Icon

Make your own icon!!!!!

I just used up all my exclamation points for the month.

A friend once made me an icon, for unknown reasons. I’ve given up asking questions about human motivation.  This is how it was made:

1. Make a copy of your favorite holy intercessor on a transparency. If you’re unsure of your patron saint, there’s an app for it.

2. Back the transparency with slightly crumpled aluminum foil.

3. Frame it. This frame is from Ikea.

I’m a little disturbed that this icon features Adam and Eve. They aren’t actually saints, and the whole point of their story is that their excuses were ineffective. It was a sweet present, though.

Synesthesia

I thought everyone had synesthesia
until I was eight. I felt I’d been very patient with everyone using the wrong colors, so I finally said something. My teacher told me there were no right or wrong colors for letters and numbers – we could all do what we wanted!!!!! I was miserable.

I have the most common type of synesthesia, color-graphemic, as well as some spatial/sequential weirdness. I took the synesthesia battery, which is strangely tiring, but informative.

Windowsill world…

Mother and daughter

This painting is in the collection at the Walters Museum in Baltimore. It’s a huge portrait, by Paolo Veronese, of an Italian countess and her daughter. I’m not sure why I love it so much, but I used to go and visit it every week when I lived in Baltimore, just a few blocks away from the museum. The Walters is still my favorite museum, too; I think it started out as someone’s private collection, and it’s full of very odd, luxurious, detailed objects.

The museum website has an online catalog of their collection. It’s all there, carefully photographed and very searchable. Here’s a Mughal manuscript, a drawing of dragonflies, a Lalique hair ornament, ancient jewelry, Cordier’s African Venus, and an Ingres beauty with extra vertebrae. All gorgeous.

The pants

This picture was taken because Karen and I wanted to show off our pants that we made in our first ever sewing class. The class was really fun but the sewing teacher had to admit that she has a few more grey hairs now and this is the first time she’s ever had someone (my mom) drop out, but we finished our pants.