Welcome To The Not-So-Secret Blog Of Aurelia Nobleia

It’s our wedding anniversary today! 🙂

Yay!

Yes, we did in fact get married on a Labor Day.

But, my how time flies…

9 years comes and goes in a blink. I really need to be careful. Because if I’m not, life will pass by in a flash, and suddenly I’ll be old and realize that I haven’t done anything meaningful at all! 🙁

Today:

We decided to do something meaningful for our anniversary.

We decided to stay at home. And whip up something super special together in the kitchen. Instead of going out. Or ordering a lavish meal delivered to our doorstep via limousine.

We thought it’d be fun. 🙂

And we had something really delicious on our mind. Something we saw on YouTube.

It looked fantastic.

Delicious too.

But most importantly:

Extremely nutritious!

I’m talking about cauliflower pizza! Made without any flour, gluten or processed ingredients. Totally comprised of fresh vegetables, nuts, herbs and spices. And yes, we were trying to make it as vegan as possible.

Thus the adventure began…

But unfortunately…

The adventure ended as fast as it started… because… after a long time of blending up stuff, and getting the pizza sauce and toppings ready, we realized that the cauliflower dough blend we made for the crust just wasn’t forming.

It was on the stove.

Flat as a pizza dough.

But it just wasn’t coming together. No matter how long we cooked it, it was still mushy.

Darn.

I knew we substituted too many ingredients from the original recipe while trying to make it even more nutritious! 🙁

And to make matters worse…

… we were starving.

And the pizza wasn’t ready… yet.

I don’t think it was ever gonna be ready.

Were we really gonna have to order a lavish meal delivered via limousine right to our doorstep?

Fortunately, not.

In a sudden stroke of creative inspiration, my hubby took the cauliflower dough, and made some additions to it… turning it into an amazingly tasty filling.

Next, he then used the filling, and alternated it with the pizza sauce (and some homemade vege crackers we had) and…

… created a uniquely vegan wholefood lasagne! :O

And it was the most incredible lasagne I’ve had in the longest time, vegan or no vegan! :O

I kid you not.

We ate and ate and ate and ate until we were stuffed. Along with all the other goodies we had. It was heavenly.

But looking back at this, I still have to give a little sigh.

*sigh*

Because:

It reminded me how…

… sometimes I focus too much on achieving a specific goal…

… like making cauliflower pizza…

… so much so that I lose sight of the big picture…

… like making an amazing meal.

And this means I’m less flexible. And less creative. And miss out on a lot of opportunities to take what I have and turn it into something even better than what I originally wanted.

I think the saying was:

“When life gives you lemon, turn it into lemonade”?

That’s what I’m talking about…

“When life gives you a useless cauliflower pizza dough that refuses to become a crust, make cauliflower lasagne.”

Sincerely,
Aurelia Nobleia
“I Don’t Have 10 Rings”

P.S. I didn’t create any art today. It’s a holiday for me. *Sigh*. 🙁

But I did fatten up my store by adding this wreath yesterday. 🙂

I hope you like it.

A couple days ago:

My hubby came over to my desk and asked me an interesting question.

“You wanna see something cool?” he said while beaming.

“Sure!” I replied in astonishment.

We then sat down and started watching a documentary. About creating art. Featuring someone the media calls “an art spammer”. And when the media says that, it doesn’t necessarily mean you are one. It just means that the media is looking for someone to paint as a villain so their story gets more views.

Anyway:

The documentary started off with this guy, Anthony, from Adelaide, Australia.

He was a failed musician.

He started a band with his friends. But they failed to make enough money to support themselves.

So they dis-banded.

(pardon the pun)

And he ended up in desperate straits. Because he wanted to create art for a living. But he couldn’t make enough of a living doing it.

So one day…

… he ended up searching the internet for clues on how to make a good living doing the art he loved – making music…

… and his search led him to…

… Matt Farley…

… who is one of the most prolific songwriters of all time. Writing over 22,000 songs to date. And making a decent $65,000 a year just from streaming and downloads of his songs from what I’ve read.

This figure doesn’t include what he earns from television and movie films using his music. And it also doesn’t include the income he gets from sponsorships by companies who want him to make music for them.

Anyway:

Anthony decides to contact Matt.

Matt agrees to mentor Anthony in the ways of the middle-class artist.

And the series begins with Anthony flying off to the United States to learn Matt’s prolific ways.

An incredibly interesting documentary series. Really.

I seriously learned a lot.

Some of the things I learned?

Well…

1. Quantity leads to Quality.

As creative professionals, we often censor our own ideas. Because we worry that they aren’t good enough.

We want to create masterpieces.

Amazing hits that everyone will love. And no one will criticize.

But in doing so, we end up limiting ourselves. And our work. With fear. And we end up creating much less than we could.

The result?

We end up not making a lot of stuff that would have been terrible. BUT… we also end up NOT making a lot of stuff that would have been EPIC.

Quantity doesn’t equal quality.

But it often leads to it in the end. If you create 20,000 pieces of art, chances are high that 1% or even 0.5% of that is gonna be a world-changing best-seller.