Photo Friday: Best of 2007

Hello dear blog friends. I'm so sorry my posts have been rather infrequent of late. The usual holiday craziness coupled with a lingering cold has resulted a case of the "blog-humbugs". The Photo Friday challenge this week is "Best of 2007", and while the above photo is not the very best photo I've taken all year, it is one of my favorites and one of the few that is not of my darling daughter! It was taken on a snowy January morning, and was one of those snows that sticks to each individual tree branch, lasts through the night ,and into the next sunny afternoon. Snow like this is pretty rare in my part of the world. And as I sit writing this it is snowing again, making this a true white Christmas.

Photo Friday: Primitive

A few years ago, on a whirlwind trip to Albuquerque for a family reunion, my hubby and I took a wrong turn and drove past this cool building that was covered with paintings like the one above. There was something kind of mysterious about the place so had to stop and snap a few shots, plus it was right next door to a Dairy Queen (and who could resist a Blizzard in 90 degree heat). I loved all the textures on the building and the random paintings covering it. I really felt like whoever made these paintings to advertise their business really enjoyed doing so.

The word "primitive" when attached to the word "art", is kinda loaded. I really feel like it has taken years for me to shake off the art school definition of the term. In the academic world "primitive art" (work done by self taught artists using basic supplies) was something that was mostly looked down upon, and seen as "low art". I really don't subscribe to that way of thinking. In as much as I loved going to art school, the constant critiquing and analyzing ended up leaving me doubtful of something I once took so much joy in. So that's what I strive to get back to and what these picture remind me of: making art with what I have just because I feel like making it.

Illustration Friday: The Zoo

Ths week's topic for Illustration Friday is "The Zoo". It was hard to think outside the box on this one. I'm not a real fan of zoo's personally, so I took another angle. I went searching for words that contain the word zoo, and built an illustration around that. Here you have Giant Gertie and her Giant KaZOO, flying thru town with her giant baZOOms, causing all of the townfolk to cry out "GadZOOks!" The End.

Weeklies#7: The Easy Bake Effect

Image
Here is a fun still life I did awhile back. My friend Jen and i used to have Art Saturdays where we'd sit and do still life drawing with household objects, while drinking tea and listening to oldies on the radio. I like the contrast of the tools with the vintage bustier from my grandma.



Best food I ate
Thanksgiving food of course! We had dinner with good friends, potluck style. We were in charge of pie and a green bean dish. I got all inspired by Martha and made her Spiced Apple Pie. It was sooo good and worth wading through her sometimes wordy directions. I love the way the pie crust rounds look like shingles for some kind of elf house. Do you like this animated photo? I'm calling it The Easy Bake effect..kind of like an online Easy Bake Oven. We decided to be 100% Martha and also make her Green Bean Casserole. Also very good, but I have to say I did miss the crispy crunch of the typical French's Fried Onion topping.

Thing I made
The only thing I made this past week was the crazy Martha pie and our bed.

Best thing I saw on the web
This website dedicated to the one and only Bob Ross.

Can't live without
My sunglasses..they were prescription and I lost them this week, the sunniest week we've had all month!

Music
Here are a few new tunes. The song by Pinback starts out sounding kind of Goth, but then goes a little Campfire when the band sings in rounds. I really like Viva Voce, especially the beginning of this song. "Ode to LRC" is rockin' and makes me love Band of Horses even more. Some of the lyrics to "Masterfade" are "and when you look up at the sky / all you see are zeros / all you see are zeros and ones". I know enough to know that they are singing about binary, something my hubby totally gets, and I pretend to. Also this song has kick-butt whistling with vibrato which I love to do (just ask ant of my former co-workers who put up with a lot of my whistling of show tunes in this style).

Feeling happy about
Installing this Bush Countdown Widget on my computer. Hurry up January '09!

Photo Friday: Two

I'm trying something new here. I found Photo Friday, akin to Illustration Friday in that each week a word or theme is posted and you either shoot a photo for that theme or dig through your archives to find one that fits. I'm by no means an expert photographer, but it is something that I'm interested in getting better at or at least playing around with.

I was just looking through some photos from a trip to Europe a few years ago. This is the way I'm traveling lately, looking back at old photos of my vacations pre-baby. I'm particularly fond of my pictures from this trip. I found these two chairs sitting in a corner of an old church in the south of France. Hubby and I were walking through a sleepy village with my Dutch family after a nice lunch and we came across this church and ducked inside. I love all of the textures and muted hues in those old villages.

Illustration Friday: Superstition

It was really fun to research superstitions for this week's Illustration Friday topic, Superstition. I wanted to illustrate something that went beyond the usual black cats and walking under ladders. I found this: "It is good luck to cut your hair in a storm". The image that popped into my head was of a storm actually doing the cutting of a lady's long locks. I think I've been watching too many episodes of Storm Chasers!

