After taking a break for the summer, I've come back and am posting elsewhere. I finally got my own domain, so now everything's being posted to envisionedreality.com. I'm working to post a weekly blog in the soapbox rant base. I'm finishing my next post for tomorrow morning. Check it out.
Things going well at the bookstore...it's extra money, that's all I have to say.
I've been all over Craftster, and I've been sewing things up lately, from doll clothes to cloth pads. Yes, pads. The idea intrigues me...possibly because if they work, I can save all this money. Scribe's grossed out, but that's just her. Both Blue and Fashion Guru are interested. I'm going over Blue's this week for help reconstructing clothing. She's come up with this cool design for something to do with my old geeky plaid shirts.
While I'm still working on my character journal, I also have an idea for binding a book. I dug out a lot of my early school stuff (all of my pre-homeschool things, actually). I've been pulling out the stuff I like the best, and I want to bind the various things together into a book. Hmm..it's probably time to learn something other than coptic stitch.
I've also had another pretty cool idea...okay, so I've read about it elsewhere and want to do something similar myself. I was thinking of how cool it would be to create a blank book, write something in it, pass it on to a friend, who passes it on to another friend, and so on until the book is filled up and sent back to me. But I don't have any friends that would participate in something like that, so onward with my school book idea.
Well, it's almost 4 here on the East Coast, and I've decided that I am now addicted to Craftster...for the summer, at least.
Craftster is a giant crafting forum with a vast categorized bunch of really interesting and unique (or, at the least, unique) crafts. A really great change from reading posts on craft forums by little old ladies discussing their plastic canvas tissuebox holders.
I've been reading it for some time, so I finally registered yesterday so I could post my completed book project. However, I've been reading posts on reconstructed clothing, and I now want to take those plaid men's shirts (they have deep pockets for holding pens–I'm such a geek) and make them into something that won't frighten people as much when I walk by...or maybe I want to make something that will frighten them...hmm...
So I've been up and going for at least five hours reading these things...and wondering what all the llama references are below the members' avatars (although under a post for some sort of skirt, the one person posting had a pic of Brad Pitt as their avatar and underneath it said "Mmm...men in skirts." I know Blue is the only one who will understand the really sad humor I see in a reference of "skirty dealies" and Brad Pitt).
Okay, onward and...stranger. I took a quiz, what's new?
High elf: You're what most people think of when they think "elf" but you're just not THAT simple. You're taller than most elves, but not by much, you are thin as a river reed you're known for your light skin, bright eyes, and flooring beauty. You are gifted in music and the arts and have real appreciation for beauty, even in everyday things.
Yes, yet another quiz that doesn't match anything I put into it, but hey, I took another quiz by this person and it told me I was "Hell's Librarian" and my ideal fashion designer DKNY. Oh yeah, that's really fun...or something. Oh, and this one was cool because I bought a bottle of some other flavor of this stuff over at Starbucks the last time I was there with the Fashion Guru...strange, they didn't have this one.
You are Blue Bubble Gum! You are laid back and calm most of the time, but when you get sugar, TAKE COVER! You are very creative and artistic, and you dont try to be anyone that youre not. You do have a strange side to you, but most of the time your fine. Good job!
Subject intrigue you? The lizard thing is at the bottom, but if you're darting down there to read that right away, I don't want to know what you're thinking.
A nice wave of storms swept through and pillaged, plundered, and...ahem, I mean flooded, fell trees, and knocked out power lines. And as is typical, our electricity was among the first to go. Same with our phone lines. Sometime the next day, power was restored to the area, but how were we to know when we still were running off the generator? The electric company said our house was probably struck by lightning, although Dad says it probably hit a nearby pole. Never know, though, because we were the only ones still out, and we had no phone on top of it.
And then while I was at work, we had another electric adventure. Since summer work through my new co-op is not so easy to come by, I went over to the bookstore and asked if they needed any summer help, since school was out. I explained to my boss that I'd work whenever they needed me in the main store and the one close to my house, so I've got a couple evenings a week at the main store, which helps pay gas and library fines (oops).
Before I let her start scheduling me somewere, however, I told her I had just one condition: that I do not work the same shift as Dead Fish. She gave me this look, not necessarily a horrible one, and I could tell that she knew DF heavily influenced my decision to initally leave. That was fine, so I started work a couple of days ago.
