Dandelions

Dandelions
Little Bits of Sunshine

 

        So many people hate on dandelions. Why? They're gorgeous little drops of sunshine that spring up so unexpectedly and suddenly it's as though they're little children playing peek-a-boo with you. The first dandelion of the spring never fails to make me smile. Their vivid yellow color is startlingly bright against the luminescently green nascent grass of early spring, and it catches your eye at once with its glow. They are perfectly designed for picking and sticking in your hair, for fiddling with, for making into mother's day bouquets, for simply admiring them, and for so many other things. 

        Did you know that dandelions are technically classified as vegetables? I think they must've taken the open spot when we found out that tomatoes were fruits (remember when everybody was making such a big fuss over that realization?). But every part of the dandelion plant is edible: the flowers, the leaves, the stem, the roots. I was so amazed when I learned this, and I was excited to try it out--and I did.  Of course, I personally find the stem too bitter to be of any real use, but I love the leaves and the flower. The leaves are pleasantly tangy, and admittedly bitter, but in what I find to be a good way. As greens go, I far prefer dandelion greens to any lettuce, and even to spinach, though I would take spinach over lettuce. I've never been fond of lettuce. But dandelions have such a flavor--it's quite unique and delicious, I would say. And the flower--first off, there's something spectacularly wonderful about being able to pick a flower from the ground and eat it. I like to start by licking my dandelions. I know. It sounds really weird. But you should have figured out by now that I'm really weird. And I like to taste the pollen, to feel the delicate grittiness on my tongue. It's like... powdered sugar, but not quite as sweet. The outer bits of the flower are not extremely flavorful, but they're light, and one can't help but imagine that it's like eating sunshine. The best part of eating the flower, though, is that if you can manage to catch it just right, the center is extremely sweet. This isn't always true, I've found. I think if you catch them too early, or if you don't get the center quite right, or if you get some of the green stuff underneath it, or whatever the reason, and you don't catch it just right, it's not notably sweet, and in some cases is even bitter. But when you get that perfect bite of dandelion-center and somehow hit the flower's sugar reserves, it's deliciously sweet. I've even read recipes for making dandelion jelly, and I'd love to try that this year. I love eating random things I pick from our lawn. A disclaimer, though: don't eat dandelions from public lawns or lawns where you don't know what they've been spraying. We don't spray our lawn with anything or put any chemicals on it, so it's safe to eat our dandelions, but you do have to be careful. That's why my mom says not to eat the dandelions at school. In Virginia in our yard, I used to eat wild chives, but those don't seem to grow here in Iowa. But they were so pleasantly spicey and garlicy, and you'd find patches of them strewn all through the lawn and I'd just pick them and chew away. There is some satisfaction in eating the same stuff as your bunnies.  

        Dandelions just bring such happiness, if you let them. The other day, when the dandelions were first starting to show, I saw a small patch of dandelions and smiled and thought, "I'll eat one or two of these, but I'll have to save them until more come up" but then I walked around behind the house and I just laughed out loud with joy and surprise because there was this huge patch of buttery-golden flowers and I thought "guess I don't need to worry about saving those". Give dandelions a chance, world. They're the farthest thing from weeds, if you only let them impart their joy upon your lawn and upon your palate (plus their health benefits--they have lots of iron, as it so happens).

       Here beyond the violet mist, violets, of course, hold a special place among spring flowers, but so do dandelions.

school-related madness

End-of-the School Year Madness
~because at first I just titled this post "Madness", but then it occurred to me that on this blog that's not nearly specific enough~

