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Hey everyone.
I’ve been loving this journal for a while now. It looks good, I can customize it easily. I enjoy it. My only complaint is that wordpress does not have a very good way of socializing and finding other people of similar interests. The comments are very non-streamlined and there is no way to “reply” to a comment. I hate that. I hate that I feel like I’m standing on a podium high above people, hoping they’ll stop to hear what I’m yelling down, with no way of actually communicating.
That’s why I’ve returned to www.livejournal.com I am still keeping this one for now, but my heart just isn’t in it like it once was. I need the socializing. My new journal is houseofstories : http://houseofstories.livejournal.com/
If you have a livejournal, feel free to add me. If you don’t, the journal is open to the public so anyone can read it. I encourage you to create a livejournal though. It makes keeping up with people a breeze! I love having mini-conversations in comments.
Make sure to say hi if you head over. I look forward to talking to some of you!
-Sommer
The dining room walls are all done and boy do they look beautiful. I’ve just about fixed all the trim in the room/hallway/foyer. That will be done this week, likely this night.
I did a piece for last week’s Illustration Friday under the topic of “Foggy” but never got it posted up. I was on vacation. I have an excuse. I do have this week’s finished, just nowin fact, under the topic “Enough.” It is dedicated to my friend Lydia because it’s been that sort of month for her. I’ll say more when I post it. It’s done in acrylics, which is the first time I’ve done that for IF, I think. I did it in my watercolor notebook, of all things, and it’s just black and white. You’ll see. I like it. It has one of my new fancy cartoonish characters in it. And an origami bird.
I have several new art pieces done at home that I desperately need to get photographed and posted. I am so very, very proud of them. I’m getting ready to hang them up, in fact, in the dining room. They are going to look supa-dupa-fine.
My husband’s sister is coming to live with us for a couple of months starting at the beginning of August, just days before my 29th birthday. I’m very much excited because I like her a lot and I hope we can become friends. It is going to be fun, and a little strange. We’re used to having someone stay the night every once and a while, but to have someone there all the time will be odd.
We got to go to a sneak peek of “The Dark Knight” last week. It was incredible. Loved the movie so much. Go see it. Go see it now.
Oh I am also deciding to return to my watercolor journal to do mini-paintings. I miss it. Expect to see me posting on Illustration Friday regularly starting this week.
This week’s word is Sour. I am a little stumped as to what to do. We’ll see.
If you’ve been even remotely watching the news recently, you no doubt know about (or are personally experiencing) the flooding in Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, etc. Living in the Midwest is a very peculiar thing. Sometimes we look so urban, so suburban, so much like everyone else. And other times…well we just aren’t. There’s something still very pioneering, weathered, and tough about us. We know the weather. Since I was a little girl, I could smell a thunderstorm, understand the clouds, know the sound of dangerous weather. We know what to do and how to do it, and for the most part we always weather our yearly bought of storms. I suspect it is not unlike how others weather hurricanes and the like. You grow up knowing what to do when the wind howls harder than it has any right to, and the water is coming down faster than you know the ground can absorb. You just know how to keep yourself safe.
But we are helpless to protect anything but ourselves. Our houses, our fields, our farms, our land. They are at the mercy of the storms. During my first storm since putting in a garden, I posted here asking for advice, practically desperate, sure I was going to lose everything, cringing and pacing at the doorways and jumping with each “thunk” of hail that struck a window pane. I was so sure I was going to lose my whole garden…but there it was when it was all over. Hardly a scratch on them. In fact in the days that followed that storm, they sprung to life magically. I was lucky. Others were not. Not far from where I live…less suburban but still not a far drive, whole fields are still under water with a crop sinking slowly into mushy soil. My dad’s house, in the middle of the country, survived the storms, but his land at the bottom of his hill was nothing but a newly grown lake, swamping the driveway and anything else that might have been planted there. It’s absolutely devastating watching what’s going on with people who have giant farms and endless rows of crops. Gone. It’s sobering and makes me proud and thankful of my little dirt mound in the backyard.
Anyway, I do have a point to this post, not just shock and awe. As you probably know, the Midwest got sucker punched by dozens of storms over a two week period. Every day I was running home to batten down the hatches. More that one night was spent with my husband huddled under a large table in the basement while I watched a fuzzy TV after the cable went out and my husband read a book and waited it out. On one evening, well into the stormiest week I can remember in many years, my friend and I were sitting in my library watching a TV show on the computer. My husband was out, and it was supposed to be the first clear night for a while. Suddenly, we heard thunder and having not expected it, we quickly ran to the back door and out onto my deck to see if it really did look like another storm was coming in. God knows we didn’t need it.
What we saw was more than amazing. And scary. And beautiful. I, of course, had to take pictures, though it took me a week to get them posted finally. Most of the storms came in the night, like little wet bandits. This one was coming just on the cusp of nightfall when we still had a glow in the sky from the sun. Because of that, the sun lit up the sky like a fireball. It was absolutely incredible. Here are the pictures I took that night. Mother nature is incredibly beautiful, even when she is at her most destructive.
