Clay

One of the things that Maddie's been working on in her ceramics class has been a project that involves creating textures and patterns on clay.  She's taken a few pictures above during class, including that pile of clay chunks which of course could be just available resources, or it could in fact be a very expensive piece of art called "The Balance of Clay."  It's a sort a statement of the harmony of creation and artistic expressiveness found within squarish lumps of clay piled up in the near shape of a tree.

Oh, look!  A new White House Ornament!  We usually keep our patriotic tree up until Patriot Day, and somewhere in that window we order the latest White House Historical Association ornament.  Each year they release a new one, dating back to the eighties or nineties when they first started out with George Washington and then moving forward through all the different administrations.  I've been collecting the ones released each year, and then backtracking to collect the past ones too, so it'll take a while to get there.  Meanwhile, you can see the new one above for Gerald Ford, which comes with a nice box and a booklet that celebrates the holiday seasons spent by that President, as well as a few pages written about the life of the man and his Presidency.  They're pretty awesome ornaments, and you'll have to blame Mom for my addiction to getting them all - she started it out with the FDR one and the Truman one and then the JFK one... and now I've got quite a few of them.

Speaking of which, I categorized all the Disney lithographs we have today, and we've got quite a few of them.  Back during the golden years of the Disney Store, they used to give away a set of lithographs with every pre-purchase of a Disney movie.  The pandemic helped bring down a lot of Disney Stores, and the streaming channel helped erase the need to buy a lot of those movies, and finally the quality of recent Disney movies also lent a hand that resulted in the end of lithographs pretty much.  The Disney Movie Club's lithographs are basically post card sized, not these beautiful works of art "suitable for framing," that used to be a lot more common.  Anyway, as mentioned earlier, I got a lithograph from their rewards site, a nice and very big one from "Raya and the Last Dragon."  That prompted us to look through all these previous ones, and we have quite a collection - two hundred and twenty-eight lithographs!  

This afternoon we were outdoors a little bit, picking blueberries and spider hunting.  There were some monsters out there in the woods, big yellow gooey spiders.  I had the bug-a-salt weaponry with me, and had a lot of target practice.

In the morning, Mom had a huge skillet meal for us, with eggs, bacon, sausages, tater tots, mushrooms and onions.  Oh, and we had English muffins and elderberry jam too!  That was from our most recent trip to Tennessee - on the way back we stopped by the honey factory, where we got some jams too.  Breakfast was delicious!

Maddie had Team Edge this afternoon, and it went well, of course.  Maddie practiced with her friends, and there was a bit of catching up to do, but class went well because it was an hour and a half.  There's plenty of time to settle in!

Tonight Maddie and I finished off "Luigi's Mansion 3" by claiming victory of King Boo, who seems a lot more mean than Bowser, but nevertheless, he was taken down by Luigi and Gooigi working together as usual.  This game was super fun, and I'm so glad I got it.  It was somewhat of a holiday purchase, as I just wanted to hunt ghosts in the fall.  But it is really creative and just plain fun.  Maddie and I loved exploring and just discovering secrets and other things.  It was fun.

Tonight we started "Wee Free Men," the first of the Tiffany Aching books.  Having finished up with the last Terry Pratchett book, we're off to another Discworld book.  It introduces a whole range of new characters, so we'll see if Maddie likes it.  I read this some time ago, and enjoyed them too.  

After reading, it was time for prayers.  We had a good day today with a lot of house cleaning.  We're setting up things in the basement for a new treadmill, cleaning elsewhere and getting ready for fall decor and all of that - it was a nice relaxing day really.  Tomorrow... that'll be along day though...!  Goodnight!