Fourth quarter downpour

The rain started in the last quarter of the Super Bowl and continued all through the night. Tooth pain woke me several times to listen to the rain, and wonder how complicated it would be to fit a visit to my dentist into the week. A couple times I turned on the patio light to see if I should start an ark. I hoped the newspaper deliverer wouldn't slip in the mud out front.

The rain continued until mid-afternoon, after the dentist made impressions of my upper and lower teeth. I would rather eat mud than do that again!

The rose quartz in my fairy garden looks particularly beautiful, cleaned by all the rain. I've had that piece of quartz since I was a kid. It's handful size.

Posted a different view of my rainy day on the 365 Project. I like the process of deciding which photo best describes the day.



© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

Daily Shoots and Leaves

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

The Itty Bitty Blogger shoots; and, feeling vexed,
She cannot figure how her cell should Text
Not camera post: nor Tweeter Twit
Fights back the fears that bubble next.

© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

The Muse Knows Best

My muse offers two new projects to get my creative battery jumped. I'm in a deep funk. New projects seem like the last thing I need. My brain runs the hamster wheel, cycling and recycling suggestions, admonitions, resolutions, shoulds, and regrets until I get off the treadmill with no energy at all.

My blog muse knows me well, and she knows when I need an inspirational jolt. If I'm not creating, I don't feel much like tackling life's problems. Her timely suggestions are way cheaper than therapy. It's time for a 365 Project, and maybe a Daily Shoot.

Getting started on 365 Project was easy. I like the calendar photo, and hope it will be printable. I started with the Yahtzee photo from a current Valentine project, but want a theme for my 365 effort. The concept is to post an original photo each day for a year, learning to be a better photographer and a bit about myself in the process. I'm leaning toward a collection of photos taken within one block of my front door. It's time to pay more attention to my own spot.

When I walked down to the garbage dumpster this morning I was stunned to see the huge tree had been removed. Maybe the garbage truck had one close encounter too many with that tree, but the spot looks very strange.


Headed back to my condo, I saw a big hawk in a tree by the creek. It was sitting there yesterday, too. Got my jacket, camera, and binocs and headed down the drive. The hawk humored me for awhile as I practiced with the binoculars. A squirrel and a cardinal cooperated, too. I walked several times around the condominium complex and the little park that borders it on the creek side, without ever getting more than a block from my door.

This impressive unidentified fungus is the size of a paper plate. On this gray day it was tricky getting a photo of it on the tree at least ten feet above the ground. If I don't get poison ivy, I'll be pretty pleased with this photo.

As the muse knew, I'm feeling better already.

© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

What does a hedgehog feel like?

Having survived the 100th Day of School celebration, including a visit from the Creature Teacher, I got home and found a letter saying the insurer was about to cancel Dad's insurance AGAIN. Managing things for an elderly parent is challenging, but especially so when it comes to billing addresses that differ from places of residence. Dad's local agency never got the billing address corrected with the insurer, so I never got the bill. It is all groovy now, many phone calls and phone menus later. The curse of UNCWY continues!


I did not pull out my hair, but that is only because the Creature Teacher brought a hairless guinea pig for today's presentation. Yes, there are people out there who intentionally breed bald guinea pigs that look ever so much like hippo embryos. We love the Creature Teacher, aka Robyn Wheeler. The kids have a favorite free-time game in the puppet theater where they take turns being the Creature Teacher and giving a show with the animal puppets.

For extra excitement during the presentation, the pygmy hedgehog escaped from her cage and ran across the classroom. The student who got to pet the hedgehog reported it felt like "sporks".

If today was an episode of "Let's Make a Deal" I would hope to get the sporky hedgehog behind Door #3. I don't want the insurance agent or the hairless guinea pig.

© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

Marmot Day, 1978

Wish I could fit in those jeans, but so glad I'm not that clueless! Considering how uninformed we were on this backpacking trek in the San Juan National Forest above Durango, Colorado, I'm glad to have survived with only the occasional recurring lost marmot nightmare.

It's Greta Groundhog Day, a silly holiday I never forget. In my elementary school class, my friend Greta celebrated her birthday every Groundhog Day.

In Alaska, today is Marmot Day. My personal Marmot Day [pMD] was in the snowy mid-summer. It was the first real vacation with my law-student spouse, and our budget for the two weeks was slightly over $200. My mom slipped me another hundred in case something broke on our puke-yellow Chevy Nova.

In the photo I'm smiling because no bears ate me through the whole night while I tried to sleep on the crunchy vegetation and steep slope. As you may note, I can see my shadow. That meant eighteen more years of marriage!