        A while back, the Creative Writing I class's prompt was to list all the things they had to do before the end of the school year. I didn't feel like doing it then, but now, with the insane weight of everything I must do before The End and the surrealy minimal amount of time remaining in which I must do it, it's about all I can think about. Thus, I elected to hash some of it out here on the internet. 
        The thing foremost on my mind at present is the astounding amount of art I have left to do. I don't know how it gets this way, and this semester it seems particularly bad. I love art, and Drawing II (the art class I am in now) is a really fun class, but I could easily occupy myself for another month with all the pieces I need to finish presently. I am almost finished with my self portrait and a drawing of a faerie I started Friday (the Faerie I started Friday, the selfie I've been drawing for... maybe a couple weeks now, I'm actually not sure), and I have to finish the e, u, and r in "fleur" for my letter drawing, which I've been working on off and on for, wow, it must be months now, but at least those are relatively small, and I also started a drawing from my story about Avgir Lys on Friday. Is that even everything? Yeah, that is. But it's a lot. I don't know how it gets like this, I honestly don't. I work on my drawings every day in class, it's just that I'm an incredibly slow draw-er. 
        It makes me think of this episode of the Amazing Race (which is, by the way, an Amazing show) my Mom and I watched today where they had to do illumination on a book page. I've always been intrigued by the ancient monks who devoted their lives to illumination, and sometimes I find myself envying them a little. I forget whether I read it somewhere or watched a documentary or what, but I remember seeing something about them that talked about how those ancient monks did such detailed, perfect illuminations because they pretty much had nothing else to do. But that was a good thing, because they had all the time in the world to devote themselves to their singular passion, and that's what I kind of envy. They could just get up in the morning and do what they did, and they didn't have to rush or hurry because they had no deadlines and no other things to rush off and do and all they had to do was just one page after another. They could be utterly meticulous and perfectionist and OCD, and they had so much time they could make it pretty much perfect. That would fit my work style almost perfectly. I say "almost" because I do like to have a bunch of things going at once and switch back and forth between them, and I do like to have some sort of endpoint--progress of work-wise, not time-wise--to work towards, and I do like to start new things. But I like having all the time in the world. Which I don't now. Isn't it ironic that I've just run out of time to write a blog post about all the things I'm running out of time to do? Suffice to say, I've been praying a lot. God has helped me finish more of my schoolwork than I can say. Honestly, I am such a horrible procrastinator, without God, I may well be an F student. Sometimes, I just don't know. I can't handle it all on my own. I'm so glad I have a God who cares enough to help me with things that, in the grand scheme, would seem incredibly insignificant, like homework. 
        Beyond the violet mist, we may be in over our heads, but God isn't.

Words Follow-up

Les Mots Encore

~I finally explain those words I promised to in the last post~

        All right, last week I made a post saying I was going to talk about some words I made up that I've been using on my blog (and ones I haven't been using, too) but then I got caught up in all my explaining and was suddenly out of time and had to post, and so no words were actually defined. Thus, this time I'm going to jump ahead to defining words, since it's already after midnight. 

          Luxilliquant--this is probably the word of my own invention I've used most on my blog. It's my own word for a step above luxurious. I thought it up and thought it just sounded even fancier than luxurious, and more... well, luxilliquant. I know, one oughtn't use a word in it's own definition. But basically, I conceive of luxilliquant as including ornateness and the very pinnacle of luxury and elegance, and ultimate fancieness and depth and the best of the best. Is it really a nessecary word to add to the English language? Probably not. But it would make the language more luxilliquant.

        Thrairilous--as thin as air (metaphorically). This one has a simpler definition than luxilliquant, simply because it originated from its definition more so. You see, I was thinking about words, and I was just thinking "I can make words up out of thin air. I should make one up now. Hm. Thin air. Thin as air. Thrairilous." because thinairilous doesn't sound good or like a word, but thrairilous just came to my mind naturally as sounding elegant and right. Sometimes words just sound right to me. I've been making up words for quite a long time. Thrairilous sounds to me as if it would be quite useful for describing things like a very thin, gauzy fabric on the sleeves of a gown or something--her sleeves were thrairilous as the moonlight shone through them, and when she spoke her voice was like mist on the air. ("her voice was like mist on the air" is actually a sentence from my writer's notebook--which is where I write random things, such as cool-sounding sentences, phrases, and, as it so happens, words I make up). I just think that sounds like a beautiful sentence.

       You know, at the moment, I'm finding it hard to think up more words I've invented that I could define here. I could go get my notebook, but I'm sitting here in bed and it's actually quite cozy and I don't really want to get up until I have to. So, you know, for now I think I'll just post this. I'm quite fond of my invented words--the other day I actually googled them and I was proud to find that my blog is the only result for both of them. I am expanding the bounds of the English language. But I mean, come on, think about defenestration. That must have been a totally random word whenever it was thought up, but now it's the most epic word for throwing a thing or person out of a window that there is.

