Last week, I started a new weekly series – Four Things.  These posts are for sharing four things – what I’m reading, watching, loving, and working on.  I hope these posts will be a nice place to drop the this-and-that sort of things that happen throughout the week and will be a source of encouragement and inspiration to you.  If you missed the first post, you can find it HERE

Here are my four things for this week…

what I’m reading

I was looking around for a good book on identifying fossils, specifically on east coast beaches, and I found A Beachcomber’s Guide to Fossils.  I’ve been reading through it over the past couple of weeks to start training my eye for my next beachcombing excursion.  I told my mom I was doing research so I could win next spring’s shell collection contest, but I have a sneaking suspicion bits of fossils are going to do it.  Maybe I’ll win if I find a full fossilized skeleton of a Xiphactinus fish, but I think both the find and the win are unlikely.

What got me interested in looking for fossils was the lion’s paw clamshell fossil I found on the beach a few years ago.  Since then, I have found four or five more now that I know what I’m looking for.

When we were shelling on the beach at IOP last spring, a woman briskly walked up to me and handed me what looked like a small pitch-black rock.  It is about an inch long and has a rectangular shape that’s been softened by friction and time.  “It’s jet.  Have you found any pieces?”  I didn’t even know what it was or why I would look for it!  She informed me it’s petrified wood and she finds pieces regularly on the beach.  She told me to keep the fossilized find as a reference and wished me luck on my search.  It was a great reminder that you can’t look for something if you don’t know it’s there or even worth looking for.  Hence, I bought a book on fossils so I can learn what to look for and, hopefully, recognize something interesting when I see it.

what I’m watching

I actually haven’t been watching a lot of TV lately because we’ve had busy evenings and I was sick of watching TV after being sick for a couple of weeks.  So, when we sat in the living room at night, I told Jeff he could watch whatever he wanted.  I’ll usually be sketching, reading, or doing word puzzles, and half-pay attention to whatever is on the screen.  He has elected to watch Life Below Zero – The Next Generation and, I must say, it’s a good show.  It’s an unscripted series that follows a few families and individuals living on homesteads in remote Alaska.  I appreciate the creative problem-solving on display and hearing the reasons they choose to live in a harsh environment, isolated from others.  While I would never want to go live that way, there is something admirable about it and enjoyable about watching families work so closely together to procure necessities like firewood, fish, and game.

Jeff and I both like shows that celebrate good things like hard work, the beauty of nature, creativity, family, resilience, etc.  This show definitely falls in that category.

There are some amusing people and moments as you would expect with an unscripted show.  We dubbed one young man featured as Edgar Allen Poe because he always talks about death.  One over-dramatic fellow acted like his leg needed to be amputated after a run-in with an ax and ended up only needing seven stitches.  Even as we poke fun, we know these people are tough and I’m sure I would be overdramatic in some of those situations, too.

what I’m loving

My book stacks are usually pretty tidy and stable, but I’ve been a bit careless while adding to and pulling from my current stack, leaving it in a slightly precarious state.  I shared the wonky stack on Instagram and one of my loyal blog readers/IG followers said, “Oh, you made a lovely book cairn. You are an artist in all that you do!”

(Currently in the Cairn – A Beachcomber’s Guide to Fossils, Affinities, The Soulful Cottage, Holbein at the Tudor Court, The Art of Gracie, Art of Nature, How Romantics & Victorians Organized Information, The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, Illustrator’s Sketchbook, Every Atom is Colour, Country House Living, Vignettes, True to the Letter, The General in the Garden, George Washington’s Eye.  John Derian’s Picture Book is too big for my bookshelves, so it’s always the foundation of the book cairn.)

I used to do a lot of hiking, so I’m familiar with cairns.  If you’re not, they are stacks of rocks used as markers on a trail or built at the summit of a mountain.  Here is the rock I added to the cairn at the top of Cottonwood Pass in Colorado in 2013.

Cairn was the perfect description for my book stack.  I always loved cairns on a trail because there is something sculptural about them.  They are typically the result of contributions from many hikers, they’re subject to the weather, they shift, change, grow, are dismantled, and rebuilt over time.  I am the only one who literally contributes to my book stack, but the stack is made up of the words and images of many.  It is a cairn of inspiration, information, and education.  It grows, changes, and is regularly dismantled and rebuilt.

My book stacks shall henceforth be known as book cairns.

what I’m working on

I’m working on a lot of things, but the project I’ll share this week is the basement floor.  This is a long-view project that likely won’t be finished for several months.  In case you missed it, I am removing the remnants of carpet glue and padding off of a cement basement floor so it will be clean, smooth, and ready to paint.  I’ve been working in one or two-hour increments, testing out different techniques and projects to see what works best.  I’m still sampling a few things, so I’ll write an entire post once I figure out the method that works best.

The good news is I am making progress, even just in my test patches.  We have about a 3×4′ section of clean concrete and it’s nice to see.  It’s motivating to keep eating that elephant, one bite at a time.  I’ll give an update on it soon.

Tomorrow is Lucketts and I hope to get some projects done today and over the weekend…

PS – New images have been added to Artist Reference Photos this week.  We add new ones each week, so visit regularly if you’re looking for royalty-free reference photos for artists.  You can also contribute photos if you’d like to share them with artists.