Tomorrow is a big day for The Spotted Elephant. I’m starting the Project 365 challenge. I’ll be taking at least one photo a day for a year and post it here as a way to document everyday life. Sometimes I’ll write a regular post to accompany it, and sometimes I’ll just let the photo speak for itself. Either way, my goal is to post something for each day of the year (even if I have to play catch-up sometimes and post a couple days worth all at once). I love the idea of making a sort of digital time capsule and being able to look back at the moments that made up my year – all the familiar, the everyday, the weird, the important, the once-in-a-lifetime, the common, and the uncommonly beautiful things I encounter.
Monthly Archives: April 2009
Still Life
Time Travel Tuesday
I’m married to a very eclectic, well-rounded gentleman. In his life so far, Randy has:
- Taken riding lessons and ridden in horse shows
- Played soccer, football, and volleyball
- Coached a girls volleyball team
- Starred as the only male member of our high-school’s rifle and flag team (winterguard) and then came back to coach during college
- Dabbled in minor dentistry in a village in Ecuador
- Worked doing lab testing at the Pringle’s factory
- Skied the Matterhorn
- Excelled at high-ish level gymnastics
- Played bass in several bands (along with various other instruments from time to time, including: electric guitar, accordion, piano, mandolin)
- Been a construction worker for a new home builder
- Performed a science-fair experiment for school in which he disguised himself as a scarecrow and sat perfectly still for 30 minutes a day to see if birds would eventually get used to him and land on him (they did)
- Helped me on sewing projects with tight deadlines, getting me out of a pinch
- Backpacked in the Red River Gorge, camping just off the trail in a hammock under the stars
and
- Taken a fair share of art classes, amassing a size-able tub of supplies and a healthy skill level (healthier than mine, anyway!). I don’t want to brag , but his framed artwork already hangs not only in his parents house, but also in is Grandpa’s apartment!
We recently decided to institute an art night at our house once or twice a month. This month’s night was a bust for me because I was too tired to be creative. But randy dragged out the old tub and worked on this still life of one of the few houseplants Einstein hasn’t turned into a salad bar:
Not to shabby, I’d say! I’m looking forward to the plunders of future art nights at Casa Marksberry.
Sometimes Rain Pays Off
Complete double rainbow as seen from my front porch. (The second rainbow is very hard to see in these pictures.) The best rainbow I’ve ever seen, hands down. As the rainbow faded away, some cartoonish cotton-ball clouds developed. 
Thursday Crafternoon
My latest sewing obsession is the Stacked Coins quilt. I’ve spent way too long browsing the photo gallery of the 2009 Coin Quilt Piece-along. Its like quilt porn and I can’t get enough. So I decided to start one of my own. This quilt doesn’t have a purpose yet. Suspiciously, it seems to match my craft room decor perfectly.
Monkey Business
Wildcard Wednesday
An Open Letter to Brooke from DrunkenMonkeyKnits:
I thought we were friends. I thought I could trust you not to sneak around my house and spy on my craft projects, then subsequently copy them and publish the results on the world wide interwebz as your own. But I guess I was wrong, because I recently went to your blog and found this.
Hmmm. Looks suspiciously like this serving dish that I made at Color Me Mine back in November.
Really Brooke? You wanna try and tell me this is a coincidence? You think I’d believe that? And so what if I stole borrowed the idea from a sample on display at Color Me Mine? That has nothing to do with your blatant theft of my intellectual property.
I thought I knew you, but I was wrong. I don’t know you at all, Brooke. At all!
Sincerely,
The Betrayed
Springing
The Monday List – How I Know its Spring
1. The scent of a thunderstorm at dusk last night.
2. A carpet of daffodils lining lucky sections of earth along the interstate.
3. Bradford pear trees everywhere, exploding with snowy blossoms.
4. Tiny, bright green shoots optimistically breaking through the ground to replace last year’s spent, brown branches.
5. Daylight until 8pm, automatically giving off extra evening energy, spurring me on to get more done.
6. A sense of promise, optimism, and unlimited potential for the upcoming season.
The Spotted Elephant 