That was an adventure. I've only worked in the main store once before, and it was with Scribe and a couple of other people who dropped me at the front counter and left me to figure things out myself. This time, one of the managers took me around and showed me everything I needed to know that I didn't already, such as how to remove safers and how to page overhead.
Yesterday, I was working with three other people. At about twenty minutes to closing, the lights start flickering wildly, and then go out after about thirty seconds. What a way to spend my first evening closing in the main store. We rang up the rest of the customers with handwritten receipts (so technically we didn't ring them up, I know), and then we closed up for the evening. No such adventure tonight.
And then ever since I found out what I want to do with my newest set of characters, I've been plotting out the race that inhabits the planet my settlers try to colonize. Since the closest book within reach was one on lizards, I begin to read it for some ideas. I learned about poisonous lizards, the incredible eyesight of some, that lizards use their tongues to gather scents as a sort of "autopilot" smelling thing, and that there is a handful of lizard species that can reproduce asexually.
That last thing I learned made me curious as to how an entirely female alien race would work. Their ways of thinking, their rankings, their government, and their whole culture in general would be different than in our own male-dominated society. So I've been developing a brief history and some traits of society for them. It's interesting so far.
Happy Independence Day to Americans at home in the U.S. and overseas.
The day wasn't too bad. I spent a good amount of time playing Pac-Man with Aerrer. He has this new version of it that involves time travel and a lot of other things that take away from circle guy's humble origins as eating white dots on a black maze while blobs called ghosts bumped around. Aerrer loves all those updated games, so I've been playing Pac-Man, Centipede, and something else I can't remember at the moment. I couldn't care less, but he likes them.
The whole front landscaping project is nearly finished. Sure, there's a nearly complete lack of green in the majority of the front yard, but it's getting there. It looks a lot better than the disaster area they started with a couple of weeks ago.
I went and saw the fireworks for the first time in two years. It was rained out the year before, and last year I think I was at someone's house and we just didn't feel like going to see them. I talked Dad into going by the lake, closer to where they shoot them off, rather than some nearby elementary school where the distance and the trees hinder visibility.
The sight was really incredible. There were the ones that go off fairly low and spark like crazy. Then there are the ones that shoot up until you cannot see them, and then they explode into a multicolored rain of light with a boom that sets off car alarms and that you feel in your chest. Sure, they set off the fireworks every year, weather permitting, but there's something about 4th of July fireworks that is thought-provoking as well as entertaining. I'd like to go see them in Baltimore sometime, although it's some sort of hassle getting in and out of there.
I guess it's a time where you can think back and remember why the early Americans fought for their independence, why we continue to fight to keep it, and about the people who have died fighting for it. I find that during the fireworks is the best time to think of that because it's the end of the day, I've been anticipating this moment, and seeing the showers of sparks come down in honor of the celebration just makes me think.
I like the way it turned out...and, thankfully, so did the Fashion Guru. She didn't mention anything about the lack of a flap or lock, but I think she just liked it enough to not think about it. I put some "word-fetti" stickers on the front that were classic Fashion Guru phrases (I can't remember who makes the word-fetti stickers, but I found them up at the scrapbook store).
I right-bound it because we're both left-handed, so I usually flip my left-bound notebooks and she would benefit from one. Binding a journal for left-handers is no harder than binding one for right-handers, it gives the book a certain uniqueness, and it's so much cheaper to make one than to buy one–and this doesn't have obnoxious lefty quotes like we're some sort of freakish class. We're freakish by our own merit, thank you.
I used the coptic stitch for the binding. Unlike Blue when she used this binding, I enjoyed using this stitch...once I figured it out.
The book lays open nicely. For the endpapers (the papers glued to the other side of the cover), I used tea-stained drawing paper. In retrospect, I wish I had dyed all of the paper before I created the book, but I'll leave that for another project.
My sister was thrilled with it, enough that it paid for the newest Timothy Zahn book that I borrowed money from her for.
Okay, this one I took from the point of view of my character Alanar the suicidal immortal...but since he's kinda my alter-ego, I guess it doesn't matter.
This was just cute. When my brother was about two, he and I started this thing where we gave everyone in the family Pooh Bear nicknames. For whatever reason, I was Tigger, though I always thought I was more like Rabbit.
In honor of my Orlando hatred, I'm posting a link to this What Orlando Bloom are You? quiz, but not posting results. Bleh, someone definitely needs a life.
