wonky windows #24.

these are my travel windows...a few tidbits that made me giggle during our christmas trip to los angeles.

pringle on the plane. checking out the view from 35,000 feet.

have you ever looked closely at the lock on a public bathroom stall? me neither. or maybe i have and there was never anything to see. either way, when i saw the logo on this lock, it made me giggle. hiny hiders!! and check out the logo's picture...soo awesome.

upon returning to fort lauderdale, we saw this dude sitting in a room. whatevs. but then i started feeling a little creepy. we looked a little closer...

he is made of wax. art installation. right then. welcome back to florida.

wonky windows #21.

i am always snapping pictures of things i want to share...of course i never seem to find the time to do my sharing. but here are just a few things i have seen recently that made me chuckle.

i took this picture at a cvs pharmacy. in my opinion they need to do a little work on their signage... when i want a soda pop, i have never before thought to myself "let me go and buy a warm beverage."

on wednesdays i work at a different school, which takes me on a different path than usual. i drive by this plaza that hosts the sexy shop and cuban cafe. i will never understand how these two businesses ended up sharing a parking lot. i am equally baffled by the shopping center two blocks further down the road, which houses a bagel store and a gun shop. strange bedfellows.

saw this sweatshirt at a tjmaxx. i immediately recognized that something was strange, but it took me a second glance to see what was amiss. apparently we live in miaim.

art shmart.

hard to leave this little face at home.

three weeks ago marked the end of my maternity leave. (obviously it also marked the end of my free time, hence the abrupt end to blog posts.) it was a bummer because as a happy homebody, i do not suffer from a burning desire to be employed. alas, there are bills to pay, so back to the grindstone. but the exciting part about returning to work is that at the beginning of the year my principal did some finagling and managed to hold open the art position just long enough for me to get my art certification. and now, that's right, i am an art teacher. and it is divine. i teach art to all the students in the second through fifth grades. it is official. i love my job. 

two fourth grade classes at one time. crazy, but we survive.

now i am not one for complaining. well actually, that's a lie. i complain a lot. however, at work i try to keep my chin up, because i have learned that the place is what you make of it. i wander the halls with a big smile, because my personal motto is "a happy face makes a happy place." are you gagging? sorry. now where was i? oh right, about to tell you about the trash pile i inherited that is supposed to pass for an art classroom. yikes.

six 1" squares of fabric clipped together and stored in a box. what the what? why save these?

floppy discs from 1993. how did we manage with 2mb of storage?

okay, so i am thrilled to have a classroom - not all art teachers are so lucky - but this place was a dump. bursting at every seam with bits of paper, jumbled up crayons, oozing tubes of ink, lumpy paint, broken pencils, and dust. oh my god, so much dust.

politically correct crayons. i heart crayola.

the good news is that under the craziness, i unearthed a surprisingly good selection of art supplies. three weeks of tossing, scrubbing, sorting, cleaning, and organizing, and i can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. i still have six boxes of paper scraps to sort by size and two hundred large art reproductions to organize, but then i will have a dream classroom.

making adinkra "cloth" with a third grade class.

and my days will consist of wrangling children to create gloriousness, wandering the internet for project inspiration, and creating sample projects. did i say, i love my job? i do. i love my job.

tales of lesotho. happy faces.

just discovered this unpublished post that i wrote last august, shortly after our trip to visit the mister's family in lesotho.

a tourism poster from the 1970s.

lesotho holds a special place in my heart...not just because it is the mister's country, but because it is full of friendly faces. some of the faces i know, some of them i don't. basotho love to smile and laugh. when you consider their circumstances, you would think there is no reason left to laugh, but they do. if you look at their clothes, possessions, and houses one might think they have nothing to give, yet they are unfailingly kind and generous. they open their hearts and their homes with no questions. my favorite times in lesotho are laughing with the people i meet and i can only hope that my spirit is as unbreakable as theirs. here are a few of the smiling faces i met during our trip.