Fog

Spooky!

Shamrock Suit

Time for another fashion flashback! I have so much fun giggling and guffawing while re-creating the appalling fashion faux pas of my youth and--despite my rubbish drawing skills--I have to admit that the outfits are pretty authentically rendered. Don't believe me? Compare my drawing of the psychedelic jumpsuit with this photo of the real thing. I just happened to find the photo when I was visiting my dad over Christmas, and I was quite surprised at how accurately I'd recalled the whole Peter Maxishness of it all, drawing only from memory.

Moving forward a few years, here I am sporting a belted pantsuit. Aren't you green with envy?



What kind of an eleven-year-old owns and wears something like this? And wears it with a smile on her face? Answer: The kind of eleven-year-old I was. As I recall (and my memory may be faulty), one of my aunts gave me this pantsuit. Maybe she was trying to point me toward a career as a girl scout leader, I don't know, but I remember first thinking it was hideous, but then gradually growing to like it. I believe I even wore this to school, but maybe I only wore it on special occasions (like St. Patrick's Day). NB: I never did own any curly-toed slippers like this, but I couldn't resist adding them in when I was drawing this. That's the kind of thing that, as an "artist," I can get away with doing.

Proud of Myself

Well, I did it. I took a photo* a day for 366 days in a row. Every ding-dong day last year! Project 365/366 is done. I'm proud of myself and more than a little pleased with some of the shots I took. I think Woody Allen's comment--"80 percent of success is just showing up"--applies here. I got out there. In conjunction with the photo-a-day thing, I took a walk every day,** usually a pretty decent one (i.e., at least a couple of miles). Yeah, sometimes I didn't get out until after dark and, yeah, there were a few days when all I did was take a spin around the block, but those days were in the minority.

I think getting out there every day, walking with my eyes open helped keep me from losing it while embroiled in the most stressful and ill-conceived (work) project of my life this summer. And, quite simply, I just saw so much in my own neighborhood that I probably would have breezed right past, if I hadn't been under the gun to get some kind of decent photo every day. Not to mention all kinds of weirdness that it would have been a tragedy not to document.



One completely unexpected serendipity was that I got to meet up on my last day of the project with another Project 365er who lives in the Chicago area. Here's my final shot of the project, with both of us reflected in the Cloudgate (AKA "the Bean") sculpture in Chicago's Millennium Park.

Here's a short (30-seconds), semi-cheeserific movie of just a few of my faves that I remixed about 20 times and am not too happy with. It just keeps coming out weirder and weirder because the "movie" (really just a slideshow with music) is a free application and the user has no control at all over what comes out the spigot.

If you're so inclined, click here to see all 366. You know I want you to!

*Actually, I took way more than one photo every day, and then had to choose one as photo of the day. Mega, mega, mega time-consuming, as you can imagine.
**I didn't get out for a walk on Christmas--so out of 366 days, I missed one day of walking (but I still took a photo). I'm not beating myself up over it! It really wouldn't have been right to walk out in the middle of a family gathering and by the time everyone left, it was dark and all of Chicago was covered in a treacherous sheet of ice.