Debi van Zyl

When my external hard drive decided to fake it's death the other day, I didn't really know what to do. It seemed to take over my lap top; the screen went black, all this jibberish appeared and lots of noise came from the hard drive. For hours. Ten hours. There was nothing I could do.

I haven't had a lot of free time lately, so I confess I really didn't know what to do with myself. Habits are hard to break, and work is like a habit. And except for knitting (which is work and sadly not so much of a hobby anymore), I can't do much with my job without a computer. After I had done some long-overdue filing I took stock of the situation. I looked at my laptop, still a black screen and only 8% recovered. I looked at my knitting needles and all the half-beasts waiting for legs arms and faces and thought that seemed like a lot of work. And then I picked up a paint brush and a very nice quart of grey paint ("Slip of Silver" by Mythic, my new favorite paint company) and proceeded to make-over my studio space. Just like that. Paint is an awesome refresher of spaces as well as spirits. Not the most efficient use of ten hours, but the most fulfulling.

And yes, ladies and gentlemen, I did, as you can see, paint while the bookshelf was still installed. And yes, I did just simply pull my desk away from the wall and I did just dump everything on any extra surface I could find and did not cover anything properly. And yes, I did spill paint on the floor and no, I did not wait for the first coat to dry properly. It was a very very very unprofessional ten hours of painting and rearranging. BUT, I love it. I couldn't be happier.