"It's What I Love"
December 02, 2010, 8:09 p.m.

I am a "Jill" of many hobbies and a master of none.  Yes that is a clich� but it rings true for me.  I have these things that I do and that I love doing.  I don't excel at any one thing, but I love playing at all of them.  Sometimes I get obsessed and go off on a tangent of one thing or another for a while but I usually allow myself to get distracted with a another project along the way. Here they are:

Photography / Elephant from the Houston Zoo

Photography.  I love taking pictures with my little camera.  I love taking shots of nature, flowers, animals and people.  Whether I am walking in the country, walking in the city, walking in the zoo, or just staying home in my own back yard, I can always find something to photograph.

Photo-Editing / Mom's Ranunculus

Photo-editing.  Working with Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop is so much fun! Turning an ordinary photo into an extraordinary image is exciting.  I love making mundane photos look like pieces of art.  What I like as well is printing them and then applying paints and markers to them to create interesting images.

Digital Image / Color Bubbles

Digital Images.  l I love creating digital images like the background image on this blog.  I could spend hours on Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop and often do.  Simply creating something from a blank screen and applying various processes to it to make them interesting is just such a delight.  I started out making sets for web pages, then background images for myspace.  It's just fun!

Drawing / Quick sketch with soft pastels

Drawing and Painting.  I love sketching, doodling, painting, drawing, with all sorts of methods and mediums.  It's my current passion!  I was influenced by my sister Audrey who was a wonderful artist.  She was the master and I learned as much as I could from her.  She taught me how to draw faces, shoes and do shading.

Writing / A page from my journal

Writing.  I love writing!  I write stories, poetry, screenplays, a quite a lot in my journal.  I enjoy expressing myself through the written word.  Even when I was a young girl I had pen pals all over the world: Diane from Auckland, New Zealand;  Christian from Tangier, Morrocco; and Miguelita from Buenos Aires, Argentina.  Writing to pen pals and sharing my life with them was the beginning of writing for me.  

Reading / A few books from my shelves

Reading.  I read avidly.  It's not uncommon for me to have multiple books going at once in multiple rooms of the house.  I read mostly novels, but not always.  The last three books I've read are non-fiction.  (The random books shown here are The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, Stark Knight by J. R. Turner, Life of Pi by Yann Martel, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, The Secrets of the Heart by Khalil Gibran and The Force is With You by Stephen Simon.)

Baking / Bread from the oven

Cooking and Baking.  I love mixing and the stirring and chopping and sauteing and baking and creating something delicious.  I'm lucky to have had 2 wonderful grandmothers who influenced me.  I remember making my first layer cake all by myself from scratch when I was 10.  It was a marble cake with a meringue frosting (okay I had help, my Grandma Weber told me what to do but she didn't lift a finger).  In any case, I was hooked.  I admit, that today I am a better baker than a cook, but I still love doing both!

Knitting / iPod Sock

Knitting and Crocheting.  My Grandma Weber taught me how to knit and crochet.  She taught me how to darn socks as well.  I never got hooked on darning, but I still knit and crochet.  While I don't do it so much these days, I might create a hat or scarf every once in a while.  It's fun!  The last thing I created was a couple of iPod socks.

Movies / Casablanca

Movies.  My Mom is the expert who knows about many of the actors, directors, writers and producers from the golden age of Hollywood.  She knows the names of many the secondary players on the screen.  From her I learned about Frank Morgan, Gene Lockhart, Judith Anderson, Oscar Homolka, Jesse Royce Landis and more.  She never taught me how to cook or bake, knit or sew but she certainly taught me about people the movie business.  So that now, I love watching old Hollywood films and reading the credits on everything I see.

Puzzles / Working a crossword puzzle

Games and Puzzles.  When I was young, my mother and I would leave cryptogram messages for each other.  We would have to crack a new code each time in order to read the messages we left. When Dan Brown published The DaVinci Code, it was such a treat for us to solve the puzzles inside.  Crossword puzzles are a daily favorite as well.  Weffriddles are fun too.  And we love, love, love, Jeopardy!

Learning new things /Guitar

Learning new things.  Okay. I like learning new things.  I've been trying to learn how to play the guitar and I'm also trying to learn German, my family's language.  I've found that I'm not so good at the guitar, my fingers are clumsy but I'm great at the tambourine.  I'm also learning how to make videos on my laptop.  Seems like everyone is doing it and I know why.  It's fun!

I don't know what I would do if I had to choose one thing to focus on alone in order to become an expert.  I enjoy them all so much!