Back In The Game

Until now my summer has been about being a mom, getting my house in order, growing food, vacation bible school, preschool, etc. All great things and important and worthwhile. But I had no time –or was giving no time– to my own creative pursuits.

Until now.

I made a map of the rest of my summer and it includes four (4) projects. They are all art/design related and will all go toward my senior seminar portfolio. They all address various gaps therein as well as things I've just wanted to tackle. When I'm done, I will have no products or market-related items in my portfolio. (*goal*)

Drawing, designing, printing, painting, vectoring, photographing. Four projects. Four weeks.

I'm so freaking excited!

True Confessions

1. I don't sort the laundry. 

I don't have time, for one thing. And also, we don't have whites to keep white or brights to keep bright or reds that haven't had a million opportunities to bleed. Our clothes are old. Maybe the previous owners sorted them, but by now they are well broken in. I have to keep laundry as simple as possible... or I simply won't do it.

2. While we are on the laundry thing, I don't fold all the clothes. 

If something of mine is in danger of getting wrinkled, I'll usually just hang it up. Bea's clothes don't get folded because she removes them from her drawers to spread around the room anyway, so that would be a waste of my time. James has his own way of folding and organizing his things so I dont' fold them.  Amby's the only one when gets his clothes folded just because they are so little and cute and they stay in neat stacks in his chest of drawers.

3. I throw away my kids' stuff.

Like, constantly. If you ask me one too many times to fix something? It's disappearing. If I step on it and hurt my foot? Gone. If it makes any kind of annoying sound whatsoever? Well, you get the idea.

4. I delete phone messages without listening to them. 

Most of the time, I avoid the phone. Ignoring calls, opting to facebook people instead of call them. We have a really basic phone without caller ID, so if someone calls and leaves a message, I go into voice mail just long enough to hear what number called. Then I delete it. If I know the number, I might call back. Like if it was James or Mama. That's about it. And here is why: I have small children. It's like some kind of switch that gets flipped in them whenever I am on the phone. They have to interrupt, pull each others' hair, fall from high places, break things. The household dissolves into a pit of tormented screams every time I am on the phone, without fail. It is both infuriating and embarrassing.


Ok, I think I'll stop while I'm ahead. But this was fun, I should do it again sometime. But now it's your turn. :)

Something is Not Right

When the chair of the Art Department and all the Graphic Design professors (3) resign within a couple months of each other, you know something ain't right.

via

At this point, none of us knows what is going on and we have to just hope that by the time we get back to school in a few weeks, there will still be a graphic design program. I am set to graduate in Spring and I only have three classes in my field left to take.

It looks like I will spend my Senior year under the tutelage of complete strangers rather than the professors who guided me and know my style and how I work. It's kinda scary.

What Is Going On?

Fairytales

I love telling Beatrice dreadful stories at bedtime about young girls in harrowing situations who save themselves by being "quiet as a mouse and still as stone." She is always the girl and she always falls asleep in no time.

One is about Goldilocks and the Three Bears at Night. The bears are still hungry that night after Goldilocks meddled with their porridge. Goldilocks is in bed (with her door shut and locked, her closet light off because she refused to hush!) when she hears a low, angry growl (1) under the bed, (2) in the closet and (3) outside her window. Soon her room is swarming with hangry bears and the only way she might go undetected is to play dead, er, pretend to be asleep. This story has worked for nights and nights on end. I leave her looking asleep and within a few minutes she really is!

Now we have a July in Berea edition. (Or do people all over the place continue shooting fireworks all month.) This story is called The Firecracker Witch. It is about a witch who cannot stand bright children and seeks to destroy them. She invents a kind of firecracker that is so loud the children jump out of bed screaming. The magic part is that the firework can find the children, smashing right through their windows and into their beds, exploding into a nightmare of fire and lava that consumes them. But only if they are moving and/or making noise.

I fill these stories with a lot of detail and suspense, enjoying the way her eyes grow wide along the way, our faces close. She is so earnest and innocent. But she is smart, too. She knows they are stories, not real. But it's a fun game to close the day and Beatrice likes to suspend disbelief as much as her mama does.

All these images are illustrations by Jessie Willcox Smith.

Foundation

this is rad

I started reading Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asshole Asimov and found it to be totally unbelievable. (Supposedly genius characters putting complete trust in total strangers.) I read the first 50 pages and put it down. I'm used to sci-fi being both gripping from the start and believable given the constraints of the (D)universe.

Instead, I am reading Foundation by the same. (It is the one that was written first in the series, although Prelude is the first chronologically.) This one makes a lot more sense to start with as it does a fairly good job of setting up the universe. (It's kinda like reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe first rather than The Magician's Nephew even though the events in the latter happened first. It seems rarer to have this problem so much these days as series are planned at conception, like Harry Potter as well as that unfortunate series.)

I'm already pretty into it. And really, with the weather so gray and dreadful (as it's been and threatens always to be), what could be better than a good sci-fi story?




Note: I considered titling this post An Exercise in the Overuse of the Parentheses. 

Paris Mountain

It's been raining every day and rarely climbing above 83 degrees. Mostly we get storms in the afternoons, huge dark clouds rolling in over the backyard. There's a sudden drop in temperature and the rain pelts down, killing our garden.

I love the excitement of a good summer storm. But every day??

So yesterday, we decided to go out anyway. Yeah, the sky was dark, but the forecast assured us we had until 5pm eastern time to seek shelter in an interior room.

We went to Paris Mountain State Park and walked around Lake Placid. It was great to get out. We took off our shoes and hiked. The kids were troopers; We didn't have to carry them at all! And it was nice out the whole time.

Hiking with kids means examining every little thing. 

Bea had to stop and let her dress dry out a little.

Ambrose is still getting used to diaper free living. He needed to rinse off...

Such a pretty trail.

Dead snake. Yeah, a second later Bea picked it up.

Hiking in style.

Everyone who passed us seemed disturbed by our lack of shoes. It was ok though. We didn't see any needles.

Nothing but BS

Baking Soda, that is. Bear with me.

So my sister Emma stopped using shampoo. She's doing the "No-Poo" method. I think that sounds like something gross. It's just baking soda for washing and vinegar for conditioning. Her hair looks amazing.

Now I've joined in. I read up on it. All about how the first few weeks are going to be hell, (so make sure you don't have any big events planned). I haven't noticed any difference except that my natural curl is more pronounced, a welcome change.

But it's weird in the shower. You have the baking soda in a container, right, I use a measuring cup. You get a little in your palm and add water, mixing it up until it gets... slimy. Then you wash, just the scalp. It's just to get the build up of oil away. I'm not sure what you do if you use a lot of product in your hair. I don't. I only wash when my hair gets flat on top from being oily after a few days. It's been a lot less oily since I stopped using shampoo. Anyway, you kinda just scrub and try to get that strong desire for lather to leave you alone.

Then you rinse out the BS and condition with vinegar. I started out using apple cider vinegar. You know that sour smell of laundry that didn't get put in the dryer soon enough? That's the smell that followed me around after the first wash. I'd read that there'd be no vinegar smell. But come on, common sense, folks. If you put vinegar in your hair and let it sit there while you wash? The smell is going to linger.

Now I use regular vinegar with a few drops of eucalyptus oil. It's a lot better.

If you want to try this method, do it! I'm really happy with my clean, fresh, healthy hair. No harsh chemicals (edit: Fewer harsh chemicals in the long run) and no pricey products. :)