Beyond the violet mist, the Queen's ballgown is as luxilliquant as a faeries, with the most thrairilous of sleeves.

words

Les Mots

~words of my own invention~

     I am rather fond of inventing words at times. Sometimes I just think "this sounds like it could be a word", or "I wish there was a word for this". Other times, I just think, "I feel like making up a word. How about...". When I was younger, I thought I should write a language, because I was ambitious and random and Tolkien-like like that (though at that point I hadn't yet read LotR, and I'm not certain I'd even seen the movies). To date, it consists of somewhere around 10-20 words (that's a high estimate) and I can't actually remember what it was called, though I recall it had a really cool name, or at least I thought so at the time. I just spent some time perusing my notebook in search of it and couldn't find it, but hopefully it's written somewhere, or maybe I'll remember it. Else it's lost forever. 
     Words I was planning to explain:
     Luxilliquant
     Thrairilous
     some other words

     Beyond the violet mist, linguistics are important, but so is sleep.

Picts of Chicago: Part One

Pictures from: the Sojourn to Chicago

Plus, exclusive: I cover a song!

update: that latter isn't in this post, but I did kill the internet!
Let's just call this Part One.

        You may remember, a few weeks ago now, we went on a trip to Chicago. I may or may not have promised to show you pictures from this sojourn, but that is what I am doing now. I was also going to include a video I made on the train ride back when I was tired and decided to make a video of me singing a train-related song, but I think I killed the internet by uploading too many pictures--actually, I had like 800 pictures I took on our Chicago trip, and I was uploading like 500-some of them to look at them and pick them over for this blog post. It made my internet go really slow and as it is it took probably a couple of hours (I left it going while I ate dinner and did some other stuff) to load the 200 or so I eventually got downloaded, and then a little longer to get however many are in this post here. It would have gone on loading, but I stopped it after the first around 200-ish for time reasons. I. e., welcome back to the late-night saturday blogging tradition! And so anyways, the video was near the end of the pictures, because they, of course, go in chronological order, and so when I stopped the uploading the video was among the larger half of the pictures that didn't get uploaded. I'll have to do a separate post of it some time. So, here is the first less-than-half of the pictures from our trip to Chicago!

 The pictures, like all pictures I take on road trips, begin with travel pictures. Taking pictures, for me, is not only something necessary to capture something really cool or a tool for obtaining things to take with you from a trip, but rather is an enjoyable activity in and of itself (don't forget, this blog originated from my Digital Camera class). Thus, on road trips, I often take pictures merely to amuse myself. When we were visiting my cousins in Houston and we sojourned to the beach at Galveston, I took probably 200 or so pictures just of houses and random stuff on the drive back, not even because all of them looked cool but just because I wanted to be taking pictures. These road trip pictures, though, are some I think are quite good. On the drive to Chicago, one of the highlights was the part where we came along the Mississippi River. This first picture is that moment when you come down the hill and the view just opens in front of you, of misted blue hills and island-spotted silver-grey river. 

going down the hill, more river-view and a couple of trees.

I like solitary trees next to landscapes. It's maybe a little clichéd, but it works well.

grr semi getting in my view. 

cool trees, a little blurred with driving, but nice

A cliff to our right, a drop-off to our left. I've ridden on many a road like this, though few were in the vicinity of the Mississippi. It's got a nice look.

In case you haven't noticed, I like trees.

It was a rainy, grey day on our drive. Thankfully, it wasn't the day we were in Chicago, so I guess that worked out fairly well. I would have preferred sun sometimes in my picture taking, but rain can have a neat effect sometimes, too. I was annoyed at the time that my camera kept deciding to focus on the raindrops when I didn't want it to, but some pictures, like this one, actually turned out pretty neat.

some cool church spires and a tree in a town by the river through which we drove

exiting the town, the river peeks back through the trees like a shining mirror. Now we're back down closer by it.

Rivers & trees are a good combination.

Tree.

