Pict Pandemic Spring

I’m back! I finally have enough free time that I feel able to resume blogging – though it may continue to be very sporadic for a while because, like many people, I don’t have a lot of interest going on in my life given the whole pandemic context.

I thought I would write a bit of a catch-up post containing some of the things we have been up to this Spring. Most importantly, we have celebrated three birthdays. These are all, of course, the second birthdays being celebrated in this weird lockdown context. Yes, I appreciate we are technically no longer in strict lockdown but as a family we have chosen to behave largely as if we still are, taking mitigation efforts seriously. Mr Pict’s birthday last year was literally two days into lockdown so there was a lot of improvisation involved but we made it work. This year was much less stressful because we knew we were going to have to keep everything lowkey and also because the supermarket shelves weren’t empty like they were last year.

Two of the boys have also had their second pandemic birthdays. My third son turned 14. He is a massive Roman history nerd – he seriously knows more about Ancient Rome than anyone I know and I know a lot of Roman history nerds – and is also passionate about Soviet cinema, especially of the 1970s. Those themes, therefore, informed his gifts, one of which was a photo of his favourite Emperor, Trajan, which had even been signed. I am assuming Trajan won’t sue me for forgery.

And our oldest son turned 18. I know! We cannot believe it either. He is now technically an adult. That is somewhat nerve-wracking to think about and makes me feel even more ancient than usual but I am very excited to see what this next phase of his life has in store for him. He is off to the Rochester Institute of Technology in the Autumn to study computer science.

We have chosen to keep our sons learning virtually for the entire school year for a variety of reasons. They have adapted well to learning online and are enjoying having more free time and flexibility in their schedule. My 15 year old, for instance, has been using his extra free time to make lots of short movies. His brothers and father have all been press-ganged into acting parts and as cinematographers while I sometimes provide help with costumes, props and make up so it is a bit of a family affair.

Having the boys home proved very useful this Winter as I very much appreciated their extra digging power with all of the snow we got. Even with all of us digging, it took us over 3 hours to dig out after one particular storm. We then had weeks of vicious looking icicles falling from the house. We built up quite the collection in our azalea bushes.

We have been on a few walks and excursions since I last blogged but we have tended to return to familiar places. A couple of weekends ago, however, we finally ventured to Ringing Rocks County Park. It is not even that far from home so it is kind of bonkers that we have not ventured out there in the previous seven years. We took the loop trail which took us to the boulder field first. We had a hammer with us (as the website instructs you to do so, we felt OK about the geologic vandalism) and set about glancing it off of various boulders to make them ring. We found that they all emitted a noise that was not just the normal smack-thud you would expect from a hammer whacking a rock but that some boulders really made the ringing sound. Our 11 year old in particular really enjoyed the experience. I guess having spent his entire life being told to respect nature and leave things as we found them he must have been relishing the opportunity to bash those rocks.

The male Picts all bounded from rock to rock like mountain goats in search of the best rings. That is not something I am comfortable doing primarily because of my malingering SPD problems and also because I am a lifelong wuss so I went off into the woods in search of salamanders. Alas, I did not find a single one. Meeting up again, we headed further along the loop trail to see the waterfall. I was anticipating a bit more drama and oomph out of a signposted waterfall but it was a nice spot to stop and spend some time before we completed the loop. It was a nice, easy walk and one we would definitely do again.

Finally, and most excitingly, those of us who are eligible are finally receiving our Covid-19 vaccines. As a teacher, I became eligible first but I still had such a massive problem finding and scheduling an appointment that it still took until mid-April for me to be fully vaccinated. Meanwhile Mr Pict and our oldest son have both received their first shots. We plan to keep playing it safe and following mitigation efforts, not least because we still have three members of the family who are unvaccinated and not old enough to be eligible, but it is definitely a weight off my mind – especially as someone who has been teaching in-person since September – that I have that layer of protection. I am so grateful to the scientists and everyone involved in the distribution and delivery of the vaccine.

PS Here are some photos of our cats, Satchi and Peanut. They have adapted to having us home all the time and think they get to participate in all of the video conferences and frequently appear in my sons’ online classrooms.

