Peg Kerr's Journal

Week 37: Curse
The campaign is having some difficulties.



This card is about how the fanart contest I had planned for EverTwixt ran into some problems. The day the contest was launched, Kelly (the owner of EverTwixt) fell down the stairs, resulting in a concussion and broken arm. An inauspicious start. We decided it was due to the malign influence of Baba Yaga, the nemesis of the stories on the website. We also determined that the contest had to be rejiggered, because we weren't getting the response to the ads that we'd hoped.

Week 38: Redesign
I spent the week redesigning the contest, hoping to still find our mystery artist out there somewhere.



This card represents both the fact that I redesigned the particulars of the contest, since Kelly was unavailable (landing pages, email automation), and the silhouette also represents that mysterious artist we still hoped to find.

Week 39: Certification
I took the test and finished the Hubspot Academy Inbound Marketing course.



The Inbound Marketing course is built on the four stages of inbound marketing as Hubspot sees them: Attract, Convert, Close, and Delight.

Week 40: Treats
I begin designing the website for Barking Good Healthy Treats.



Week 41: Girls
Meals with my girls mean love.



This combined two Snapchats: Fiona and I send this a Snapchat to Delia informing her of our brunch at Turtle Bread Bakery. Delia also sent us a Snapchat, showing the set up of her table at her new apartment in Eau Claire. The vase of peonies were the ones I brought with me when we moved Delia in.

The flu put me badly behind, but I'm not quite so far behind now.

Week 31: Minicon
We're there every year!



The challenge that minnehaha K. gave me was that the Minicon card had to be made entirely with materials found at Minicon. The image in the lower left was cannibalized from the business card of the Artist Guest of Honor. I used bookmarks left on the freebie table, promotional postcards, bits from the Bozo Bus Tribune, etc. I like this card.

Week 32: EverTwixt
EverTwixt awaits you if you dare.



As part of my attempt to switch career fields, I started a marketing internship with an old friend, a writer I met at Clarion almost thirty years ago, Kelly McClymer, who is attempting to start a new website, EverTwixt.com.

Week 33: PhotoShop
It's great fun, but an amazing time-sink.



Also as part of my training, I've started learning PhotoShop. This was an attempt to make a graphic that could be used as part of the EverTwixt site: one of the stories available for download, "Maiden Ash" is a variant of Cinderella, and this image is suggestive of the moment when the stepmother scatters ivory beads and jewels in the straw and tells the heroine to pick them all out into separate piles if she wants to go to the ball. Of course, in PhotoShop, I was doing the exact opposite: painstakingly assembling the layers: straw, then jewels and beads. When I made the card, I cheated and embellished the beads with some glimmering paint minnehaha K.had hanging around.

Week 34: Shadow
"There are three shadows on the liver in your CAT scan, and two on the spleen."



This is what the doctor said when he came in to our meeting that week. (For details, you can see our CaringBridge). This is not an actual diagnostic image taken of Rob, but a graphic I found online, highlighting the liver. I added the shadows on it with PhotoShop.

Week 20: Twelfth
Once again, we gather around the table to celebrate the end of Christmas.



Yes, yes, this card should be named 'Twelfth Night' But I am limiting my card titles to one word. Not quite satisfactory, but I couldn't find a one word that would substitute (unlike finding "Hogmanay" as a substitution for "New Year's Eve.")
Again, this card was an experiment with different media. The table cloth and napkins are tissue paper, the forks are cut from aluminum foil. And the plates are from the foil wrapped around the Hershey's Kisses we had inside the miniature stockings.
We did indeed manage to gather around the table this year, although it was a Twelfth Night dinner this time rather than breakfast. That's just the way the schedules worked out.

Week 21: Severus
He was the bravest man I ever knew.



This was the week that Alan Rickman died, and I made this card in honor of him and in honor of one of my favorite of his performances. Once I started thinking about Severus, I started making connections between his situation and mine (and not all of them are flattering, to say the least). This gets into personal stuff, so Elinor Dashwood will leave it there for now.
It was the last day of the previous week, January 9, that was Severus Snape's birthday. Rowling deliberately chose that day because it was the feast for the Roman God Janus, the two-headed god who guarded doorways, looking both into the past and into the future. An extremely appropriate choice for the ambiguous Severus Snape's birthday, and an appropriate thing for me to ponder, as I think about my career--where it has been as well as where it is going.