Well, life's too short for a blog to be entirely depressing.
My sister is paying me to make her a journal. It started with just covering an old journal with new paper, but then she wanted different pages, etc. So I took her to the scrapbook store up the street and let her pick up paper for the covers. Here are the materials I'm using:
Sorry for the bad lighting. Someday I'll take pictures of my projects during the day.
Anyways, the cover boards are made from This & That's "Metallic Stressed" paper over scrap mat board. I didn't take a picture of the other side of the coverboards, but the endpapers (the paper glued to the inside cover) is tea-stained Strathmore 400 series drawing paper.
The paper for the pages or signatures came from my Strathmore 400 drawing pad, Strathmore 400 Artagain pad, and Canson Watercolor pad. The string still needs to be waxed, but it's just regular string.
At the moment, I'm making up a dummy cover and signatures out of something else, because I'm using the coptic stitch to sew this book together. The only problem is that I've never sewn this particular binding stitch before. But I'm hoping that everything turns out.
Ever wonder if someone really is your friend or if they're really just waiting in the shadows to trip you up?
Okay, everyone has someone like that. Thing is, I honestly don't know. This person and I have been friends for some time, but I feel caught in the middle of something I shouldn't even be caught in, and now I'm just half expecting to find the dagger buried in my back.
On top of it, I have another friend who has turned legalist on me (and not just because she torched hundreds of dollars worth of Tolkien things just because her psychotic study leader told her his works were evil), and she's trying to "save me from my sin."
I don't even hate either of these two friends, particularly Scribe. I have nothing against her, but I feel like I'm being blamed for something I have nothing to do with. It's giving me a lot of turmoil over the past few weeks, and unless something changes soon, I don't think it's going to let up.
I've been out since the middle of May, so I am seriously sick of summer. On top of it, I'm used to working considerably more hours in the summer...but with this new job, as much as I really like it, I work as the work comes.
In addition, for whatever reason, I'm starting to dread this whole turning twenty thing, even though that's not for several months. Maybe I just have too much time at the moment to think about it. I suppose it's the idea of being past a big stage in life. I won't be a teen anymore, and just a year shy of all rights and privledges of an adult. I also have only a couple of years until I get my degree, which means that I'll be searching for a new workplace and building a career instead of just working a part-time job as I'm going through college. And then there's that whole "what if I waste my life away?" thing. I'm the type of person who likes to have everything planned out, so I know I'm just thinking too far into the future.
In the present, however, my sister wants to know if I can put a new cover on a journal someone gave her. It's the perfect size, she says (4"*6 1/4"), but the journal itself is really dorky. I took it apart to see what I could do about it, but I think I'm going to be making her an entirely new journal, and it will involve learning the coptic stitch, which is different than what I use to bind the paperback journals I usually throw together.
It's been an eventful day. Get my check, get my car checked, keep my tired self in check as I nearly rear-end someone today, and check on the Fashion Guru to make sure nobody's tormenting her at work. Now if that isn't all fun, I don't know what is.
So I've been relaxing by watching movies and working on my story/writing/character journal. I picked up this stupid little pack of love and wedding stickers from the scrapbook store to go with some of the entries on character couples. Instead of the mushy quotes, I found a sheet of stickers with words relating to the subject so I can stick them around the page without stupid quotes. To make up for that purchase, I found some unrelated quote stickers that suited some of my characters, and a sheet of leopard-printed scrapbooking paper. No, I have no clue why the leopard-print. It was just interesting and different–for me.
Oh well, back to movies, since that is my topic...
I've been watching movies more this week. I tend to watch the same ones over and over. After a while, I will skip the slower scenes and watch my favorites. Either that or I just listen out for my favorite parts.
Favorite parts...or just the more amusing ones, such as:
Ëomer: "I would cut off your head, Dwarf, if it stood but a little higher from the ground." Legolas: "You would die before your stroke fell!" Hmm, here I am surrounded by Rohirrim with their leader threatening to kill the Dwarf. I wonder, if I'm quick enough, if I can shoot him before his men react. Yeah, I think those Elvish reflexes should do it. Of course, I'll die in the process, and they'll probably kill Gimli and Aragorn anyway if I do so. Sounds like a great idea! Nice knowing ya, buddies.
