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I am an artist & teacher with a ❤ for visual expression, educational methodology, homesteading, & Jesus. My geek-love is The Joshua and we have three peanut-butters: Caleb, Jack, & Louritta.

5. There’s No Place Like Video for the Holidays

12/29/2006

Since Josh and I did not go home for Christmas this year, we tried our best to make our family members feel loved. We sent them all a Christmas card, which I’m sure was read with baited breath. We also sent gifts to all of them. I imagined them opening the gigantic shipping box and digging through to see what was in store for them.
We also called my family to say hello, which was nice.
Oh, and we had a video chat with Josh’s family. That was, well, it was quite the experience. Josh’s parents set up a video camera in their Minnesota living room and invited Jon & Emily (with their 2 little girls) and Grandpa & Grandma Hastings. In our California living room, Josh and I prepared for our end of the video chat. I waited patiently while the resident techies messed with the video camera, discussed server caps, and other geeky things. Then, the computer rang with an incoming video chat and – BAM! – there they were!
Only… they were different. They looked nothing like the photos in the Christmas cards we had received from them a few days earlier. They looked all… cubic and legoish. It was as though they had been abducted by a sinister alien clan and transformed into something mathematical and garish.
When I first saw them, I imagined the late Phil Harman doing an SNL spoof on Soylent Green, running onto the set shouting, “The pixels are PEOPLE! It’s PEE-POL!!!!!!!!!!”
Anyway, they saw us clearly on their end, and we saw this on our computer:



I will forever remember the joy of our pixelated three-year-old niece as she sang us a beautiful Christmas song. Or of little cubist-style Maia shouting, “Yay! Yay!” while playing in the tent we had given them. And. I will cherish Josh’s grandparents wishing us a Merry Christmas in a mangled, matrix sort of way.
Sigh. Gotta love the technology. It makes all things possible. Sorta.

4. Attacking Faith – or – Hope in an Empty Parking Lot

12/29/2006

I’ve felt a lot of attacks on my Christian faith lately.
First, the holiday season always prompts the public educators tolerance talks where, if we mention Christmas, we should also mention all of the other holidays. I grow weary of saying, “Happy Holidays!” to all the kids lest their parents call the school about me offensively omitting their faith from the list.
Second, I was browsing at the bookstore and noticed a book that is now on the bestseller list that is basically about how religion is the cause of all of the world’s problems. I read a little bit of it and finally put it down, a bit horrified.
Third, I went to Target to get some Christmas lights and found a pretty ornament that said “Love.” I liked it and wondered if they also had faith and hope. I looked around and found the “Hope” ornament. Perfect, I thought. Now I just needed one more. But it didn’t exist. There were two more ornaments that matched the set. The first one said, “Wish,” which I thought was a lame new-age retake on the word “Faith.” The last one said, “Diva.” I kid you not. Can you imagine the Lewis Christmas tree proudly proclaiming our Wish, Hope, Love, and Diva?
Starbucks also had cookies that said, “Wish,” “Hope,” and “Love.” Apparently we are not to have faith in anything, but to just wish really hard for it. Maybe even throw some fairy dust on it and sing kum-bay-yah.
Without going into even more epi-ma-sodes where I see religious faith crumbling all around us, I’ll move on with my thoughts. The point is that my culture, which used to openly celebrate Christmas, has been watering down religion so much that it has been reduced to a materialistic celebration of whatever you believe hokus pokus.
The thing that got me through all of this, and gave me a glimmering shard of hope, was my errand on Christmas Day. I set out to find some kind of dessert to bring to an event later that day, and found that everything was closed. Every grocery store & restaurant, Target, and even most of the gas stations… all closed. The more stores I saw closed, the taller I sat and the more hope I felt. These were all closed on December 25th. Christmas. And it seemed that people still believed in at least closing down shop to be with family and friends for a day.
Though I still feel that religion is under attack, it warmed my heart to see that one day was still this important. No other holiday closes down business like Christmass. My little trip was worth it, even though I went back home with no dessert.

3. Leftover Landslide

12/29/2006

I have officially mastered the art of the leftover landslide, or using leftovers to create a dish whose leftovers are used to make another dish, and so on.
I made chicken tacos a few weeks ago and used the leftover chicken & veggies to make a tortilla soup. The tortilla soup has been rigged up to serve as a main dish as well as a nice side dish with a few simple modifications.
A few days ago, I made garlic rosemary diced potatoes. The leftovers were mashed & used to make really good hash browns yesterday morning. Those leftovers were mixed with roasted corn & browned hamburger & cheese to make a really good hot dish thing for dinner.
I love seeing the leftovers trickle down… I wonder how long something could last & be modified if you made enough of it.

