Who's got the button?

There is a story that Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat Pray Love fame) tells in a TED talk that I've mentioned here before. It's about the singer Tom Waits, who once was in traffic and got an idea for a song. He didn't have paper and pencil, and was quite busy driving. He cried out in frustration something like, "Can't you see I'm driving?" The idea being that sometimes creativity seems to come and get a person, as opposed to being something that one just sort of pulls the lid off of and has.

I'd like to think of myself as a sometimes creative person. I get ideas that seem neat to follow up on. I was surfing around Etsy and looking at the things people do with polymer clay. In a great example of how there are very few original ideas, I saw some buttons on the site and thought that my stamped clay medallions might make good buttons.

Here are a few of my first efforts. I think I will offer these in sets of 6.

In other news, Mr W and I watched Howl's Moving Castle last night on Netflix. I don't know what it is about some of the anime stuff out there, but I loved this movie. I had seen it before, but it was great to see it again. I dropped the DVD part of my Netflix subscription a few months ago, and since then have not had much luck finding the things I specifically want to watch offered as streaming video. But this movie was offered in that format.

I'm funny with movies. It's hard for me to commit two hours to what part of my mind sees as "just sitting around". I feel like I should be "doing" something. I suppose I could knit, or work on some bracelet stuff that doesn't require a lot of mental effort, but for whatever reason, I don't like to double up like that. So, I don't watch many movies on my own, and that's OK.

We've got two engagements today that involve restaurants. We're going to lunch with friends from the dog park, and celebrating M's retirement. Then, just a few hours later, the single parent group is getting together for an early dinner at a restaurant down the street from the first. In between, I'd like to pop over to work to see if some of my DNA sequencing results have been uploaded so I can see them.

I've pushed myself to get these results in order to have something to present to our collaborators, and I'm really hoping that they show something interesting. This process has been kind of exhilarating, and I've enjoyed work for the past few weeks, going through this process of finding differences that help solve a taxonomic puzzle.