I got a little of that sun-visor blue strip from the windshield in that one, oops. But it's a nice upward look at the cliffs. I'm using words like nice and pretty way too much, but I guess those are the categories most of these pics fall under, just average, nice, and pretty. 

It makes me think of, if you've ever seen the movie brother bear, when the two mooses are playing eye-spy (or I spy. Come to think of it, I was never sure which and I've never written it out. Huh. Random realization.) and they both keep choosing tree until they can guess before the other moose has finished his "I spy with my little eye" phrase they just say "tree" over and over. Tree. Tree. But trees are nice. 

landscape without river as we got farther away a little, but still those river-carved hills. 

TREES 

I should rotate these sideways ones. I'll probably get to it. Eventually.

Then we passed this awesome house with butterflies all over its walls and I managed to time it right to get a picture. I want butterflies on our walls. 

downtown of some town or another by the river with a cool gold-topped capitol spire.

A stoplight both gives me an opportunity to take a good picture of the gold-spire and blocks my view in the same instant. Oh, the irony. 

Crossing the river & state boundaries.

Road trip selfie! Shortly thereafter my camera died. 

The lights of Naperville! That's the town/suburb of Chicago's outskirts where we stayed with my grandma's cousins. This is an artistic light-picture, I guess. I suppose my other pictures of Naperville must have been among those that didn't load, because I'm sure I had more. Here, we were in this awesome elevator going down from a parking garage that had a glass wall and a nice view of the city-section or whatever Naperville is. Technically a ville, I guess. Anyways, the picture was blurry, hence it's "artistic". There's more reflection than I would have liked, but it's alright.

Chicago day (the next day): we embark our epic journey from the epic top floor of an epic double-decker train. That's the back of my mom's head in front of me. I mean... the epic back of my epic Mom's epic head. Because you can't overuse the word epic.

The train station through green-tinted train windows.

I love being upstairs on a train :D This is an artistic look down. 

passing through various suburbs, crossing streams and even seeing a few scattered wooded areas.

the coolness of the train again

The first thing we did in Chicago, once we did a little figuring out, was to go to this restaurant called the Little Goat my mom had been wanting to go to (either this one, or the Girl and the Goat) because it (and the other one, too) was owned by the only woman thus far to win Top Chef, who my mom enjoyed watching on T.V., so it was dream of hers to eat at one of the restaurants.

Everywhere was this adorable logo of a little goat :) Also, an exclusive picture of my camera case hanging from my purse in the bottom right corner.

Deliciousness. Chocolate-toffeee-bacon shakes.

With chocolate almost too cute to eat--that little goat again!

Mom's having fun :)

Then, we left and walked some more. I should reiterate that we did a *ton* of walking. Here is a funky shape building mom suggested I take pictures of. There were lots of huge, funky-shaped, and utterly immense buildings in Chicago. 

I must say, this picture feels very artistic to me, and I'm rather proud of it, though buildings aren't my favorite subject matter, and in fact I felt this building was a little... obtuse, and somewhat overbearing. I'm not really a city person, though again, it was an amazing place to visit. I probably prefer rivers and trees (mountains, when I can get them) for photographing, but my river-tree pictures didn't turn out, for the most part, quite as artistic as this.

Here's a cool older-fashioned looking building in amidst newer ones. It's an interesting contrast and very city. Again, I apologize for the sideways-ness, but I don't really have time at the moment to right-side-up all my pics. I took pictures as we were crossing an intersection, and I have pictures both with the stoplight in them...

...and without. Not sure which I prefer.

Mom & I taking a Chicago selfie! I still need to work on the angle of selfies with a handheld camera because I kind of cut Mom off a little in this one. It's funny, I never really took that many pictures of myself before I got this laptop and started taking selfies with photobooth and screenshots of facetime, but now I do it so much I've started taking selfies with my actual camera. It's still a skill I'm developing, though.

fancy theatre signs and whatall

This looks famous. I'll take a picture of my foot on it.

Fancy theatre stuff with a tree. 

Cool tree perspectiveness.

