Getting to France: Planning our vacation

 Hi everyone,

I have had a dream for a while now of going to France again, but this time with my husband. I started off with the truly wild idea of living there for like three months, to get a taste of what it is like to take care of the day-to-day living essentials but in a different place with a different mindset. 

When I first shared this idea with my husband in 2022, he assumed this was something we would do when we were like 50 or something--towards the end of our era of responsibility--but I actually wanted him to graduate a semester earlier so we could go in the summer of 2023 so we could go before the age of mega-responsibility even started. After all, you never know what life will dish you up later, now might be the best shot you have. 

Well, the dream and the time-bound goal are the most important pieces to have, but there were plenty of challenges standing between the dream becoming reality. For one, how would my husband manage to graduate a whole semester early? For another, how would we pay for it all? Between the flights and trains, apartments and food, it is a lot of money. And then, after all of those logistics, how do we become the people who would really enjoy living somewhere else for an extended period of time (not for 3 months, but maybe one month)? After all, living somewhere else is surely very similar to living in Idaho--and if I can't enjoy the day-to-day living in Idaho, why would Europe be any more enjoyable?

Conquering Roadblocks: The Logistics of Getting to France

1. My husband cleared up his 12 credits of required electives by taking a Spanish FLATS test (foreign language achievement testing service) to get college credit for the three introductory Spanish classes. He would be able to graduate a semester early, in July 2023.

2. Luckily we do not have any student debt to pay off, and we got a great tax return in 2023 because my husband is crazy and worked full time while going to school full time in 2022. We have money for things!

3. My parents wanted me to take my younger sister along, so they covered the apartment where we would be staying so we could get one with an extra room. We had somewhere to stay! 

4. My grandma offered to cover the flights for us with frequent flyer miles to and from France. With her help, we purchased the round-trip tickets in May. We were able to get there and back!

5. We got a couple no foreign transaction fee credit cards with 0% intro interest for 15 months to cut our costs abroad by avoiding transaction fees. The credit cards would also let us pay the balance later (before 15 months) with no added interest, which will be helpful if we need cash to move and pay a security deposit on an apartment when we get back. We won't be broke when we get back!

6. We all applied for passports and they came eventually. We were able to actually leave now!

So by the end of June, I had the logistics basically figured out. But there is more to a good vacation than being somewhere else--a good vacation is enjoying being somewhere else.

Learning Systems to Enjoy Living

The things that I do not enjoy about daily life usually come into play when I don't ask for the help I need, and I get overwhelmed and hungry. Things like watching dishes stack up, and feeling the oppressive need to clean in my spare time. Or, wanting to do anything--cook, clean, draw, write--so badly, but Petra has been demanding all of my attention all day. And the worst one--being very hungry and having no idea what to cook, while also feeling that if I don't make food now, no one else will either and we will all die of starvation.

Those are examples of the despair cycles I find myself in, and here are a few systems we have learned to combat specific things to stop them from coming around and around.

0. STOP! Ask for help: It's hard to ask for help, but it's easier and better than doing everything alone!

1. Clean kitchen: My husband came up with this system for a manufacturing efficiency class, and I must say I'm thrilled. The system involves putting all of your dishes away, except one of each type per person, so if a dish is used it also is cleaned. And because you can't get more out, you don't build a mountain of dirty dishes. One person would be in charge of doing the dishes each night, so we start the next day off with a clean kitchen.

2. Avoiding baby crazy: A week after my husband graduated I hit crunch week in my book dummy project. So every (almost every) morning I would leave the house at about 8 and sit in the lobby of an event/business center near my house and draw for about 4 hours. If I had the energy to go back after lunch then I would. What I noticed about this week was that I didn't get baby crazy once. When I came home I was happy to just be with my husband and baby, and I wasn't trying to do a mountain of other things. I suppose my need for 'me-time' was being met and I didn't feel the need to carve out more.

3. Planning what to eat: I have been trying to come up with a system for meal planning for a while, and I am starting to understand what works for me and how I think. First, I need to know what kind of foods we want to eat or what we usually eat. Then we need to put in a few landmark meals--Wednesday is pasta for example, and Thursday my sister cooks. On Sunday we have a picnic after church, and later we heat up a casserole for dinner. From there it is easier to think about the gap days and start listing what foods you can make with what you have, what foods you want to eat, and what ingredients you need to buy. The key to a good menu is to stay as close to what you want to make and to what you have as you can, and that starts with the landmark meals. I like to write all of this down on a piece of printer paper that I have folded into a rough month or two-week calendar and then post it on the fridge. This way people know what is for dinner or lunch and can help start making it when they get hungry.

4. Other skills to practice: To really enjoy our trip, we started going on long walks and tried learning a bit of French. I have learned the most French so far (I have been picking up words for years now) but I still do not know very much. The walking practice has gone well, and I do not think that will be a problem, but it is beginning to show me just how out of shape I am compared to when I was a swimmer in high school.

Those are the systems that were most important for me to enjoy our time in France, but for me, there is another aspect to the vacation that is extremely important for me: Artistic growth.

Setting the Stage for Artistic Growth

Working on my book dummy so rapidly has definitely shown me where my strengths and weaknesses are as an illustrator, and I really want to take this time to address them and find new ways to work. I want to work on a new project in France that will focus on my weaknesses and help me find new and better or supplementary ways of working. I want to become more confident in my artwork as a whole and have more than just one trick up my sleeve. 

• My strengths are showing emotion through facial expression, command of the general figure, and storytelling in pictures. My sketches are messy but okay, my perspective is functional, my character coloring method has worked well for me, and I have a working palette I am happy with (although I feel I should expand my color horizons). I use Procreate exclusively.
• My weaknesses are vignettes and background treatment! I have the 'fine art painting is the only rendering option' mentality, even though I have never been a fine artist or really even a painter. Animals are also not my strong suit, but that isn't a problem for me right now. I am also not fast, but that comes from being proficient and having lots of experience, so anything helps. 

My project plan is to make a zine (8 pages, including covers) of our travel experience using Adobe Fresco. The more specific prompts will be an airport environment, a street lineup, and an aquarium painting, I signed up for svsLearn.com (where great illustrators start) to see if they could help me pinpoint what I should do about the problems that I have, and I did find some helpful things! While watching the "Digital Illustration Process" class with Shaun Keenan and Lee White I realized that I could learn a lot by focusing on making vignette illustrations and that I would probably improve a lot if I focused more on rendering in grayscale. So that is what I am going to do. Everything is a vignette, and everything is rendered in grayscale with multiple colors on top (if any). Okay not everything, but that is the mindset I want to be, without tying my hands so much I don't know where to start.

Inevitably there will be problems and roadblocks that we did not foresee, but I hope that this set of plans will be enough to get us through and help us all have a good time.