And then the classic:
"You're late. You look terrible." Yes, Legolas. If you'd battled wargs and then took a trip down the river and then traveled here, you wouldn't be so pretty and punctual yourself. We don't all get as much primping time as you do.
The ever annoying Orlando Bloom and his roles aside (so we won't go into how annoying he was as Will Turner in Pirates...at least not today), there are other lines I take interest in, whether they're simply ridiculous, meant to be so, or serious.
My favorite lines in Princess Bride are all through the movie, but my all-time favorite is when Inigo and Fezzick are asking Miracle Max for help:
Inigo: "Are you the Miracle Max that worked for the king all those years?" Miracle Max: "Until the king's stinking son fired me, and thank you so much for bringing up such a painful subject. While you're at it, why don't you give me a nice paper cut and pour lemon juice on it? We're closed!"
I must just have this amusement in paper cuts in movies, because while forced to watch Muppets from Space with my little brother (sometimes I wonder if I do too much for him), the only line I laughed out loud at was when the agents come up to Gonzo and says "We feel your pain." Rizzo the rat, standing next to him, then says something to the extent of, "I've got a paper cut that's a doozy; do you feel my pain?" It's the type of thing that has to be heard in context.
Off the paper cut subject, another line I like is from Conspiracy Theory–one on the list of my favorite movies–during the scene when Alice is in Jerry's apartment and asks for coffee when he offers her a drink. Not having the movie in at the moment to quote directly from, after she asks if that's all right, he replies, "Coffee is our friend."
Mel Gibson says a similar line when he does the voice for Rocky in Chicken Run. As all the hens are trudging to their huts, he calls out, "The pain that you're feeling is good. Pain is your friend."
Books have some pretty good lines and passages, too. While I don't usually like the grossly overstudied short stories I have to read for my lit classes, there was this one passage in A&P that I liked because I could relate to it working at the bookstore:
"I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She's one of those cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. She'd been watching cash registers for fifty years and probably never seen a mistake before.... She gave a little snort in passing, if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem...."
This one, from Madeline L'Engle's A Wind in the Door, is also a favorite:
"It is a constant amazement to me," the cherubim thought at them, "that so many earthling artists paint cherubim to resemble baby pigs."
For the moment, that's all I can think of. I've enough to do when daylight comes, so it's time to go.
Ah, it's been an interesting week, though at the same time, not incredibly eventful. I did a lot of running without getting anywhere, I suppose.
However, I made progress today on a story project I'm working on, although I have a feeling that's not quite what church was intended for. Oh well, they were singing MercyMe's "I Can Only Imagine" again, and focusing on a group of characters in another part of the galaxy was the only way to keep me from screaming. That song is entirely overplayed to the point that any charm it originally had is now forever lost.
I haven't drawn much, but the journal is slowly progressing. And with my newest project, I've been writing at least a little bit. The problem with summer break is that I know I have the time to the point that I waste it. I've been completely lethargic lately, which has to stop.
I did watch a couple of movies this week that I hadn't seen before...and a few I have. Evelyn was pretty good, even though I'm usually not too keen on movies and books based on true stories. I don't remember this coming out a few years ago, but it wasn't too bad. On a lighter note, I also rented The Princess Bride, which I haven't watched in a while, and am currently compiling a list of favorite quotes for a later post.
...the subject coming from my writing obsession (confidante is the person that the main character trusts and can work things out with, antagonist is the opponent).
Friends and workplaces are a serious pain in the ass.
Some months ago, I helped my sister get a job in the bookstore I worked at. However, a month or so later, the manager quit. The new manager, known by the part timers as the Dead Fish, is selfish, inexperienced, and unwilling to be manager, anyway. And not long after that, due to a number of reasons, I quit.
And now, I'm seriously regretting helping my sister get this.
For some time, I've seen and learned from a small number of reliable sources that one of my closest friends and DF are using my sister as a scapegoat and making her life generally miserable to the point that my sister is terrified of working with them, especially my friend.
I've been in fights with this friend of mine on a small number of occations for this, but she continues to do it. Now, she's crossed the line again and I don't know what to do about it.
She's a very good friend, one of the three I consider my closest ones I can tell anything to. In addition, my family loves her and considers her a part of the family. Because of this, her whole work torment thing isn't just something I tell my sister she has to stand up to...it's worse and getting personal.
