Roses and Thorns Feb 27 - March 5

Remember Roses n' Thorns? Yeah, I don't know what happened to those, but I kinda liked 'em as a way to recap each week or two. Because it's been *months* since my last R&T post, there's no way I could ever possibly catch up, so I'll just stick to what I can remember from this last week and then move on from there.

Here we go...

Rose
My mom told me a heart-touching story the other day... Since the beginning of the school year, my niece Josie, who is in the second grade, has constantly been coming home hungry. My sister n' BIL had been giving her trouble, accusing her of not eating all her lunch. However, they recently learned the reason why she wasn't eating all her lunch.... Apparently there is a girl in Josie's class whose family is very poor (she doesn't even have a bed!). This little girl's lunch usually only consists of a few marshmallows or a baggie of potato chips. Josie has been splitting her sandwich with this classmate every day. She even started making it without butter, because she knows that this other little girl likes it better that way.

I'm so proud of Jo's caring heart, although I'm not surprised that she would do such a thoughtful thing. Since she was in kindergarten, Josie has occasionally offered to give away her old toys and clothes to the poor, and has wanted to send her apple seeds to the people in Africa so they could grow their own apple trees and then have food to eat. Gosh, how I love that sweet kid!

Thorn
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had a couple blah days this week where I didn't feel like doing much of anything. But then I felt useless for being so unproductive. Fortunately, I made up for those two days when I...

Rose
...finally started writing my next screenplay. I've had an idea for a quirky Tim Burton-esque romantic comedy pre-DE, that I have been talking about writing for a while. I had done a synopsis a couple months ago, but had yet to put a single word on a page. I realize how important it is to use this next year wisely, so as I fell asleep on Wednesday night, I decided to give myself the goal of writing 120 bad pages (the first draft is ALWAYS bad) before my b-day, which is on May 14th. Thursday I wrote 9 bad pages - and it feels good.

Thorn
For a couple days, one of the water heaters in our building wasn't working, which meant that our water would only get warm but not hot. This has since been resolved, but it sure sucked when we wanted to take baths. By the time the tub would fill, the water had cooled to lukewarm. Yuck.

Rose 
For well over a year I've been hanging on to this funky mango liquor bottle. (The shape of the bottle was the only reason I bought the liquor in the first place.) Having long since been emptied, the bottle has sat at the back in one of our kitchen cupboards until I was reunited with it while packing. I told myself that if I wanted to spare this bottle from the recycle bin that I would have to do something with it a.s.a.p., because we really don't have the room to hoard this sort of unnecessary crap. (If you've ever watched Mental Illness for Entertainment television, ie: Hoarders, you'll see that a number of those people have all these big ideas for projects that never come to fruition, and so their collections of garbage grows. In an alternate reality, I think I could probably be the same when it comes to wanting to save nifty bottles/containers and old shoes to make art...)

Anyway, this week I finally gave the bottle a makeover and painted it with some pretty blue n' green swirls. All I have left to do is finish the top part, which I think I'd maybe like to paint as a pink lotus flower, and then spray it with some gloss. I was originally gonna keep it, but we don't have room, so instead I've decided that it's going to be the first item I put on my Etsy site! After all, that was one of my goals this year, to sell two things on Etsy.

Once I'm done that, I gotta get back to my oil painting I recently effed up. I've been waiting for "Suzie's Power" to dry so I can paint over the parts I hate. Blegh. I hate when I mess up a painting. Where's the undo button? :(

Thorn
If I were a Barbie doll, y'know the part where the leg attaches to the torso - not the stomach, but not really the thigh either? - well anyway, the other day I realized that I was tender there on my left side and could feel a small bump or something beneath the skin when I pressed the sore spot. While I'm obviously not a doctor, I don't think it's like a tumor or anything dreadful like that -- I suspect it's more of a hard knot-in-the-muscle type thing... I don't know. Anyway, I'm gonna leave it for a week n' see if it goes away before getting it checked out. In the meantime I've been putting some arnica gel on it. I don't know if that'll do much, but it can't hurt.

The only piss off is if it doesn't go away (well, I shouldn't say the "only" piss off... it'd be a pretty big piss off if I find out it actually is something serious, although I sincerely doubt it...), is that I'll have to visit some random doctor in a clinic. For years, I had a really great doctor in Kelowna who I never once had to visit except for my annual check-ups... and now that I may have something that needs checking out, I don't have a friggin' doctor. Figures. :P

Anyhoo... no need to worry just yet. I'm pretty confident it's just a weird muscle thing and that it'll go away on it's own. I wouldn't even be mentioning it on here, except that I'm having trouble thinking of thorns.

Rose
Every year MOMA (the Museum of Modern Art in NYC) does an exhibit on Canadian films, where a variety of clips submitted by Telefilm are projected in one of their rooms. Last night after our screening (which went very well, btw - but more on that in another post), we learned that two clips from DE will be looped in the cinematic collage!

I went to MOMA on a school trip when I was 17, and it still stands out in my mind as one of the highlights. Interestingly enough, I even remember watching a couple clips of Canadian films the day we were there. But never in a million years did I every imagine that something I did would end up projected on the walls beneath the same roof that houses the works of Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, etc. Even though our producers seemed somewhat nonchalant about it, I have to admit that I'm pretty giddy. I mean, it's the friggin' MOMA for Pete's sakes! That's SO awesome!! (At least to an art nerd like me.) Personally, it's almost as exciting as the possibility of screening at TIFF. :)

And on that note, I think that's it for another week!!