I learned about Oblique Strategies from Robert Genn's Painters Keys Blog.  These little dilemmas are a creative way of getting out of thinking ruts.  On Friday, I turned over the next card in the deck and read, "Do nothing for as long as possible."  This is an existential question and I could write a million blogs on it.  But that would be incredibly boring.  What its really about, I decided, is making use of guilt. 

Sometimes I do nothing for a couple of days just to build up enough guilt to get going again.  The block study above is my 44th and I did it on Thursday after a couple of non-painting guilt days.  The 45th study on Friday wasn't going well and I needed to fix it.  When I went outside I forgot the little step down to my patio and I fell down, my left foot twisting in the little sandals I was wearing.  Half the skin on my right palm was scraped off and I knew there was something seriously wrong with my foot.  Jones fracture they said at the emergency room. Update: the orthopedist says I have an avulsion fracture which is a lot better than a Jones facture, which often doesn't heal.  So my outdoor paintings days are not numbered.

Now it would be quaint, even if true, to say that the universe was trying to teach me a lesson about doing nothing for as long as possible, because I have been forced since Friday to lie down with my foot elevated and iced.  And to wear a therapeutic boot and use crutches making the simplest of tasks tediously time-consuming.  But the real moral of this story is that if you are painting outdoors and you have your head in the clouds, don't wear silly little sandals that can screw up your balance. Wear your hiking boots! I know if I'd been wearing my Renegade GTX Lowa Hiking Boots, the ones I wore every day painting in China and hiking this summer on Mt. Rainier, (or even my Crocs for that matter), that the 5th metatarsal in my foot would still be intact.