Frost

I had a clear vision of what I wanted to achieve with this winter inspired art journal page.  Unfortunately, as I was still recovering from illness and was very fatigued, my execution did not meet up with that vision.  There are layers of patterned origami paper that I wanted to show through more, to suggest the patterns frost makes on surfaces.  I was, however, too heavy handed with the paint and a lot of that pattern detail has been lost.  I do, however, think that the figure I painted clearly personifies frost and ice and cold.  I could have kept fussing with this page a bit but I was out of energy even more than I was out of time.  Maybe I will return to it at some point when I feel better.  Probably not.  In the meantime, I will say that taking some time for creativity while I was flopped on a sofa was beneficial.

Werewolves, Power Cuts, and Feral Children

On Friday, I went to work wearing a raincoat and carrying an umbrella since a rainstorm was forecast for the weekend.  However, while I was at work, snow started to fall.  I left work in a blizzard.  Thankfully my kids were already on an early dismissal (I cannot remember the last time they were in school for an entire five day week) so two were already home and two I picked up on my way home from work.  Just as we walked through the door, hoping to get cosy, looking forward to a steaming cup of tea, the power cut out.  And it stayed out.  From 2pm on Friday until 1am on Sunday, we had no power whatsoever.  No light and no heat is pretty miserable in Winter.  We kept ourselves occupied with board games and reading by candlelight.  However, my 21st Century kids started to miss screens and WiFi after a mere 12 hours and things were rapidly descending into ‘Lord of the Flies’ territory.  Thankfully the power came back on before they started sharpening sticks.

Since I could not do laundry, cook complex meals, or run the vacuum around, I found an unexpected ration of time to spend on art.  Sure, I could have dusted but you know how I like to sacrifice dusting so I can get in some art time.  I decided to work on last week’s Art Journal Adventure prompt which was simply the letter W with an additional option to use shiny, shimmery or sparkly media.  Perhaps it was because I had just illustrated a vampire on the previous page of my journal, but I was in a monster mood.  That said, when am I never in a monster mood?  For me, therefore, W was for Werewolf and I set about drawing one in ink as the sun slipped towards the horizon and the house became gloomy in the dwindling light.  It seemed apt for the subject but drawing in the dark is hard on the eyes.  I added the diluted ink and watercolour by candlelight while my fingers shook in the cold.  Amazingly, despite the circumstances, the illustration turned out to be completely acceptable.  I hope, however, to not be doing too much future art in the cold and dark.  I am SO done with Winter!

Abominable Snowman

It is only January and I am already so over Winter.  I like to be warm and cosy.  I dislike shovelling.  My kids have not and will not have a full week of school this month thanks to snow days, early dismissals, and late arrivals.  While I love spending time with my kids, it has been pretty disruptive and we are a family who does better with routine.  Winter is the price I pay for getting to enjoy the other seasons of the year.  Alas, it is too early for me to even start searching out the first signs of Spring.

Anyway, thoughts of snow, ice, and winter chill inspired my most recent art journal page.  Technically it is a response to the Art Journal Adventure prompt which was the letter A.  I had already been thinking about creating an illustration of a Yeti so I am just labelling him as the Abominable Snowman to fulfil the prompt.  I love monsters and mythology and cryptids so I always enjoy drawing them.  This yeti is inspired by a painting I did in my altered book of monsters a couple of years ago.  That painting was just the face but this time I drew the whole body.

Seasonal Faces

Despite being a mini lesson, it still took me all week to get around to completing last week’s Let’s Face It lesson.  The tutorial was taken by Angela Kennedy and the focus was on drawing and painting a variety of hair styles.  This is something I have been pondering myself lately as I have noticed I tend to draw and paint hair the same two or three ways over and over.  Therefore, with my 100 Faces series over on my other blog I have been trying to illustrate a wider variety of hair styles.  Following advice from one of my kids, who knows I know nothing about hair or style, I have been eyeball stalking people’s hairdos for inspiration.

