plants!

They grow up so fast! morning glories in my window, with some dying cilantro.

Summer ^_^

mroe summer

Still more summer. But I'm gladly busy with my quaint (at the worst, pathetic) goals. Like watering my garden in the morning, and I'm still trying to make the best pancakes ever. So far, they involve cornmeal.

And I guess that's what I look forward to: food. Not fast food, not out to dinner, I want to make it. It's a fantasy of failure and having to try again. It's an occupation of time. I want to find some creative way to mix flour, butter, sugar, and milk. It's precious.

I painted half the livingroom, rearranged the furniture, and packed a full garbage bag full of stuff from a sideways bookshelf.

I'm still doing my self-portraits. I don't know when they'll ever be online, but they will. I should probably put an adult-content warning. Nothing explicit, but as a project inherently about body-image, and clothes are unnecessary.

Keeping Busy.

It's been weeks, and everything is still a mess, except, for some reason, my head. One month till my birthday, another and I'm at school. I'm keeping busy:

Gardening. I borrowed a rototiller and cleaned up a plot in the backyard. It's midway through June, but mom already bought the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. I even consulted my books (what's the point of having them if you don't read them?) to get the spacing and planting right. I love the work. I hope that some day I'll grow my own vegetables.

Painting. I have the paint, I haven't painted my room yet.

Cooking. I'm trying to make the core recipes for next year, make sure I can make real healthy food in a short amount of time with a few ingredients- how much can I do with flour, eggs, butter, sugar? Would it be cheaper to bake my own bread?

Asking Questions. I want to know how businesses and politics work. I love learning about it. What laws govern businesses and religion and politicians and real estate and how they are interpretted. I've become increasingly interested in corruption and I want to be able to understand the economy better than an art student stereotype. I want to have intelligent conversations with people. I'm also preparing myself for the upcoming presidential election.

So, tomorrow, I'll wake up early and make french toast ravioli.
http://www.newlyweds-blog.com/2010/09/23/stuffed-french-toast/.
I probably don't have ricotta, but I'm thinking of putting something else in there, like eggs or PANCAKE BATTER. Pancake in french toast. THIS is what summer is about.

where do you go when it gets dark? and is there room for me there?

listening to: something medieval. iTunes on shuffle, you never know. "Prevent Us, O Lord" from cd Musick for Elisabeth (the shakespeare one).

made oat-almond-zucchini muffins, that were'nt that bad. Not as bad as they sound, anyways.

staked the tomatoes. bushes and bushes. also got to trip a lot of the garden and spray the powdery mildew-ridden squash with a milk solution. i don't know if it works, but I don't want to lose a zucchini crop two years in a row.

Art with Ganes from school, with his mustache. it's basically art class from school with a different group of kids. The kids are generally nicer- nicer than FIT girls. And there's at least one kid who has better drawing skills than me, which is great.

There is a nice pair of styrofoam legs that will be the center of my piece. I'm trying to throw conventional proportions behind me. And I wanted the background just to be black, but that will not sit for the Ganes.

I do not like large, loud noises. Especially gun-like noises that i cannot see.

Fireworks, between 3 and 6 blocks away from my house, and night. Real fireworks, with different colors and patterns. Technically, illegal in New York without special permission, but a lot of firemen and teenagers usually get things like sparklers and bottle rockets.

In the end, I hid in my basement fearing the apocolypse. The sky was on fire, and there were cannons and gunshot.

In garden news, my first zucchini was harvested today, and it will be made into breakfast muffins tomorrow. I'm trying to dry lemon balm for tea use, to see if i can do it and to cut down on the overgrown mess of a bush.

On the side is my first friendship bracelet. I'm a lanyard (aka boondoggle) person, but i had a lot of pre-cut string around.

a rototiller is the child of a plow and a gas lawnmower. it's terrible to use, eats up the ground, and makes a lot more noise than an ox amd plow. but my little plot in the backyard really needed it.

SATs stole my brain.

painting, being sorta messy, and planting

cathryn's workshop! more later, and explanation first:

i'm partially person. my handwriting isn't neat, my clothes aren't quite folded in their drawers, my books are in their own piles on the floor. painting works well for me because i can nudge it in the right direction to make a painting and i can get messy.

painting in general is an action of mess- i don't really know what's going to happen when i put a brush on the paper/or/canvas. sometimes something coherent comes out and looks decent. sometimes painting results in a fruitless mess, but that's okay, too.

in the workshop today i made such a mess. but i definately learned a lot about palate brushes, and i have an outline and underlining texture for my painting. its a good design, too, i think. the coloring was interesting, and i got to use negative space (!) to connect the face with the background better. <3>

this summer's garden is turning into a medicinal/culinary herb garden. with the tomatoes and radishes on the side. i even found chocolate mint at Hicks last weekend, and that should be interesting in tea. That, and peppermint, spearmint, lemon balm, chamomile, anise, parsley, sweet basil, chives. so far. the chives and lemon balm grew back from last year. the lavender and rosemary did not.

story vs. game:

the protagonist of a story is a character, a separate entity. the protagonist of a game is a person. people learn from example from stories, and learn from experience in games.