However, I've no idea what to do. She's a good friend. When she's not at work or talking about it, she's really great. But no matter how great she is then, I can't keep talking and joking with her while I know she's picking on my sister. She's still very much my friend, she's just not acting like it.
17 Uses that You Never Knew (or wanted to know) Existed for that Sparkly Blue Window Cleaner, by
Me: What should I blog about? Scribe: that windex can get blood stains out of concrete? Me: I didn't know that
I really don't want to know how she found this out, but I can relate. After working for three years in a small bookstore, I learned that there are certain materials you can use for anything.
Take packing tape for instance. You can use it to secure that glass plate on the broken display cube and make it useable again. If you position the display well enough, nobody will ever notice.
Or you can use it to tape the plastic t-shirt hangers back up after your co-worker decides to stick her head through them. *sigh* You'd think that once these people hit 40 that they'd know better...
Additionally, packing tape can attach posters and other cardboard promotion signs onto the walls, and takes longer to pull the paint off than the blue "wall-safe" sticky putty substance does.
I could sit down with the rest of the old crew and write a book: Packing Tape Chic I could be a famous writer, I tell you! *ahem* Delusional moment.
Another one of these miracle substances is window cleaner. Hidden within its crystal blue sparkle is a number of uses.
So without further ado, 17 Uses that You Never Knew (or wanted to know) Existed for that Sparkly Blue Window Cleaner, by AragornElessar
Compulsively scrub the entire front counter
Clean the jewelry
Give the books that "brand-new item" look
Clean the smudges off of the gift books on the main display
Wipe out the teacups and teapots (a dirty teacup never sells...let's hope you wash those things once you take them home)
Clean the dirt smudge off of the last greeting card in the "special obscure relative birthday" card slot–the one card the customer shoves in your face and yells they can't live without (note: you really want to take it to the stockroom and do this; customers tend to show the warning signs of cardiac arrest if they watch you spraying their card with window cleaner)
Remove the drool stains from the board books
Spray on notes written with my fountain pen's water-soluble ink to blur them beyond recognition
Clean blood off concrete (so I've heard. I wonder who died in the breakroom this time–j/k)
Spray the register monitors just when the manager you hate the most needs to look something up
Run to the back office and spray the monitor when said manager needs to look something up
Set in front of your coworker's water bottle
Keep at your side as a defensive weapon when creepy customers walk in
Keep at your side as a defensive weapon against bratty kids
Clean the dust off of the family videos and books on cassette so customers don't realize the same movies have been on the shelf for eleven months now
Clean the CD playing overhead to make it stop skipping and repeating MercyMe's overplayed song "I Can Only Imagine" over and over and over and over....
Rub the adhesive from ripped-off expired coupon stickers off of those lousy Christian heavy metal CDs.
Did I mention clean the windows?
Oh, and did I mention my one friend's obsession with adhesive remover?
I'm seriously ready for school to start up again. If they started as a June/July term instead of a May one, I'd jump for it...but then there is the problem of no scholarship money during the summer.
At any rate, I was on campus today being the nice, friendly newspaper staff representative sitting at the table by myself during Freshman Orientation. I just sit there for an hour watching all the incoming freshmen eating lunch, glancing around nervously beside their parents, and talking with the student advisors going from table to table. Oh, and I took the subscription money from the periodic parent who wanted a newspaper subscription.
But the instructor who gives the hours for the newspaper events always lets you count travel time in the scholarship hour amount you mark down for the activities (at least, when at the ones I've attended or helped with), and since I'm only a little more than halfway through my requirements and am not just right around the corner, that's great with me.
I found this really nice black feather the other day when I was walking up the driveway. Most likely it's a crow's feather, because my one neighbor is obsessed with leaving food out for them, but I cut slits in a sheet of my journal to slide the feather through and the wrote the last stanza of "The Raven" beside it in fine-point black sharpie. I liked the overall simplicity of the page.
And then I remembered that this was my character/writing journal, so I wrote in how a set of twin characters I have would react to the poem. I still like the page.
My next idea is to write about a few of my character couples, because I've written something about a couple of my character friendships. This means I'll be sneaking into the scrapbook store sometime this or next week to buy some sheet of sentimental stickers when nobody I know is in sight. This journal is giving me a nice creative outlet when I'm not writing or drawing for some sort of short story or "great novel project."
I have an observation to complain about. It's not a new one, but it's been irritating me lately.