Kennedy’s demonstration was in simple ink pen and watercolour.  This was very welcome since I was super short on time.  I decided to challenge myself to work small so cut four 3X4.5″ pieces of watercolour paper.  Having four little oblongs of paper in front of me made me think of either the four elements or the four seasons and so I plumped for using the latter as a theme.  I used the hair of each face as a practice for a particular watercolour technique.  Spring, therefore, has a wash of one colour with more concentrated areas of the same colour added in wet on wet; Summer has a concentrated wash of one colour and then I dropped water in to dilute and puddle the paint in some areas; Autumn has a wash of one base colour and then I painted two further colours on top of that base; and Winter was a wash of watercolour with table salt sprinkled into the wet paint.  I was rather rushed and impatient when it came to painting the faces and experienced some bleed between colours by not ensuring one was dry before adding the next colour.  It was a risk I knew I was taking yet still hoped to avoid.  Working small and in a rush was perhaps not the best circumstance.  Having blank space beneath the heads, I took that as an opportunity to practice my watercolour lettering again.

PS  I had not removed all of the salt from the Winter piece before I photographed it as I found some patches were still a bit too damp.

 

Museums as Winter Playgrounds

The weather has been pretty miserable here in recent weeks.  Snow, slush, chill winds, bitter temperatures, and dull, grey skies.  This weather has not been conducive to wandering, exploring, and playing outside.  What that means is that my kids build up into powder kegs of pent up energy which runs the risk of igniting and that means I blow a gasket and have to release my flying monkeys.  It’s not good.

The solution was to find somewhere the kids could go and burn off some energy without it costing a small fortune.  That was when we thought of the Franklin Institute.  We have a family membership there so it made complete sense.  And instead of seeing it as a place where the kids could be intellectually stimulated and learn about science, we could utilise it as an indoor playground and they could expend some of that pent up energy.

We let the kids plot the path around the museum so that they could visit each of their favourite places.  While Mr Pict and our oldest son went to the planetarium (to lie back in seats and therefore have no exercise at all), I took the younger three to the brain section.  They played for ages on the neuron climbing frame.  They invented some sort of space ship drama involving aliens and ray guns.  After a few more brain experiments, we headed to the Heart section where they pedalled to power an opera and ran around inside the giant heart.  They wanted to see the train, so we met up with the other two and the kids all ran around inside the train, treating it like another climbing frame.  More energy burn off.  Woo hoo!  Our plan to treat a museum like an indoor playground was working.

The sports science section had been closed for renovation last time we visited the Franklin Institute so we headed there to check it out plus sports ought to mean more energy burned.  The old sports section was a favourite with my kids but it was a bit tired so we were excited to see what they had done.  I must admit, I was a little disappointed.  The layout means that people are funneled in narrow corridors past the interactive exhibits and adults clog that corridor as they supervise their kids.  Not great.  Some old favourites, such as the surfboard were still there, and some of the new exhibits were great fun, but some of the exhibits were already broken.  There was a display of (I assume and hope) fake urine to demonstrate the importance of correct hydration that my oldest son found thoroughly entertaining.

The mission, however, was a complete success.  The boys found the Franklin Institute to be entertaining without us having any sort of focus to the visit (in fact, I think the 10 year old preferred the lack of direct learning) and they did burn off energy and get some exercise.  Museums can be winter playgrounds.  Maybe not the ones with Ming vases though.

Snowmageddon 2016

After a pleasingly mild winter, this weekend we got slammed with all our winter weather at once.  Winter storm Jonas walloped us over the weekend, dumping an incredible amount of snow in a short period of time.  It is difficult to determine exactly how much snow we got in our neighbourhood – the blizzard’s winds created drifts a good few feet high in some places while other patches had under a foot – but I estimate we had over two feet of snow.

My brother-in-law was supposed to fly in to see us with his wife and son on Saturday.  While he had to contend with the stress of cancellations and postponements and changed plans, we were thankfully all cosy and safe at home as the snow packed in around the house and made the street disappear.  My husband did a power of work digging out the drive over and over and tunneling narrow pathways through the snow.

Rather than go sledding, the three younger boys decided they wanted to go for a walk through some nearby woods in the snow.  They passed a man walking with snow shoes and using cross country ski sticks but they were undaunted.  They were excited to spot animal tracks in the otherwise unblemished snow.  Even more exciting was the news – delivered during post-walk hot chocolate – that there was no school on Monday.  They have been hoping and yearning for a Snow Day all winter and they finally got one.

In addition to yesterday’s Snow Day, we also had a delayed arrival for school today.  Not everyone has cleared their portion of the sidewalks and in some places the snow piles (an accumulation of snow drift and snow ploughing) are taller than I am but we had our snow boots on and trudged valiantly ever onwards.  Since we had to walk in the road at points, I was glad of the two hour delay since it meant there were fewer cars to contend with.  The kids, of course, would have rather had another Snow Day.