Week 22: iPod
I lost my iPod in the snow and felt helpless without it.



At least by process of elimination, that's where I figured it wound up. I never got it back. I held out a week, gritting my teeth, and then I bought a replacement. Screw the fact that I am unemployed. I need one to organize my life.

Annoyingly, I found out when I upgraded to the next model, that I can't synch it on my iMac. The software on my desktop Apple is too old. Planned obsolescence is pretty damned annoying.

Week 23: Three
There are three things I do to help myself.



This was a tough week. Again, Elinor Dashwood will not provide many details. The three stones represent three stepping stones, the sort to keep you above the water you would drown in otherwise (I tried and tried to find an image of three stepping stones, but for a variety of reasons, what I found just didn't work. So I used an image of stacked stones). The stones represent three things I do throughout the week for self-care. The stones are carried by a manatee, and if you haven't found the site Calming Manatee, really, what are you waiting for?

I know what the next card is (Card 24) and I worked on it today, but I had tremendous trouble with figuring out the right fixative to use. I had an image with words superimposed over it. I printed the words on waxed paper, but every fixative I used just smeared or blurred the words. I have an idea for how to fix the problem, but it involves a trip to the store. So I started working on the next card (Card 25), and finished it, too. I worked on the cards OUT OF ORDER! I felt SO GUILTY! And I will not scan and show this past week's card until I finish the card for the week before.

This means we are almost halfway through the year! (It also means it's been half a year since I've had a job--groan). minnehaha K. impishly suggested that we could swap decks and I would do the rest of hers and she would do the rest of mine. I firmly vetoed this idea. But then she made the clever suggestion that we would each do the jokers of the other person's deck, one at Week 26 and one at the end. Which I think is a really cool idea.

I have been waiting to post these until we told the girls the latest medical results.

Week 15: Pain
Everything hurts.



Since Rob's heart was damaged by chemo, I have been doing all the shoveling. At the first snowfall, doing the job, I hurt my back. Badly. Ice and painkillers and pillows and baths and ow and tears. It really, really hurt. At the same time, I have been fighting off depression (in the Victorian language of flowers, marigolds are associated by some with grief or despair). It has been very difficult to deal with physical pain, combined with the anxiety of job hunting, combined with the bad cancer news. This card is tied, symbolically, with the marigolds, to a card in my Soulcollage deck, The Woman Who Listens to Ravens.

Week 16: PET
Rob undergoes testing at Mayo Clinic.



I cut the words and the picture of a patient undergoing a PET scan from the various educational brochures we've received from Mayo (really, they will give you a brochure about anything under the sun). The blobby shapes draped over the words are photographs of some glassblown art hanging from the ceiling in the large atrium at Mayo Clinic (printed out on tracing paper, which is the first time I've used that technique). Here is a picture of the installation, in situ. Very pretty, if you look at it one way.

But every time I look at those shapes, I think they look like cellular structures. Even like tumors.

I suspect that impression is intentional.

The card for the week before last, of course, was obvious. And you've seen the picture before.

Week 12: Sixtieth
Rob celebrates his 60th birthday.



Actually, I'll admit I cheated a little. I bought a new color printer/scanner and printed this out on matte photo paper. However, by the time I glued it to the card, sprayed it with fixative and scanned THAT, the photo was blurred out. The original photo wasn't terribly good quality, either, which didn't help. So I just swapped out the original photo .jpg into the scan for posting this digital version. The actual card doesn't look quite as good.

So I just have last week's card to catch up and then...good heavens. That's thirteen cards. Which means we are already a quarter of the way through the year.

Week 8: Encouragement
You are a strong, powerful woman, no matter how defeated or nervous you may feel.



This card is strongly tied to last week's card, Fall. In fact, this week's creation was entirely due to reaction to last week's.