2. Forward Thinking

12/29/2006

One thing that I’ve loved about this break so far is that it has given me the chance to slow down and actually think about things. The main thing on my mind is that I will be finishing my master’s degree in May and I can’t wait to be done with school. I have started visualizing what that would actually look like – what does one do when they aren’t in school? There must be so much time left wide open for personal use…
I actually have always been enrolled in some kind of class during the school year ever since I started kindergarten. I am stoked that this will not be a continuing trend after May. (I am, however, considering taking some surf lessons this summer so that I can pwnz0r the waves… but those don’t count as classes because they’re fun.)
I’ve also been relooking at the curriculum that I teach my students and have come up with a bunch of ways to make it even cooler. I’m looking forward to researching these things and implementing them into my classroom.
It’s good to think about things you might do later.

1. Shopping with Visa

12/29/2006

I use my Visa debit card for pretty much everything I buy. When I got home last week, I was shocked that there was a message from my bank telling me that there was potential fraud on my account and that I should call them. So, I double checked the phone number and it was indeed from my bank. I called them and they said they noticed some suspicious activity on my card and they wanted me to verify some purchases. Fearing that someone had charged a nine day cruise to The Bahamas or something, I held my breath.
The man continued, “Yes… have you been to a Star-bucks?” He said it in a strange syncopated way so that it sounded foreign and strange.
I repeated it, “Starbucks???”
Considering that I go to Starbucks like twice a week I found the whole thing hilarious. Yes, how suspicious of me to visit a coffee house. They apparently have never tested the caffeine levels in my body!

Top 6 Christmas Vacation Thoughts

12/29/2006

Well, I’ve had a long, interesting Christmas. It all started at the beginning of December with Josh playing with the camera on my computer. He titles this one Sharp Teeth!. We’re all proud of his artistry.

But let’s not dwell on Josh and his… talent. I have been brewing a list of things I wanted to blog about and have come up with a top six list. (Note – I started putting them all in one entry and then decided that Josh was smarter to put them in separate entries. So, I’m dividing mine up too. Call me a copycat).

Glad I Caught This One!

12/15/2006

I’m finishing a giganto-paper for a final for grad school. Upon proofreading it, I caught a potentially deadly error. For one section, I repeatedly explain how someone can interpret a work of art in “four easy steps” and then elaborate about each of these “easy steps.”
Unfortunately, my repeated typo kept saying, “Students can interpret a work of art in four easy stephs. Using these stephs, they can come to a deeper understanding of how art has impacted people throughout time and cultures around the world…” And so on.
My favorite was the blaring subtitle on the student instructional guide that said, “Interpreting Art: In Four Easy Stephs!”
Wow. Glad I caught that one. Guess I’m just used to typing my name that it just kind of comes out like that after forty pages.

Christmas Card Design

12/10/2006

I was going to design our own Christmas Card this year, what with all my design skills and all. I worked very hard trying to find just the right card with all the right colors. Anyway, despite all of my hard work, Josh just didn’t like it. I can’t figure it out…
carddesign.jpg

My First Wii Injury

12/07/2006

wiiouch.jpg
Well, I have officially had my first Wii Injury. After totally owning at Wii Sports golf and bowling, I decided to move on to baseball. Well, I always hit a stupid foul ball or I swing too early.
Anyway, so I wanted to be able to say that I also pwn3d at baseball. So I trained on swinging for like a half hour straight. During one of my swings, something funky pulled in my shoulders and I was like, “AHHHHHHH!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!” I had decided before hand that I wasn’t going to be a loser with a wii injury and even stretched before hand. Apparently, I wasn’t ready to swing a “bat” for a half hour and I am now officially a loser with a wii injury. And, in case you’re wondering, I still suck at baseball. Stupid baseball. But I’ll take all ya’ll on at bowling. I rule at that.
I looked up wii injury on google and learned all about Nintendo’s health and safety precautions. I was also happy to eventually find this: www.wiihaveaproblem.com. At least my injury didn’t involve shoving my hand through a broken pane of glass from chucking my wii remote. Or wailing my hand on the corner of a metal chair and having to get stitches. All of that is too dramatic and too expensive. All my injury has cost me so far is a fair helping of Ibuprofen. Yeah, that’s and injury I can afford.

Modern Art Murals

12/04/2006

pepper.jpg
Many of you know that I teach art at Hyde Middle School. We recently finished putting up a bunch of paintings around campus that reflect selected modern art styles. Students worked in groups to select different styles ranging from surrealism to non-figurative (a detail of the photo realism painting is shown above). They then researched their style and made works of art impersonating that style with their own twist.
Anyway, thought you might want to check out the paintings on our class gallery. The kids are making a podcast to give a tour of the paintings on campus and explain what they learned during the process, but it’s still in the works. It was a really fun project!

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