Pants, Pyjamas, Laundry and Hibernation

This week’s Documented Life Project challenge prompt had me scratching my head for inspiration.  Incorporating fabric onto the journal page seems simple enough but I don’t ever create with fabric (unless you count the occasional sock monkey or sock monster) so not only do I not have much in the way of fabric crafting skills but I do not have a stash of fabric of any kind.  Not even any old socks since those have been turned into sock monsters.  Being a tomboy mother of four boys, I don’t even have any ribbon or bows or anything.  It was suggested that I could utilise a scrap from some old clothing but we emigrated with very few clothes as it is so there was nothing that was not being worn for me to cannibalise.  One of my sons has ripped a pair of jeans but they are his favourites so he would not part with them and I also was not keen on the sewing challenge of trying to work with denim.  I kill my thumbs enough trying to hem denim jeans.  I was not about to put myself through that for fun.  My mind was wandering to ways in which I could loosely interpret the prompt and I was all set to produce a watercolour sketch of some crumpled fabrics when my husband announced that he had identified some old clothes that I could chop up and use: his underpants.

Yes.  Underpants.

At the risk of having my Green Card revoked, I am really not a fan of American washing machines.  Since moving here, I have had two top-loading washing machines – one at the rental house and one that came with our new home – and both have been awfully hard on our clothing.  Because they spin around a central axis point, it creates a sort of centrifuge (or does it?  Because I know even less about physics than I do about sewing) and all the wet garments just stick to the sides of the drum, becoming a tangled mess, straining and pulling against each other.  In all my years of doing laundry, I have become accustomed to using a front loading machine whereby the clothes spin around in the drum but also tumble because of the effect of gravity: whatever clothes are at the top of the drum fall down and rejoin the fray, so they are being constantly separated from each other.  The problem with the top-loading system is that the clothes pulling against each other leads to misshaping and tears.  A button or zip catches against a jumper and gets pulled to such an extent that a hole appears.  I have had more holes appear in laundry in the past year than I have had over the previous decades of my laundering experience.  Washing machine design is one of the few small differences between my domestic life in Scotland and America that really irks me.  When it comes time to replace our washing machine, I am hoping we can do so with a front loader.

Rant over and out but that explains why my husband was able to donate his under garments to my creative project: the blasted washing machine had created a hole in them.  So underpants it was.

It took me some pondering time to decide how I could use them on my page.  Some ideas were just too ambitious for my sewing skill level and some would have involved creating too much in the way of three dimensions which would make my art journal too difficult to work in.  Finally, last night, as I snuggled down to watch some TV while wearing my jammies and clutching a mug of hot tea, I had my inspiration: hibernation.

So this is the page that resulted from a combination of undies and hibernation.  Many days in winter I wish I could hibernate and just hole up somewhere cosy with jammies, a hot water bottle, endless supplies of tea and some favourite movies.  The undies were in a soft jersey fabric so I adhered it to some thin card stock and then used some embroidery floss to add details to the pyjamas.  The bear was painted in watercolour and then outlined in ink.  I used gel pen for the lettering and narrowed the size of my page to eliminate some of the white by using strips of colourful, patterned washi tape.  I have defaulted to my everyday illustrative style of drawing in order to create my DLP page again this week but using that fabric in a creative way was ample challenge.  It is always good to be shoved out of one’s comfort zone and try something new but quite honestly I don’t think I will be in any rush to repeat the experiment of incorporating fabric into my art.

*PS The colours are not as washed out in real life.  That’s just my camera phone not capturing the colours accurately enough once again*

Sledging

I think Americans call it sledding.  I actually don’t know which is the correct term.  Maybe only my family calls it sledging for all I know.  Anyway, I grew up calling it sledging so I am sticking with that.  I will also probably never refer to trousers as pants.  Old dog, new tricks and all that.

So sledging is what the Pict family did this last weekend.  We had a massive dumping of snow in suburban Philadelphia – deep snow by my standards anyway.  It reminded me of the snow I used to experience growing up in Fife during the 1970s and 80s: proper snowman-building, snowball pelting and, yes, sledging snow.  Our rental house comes with a shed and in that shed are some sledges so we packed those into the boot of the car (I might one day demur to it being called a trunk here), swaddled our children in layers of clothing and set off for the nearby state park which we had noted on our last visit had a slope nature clearly intended for just this purpose.