Oo! how cute! it's a little old-fashiondey clock shoppe thing with really neat architecture. Huzzah for juxtapositions! (and... guess what... ANOTHER TREE! :)

the olde-fashiondey clock building next to the sparkly-shiny theatre

cool lamposts and a corner-clock and Chicago street-ness

Finally, we stumbled upon the famous Millenium Park. It was like there were just these walls of buildings and then there was open space and for a bit I wondered if we'd reached the lake but it was the park. We took a much-needed rest, and I took some pictures from the park bench. This is some collumy-monumenty-archy thing at the edge of the park where we came in that reminds me of Virginia monuments. There are more tall buildings behind it, in that ever-present citieness of Chicago and that contrast that often is nifty for pictures. 

Mom, checking out the map, which kept us from running around in circles and which helped us actually get places. We very nearly lost it to the strong winds more than once, but Mom managed to keep track of it!

The park.

artistic pictures of tall, tilty-looking buildings

I zoomed in on the monument. A nice bowl of flowers at left, though it was still really early in the spring and the colors weren't much yet, and to the right a stalker picture of a kid playing. For the record, I wasn't trying to take a picture of him, he just got in it.

Then I suggested we explore the park a little more, like, for example, go up those stairs over there.

And what did we happen upon up those stairs?

The famed magic wormhole jellybean of shininess.

I once did a google image search of the word "shiny" (again, I'm random like that) and that's actually where I first saw this thing. Obviously, the internet is in a constant flux, and so I don't know that this comes up any more, but I still think this is a fitting thing with which to define the word "shiny". I had also looked at a bunch of pictures of it after that on google earth after that. And now, I got to see the legendary Shiny Thing in person!

This and the one before are touristy pictures of me standing in front of it, if you can pick me out from the bustling crowd. Shiny things are popular.

Think of this as, like, a where's Waldo picture. My Mom and I are actually in it, and as a matter of fact I was trying to take a picture of our reflections.

You may have an easier time finding us in this one. My mom is the one with the bunny ears. For the record, this is a zoomed in picture of our reflection on the Shiny Thing.

Then we entered beneath the belly of the beast--a side I had not yet seen on the internet--and stumbled into a wormhole. I kid you not, looking up into the underside of the belly of the Shiny Thing is exactly what I imagine a wormhole would look like. Thankfully, it wasn't actively wormholing that day, because then this would be a picture of my mom being sucked into a wormhole. Instead, it's a picture of her standing under a frozen wormhole.

These very cute little kids were playing in the wormhole.

IT'S A WORMHOLE I TELL YOU! Don't fall in....

A reflection-selfie looking up into the Shiny Thing where it slopes back down to the ground. It's so disorienting, though, because it's such a clear mirror, that I was actually closer to it than even I realized and I bumped my hands on it going to take this picture. It was like, woh, I'm right under the Shiny Thing but I can't even tell where it is, and where the world ends and the Shiny Thing begins. Woh, man.

See? It blends into the sky deceptively. This is looking out from the under-belly.

Then, we walked some more and came to a shopping area. This was an epic interior design store, the name of which escapes me presently. It was so huge, though, and so filled with interior designingness, and it was like, literally, five stories, and there were escalators. I am like a five year old around escalators and I will ride escalators simply for the sheer joy of riding escalators. Plus, this store had these epic banner things (which, FYI, you're not supposed to touch. Not that I would try something like that or anything...) and a really cool glass dome that let the bright afternoon sun in beautifully. It was still really early spring but it got up to 75 that day in the city. It was so hot after the long winter, but it was so much nicer than it'd been!

Banners and architecturally cool glass ceiling (not the metaphorical sort).

a view out onto the city past the banner.

Ceiling, from an escalator. Very artistic-y.

The banners made for such cool pictures! Plus they were a good excuse to ride the escalators more. It was one of the most epic stores I've ever been in.

ESCALATORS

are good :)

plant box

Mom watching me ride the escalator yet again.

some of the actually interior-design related parts of the store. It was very colorful and springy.

Plant. 

I love that chair :) both to rest my feet by sitting in it, and because it's cool and pretty.

more banners

Don't get sucked into any magic jellybean wormholes, beyond the violet mist or otherwise, before we can return to explain things!