelstrom of action and reaction, which tug and vie for our scarce time.

Spring, by Carol L. Douglas, painted down the road a piece, on an April day.

Chief among the reactive tasks is bookkeeping, which I’d never do at all if the IRS didn’t prod me into it. Before I can file my taxes, I must audit my records to determine if they’re true. The whole job takes me the better part of a week. I think I should try doing the audits monthly. However, every February, I am so happy to be free of bookkeeping that I just go back to the Excel equivalent of stuffing receipts in an envelope.*

This year I decided to try to paint in the mornings and work on bookkeeping in the afternoons. This was a total failure. I would just settle in to my canvas and it would be time to move over to the dining room and its carefully separated piles of papers.

I’m back to my usual technique, which is to schedule tax prep during the nicest week of winter weather. It’s a knack, I tell you.

Why can’t I just ignore my taxes for a week and get back to them when the weather gets bad? Despite my protestations that I wouldn’t do this to myself again, I’ve arranged to be shot out of a cannon again this spring. On March 4, I’m leaving for a short painting trip through Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. My third daughter is getting married in May. And after that is my regularly scheduled season. It’s now or never, and the IRS doesn’t like never.

Fall cookies for another daughter’s wedding. That won’t work for May!

I have learned that tasks tend to be amorphous until they’re pinned down. That means that small ones, like “order paint” loom as large as “bake 1000 cookies for the wedding reception,” a job I will be doing without my designer pal Jane this year. Writing them down and classifying them helps me keep them in perspective.

I’ve written before about Bobbi Heath’s time management system, here. It’s a simple system that can stop you from losing your mind when you’re overwhelmed. Whatever system works for you, now is a great time to deploy it, before the weather gets fine and you’re on the run.

*I had a GPS that kept mileage records. I just retired it and bought MileIQ. It’s fantastic for the plein airpainter, who starts and stops and is pulled along by the wind.

Category: rote work

Meanwhile my paints are languishing in the van

Action vs. Reaction: the boring times in the studio