Days Thirteen to Seventeen: Ice, Etcetera

Day 13: Last week we had a major winter storm here in NC, which made life interesting. This meant lots of pretty snow (at first), followed by a sheet of ice on top of all that snow that made everything glisten - and many a car drive off the road. Around this time, when remarking to a friend how some snow-covered bushes looked like iced cinnamon buns, I had the duh moment of realizing exactly where those terms "icing" and "frosting" come from.

Once things finally started to warm up, there was an interesting phenomenon that happened where the snow beneath would melt faster than the outer "shell" of ice. This led to some beautiful images, one of which I captured as my good madness for the day:



Day 14: In my junk drawer I have a collection of greeting cards I buy and save for the right occasions throughout the year. It always happens; I'm looking for a card for a friend's birthday and find one that would be perfect for my brother. Or I find a truly fantastic wedding card, but no one I know is getting married anytime soon. So what I do is just go ahead and buy them and tuck them away until I have a use for them. Well, the other day I got a package in the mail in a small box that I noticed was just the right size for all but the most abnormally-shaped or over-sized of cards, neither of which I have right now. So, using the materials on hand (in this case, three bottles of nail polish I had intended to use at Christmas but never got around to), I painted it to look like this:







Day 15: Today I wrote 3 and a half more pages on the hand-written story I started last week. I know I said I wouldn't give away any of the plot since I intend to use it for something later this year, but here's a sentence to hopefully pique your interest:



Day 16: The Golden Globes, an awards ceremony for achievements in television and film, was on TV tonight. I watched the red carpet and the ceremony. This got me thinking about awards ceremonies in general, and how our society seems to attach a lot of value and significance to the things that entertain us, but how some of the other vital professions go sadly overlooked. I wrote about it on my other blog and cross-posted it on facebook, and you can check it out HERE.

But that's not really my good madness! Inspired by this notion that more people deserve to be recognized than just celebrities, I came up with a prototype for my own award, the "You Award." (A little cheesy, I know... but it was late at night.) Anyway, I didn't get to make a proper award, but below you'll see the drawing and cardboard version. I was going to make it gold and shiny with my gold leaf pen, but that has apparently dried out, so for now it's just cardboard.



Day 17: With it being Martin Luther King, Jr. day, I wanted to do something that fit with the spirit of the day. So I went looking for quotes from MLK thinking I'd be inspired from there. There were many about changing the world, about dreams and hope, about human kindness and dignity. So many wonderful words and ideas. But then I happened upon one that seemed a little different than the others, and reminded me of a paper I wrote a long time ago at college about Plato and the Scottish author George MacDonald. I won't bore you with the details of the paper, except to say that both those authors had written allegories all about what this statement from Martin Luther King, Jr. perfectly sums up: "Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see."

So, I was thinking of this quote and of shadows when I picked up some charcoal to sketch. The picture I came up with doesn't have anything to do with what the quote was about, but oh well.



Onward and upward, my good friends...