Yesterday started great. It was a beautiful sunny day in Texas and I had a plan. I’d take a day away from the ranch, deliver a jewelry order to a customer, visit my Mom at the nursing home and run that long list of errands. After donning my normal wear (as opposed to ranch smeared garb), and smiling because I was escaping cooking lunch for the ranch workers, I happily set out. Ah, the sheer joy of having no time line or real schedule filled the air. . . No more than 10 miles had metered on my odometer when my husband called to let me know I needed to come home early to meet some visitors to our ranch from Mexico. Taking this in stride (more or LESS), I went about my business with the minor change of eating my lunch from my lap while driving between towns rather than the leisurely sit-down restaurant meal I had anticipated.
I thoroughly enjoyed meeting our ranch visitors and, while they visited the cattle with my husband, I garnered new enthusiasm and began work on some ideas. A good pounding on heavy wire with the hammer certainly felt good and you can see some of the work in the pictures. 
I’m working on armatures for Ralph’s Rocks, mentioned in a previous blog. 
There’s something about the design work that is very relaxing and by dinner time when my husband returned, I had changed to comfortable clothes and was in a good mood until . . . the phones started ringing. It’s usually a bad sign when they ring in tandem.
On one phone a despondent person shared concerned about a fence problem and on the other, someone was calling to say some of our cows had escaped. In other words, it was time to pull a Clark Kent switching from designer to cattle rounder upper. Unfortunately, there wasn’t time to change clothing, since the cattle were making their way to the busy road. It took a bit of time to get in the truck, drive to the jeep location, get in the jeep, open and close the gates and then climb over the permanently locked gate. (Have you even done this in a little pink dress? It’s NOT pretty!) By the time we got to the neighbor’s property, the black cows had disappeared. I’ll spare you the details of locating them, but it took some time. Unfortunately, we could only find about half of them and the bull, that was probably the ring leader of the entire mess, was nowhere in sight. We moved the located girls to a safe haven and looked for the others. Just at dusk we found them. As I stationed myself to turn them into the proper lane, my husband gathered them and pushed them in the right direction. After considerable time, they rounded the corner, took one look at me in my neon pink dress and went right back where they came from. Can you hear my husband yelling? This scenario occurred twice before it became too dark to continue.
Hoping for the best with the runaways, we returned to the barn to give the required shots to our donor cows in preparation for harvesting their embryos. Did you know it’s really difficult to find the black cows you want when it’s dark? Finally, after giving each donor two shots, pulling their cidrs (if you’re not a rancher, you don’t even want to know what this is), and applying their alert stickers (you don’t want to know about this either), we headed for the house. 9:10 PM – designer, turned cattle rounder upper, now cook and doctor (did I mention the blood running down my legs from the cacti scratches obtained in the woods??)
10 PM - - designer again- - I think it’s easy to understand why, by 10 PM, I NEEDED to wrap more of Ralph’s Rocks and pound more wire.
The moral of this saga is that all of us are many things and each person could relate a similar “day in the life of . . . “ story, yet we keep designing, writing, composing music, painting, inventing or whatever we do to create. I used to think it would be outstanding to be able to sit in a studio and design all day, but now I realize that might not work for me. My better work seems to come as a result of NEEDING to design as a release from other stresses. Those stresses mainly come from that rich life outside the studio. Whether it’s made of nursing home visits, chasing cows, going to work, or feeding a family, our innovative work is a sum of our lives and an expression of who we are. Today, the hammer and I will be friends, but I AM going to turn the stereo up loud and pretend I don’t hear the telephone ringing.