I hope you like them. They aren’t Photoshopped at all. This is how the sky looked, just like a painting.
-Sommer
Oh my god! New art!
Sometimes I can’t believe it myself. I’ve been painting parts of the house so much and done so little creative art I sort of was starting to think I wasn’t going to go back. Then I had the bug to try acrylic painting, my new obsession, and off we went. The things I always wanted to achieve in watercolor but couldn’t I CAN easily with acrylic. Love love love Golden and all that it stands for. I have a 30% coupon for an item at Dick Blick and I’m honestly considering going and getting a package of mediums that add spice and love to any paint color. Mmmm. Art pr0n.
So here they are, in no particular order. They also are un-titled because I suck at titles. I just hate them. Feel free to come up with some for me.
There are 2 more, making it a set of six that will hang in the large expanse of open wall in our library. I haven’t finished the other two yet. They are sort of done but not done good enough. There are four more, larger canvases, that I’m going to start working on next that are going to go in the front foyer area by the door. They are long and narrow pieces that I’m excited to start. It’s been a long time since I worked on honest to God canvas and I love it so much. Watercolor canvas is disgustingly expensive.
Growing a garden is one of the most liberating things I’ve ever done. I think about it a lot, during the day and when I am at home. I go out every night and look at the leaves, and look at the ground. I look for bugs that might be helping or hurting my plants. I look for discoloration or spots. I want them to grow more. I will them to grow more.
The tomatoes have yellowing leaves, particularly my Brandywine, which isn’t surprising since it is an heirloom and not resistant to everything thanks to Science. I’ve been told it’s probably a nitrogen deficiency because of the very hard rains lately. I’m going to go pick up fish emulsion tonight at Menards to give a quick shot of nitrogen to the soil until the organic matter can catch up after our hard hard rains. That should put a stop to the yellowing problems.
We planted some carrot seeds, which we weren’t really sure would grow since we were a little late planting them. The seeds are tiny…I mean really tiny, so I imagined we’d have to thin them out since it was hard to carefully plant just one at a time along the row. I think the big storms that happened after we planted them blew them around. We’ve got *something* growing around the carrot bed, in the pathways and even one or two in the pepper bed. They do not look like grass, so I’m wondering if they are my baby carrots, but I don’t know. So they look like sort of a mess since most of them are in the pathway and not in the bed. Which means I have a large portion of my third bed that is empty. I’m going to pick something up to plant there. Not sure what yet.
We’re also planting some strawberries in a container on our deck. I’m going to pick those up this week too. I think next year I want to plant a dwarf apple tree.
On the same note, GM is shutting down it’s Hummer plants. Whoohoo! I feel bad for the people losing their jobs, of course, but I’m glad that we’ll stop seeing all the new hummers on the roads. And if you think people aren’t buying them anymore, I can tell you that someone in my building bought one this month. A brand new one. It makes me kind of sick.
That is all!
I have a job interview tomorrow. I’m so nervous. I’ve been unable to do any proper writing or updating of blogs in days.
I sit and twiddle my thumbs and answer pretend questions in my head. I’m slowly going mad.
My creative time has been sucked apart lately by yard work, house work, and searching for a new job. And being paranoid and worried about the economy. Is anyone else spending a lot of time hand wringing over the state of the world? It’s really starting to get to me these days.
Our yard is incredibly out of shape and last night we started working on it. A good mowing did a lot, but there’s so many pine needles and leaves caught in the rock beds in our front yard I don’t know how we’ll ever get them out. We’re going to be cutting down the pine tree in our front yard soon (It’s planted too close to the house and half dead) so this should be the last year of pine needle heartbreak. I’m going to plant a couple of flowers in the front yard, but not much. We don’t want to spend extra money on them.
We’re getting ready to paint the dining room. We have the primer and the trim paint but we haven’t gotten to it yet. WE’re still taping off and not getting very far. We’ll pony up one of these days.
Finally, I’m searching for a new job that is more challenging and will bring in some more cash. It’s going ok…I’ve got some prospects but at the same time I really like my job I really like working for the hospital. But I just think I could be doing more, doing better.
So not much in the creative side. I’ve gotten all my art pieces up on my etsy shop at www.storyvilledesigns.etsy.com so I encourage you to go check it out if you’re interested 
I have finally purchased a domain for this blog, so update all your bookmarks and blog lists! The old address will still work of course. Both the old and the new address works just fine.
or
www.rhetoricwizard.wordpress.com
Today my Etsy Shop is having its GRAND OPENING!!
I’m so excited to finally have this up and running. I have three pieces up right now, and the rest will be up later this evening (I must take time from art to go pay my car registration. Poo.)
I haven’t talked much about Storyville Designs, and I will do a full post about what it is and why I decided to do this. I love these art pieces so much, I really do. I hope you like them too.
Please go check the etsy store out. Storyville Designs: www.storyvilledesigns.etsy.com
I will tell you more about them soon.
Here’s what I have loaded up so far-