Since I've been a little short on cash, my sister's been giving me some for things. While I owe her if I buy a book, a drink she doesn't bother with since I've bought her many an espresso in the past. However, she's a full believer in buying the venti size at Starbucks, saying it's only a little more money than the grande, and you get more, so it's the better deal.
I usually annoy her by getting a tall or grande anyway. I don't want all the drink in a venti, so I might as not spend more of her money (or mine for that matter).
What is it with spending just a little more to get just a little more?
The tactic obviously works pretty well: hence an overweight society here in the United States. More than once I've value-sized my order or ordered a larger cup of tea because I received almost double the amount for a small price more. However, there is something about purchasing a drink or meal that makes you feel the need to make sure you finish it, whether you are hungry or thirsty enough for that extra amount or not. It's because you spent the money for it, I suppose.
Lately, I've made an extra effort to not overorder. Just because a larger size is only forty cents does not mean I need to buy it when all I want is a small or medium. It saves a bit of money, a bit of guilt from overeating and knowing it, and if I want something else, there's always a bowl of fruit in the house.
So, if I'm not thirsty enough for one, Fashion Guru can have her venti mocha cappucchino and I'll save a little money.
Little complaint, but just my irritating observation for the day.
It is truly amazing how I can't keep my room and car organized, yet I am slightly obsessive about keeping my computer files in order and my sites looking neat and tidy.
I grew tired of the link list on the left side, so I replaced it with an image link to blog writing prompts and such. I'll build that page further over time. I don't add links to the link list tBlog will make for you under "add/remove links" because the list is hard to read in Netscape.
In the background, I made sure all of my images are now in Photobucket–wonderful for image hosting, by the way. I also make sure that the images are as compact as I can make them while still being visible and clear...we with dial-up need to be a little more conscientious of these things.
Well, it's crawling into the wee hours of the morning and I'm busy tomorrow. Happy Father's Day to the dads out there.
They'll look even nicer when I get around to making those new curtains.
I bought them a while ago at Zyzyx!, which has some of the coolest things. In addition to a lot of really creative, artistic things in general, there are a lot of Jewish items there, though as I'm not Jewish, I don't know what about half of them are. Very pretty to look at, though.
These were 50% off after either this Christmas or the last one, so I bought the four I liked best.
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This one I liked because it reminded me somewhat of a palantír (chapter 11, book III in The Lord of the Rings, or in the movie The Return of the King). ::wonders if she should have hung it up then::
It hit me on Thursday: Sunday is Father's Day. And it would be too good of me if I actually had a present.
So I glanced around my room looking for something I could throw together with meaning. Spying the book I recently checked out on memory boxes (Blue and I saw a really neat one when we looked at the book at Borders one day), I decide, "hey, why don't I make Dad a box?"
Well, it won't be one of those time/effort/money involved projects in that book.
We have a bunch of empty cigar boxes we acquired for a craft project which fell through. Since a cigar box at my favorite scrapbook store up the street is about five dollars, we kept the boxes.
After deciding on a box, I went on the computer and found my favorite scanned and digital photos that would be nice for Father's Day. After putting them on disc, I took them to the digital print kiosk at Walmart, where they're twenty-four cents a print. Select the prints and sizes, print the claim receipt, and be back in an hour for the prints.
Unfortunately, as I learned from the girl behind the counter later, the person who stopped at the kiosk before me left a card with about 200 images on it...and the system kept timing out halfway through printing, and then screwed it up for the rest of the day, so when I came back this morning, they gave me the prints free since it took so long. Well, there's three dollars that can go towards paint.
I looked down in the basement to see what my artist father had in the way of acrylic and latex paint, and found by way of acrylic, he had basically a stockpile of Phtalo Blue and by way of latex, several buckets of Victorian Lace for my walls (not my choice), making me really wish he still painted. Oh, and lots of white, but I simply don't do white alone.
I ended up reaching for a can of black spray paint on a trip to Michaels with Scribe. Perhaps I'll rummage through the workshop and see if there's a primer I can use with spray paint.
So at the moment I am collaging the photos on top of a sample sheet the size of the inside lid. While Dad's out tomorrow, I'll spray the box black and then do the actual collaging in the lid after it dries. I'm figuring that the best adhesive is photo mounting tape, but if I need to seal the pictures afterward, I have no idea with what.