When I created Fall and posted it, I sent the link to Delia (away at college) because, after all, it was our conversation about her art assignment that inspired the card in the first place. She sent me a beautiful e-mail in response and I've received her permission to post it here:

Sorry this reply took so long.

I really like that card. The blog post on it was very thoughtful and insightful, and made it a bazillion times cooler once I really understood the meaning.

I hope things start to feel a little better very soon. Imma preach a bit here. I know you know this stuff, but I'm going to remind you of it.

I know from experience, that dread feeling you were talking about gets you nowhere. Try to focus on today, the now, and you'll feel a whole lot better. (Obviously you have to think long term sometimes, but keep that to a minimum.) Cutting down on focusing on my future to do list or stresses helps me focus more on my tasks at hand, so I have less to worry about later because it's already done or no longer stressful. It also helps me enjoy the Sparkling Moments life gives me, without feeling guilty or stressed or even miss them all together. I hope that makes sense.

I know how hard it is to stop yourself from worrying about things and retraining your brain. It feels pretty much impossible at first. But with practice, you can do it. I know you can. You are a strong, powerful woman, no matter how defeated or nervous you may feel. I know you can and will get through this. We all will. If something is important, we find a way to make it happen, right? Finding a job is important, yes, but your quality of life is extremely important as well. You can do this.

Thought this might be a good song for you on this topic:
I Will Get There

"I will get through the night and make it through to the other side."

And you will. You will get through this, and you will be stronger because of it. I love you to the moon and back, Mommy. You are amazing and you can do this, no matter what.

I believe in you. I trust you. I love you.

Delia

(Bolding is in the original).

I was so touched by that email, and I thought about it a lot this week.

Now, I was in church this Sunday, struggling with a coughing fit, and as I have about a million times over the past three months, I pulled out a Halls honey-lemon cough drop and started sucking on it. The coughing is due to asthma (yes, I am also taking Zyr-tac and using an inhaler). But in this instance, for the very first time, I noticed the writing on the wrapper. Note: I have been unwrapping these cough drops for months. I saw the slogan they use: A PEP TALK IN EVERY DROP^TM and realized what else was written on the wrapper: affirmations. Lots and lots of affirmations, exactly like Delia's email. And the layout of the card bloomed instantly in my mind, just like that.

So for this week's card, I dug some of the wrappers out of my purse and others out of the waste paper basket (there were plenty to choose from) and cut out the affirmations. minnehaha K. suggested and provided a paint that would blend in the background (because the black of the prepped card would be a stark contrast). The sentence that describes the card came right from Delia's email; she even helpfully bolded it for me.

I think I'm just about as pleased with this week's card as I was with last week's. Perhaps not as pretty (well, Delia is, but not cough drop wrappers!) but it is certainly spot-on with the theme of the week.

What do you think?

Week 6 Confusion
My thoughts are flying in a million different directions.



I have been working hard on job hunting this week. But I have nothing to show for it. That's because job hunting has not yet reached the point of having a resume because I DON'T KNOW WHAT I AM LOOKING FOR. I have done assessments. I have done worksheets. I have listed accomplishments. I am flailing around, and it's a most uncomfortable feeling. And I'm going to feel quite sheepish when I show up at the job support meeting on Monday and still don't know what I want to do.

It didn't strike me until this week that all of my cards so far are more or less self-portraits.

Oh, by the way: ( results of my Strengthfinder assessment )

Week 4: Elsa
It's time to see what I can do.



Yes, Yes, Yes, we're all sick of That Song From Frozen. Tough. The lyrics struck that exact balance I've been thinking about this week: 'What can I do? What am I capable of doing? Why, I could do anything!' and 'It's awful cold and lonely out here.' So I determined to make a card about it. Sticking to my initial intention to name the cards with just one word, I resorted to 'Elsa,' rather than the more obvious option, 'Let It Go.' In keeping with my new determination to try media and methods I've never used before, I resorted to cannibalizing a coloring book and used crayons, metallic markers, and glitter markers, too. Great fun.

For the one person out there who isn't familiar with the song (poor you), here are the lyrics.

( Let It Go )

Anyway, it was great fun, and the lyrics captured this week's preoccupations spot on.