We were somewhere in the vicinity of Kennebec Pass, and about to encounter an abandoned mine area populated by a couple hundred chirping live fuzzy hand-puppets. They were watching our every clumsy move across the snow, and singing a warning that we were way off the beaten trail. I figured these creatures were a Greek chorus of groundhogs warning of impending tragedy.

Only after I returned to civilization and my library did I identify these creatures as marmots. My students are having some Groundhog Day ID troubles, too. We made groundhog stick puppets today, and learned groundhog poems. We reinforced concepts of months, seasons, cloudy and sunny, hibernation, and shadows. We talked about tunnels and living underground. At the end of the day the kids waiting for their rides in car line said the puppets were prairie dogs and brown dogs. Oh, Greta! We really tried, but it just didn't sink in.

A topo map of preschool will lead to many abandoned marmot mines!

© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

Mercury memories

I have a favorite childhood memory from the Sixties, back before we knew that absolutely everything is dangerous. I remember playing with mercury bubbles on the blue bathroom linoleum after a thermometer broke, chasing the bubbles, merging and separating them. It was so cool and well worth working around the glass slivers!

Friends report similar experiences. One wrote:

I did the same thing! It was such fun to collect those tiny balls together, almost like magic the way they melded into a large ball. Don't remember telling Mom that I'd broken the thermometer, just the simple pleasure of playing with the mercury.

That's probably why I can't wait for my May trip to Chicago--well, aside from Danger Baby's law school commencement and meeting his future in-laws. I can't wait to finally visit Millennium Park to see "Cloud Gate". Anish Kapoor's sculpture is like a giant reflecting blob of liquid mercury. Sounds like my childhood dream come true!

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and the EPA are busy protecting today's kids from lead and cadmium in cheapo Chinese toys, and that's a good thing. Alas, in the trade-offs between safety and wonder, wonder usually loses. In the Sixties we often got small plastic maze games containing a drop of mercury as birthday party favors. In the late-Seventies a fancier elemental mercury maze toy called "Quicksilver" was popular.

Another mercury memory from the Sixties still doesn't have anything to do with the Friendship Seven astronauts. When you skinned your knee, your mom was likely to paint the scrape with a fabulous stinging, smelly, magenta, microbe-killing concoction of mercury plus bromide or sodium. Mercurochrome and Merthiolate are now known to inhibit healing, and aren't used much. There was a strange rush to having your knee painted with merthiolate. The knee scrape and the sting were often worth it to smell the pungent odor and be decorated with the gorgeous stain. Both products were pulled from drugstore shelves late in the last millennium.

Sixties moms chose up sides based on their preferences for merthiolate or mercurochrome. Later parental popularity contests pitted Bactine against Jaohnson & Johnson's First Aid Cream and Neosporin.

Kids today have a better chance of learning about mercury at the EPA's superfund cleanup site than by breaking an oral thermometer. Practical clean-up instructions can be found at this Colorado website. I sure hope kids get to visit Chicago at least.

© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

Creating space

Our first elementary art project of 2010 is finally finished. We made it into space!

When a project takes four class periods, it's a relief to have it be worth the effort. I wasn't too sure we'd get past the first morning doing a reprise of the the shaving cream printmaking the kids loved in December. The second time the kids loved wallowing in the mess even more, so I need some space and a few light years to recover before I try it in a large group again. We got great marbled effects on some old, faded construction paper, though.



The second morning we did a calm color-mixing experience while painting to the space music mix cd the Woolly Mammoth made for me years ago. A little Star Wars, some Star Trek, Holst, and a final frolic with the Purple People Eater were a treat while trying for a a wide range of tints and a soft, feathery brush stroke. Using some freebie overhead transparency sheets for palettes made for easy clean-up, plus we used the last of the paint on each palette for a couple of monoprints.

By the third week, each student had several interesting papers to use, tracing and cutting circles to make planets, asteroids, and other orbs of various sizes. At ages six to nine they feel competent at tracing and cutting, so that class had a relaxed mood. They could trade their leftovers with classmates to get different colors.



Now for the tricky part--how to introduce composition to get the best space, the best illusion of depth, so the circles wouldn't be glued on like polka dots or domino spots. Our eyes and brains play such wonderful tricks on us. The small circle seems more distant than the big circle. The circle that interrupts the picture frame seems closer still. The overlapped circle is automatically more distant than the overlapping one. A small shape interrupting the edge of a large circle seems to be moving in front of it!

The kids were delighted with their results. Their planets and moons weren't just in space. Some seemed to be rotating and revolving thanks to the patterned papers. We even had a few eclipses, and we got safely back to Earth.



© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder