toenails

My feet hurt. Not only my feet, but my toes and my toenails. How does that happen? How do you walk so much that your toenails hurt? I worked from 10:15am to 9:15pm. Well, part of it was working and the other part was a fundraising thing. But I was on my feet at both events. And now my toenails hurt.

vernacular

My friend Duey decided that she would use words that people don't normally use. There will be about one new word a week. Yesterday the word vernacular was used. Vernacular means, among a few other similar things, "to use plain, everyday, ordinary language." Kind of ironic that the work for something plain or every day isn't so plain.

strength

This print was taken from an image I found. It reminded me of my grandma and my mom. These women are women I admire and are my heroes. They have gone through so much and yet are still living and enjoying life and can still make the best food I have ever tasted. Both my grandmas are strong women. They have been through the depression, marriage, 8 to 10 kids and all their marriages and helped them grow up to be great people. My mother is also a wonderful woman. She cooks, cleans, takes care of my 9 year old sister, Natalie, as well as my teenage siblings, Matt and Colette and does all those "womanly" things wonderfully. She sings in the choir, has an active faith in God, is the leader of a girl scout troop, teaches in an elementary school with how many roudy children and is brilliant at it. The women in my life are deffinitely a good influence in my life and this print makes me think of them.

packrat

I am a packrat. I was trained by my mother, who was trained by her mother who lived through the depression and that's what I blame my packraticism on. It could be a disease that sweeps through the female side of my family, or it could be a conditioned response. I use or wear things, in general, until they don't work anymore or are so tattered or beat up that there can be no possible use for it. I wore this particular pair of shoes until there were holes in the backs of them and then I still kept wearing them until my friends made me throw them away. The shoes in the box are one of the best pairs I've ever owned and I wore them a lot. I wore this pair canoeing and camping in the Boundary Waters in Norhtern Minnesota (which mean they were treated to the elements) and then wore them gardening (a summer job) and then wore them for everyday use as well. They got pretty dirty. I didn't think they were that bad until my friends pointed it out. They still protected my feet somewhat, but if it rained my feet would deffinitely get wet. They hadn't completely fallen apart, so they were still good in my eyes. I tend to develop a fixation to my belongings and so had something close to a funeral for my shoes when I finally decided to throw them away. I put them in a casket (the nice shoe box seen in the picture), made sure there was memorabilia(the photo you see), and then threw away the shoes. I kept the box.

shapes

I am fascinated with shapes. (I'm fascinated with color too, but that's besides the point.) I found my great sequence of shapes in the girls bathroom. I wasn't necessariy looking for great shapes, I just happened upon them. On the door of one of the stalls are fasened an abnormally large number of washers and bolts to hold up the stall door. These bolts and washers, probably put in so the door wouldn't fall crashing to the floor, were most likely installed in no particular order and with no particular attention to what they looked like. However, these bolts and their washers make me think of my sketches. The ones I make when I'm bored in class. Maybe it's just a coincidence that the washers move in size from largest to smallest, maybe the janitor only had a large one on hand when he/she needed to fix the door. Whatever the case, I happened upon these shapes and came to the realization that there can be some rather attractive shapes in life outside the art world, even if it's in a girls bathroom.