Not Another Homeschool Blog

Sketch a day #10 - 10min Today is Halloween, and as usual, I will be following my tradition of busying myself with a movie or a project and ignoring the ringing doorbell.  No, my house doesn't get egged or papered, thank goodness, either my husband or one of my kids has given out candy in the past.  I just don't like to do it. I am just a non-conformist like that. It bugs me that the same kids who rolled their eyes at me, or harassed my dogs, or left dog poop in my yard when they thought I was not looking will be ringing my bell expecting candy from me. If it were up to me, I would buy 3 HUGE peices of candy, and a big bag of the most generic stuff I could find, and give most everyone the generic stuff, but then the few kids that are actually well behaved and kind came to my door, I would reward them with a honking big piece of candy in front of everyone else!  That would learn'em. But hubby's got it.  He got some big bags of candy, and a big friendly smile...

Sketch a day #9  - 45 min. This is a sketch of my upper window in my greatroom.  The room is two stories high, so there are upper and lower windows in the room.  You see a bannister in the foreground, because I am actually sitting in a room on the second floor to draw it.  The house is three stories high in the back, so in order for a ladder to be outside this window, it has got to be pretty tall.  Fire-fighter tall.  It is still not tall enough for the guy repairing the woodpecker holed trim to get where he needs to reach, so he is also propelling down from the roof to get to a certain area. This job is driving me nuts! First, tomorrow will be two weeks since he quoted the job. Second he said it would be done by Tuesday... last Tuesday... It is now Thursday of the week after. Finally, as is true with most jobs, he didn't stick with the original quote.  As of right now, $400 to replace two pieces of trim 30-ish foot high from chimney top to groun...

sketch a day - day 8 -30min Today I sketched my eyeglasses.  They are sitting on my pencil case. They are cute but uncomfortable and I don't wear them like I should. One lens is thicker than the other, and so in those lightweight wire frames, they don't really sit right.  Since my eyesight out of the other eye is pretty good, I can get away without the glasses at all, but the other eye compensates. I have to hunt down my glasses and put them on when my eye starts twitching or when I get a headache from not wearing them as it causes eyestrain.  I have been warned that if I don't start wearing them all the time my lazy eye will become more and more apparent and even lazier, but I still don't.  I am planning on getting a new pair with a better weight balance...  Don't know how they will do it, but it is what I will ask for. I chose eyeglasses for my image today because after yesterday's encounter with the cashier I began thinking about how we view others. You...

Sketch a day - day 7 I went to the grocery store for two reasons... lunch, and cash-back. Cash back is awesome because I don't have to pay atm fees to spend my money, and since I had to pay the dude repairing the woodpecker holes in my house today, I needed cash. (I probably won't use him again, with one of the reasons being he doesn't take checks.  Who wants to go to get cash two days in a row to get enough money to pay someone?) Anyway, I said to the cashier I need $100 cash back, is that possible? She replied, the max is $50, but I can split your bill. Cool.. Cool.  So she rang up my bill with a few things left on the conveyor belt. As I went fishing in my wallet for my debit card she got annoyed.  I was trying to find the right debit card, for our joint account, since I didn't want to take it from my main shopping account because most of the money was for house repairs. She replied in an annoyed voice... "that's a lot of cards".  I apologized...

Sketch a day- day 6 I was busy today updating my computer with the next mac version and then trying to get back photos from when my computer died... I think my daughter's sweet 16 photos are gone... going to try to snipe a photo or two from people who were there. My sketch today is something I do naturally and often.  It is a sketch of my bedroom floorpan.  It is a stupid room.  The most obvious place for a bed, between two windows is under a vent and right next to the bathroom.  I don't like that.  There is a huge sitting area with a slated ceiling like a huge dormer.  My bed is there now, top photo, but I have been bored with it. The biggest problem is where the cable jack is is also stupid... on the wall behind the couch in the upper photo and so I can't really see that from anywhere that it makes sense to put the bed. It is an enormous room really, just poorly planned.  The people across the street actually took half the area where we put...

sketch a day- day 5 It's Sunday, and I really have no deep thoughts. So here is my day 5 sketch of the day.  I tried to portray a couple of celebrities, and then a random person from a magazine.  Portraits are really not my thing! Can you name the two celebrities?   Good luck!  Fighting the urge to delete these.  Not my best work. 

sketch a day-day 4 I looked at some of my work from 25 years ago today... It was in the garage.  I am going to toss it, after taking a few pictures because it is all charcoal and has become muddy over the years.  Still, there are some good things about it. I will take some photos before trashing it. One thing I noticed is that there is a slight slant to everything I draw.  I think it is because I don't sit still and I don't hold my head still... I move around and kind of lean to one side, so there is also a slight lean in my work.  You can see it in this candlestick drawing from my mantle.  Also the middle candle is out of perspective because I drew it first and then when I moved my persecutive, I did not change it. But... nothing in life is perfect, and interestingly enough, my most slanted, imperfect pieces have been purchased (long ago, when I drew regularly).... so there is clearly beauty in not getting it quite right. Perfection is a dangerous thi...

