schooled

When I was little my brother and cousins and I would play "Dragon School", which was a thinly veiled excuse to write up tiny report cards and organize office materials for our fictitious school for dragons. My love of school supplies and brightly colored yet simple products has carried on throughout my life... and right into the estate sale of an ENTIRE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL a few weekends ago.

Picture it. Gym supplies, science supplies (beakers!), maps, globes, EVERYTHING. So a whole bunch of us (including Alli & John) got ourselves down to the sale to grab some numbers and go nuts. I zeroed in on the geology samples right away and got myself a most excellent sample of rocks, all named and organized neatly in what appears to be a small box covered in gift wrap. Don't worry, I have plans to mount these babies in a shadow box or somesuch business.

I tried to limit myself otherwise, since our apartment is so small... but I did walk away with a giant bag of paper flowers (currently waiting for their fate in our storage unit) and a great little book on gems. Since I didn't want to take home too much else, I settled on photographing all the great covers I found after a quick jaunt around the library. Here are my faves:

p.s. in case you don't follow me on instagram and didn't see my photo of that bottom right book: I hereby claim Spice and the Devil's Cave as my band name.

gem is my name

all images in this post were found on mineralists

So I was really into rocks when I was little. This, of course, was the natural progression from when I loved dinosaurs when I was even younger - I mean, fossils are rocks, and oh look! There are all these other crazy cool rocks out there! In my memory my entire 4th grade class was obsessed with rocks and we would trade them and stuff, but that might just be me trying to reconcile that I am forever a huge dork.

Anyway, I've taken a liking to these crazy contraptions of nature again - although unfortunately this time around my interests lay more in the aesthetic than the scientific. I need a quick crash course in minerals so I don't feel completely fake about it. Anybody wanna teach me rocks?

In the meantime I've started following mineralists on tumblr. They have the most amazing selection of rock photos from all sorts of sources around the globe, all labeled and linked back to to the source if possible! If you're also into "gems" (gems are the new cats, doncha know) I'd hiiiihgly recommend following these guys.

Here are some of my recent faves. That smokey quartz/black specularite up on the top left is my all time most wanted.

little dipper

Sometimes when I start telling one of my Minnesota friends about a story from my childhood in Michigan it dawns on me that Ann Arbor is a weird and wonderful place. Wait, didn't everyone have a planetarium in their high school? You mean your local businesses don't have "fairy doors" scattered throughout them to find? I guess I took for granted my life in this farmer's market loving, maize and blue sporting town.

Finally, after all my stories, I got to show Ann Arbor off to the boy this weekend! Along with my awesome brother and his awesome lady, we all joined forces at my parent's house during the University of Michigan's homecoming weekend.

Even though I didn't go to the U of M I do feel a particular allegiance to my hometown football team, and the ferocity with which we tailgate. A list of edible things experienced:

-One of the 2,147,483,648 combinations at Blimpy Burger, worth the 30 minute wait

-Cheese shopping at the behemoth Whole Foods

-Beers, pizzas and chacuterie, all created by the Jolly Pumpkin

-Drinks at Ashley's

-Perhaps one too many more drinks at a strange bar hidden in the basement of an office building with the best quality photobooth I've ever seen.

-Fried chicken, oatmeal nobakes, chips and more at a tailgate

We also made a quick visit to the Museum of Natural History, one of my absolute favorite childhood haunts. This place has all that a girl obsessed with dinosaurs and lizards could ask for, and it didn't disappoint my adult self. Weird triangle jellyfish (lower right), fantastic rocks, creepy possum-giving-birth display? yes yes yes, and all with a brightly colored/wood paneled Wes Anderson vibe. 

Three days of fun, and now I'm back in my other home. Minnesota, Michigan, I love you equally.

STRANGE LOOP

have you guys ever heard of a strange loop?! They fascinate me! Moebius strips fascinate me, too. Anything that has to do with something collapsing in on itself, or starting where it began, or connecting in ways that we can't even imagine. OR like the Ouroboros (pictured above)... the snake that eats itself.

Also, Renee Magritte does a lot of strange loop-esque paintings, and I loves me some Magritte. The only strange loop I do not like is the Surround Sound noise - I'm pretty sure (after doing some research) that it is what is known as a Shepard scale, which is a strange loop.

I want to do an illustration about strange loops, but if I did I would probably have to really work to not just copy M.C. Escher.......

PARADOX!