Annual Snowman

Every year my little siblings and I make at least one epic snowman together. We may or may not make more than one, but we at least have to make one, and it has to be different. The first year it was a tourist alien, another a village of dwarves, one year an ice princess, last year it of Gnomeo and Juliet. (I think I posted about it, but I can't find the entry. Give me a holler if you can.) 

Well, this year has been hard...because it's been too warm. We would get occasional dumps of snow, but then by noon it was all melted. Even when there was snow, it was too wet to make a decent snow man. This morning though it snowed several inches, and we managed to get out side before it all turned to slush. 

I have to say, the one this year tickles me, it's definitely one of my favorites. I think it was partly inspired by the warm winter, and partly inspired by all the modern poetry I've been reading. 

It is called...Martin, at Winter's End. 

That's right, we made a snowman that was melting! See the struggle he is putting up, how he is desperately shoving himself into the bucket? and his twig arm shaking with anger at the sun? There is even a part of his side that is sloughing off. His face is all twisted due to the fact that it's melting. It's very poignant, and beautiful...if you squint your eyes really tight and pretend it is not as funny as it is. Anyway, it was great fun, and oddly since the snowman was supposed to look in disrepair, the kids had a lot more fun since there wasn't so much time spent in finishing details. 

They aren't actually sad, they're just acting for the sake of the photo.

I Still Don't Get It...

Hello again, and it has only been a little over a week. I meant to do a couple of book reviews but never got around to them. If you're curious  the two titles where One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Rules of Civility. (Both have language and some adult themes.) But that is not why I am here today. Today I want to share a poem...that...I wrote...because it sounded like a good idea.

Recently at in my American Lit class we studied the Modernist poets. I studied them briefly in high school and I have to say something regarding them.

I still don't get it. 

If you only pay attention to the way the words sound together, its great, the Modernist poets put together some ground sounding lines, but as to actual meaning, DON'T ASK!!! I get analogies, and similes, and metaphors, and being vague so people can read different things into the poem, and therefore get a reflection on oneself, but Modernism is so vague I can't even begin to even point at a general thing that the author meant. I'm not saying it isn't an art form, I'm just here to testify I don't get it. 

One of the hardest ones to understand is e.e cummings. I respect him as an author and poet, and unlike last time I studied him, I was actually intriged by his idea of protraying emotion through grammar, so I wrote a poem mimicking his style. Don't get me wrong, I could never fool anyone into thinking he actually wrote a poem, the meaning of it is way to obvious, but I played around with grammar and language to try to portray an idea.

And like e.e. cummings, I didn't name the piece.

i see You are lost

in the Storm

You are scared You are are desperate You are confused 

                                         You are tired You are angry You are hopeless You are 

                                         lost lost lost lost lost

                                                                                                                 You are

alone

                                          You are shivering

                                                                      kneeling in the cold

                                                                                                 breathing whit puffs

You are standing now

                                          Hope?                                                               a light

                                         You see a light,You...take...a...slow...but...hope...filled...step

                                       but the Storm

                                                                                                       blows 

                                              white

                                                                                 snow

                                                          obscuring

                                                                                                                           the 

                                         dull

                                                                                             landscape 

and the light flickers

                                                                                                  disappears

                                        You fall down again

                                                              and are still

i pull the cover from my lamp to see that.

?i am alone 

And you better be pretty darned impressed, because it took me fifteen minutes to type it up with the funky way that I had arranged the sentences. Arranging the words in a weird order was quite a bit easier on paper. 

Blogger Book Club

I've actually been looking for a blogger book club for a while, as any and all real life groups fall apart before they begin, and my sister KatySue joined this one. I thought it looked interesting and thought I would give it a try. 

I'm BaaaAAAaack...

... but I can't guarantee that I'll stick around. I'll try, I'll really really try, but Christmas happened, and there were holidays, and then my classes up at COCC started up and, then I began to wonder "why do I even blog?" which was a question I couldn't actually come up with an answer for, and...well you get the picture. I'm busy. But I got to thinking and, hey, I  miss it here, even if most of the time I don't know what to blog about. 

Anyhoo, here is some of the stuff I've been up to.

Yet another book mark. What can I say, book marks are
to me what scarves are for a knitters trying to learn new
techniques. (If you don't knit or make book marks...I
don't think we can relate.)

And this is a little thing I like to call the journal pouch. In it I keep any supplies I typically write with, though not the pens or pencils, those are just to make the picture look better. But I keep my writing prompts there, a list of topics I want to write about, writing exercises, and even a couple of my favorite writing themed quotes. 

Last but not least in the arts and crafts arena is my USB flash drive cover, made from beads!

I've been doing more than arts and crafts though. What was one of the things I mentioned earlier. Oh that's right. College. 

It is definitely a new experience for me, never have actually ever been in a class room setting before. I different, I'm not going to say it is better or worse than being home-schooled, per say. I don't think I would have learned very well in that kind of setting when I was younger, but now I can benefit from such an arrangement. I'm actually writing way more now than I used to because one average there's about one essay a week between the two classes, American Lit and English Composition, that I'm taking. (The upside is that there aren't really that many test.)

And now anousing...da da da da......da da daaaaaaaa...da da da da da daaaaaaaaaa...da da...da daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.....

I am now on Pinterest. I've actually been on it for a while, but I just now started pinning things. The first month I thought it was totally lame and not worth my time, but then I was struck with the feeling you find yourself in of not wanting to really do anything so you fiddle with on your computer; check your Facebook page you usually only look at twice a week, play solitaire and Google random things. Well I went to Pinterest, happened to find a page full of interesting things, and now I can't seem to stop. Grrrr. The up side is that it is very easy only to spend a couple minutes on it a day and still pin quite a number of things. No reason to go crazy.