Weeklies#6: Stuck on you

Ok people. I've been officially avoiding my blog this week. Why? I really don't feel like I have anything to write about, and the weeklies categories that I set up for myself just aren't working for me this week. I've got nothin, unless you want to read my musings on the greatness of black yoga pants (you can dress them up! you can dress them down!). See? Not so exciting.

I do this to myself. I forget that I'm like The Mayor of this here bloggy town and I can switch it up whenever I want! Woo-hoo! I'm an expert at burdening myself with sky high expectations and all this does is buy me a one way ticket to "Procrastination Valley" (to quote my pal Uncle B). Isn't that brillant? Procrastination Valley! Such a great metaphor. Because I don't want this to turn into a blog about stretchy clothing, I turned to the internents and asked, "Internets what should I write about?. I found a few funny random writing prompt generators. These are neat-o because they take the pressure out of thinking about what the heck to write about and some of the topics are good jumping off points. The prompt I picked has to do with collecting. It asks: Describe in as much detail as possible something you collected as a child. Here goes...

Meredith, the Grande Dame of our local Hallmark was also a Grande Grump. Once, when I was about 3 she harshly reprimanded me for touching a snake head suspended in a glass ball (it was the 70s people, Hallmark rolled like that back then)sitting next to the register. Later, during that same shopping trip I wandered away from my grandma and found Meredith quietly re-stocking birthday cards in the next aisle. Her polyester rump was right about eye level and I snuck up, grabbed her elastic waist band and pulled down her pants with all my 3 year old might, revealing her huge waist high undies. I can still see the look of shock on her pinched up grumpy face. I was so pleased with myself that I just squealed and ran off. Sweet revenge! Needless to say Meredith and I didn't get off to a great start.

Like most kids of my generation I was wild about stickers. In my small town, the Meredith's Hallmark store was the sticker center-of-the universe. You had to wade through a maze of highly scented candles, mirrored poem-plaques, doilies, grandma's brag books and pressed flower bookmarks to reach it, but at the back of the store there was an entire wall of sticker-roll love displayed on on long dowels that reached from floor to ceiling. For most of the girls in my 5th grade class it was the piece de resistance of the mall. For us, the only thing that came even close was the promise of free Melt Away Mint samples from the Hickory Farms next door. A pair of scissors hung from a piece of ribbon next to the sticker wall, and a hand-made sign proclaimed that that you couldn't touch the scissors, or cut the stickers yourself unless you were an adult. Somewhere between the age of 3 and 10 I lost all my nerve, and started following the rules. This rule made for a big problem if you were hanging out with your friends at the mall. It meant you had to get Grumpy Meredith to help you.

For me the beauty of sticker collecting wasn't just choosing which to get (the dress-up bears, metallic unicorns, scratch-n-stiff pizza or the fuzzy dogs?) with my 50 cents, it was the chase, the thrill of the hunt. It went something like this. After your decision was made, and you counted and double counted your change, you had to gather your courage to stand in line to ask old Meredith to cut your stickers for you. If there were people behind you she always made you step to the side and wait it out till she rung up the last "real customer". You'd stand there shifting your weight from foot to foot repeating in your head the list of stickers you'd so carefully picked out, "One unicorn, two dress up bears, and one scratch and sniff pizza..or wait, was it two?". The more Meredith cheerfully stalled with her grown-up customers: offering free gold crown seals for people's cards, free gift wrapping, or making idle chit chat, the harder it was to remember your list. It was a sticker stakeout of sorts. I'm sure she thought we'd just give up. When the last person had paid for their breakable loot, and not-so-merry Meredith had painstakingly wrapped it up, she'd turn to you with a sigh and say, "Now what is it that you wanted?". Duh, lady.

You'd find yourself right on her heels as she trudged towards the back of the store. Along the way she'd be sure to stop 8 million times to tuck stray cards back into place, or re-adjust the Precious Moments display. My point is, it took for-friggin-ever. Finally, at the Great Wall of Stickers, she'd stand before you, hands on hips and ask which stickers you wanted. You'd spit out your list in one breathless run-on sentence because you'd held it in so long. Then there was usually an eye roll followed by the lecture about how you'd better be SURE, and you better have enough money because ALL STICKER SALES WERE FINAL. And then in one dramatic swoop she'd pick up the forbidden scissors and snip,snip,snip it was over.

As the years went by, the sticker wall at Meredith's slowly started to get smaller and smaller until finally it was gone. A few years ago my hubby and I took my grandma there to help her get some holiday stickers (after stopping at Hickory Farms where grandma bought us each a bag of Melt Aways), and the store was vastly changed. No more Meredith, and the few stickers they did have were all packaged up, no scissors required.

There you have it, I wrote my way down Memory Lane and right on out of Procrastination Valley! If any of you have your own collecting related story to share I'd love to hear what you collected as a kid and what you collect now, in my comments!