Forgive me if I’m repeating myself but where we moved from, on the West coast of Scotland, we didn’t experience much in the way of proper snow.  We did get snow, it was certainly often cold enough, but it either never settled or lasted long because of all the salt air involved in living on the shore of a sea loch.  We got ice in abudance, plentiful hail storms and terrible deluges of brain-freezing rain but proper snow was a rare occurrence for us. Of course, snow would land and settle in the mountains and sometimes the mountain pass that we drove through to get to the city would close off as a result but whenever proper snow appeared we had to be sure to make the most of it as we knew it would not last.  Consequently my children had never been sledging before.  Well I think they may have been pulled along a path while sitting on a sledge once but that was lame and surely doesn’t count.  

My 8 year old didn’t want to sledge.  He’s not really into physical pursuits, preferring activities that are creative, imaginative and preferably indoors.  He, therefore, spent his time running up and down the slope (sometimes becoming an additional obstacle) and jumping up and down in the snow drifts at the bottom of the slope and making snow angels.  The other three boys, however, had a blast sledging, sometimes at high speeds, downhill.  This was especially true of my 6 year old who is possibly emerging as a bit of an adrenalin junkie.  After one slide down with his daddy, he was gung ho about going down solo and did so with gusto.  Over the course of the two hours we were there he was managing to steer and slide with increasing confidence in his efforts to come to a stop further and further from the bottom of the slope.  He loved it.  The only person who possibly loved it more was my husband.  As soon as he saw that all the other dads were hurtling downhill on sledges and inflatable tubes and the occasional snowboard, he too was taking his turn on the sledges.

No doubt we will go sledging again when the next big snowfall happens.

Here are some photos from my kids’ first experience of sledging.  Or sledding.  Or tobogganing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And a photo of me too just for the merry heck of it.

Weather

According to national stereotyping, British people are supposedly obsessed with the weather.  I confess that to be true by and large.  It’s a rare conversation that doesn’t involve some mention of the weather.  There are even people who claim they can predict the weather using their bunions and bladders.  It’s an island thing I’m sure, borne out of earlier generations needing to know exactly what gust of wind was going to do what when.

However, as much as I was part of that British cultural phenomenon of talking about the weather even to random strangers, I was never as obsessive about the weather as I have become in the two and a half months I have lived in America.  Not only do I now own a smartphone (a marvel for me in itself since I had the equivalent of a neanderthal mobile phone in Scotland) but I have weather apps on it.  Yes, apps plural.  Before October, I had heard of apps, got the concept but had never been near one.  Almost the first thing I did when I had a smartphone in my mitts was download weather apps.  I felt I needed more than one for verification purposes.  That was the first sign that the obsession was taking hold.

My husband always talked about how, growing up in the Washington DC metro area, he and his brother would watch the Weather Channel.  I always scoffed at this, judging it to be a lame use of time in the “paint drying” vein.  My husband also likes to watch the map on flights, even when the little plane symbol is just slowly moving pixel by pixel across the ocean.  I thought watching the weather channel was akin to that.  But lo and behold I now have the weather channel app on my phone and I have found myself watching (just a couple of times mind) the actual channel.  The obsession was taking root.

I think it is symptomatic of having moved here as Winter was coming (Mr Pict would say that in a Ned Stark voice) but I find myself checking for updates on the temperature and predicted precipitation and whether said precipitation will be in the form of rain or snow.  We have also had a rash of weather warnings in the past few weeks linked to the snow fall, some freezing rain and, today, a warning of severe wind chills for the coming days.  All those potential little “red alerts” just feed the growing obsession.

What the boys are obsessed about, of course, is snow days.  They just want to know if the weather is going to be so bad that they get to stay tucked up cosy in bed past their usual “rise and shine” time and stay home playing instead of going to school.  I have to admit to quite liking their snow days myself at the moment but perhaps that novelty will wear off.  I prefer the snow days that are called the evening before rather than receiving a trio of phone calls (each of our cell phones plus the landline) at 4.30 in the morning.

I wonder if there is an app for overcoming Weather Addiction….