Good gourd.

You might wonder what possesses a person to go out in search of gourds at 9 pm on a Sunday night.

Or, you might not wonder.

I’ll tell you why anyway - because the Gourd Incident correlates to writing a blog, or not, while hip deep in home renovation.

Home renovation shares a few similarities to childbearing - having done at least four of each, I feel I speak with some authority. Not the least of the similarities is the amnesia endemic to both: once you see that shining face or space, you forget the blood, sweat and tears that went into delivering it. Such is the delight in this new being, that the pain and discomfort of the previous months fade into the mist, and before you know it, you’re talking your husband into another one.

And that’s why renovation and childbearing are not like rodeos. Lessons learned can’t carry over: “Not my first rodeo” does not attach in the blissful, amnesiac ignorance of reproduction and renovation.  The type of ignorance that can lull you into the belief that, not only will you be able to form a coherent sentence at the end of the day, but that you’ll do so with style, grace and high quality images over multiple social media platforms. You know…capturing the glory and the glamour, with wit and wisdom, of a yearlong renovation or the average gestation and neonatal period. (First pass on that sentence was ‘the gory and the glamour’, which is at least fifty percent closer to the truth. For either process.)

My hat is off to the scores of design and lifestyle bloggers out there who manage to do it with stylish professionalism, producing blogs that are engaging and informative, ripe with polished tutorials and photo essays of various projects. They make it look easy and effortless.

I’ve been hoping to find my place among them. I’m a designer. I like to problem solve spatial and aesthetic issues. I like to write. I like to take pictures. ‘Easy and effortless’, however, are elusive. It’s a challenge to follow many of the directives you might find in a ‘How To Blog’ blog. For instance, if you want to develop a following, you’re supposed to blog regularly. With a frequency measured in units smaller than years. You need to create quality content, identify key words, develop a calendar, et cetera, et cetera. I find that all much easier said than done. This stuff takes a lot of time.

In an effort to jump start my stalled blogging career, I hopped on the Instagram bandwagon, where images carry more weight and you don’t have to string too many words together. I still fell short on the ‘regularly’ thing. Looking for some structure to address that, inspiration arrived via the youngest member of the household, my grandson, Jack. Jack is into rainbows. Big Time. Everything he’s colored for weeks has been a rainbow. “Grom, what color comes next?” ROY G BIV is indelibly etched on our collective psyche and once it occurred to me that  I’d posted photos of pickled sour cherries and then cherry tomatoes on my counter…R…O – Insta Inspo! The ROY G BIV #counterproposal Protocol was born. Framework! Structure! I had at least one, two…seven weeks of a plan! I could do it any day of the week, preferably keeping the photo shoots at the same time of day for consistent light levels and maybe even do a few ahead to have in the InstaBank.

That worked until we got to Indigo. Indigo inspo was elusive. And, you know…life happens. All of a sudden it’s Sunday night and I have no Indigo. No daylight.

The #counterproposal was about to be tabled.

Until I remembered the paint for The World’s Smallest Powder Room which was custom matched to my Indigo Batik (SW7602) cabinets!!!

What to paint?

Another glance around the room and my eye fell on Jack’s little tiger pumpkin. But seriously, I want him to like me still.

And so…a quick trip to the grocery store, a coat of paint and before you know it there’s a trio of indigo mini gourds on my counter, waiting for their close up. I took photos as I painted, with the idea that maybe this is what they mean by ‘creating content’. Not unlike the thoughts I had as I cleaned out my closet last week. Write what you know. Sure, I could write you up a list of my Go To Living Room paint colors, but there are a lot of people doing a really good job at that. I’m still working on finding my niche, but I think there’s room for someone who can pair the proper wine with an indigo gourd project.

I was going to share a link to this post with my photo of the Indigo gourds on Monday morning, but…me. 

Still some skeletons rattling around in my perfectly imperfect closet.