Cleaning

I cleaned yesterday, a feat worth mentioning since it's been quite a while... In my cleaning, I discovered many things.

1- My work space, as much as I love to be organized and clean, is not... To illustrate, this is how I would love my work space to look-



However, this is Colin's desk. Not mine. Mine looks like this:


With other things overflowing into the kitchen and front room. Everything is in organized piles. I know generally where things are, but just guess who is the one that always is losing things in all the mess...


2- I found this in one of these messy piles. It's a drawing of a dragon.


Last semester, one of my classes required a certain amount of hours of observing different art classrooms. We went to all kinds, from elementary to high school, from troubled youth schools to charter or public schools. This particular class was in elementary, and the 4th grade students knew me as Mrs. Slade. (A name, which despite loving, makes me feel about 45 years older...)

At the end of the hour, one little girl came up to me and asked if I wanted to draw with her. Being flattered, of course, I said yes. (I was remembering my 4th grade days, and I was always so shy I never would have gotten asked then. So I was grateful to have this chance at least once in my life... even if it is 15 years later....) I asked her what we were drawing and she said Dragons. Of course, ponies are so outdated right?

I proceeded to start my dragon, which I was pretty confident in. I mean, I'm in college. I can draw decently. I am confident enough in myself now that I don't have to look at her drawing to see how I should draw it so that she likes it... So I drew a dragon. It's too bad I don't have a picture of it, she was lovely. It was a girl dragon, and she was flying. If I had time to color it, I would have colored her a ruby copper color. With golden wing tips. I was feeling pretty good about myself.

Then, another girl came over. She told the other girl her dragon looked pretty cool. Which I agree. It's a really cool dragon. Much better than I could have drawn in 4th grade. I wouldn't have thought to make it look mean... I didn't know how. When the other little girl saw mine, she said "That doesn't look like a dragon..." I hope you can imagine the attitude she had when she said this. As if she was the world's leading expert on what dragons look like. Needless to say, I was crushed. By a 4TH GRADER!

She didn't stop making fun of my dragon. The first little girl stood up for me, however. We exchanged drawings, and I'm sure she took it home to show her mother and say that she drew a dragon much better than mine...

Well, 15 years of confidence can build back up eventually right?


3- In my running around cleaning and trying to reassure myself that I can draw dragons, I kept coming back to the kitchen to see the bird's nest outside our kitchen window.



Can you see the cute little heads popping out? We knew there was a nest there, but we weren't able to tell if it was abandoned, or if it had any eggs in it at all. Today was our first siting of the babies, since we usually keep that window blind shut. I kept running in to see if I could get pictures of the mom when she came back to feed them every 5 minutes or so.





They aren't that cute. They aren't like adorable baby ducklings or anything (which we almost ran over later in the day), but it's fun to see. Even if the mother comes back with a big nasty worm to feed them.

4- After cleaning, and taking photos, I procrastinated homework and took a nap. I didn't clean up all that hard, so I don't know why I told myself I deserved a nap. But I took one anyway. It was glorious.

That's all. :)