Breadcrumbs

Do you remember that Grimm fairy tale starring Hansel and Gretel? The one where the children know they're being lead out to the woods to get lost on purpose, so they come up with an ingenious plan to get back home using a trail of pebbles/bread crumbs? And even then, they get so lost that they're in an impossible situation with a child devouring witch that lives in a candy (candy!!) house?

I just had a situation like that. Sort of.

 Easter Witch by Ylvas on Flickr

When I am working on art and life-type stuff (pay the bills, fill out the forms, etc), I know better than to say to myself "oh, I'll totally remember that" and not make a note of it somewhere. Because I'm not going to remember. It's a given. It's a symptom, that lousy memory thing.

So, I tried Post-it notes. The problem with post-it notes is that your space ends up looking like it's an office prank victim. Totally covered in post-it notes. Even though they are brightly colored, I forget to look at them, and then I totally forget what I was supposed to be doing. That's a terrific reminder, huh?

photo by bukowski18 on flickr

I have resolved myself to using the Mac Calendar (iCal). I can put little color coded deadlines complete with alarms, notes, and urls on my little Mac. I've never been this much of a planner. So far, it's kind of worked out ok.  It is kind of tedious, though.

Today, I was working on a monthly painting challenge. Monthly painting challenges are easy to find on the internet. A picture is posted by the leader, and everyone has 3-4 weeks to paint using the reference photo.  It's a nice way to do a bit of networking and work on an assignment of sorts. It gets you out of the box that you've been working in, and you get to show off your style and see other artist's talented take on the same subject.

I wanted to check out the deadline for the painting. But. I had apparently hid all of my breadcrumbs--from myself.  It's as though last week Heather decided to play mind games (hide/eat the bread crumbs) with the Heather of today. Today Heather was not very appreciative, and started having anxiety about what would otherwise be a no-pressure project.

 geocaching compass coin by sonnyandsandy on flickr

G gently helped me try to sort things out, seeing that I could possibly have a meltdown over this.   I could not find the blog that issued the challenge. My browser search history didn't have it. My iCal didn't have it.  I had not made a note in the name of the photo file I saved.  All of my previous bread crumb laying ideas were apparently not followed.             So, I did what anyone else would do. I frantically googled.   Which didn't help.



In the end, I found the clue. It was as if I had placed it ... in Toronto. Totally not a place I would have thought to look, but probably thought I was being clever at the time ("oh, yeah, this makes a heap of sense, I'll put a note here!" obviously pleased with myself).  And this is how my life goes... a constant mystery novel trying to figure out why or how I did something, and following the clues to achieve my own goal.