Today's art education video was on doing a still life . I've done tons of still-life's over the years, but I am not fond of them. They are always so fake and contrived.  For example, where in life are you going to find an apple, next to a vase, next to a wooden model?  Only in an art classroom. That kind of unnatural situation often bothered me when I was studying art in school.  I think the situation that bothered me the most is when a nude model stood on a ladder. Who is going to climb a ladder naked in real life? No one. That's who. So, my still life includes items that really were on my desk and arranging them, meant only moving them a few inches so I could get them all into an arrangement that would fit on the paper. A real-life-still life. sketch a day- day 3 Still life reminds me of that old Sesame street song "one of these things do not belong here". Remember that? I have learned in life, that sometimes it is good to be out of place in the worl...

sketch a day- day 2 In the art video I watched today , the artist instructor demonstrated how to draw the human figure and understanding how the body works and what shapes it is generally made up from.  So, today's sketch is of a model dummy I have that interestingly enough is not comprised of the same shapes that he demonstrated in the video. Something he said in the video caught me as very interesting. He said that an artist has two talents... the first is being able to remember what things look like and to draw them from memory. I am and have always been weak in that. The second is in being able to see in a way that most people cannot, to break down an item, a figure, etc, and draw it on paper in a realistic way. That is my strength.  I have always happily leaned on it. I always thought that my talent was what it was and that I could not fix the missing part of my artistry and learn to draw from memory. But according to this instructor, I was wrong. It seems that th...

Sketch a day, day 1 I am trying to force my creativity by doing a sketch a day.  I am using some free video lessons by  http://www.jerrysartarama.com/art-lessons/free-art-instruction-videos.html to inspire me.  I used a lesson today on using shapes to draw buildings... this is the house across the street from me.  You could say I am homeschooling myself in art... kind of as a refresher. This sketch took all of 10 minutes.  I am sure I will revisit it later and add ink. As I was drawing, the news was on. I got distracted from my task when I heard the phrase "the devil in the White House". They were interviewing an elderly early voter who was saying he was voting a straight Republican  ticket because he dislikes the devil in the white house. I had a personal heart response to his comment. It hurt my feelings. I've heard presidents called a lot of things by fellow Americans but never the devil. I couldn't help but wonder what in him made him view Obama ...

It has been 1 year and 5 months since I finished homeschooling my kids.  My youngest is well into her Sophomore year at college, and my son is well past the halfway point.  They are doing great! And then there's me. I have a lot of ideas about what I was going to do after homeschooling.  Homeschooling gave me so much focus... so much direction, and was so passion-filled... now I'm feel like I am grasping at straws. I thought I was going to work with homeschooling families after homeschooling, but found out real quick, that the people who need me the most can't pay me, and I am not in a place to volunteer that kind of time. I thought that I was going to get a Real Estate License and sell houses, but after going through the course, I found out there were a lot of things about that industry that I - just - don't - like.  So that's not going to happen. I thought I was going to go on a bit of an adventure with my husband, but we are not sure that is still goin...

I polled a group of homeschoolers this past weekend, asking "How much time do you spend on math"... the consensus was "How much time do you spend on math?".. i.e.  the I didn't really get an answer, but was asked in turn how much time my kids spent on the subject. I thought my answer would be, up to 90 minutes a day or more for high school students... but no.  It seems I may be the only one of that opinion.  You see, my kids were not math whizzes and it took that long to get through a math lesson and then practice, especially in the high school years.  This started in middle school, where we were doing AT LEAST and hour a day, and it just took more and more time as they death with Algebra 1, Algebra 2, Geometry, and so forth. And even after all that work, they just did OK on the SAT/ACT exams in the subject.  It was their verbal scores that won them their acceptances and scholarships. So I'd like to ask a bigger audience.. how much time you spend on ma...

The door bell rang yesterday, and the dogs went wild as usual.  Fortunately, I still had their leashes on them from a recent walk, so I was able to grab it and control them and they acted like they wanted to eat whomever was at the door. (They are Minature Schauzers, so aren't dangerous, just bossy.) Anyway, there is a young man at my door.  He had a chipped front tooth, and he was holding a pretty big coupon book. He was talking pretty fast and slick.  All I could make out was "help me out, Help me out, something-something-coupons".  I replied, I've purchased those before and I never use them, so no thank you.".  That wasn't good enough for him.  He insisted, "Help me out, help me out.... don't you want to help me go to college".  I stifled a laugh and said, "how old are you?... twelve?. "  Because he looked... well.... twelve, and he replied, "no, i'm 16".  "Ok... that's cool, but I'm still not buying, ...

I am starting to see the gentrification of NYC in action. I can clearly handle the rent. The numbers meet and/or exceed the requirements to live in any such building... even the best of buildings.  But, there is that one line on every application that says what your credit score has to be to be accepted.  Brooklyn or Harlem 600.  Upper East side, Lower East side, Hell's Kitchen, Chinatown 650-700. Upper West side or SOHO or Chelsea 750. (this is approximate, but you get the idea).  If you want to live in the nicer areas you must have a pristine credit report. But there was/is this great recession. Who's credit report survived that unscathed?!!!  I know for us, there were a few years that were pretty hit or miss... one paycheck away from homelessness kinda stuff.  The credit report is not perfect. ...And we are doing BETTER than most people we know.  So that means that in order to get into the nicer areas of NYC, even if you can clearly afford the r...

I am realizing that my decisions not only impact my kids, but also my in-laws and my parents.  We can no longer make plans for ourselves and and our kids and go on along about our business... there are people who raised us who are not as independent as we would like.  That is a tough pill to swallow. So if the fact that we still have 18&20 year olds who are in college and not completely out of the nest is keeping us tied to home, and not allowing us to live full time in NYC, we are even more beholden to come home for hubby's parents... to check on them, spend time with them, and make sure they are OK.   The good part of this is that living part time in NYC will allow me to do the same for my dad.   Ideally, I'd like to have the inlaws live with us here, and dad live with us there, but first, hubby and I could use some privacy.  Second, both sets are wayyy too independent for that to work... and so lies the dilemma.  We have a lot to thin...