Sometimes I just get the painting bug. It comes in waves. A few I’ve just started on:
A few I’ve completed:
The Smokies (available here)
Sunset on the Tuck (available here)
And then there’s Boo who has really taken to watching Yao Cheng’s watercolor classes online. She gets really serious:
What are you working on?
(Daily writing prompts are posted Monday through Friday at 7am on Facebook. This is the weekly roundup with a few excerpts from my personal journal. The goal is to write for at least 10 minutes without stopping, regardless of what ends up on the paper. Feel free to share writing in the comment section. Write on!)
Prompt 26: One thing you would have saved from your childhood.
From my journal: My little blue wagon my grandmother pulled me in, and the plastic grapes I pulled off of their stems and could attach to my tongue with their suction. The braided rainbow headband my babysitter gave me for my birthday, our seashell collection, and maybe my fort in the woods.
Prompt 27: Pick one word from the list and write to wherever it takes you: flood, skating rink, urban legend, tadpole.
From my journal: The shell was a burnt orange color from the red clay soup that had splashed up onto its perch after the last rain. The red stream would have been a torrential flood to such a small insect. At first I thought it was a cicada but it was more of a large prehistoric beetle, the body split in two where it had climbed out of itself. Last year I saw a Great Luna moth. I thought it was dead but when I came back for it a few moments later it had vanished. It must have known about my collection of the dead.
Prompt 28: This is a favorite prompt from Barbara Abercrombie’s book Courage & Craft: Where was the first place you remember living? Look through a window into the first kitchen you had. Try to find at least one concrete detail. A kitchen table? The stove? Who else is in the kitchen? Write a paragraph or two about this.
From my journal: Paradise Point and the door in the floor. The room was unfinished with only rough plywood on the floor, used only for storage, which made it even more mysterious. The trap door was in the small closet on the second floor. When opened there was a hole in the floor that opened up into the laundry room below. The square hole was located right above the metal tub of the washing machine, a silver perforated doughnut when viewed from above.
Prompt 29: Pick one word from the list and write to wherever it takes you:
DAIRY
MARBLES
DRIPPING
SITCOM
From my journal: Marbles from the seawall. The wall had crumbled into nothing leaving only cement and marbles by the time we came to live there but the marbles that the man had painstakingly placed into the wet cement as he built it could be found when the lake’s water level was low.
Prompt 30: Describe yourself (or someone else) using different types of animals.
From my journal: A giraffe by height, awkward and slow unless running from panic. Skin speckled as an unborn robin’s egg, hair abrasive as the quills from a porcupine when styled. A crowy-scout but sluggishly, sloth-like when unmotivated. Fingernails ridged like a pony’s hoof, feet dry and rough like pads on a dog’s paw from going barefoot.
More posts on writing here:
More on the Lil Journal Project here:
Working on a few projects this weekend. I love this photo taken last night:
Somehow Max manages to make it into almost every photo I take. He’s such a character. Our friends were staying here last week and every time I turned around he was sleeping in their suitcase. He looks a little guilty here:
While Brett worked on some rocking chairs I worked on a project I’m just starting with Lowe’s…transforming the old train depot over the next few weeks:
Funny, I went for a 2 mile run in Deep Creek. When I got back Brett had finished mowing the lawn and showed me his Suunto GPS watch:
He walked 4.16 miles pushing that mower. I didn’t check the elevation change…but I’m sure it was more than my workout all together. Maybe I should mow the lawn sometime!