About that writing journal I've been keeping...this is the cover.
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It's hard to see on the side because I chopped half of it off with the scanner, but there is a metal eyelet that a leather cord is threaded through. There's another on the other side, and I can tie the journal shut this way. The spiral is on the right side because I am left-handed, so it's easier to write this way. Here, I used stickers, paper, yellow and blue ink with a quill, and silver sharpie, so it helps reflect the variety of writing materials I used inside as I wrote, glued, printed and sketched.
I've really wanted to use a couple of recently discovered characters in a brand-new setting and story. However, I've been having the hardest time figuring out what I wanted to do with them.
While I am still learning details, I'm figuring that I will go with my idea of their being part of a group searching for a new home rather than the previous idea of having them become part of a resistance movement to free wherever they're living. The challenges they would face searching for and establishing a place to live sounds more interesting than a band of rebels against some warlord.
Slightly aside from the currently subject, I took the dark road in my previous post and included it in a snatch of writing I'll probably work into this settlement idea I'm developing.
I was coming home tonight from a meeting at a friend's house. One of the roads I take cuts through woods, and then the houses at begin to appear a mile or two later are small and older. In addition, the road, while not in bad condition, is a little rougher and narrower than the others I travel on to get there. For the most part, things are very dark (considering the time I come up it to get home), but every once in a while, there is a very lonely-looking streetlight standing alone alongside the road. Altogether, the road is a very lonely place to be, more so at 11:00 at night than at 6:00.
I draw a distinct line between "alone" and "lonely." I'm a quiet, out-of-the-way person who prefers the company of books, Beethoven, and a good cup of tea over any social gathering. "Alone" is a good thing and how I spend a lot of my personal time. "Lonely" is a term I apply to dark back roads, watercolor landscapes, and still-life paintings. Laugh if you will, but hasn't anyone else felt a strange chill of dull loneliness looking at one of those drab pictures of fruit and inanimate objects or washed-out seascape watercolors? It's an odd, unique feeling that I don't even experience when I'm at a social event and trying to blend into the wall as I'm the only one not in a group talking.
Back to the dark road...
Despite the loneliness chill I get whenever I drive on this road late at night, I feel a desire to continue on it and the feeling that if I do, it will go on all night, and at dawn, I'll arrive at my "destination," whatever the vague connotation I have for this is. During the day, I just feel like I could continue driving forever, but then the feeling usually comes when I'm on some major highway or an interstate. I always want to drive "just a little farther."
It could be why many of my stories center around a journey. I guess I just have wanderlust.
Well, I made a nice trip to the library today. What made it different than a trip during the semester is that I was able to walk around today and check out whatever I wanted.
Technically, I have the same freedom whether or not school is in session. However, checking out an abundance of books on various subjects and actually reading them is much easier during summer break than when I have two papers, an article, and a webpage all due over the week.
So I'm finally getting around to some of those "someday" things.
I checked out a basic math book or two because I completely suck at math. Being the knowledge-hungry person I am, I want to be able to do more than add and subtract without needing to break out the calculator.
Then I added a couple of hair books. I figure that if I got the cut and spent the money to do so (and of course the money to go back and get it trimmed in five or six weeks), I had better figure out what I'm supposed to do to take care of it.
Sure, I'm reading Beowulf next semester in lit, but reading it has been one of my random "someday" goals for some years now, so I don't want to walk into my lit class without at least having started it.
And then a book on making boxes (including that envelope box Blue and I saw in the book at Borders one day), because I still need a Father's Day present for Dad.
Lastly, a CD I had to find and have sent from another county just because one track on there is one of those songs that just "clicks" with a couple of my characters. It was one of those things that I checked out quickly and shoved into my backpack before the local omnipresent friends of my family could see it and wonder why I had that of all music choices.
It is really driving me crazy now. I've had these two good characters in my mind for a month now. I liked them enough that I did not place them in my main universe but created a new one for them with different situations and settings.
But now I don't know what to do with them.
These are my two best-fitting ideas:
They're part of a freedom fighter movement against the warlords who control the surrounding systems.
They're a group of exiles searching for a new home.
Either way, I can include conflict, action, etc. The only problem is that I go back and forth between the ideas. I think knowing this would help me find a plot.
I'm feeling just a little
at the moment...
Check out the site of Sigma Tau Delta--the International English Honor Society.
