a Delightful Ditch of Dandelions

I took these photos a short while ago on day that was so truly gorgeous I couldn't help but go outside for a walk. I traversed the neighborhood and enjoyed the fresh air, greenery and flowering crabapple trees. I began to approach my old elementary school, and as I did I passed by a sort of ditch, an area that was sunken in the dirt and filled with water and the remains of fallen leaves, that lay just beside the sidewalk.


I decided to pop off the head of a dandelion growing in the nearby grassy areas (since many of them were in bloom at the time) and throw it in the water. Then, I just kept doing that - for more than an hour I spent my time collecting dandelion heads and laying them on the surface of the water in such a way that they'd float upright upon it.


I don't know how many flowers I ended up getting on there, but it was definitely more than fifty. It was really interesting to watch them move about on the water with the force of the wind, sometimes collecting at one side of the ditch or the other, and sometimes spreading out evenly upon it. By the time I tired of it, my hands were dirty and yellow from handling the dandelions, and my calves ached from doing so much bending over and squatting, but I felt quite pleased nonetheless.


Once I was done, I took some photos, and I thought I'd upload them here, for as simple as this was, it's a little like art. I know the artist Andy Goldsworthy did a lot of things like this - using natural ingredients like flowers, leaves, rocks, wood, wool or even ice, he'd make very simple but interesting and beautiful temporary art pieces in natural environments. Some of them involved arranging leaves or flower petals in the water of ponds or streams, and their interaction with the water and movement in it was part of the art.


While my little adventure with dandelions wasn't much ofanything in the scheme of things, and certainly wasn't as interesting or work-intensive as his works, it was still fun, and brightened up an otherwise dank little pool of water.


Is it art? I don't know, but I don't think it matters whether it is or not. I had a good time, and I got my hands dirty, and I made something pretty: that's good enough for me.


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Making Tasty Meaty Pasties

I cannot express just how glad I am to be back home for the summer, to be free of the stresses and time-consuming works of school! Just to have free time that I can spend without the knowledge that there is another assignment waiting for me around the corner. The only thing waiting around the corner that I have to deal with is my family, but I'll take them over essays and tests any day!

 Well, to segue into my main post topic... Earlier last week, out of the blue my mother (shown on the left) asked me to help her make pasties for dinner. They've become something that we eat every once in a while at the Alberti household ever since the first time I created them, entirely on my own, just after I first went to see the Sweeney Todd movie. While that movie probably made a lot of people sick to their stomachs, it just made mine rumble for delicious meaty pastry!

Those pasties had been a bit time-consuming to make, but they were just so delicious that all of us developed a taste for them. So this time around I was quite willing to participate in the pasty preparations, especially knowing that I wouldn't be the only pair of hands working on them.

Study of a Roommate: Sketch from Life

Tarot Fashion: The High Priestess

SignifiKate - Pop Culture-Based Super Sidekick Bio & Sketch

This is the first of the Bios for my Pop-Culture-term based Super-Powered characters, who I made up for a project for my Mass Media and Pop Culture course. I created an animation about them, and I thought it might be fun to post more detailed sketches and descriptions of these characters, their powers, relationships, etc. 'm really getting into it! Who knows, I might do something more with them in the future.

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Pop Culture-Based Super Sidekick:

SignifiKate

Power:

She can imbue things – people, objects, words, etc. - with meaning, significance, and importance. She can use it to make certain words or phrases popular, to make an article of clothing or accessory fashionable again, to lend an an actor a certain air bout them of special-ness, etc.

Her Relationship with the Polysemic Protector:

SignifiKate became the Polysemic Protector's sidekick for several reasons. The main one is that her powers make it so that she can be of enormous help to him, and she likes that. With him, she isn't just giving an actress some extra charisma to help her win an audition, or making the quilts constructed by a little old lady seem a little more special in order to help them sell so she can afford medication – for the Protector, her powers can mean the difference between defeat and victory, life and death. In this way, her makes her feel important, meaningful and useful.

She also does so because she likes to live vicariously through him – she has powers, but they aren't very badass and they don't allow her to fight injustice, corruption and evil as directly as she would like. However, when her power gives the Protector what he needs in order to kick ass, she feels the satisfaction that he was able to do that because of her. It helps quiet that little part of her that always feels that her, and her power, are just useless.

Photo: A "Chipper" Stump

A photo I took of a cute smiley face drawn on an interesting-looking stump with charcoal at a small beach near the Mississippi. A friend, a sibling and I all went down to the beach and ended up making this, if memory serves, but I can't remember which of us drew it. It's still cute though!