So Very Dark

A mid-weekend, mid-October day…the sun is shining but the wind is blowing brown and red and orange and yellow leaves from the trees and I can tell the weather out there is chilly.

Or I can simply Google my zip code and learn that it is…currently about 57 degrees, with gusts of wind from the North-north-west.

Original plans for the morning were derailed, due to businesses being open only on business days, so the afternoon is open and we sit in our PJs wondering what to do with our day until we bring cookies to Bellevue this evening and watch horror movies with other people.

A mild hike through Schenley has been proposed and tentatively accepted, crunching through autumn leaves and snapping pictures at squirrels before stopping for the seasonal salted caramel hot chocolate that is my current obsession. But for the moment, sitting nestled in blankets and a soft sweater on the sofa and telling unknown readers that may not exist about my recent days seems the appropriate activity for this lazy Saturday.

I am two weeks into my internship at the educational lobbyist non-profit organization.  On the day that I interviewed, I was asked if, as my start date was four days into October, I might be able to complete layout and design of the quarterly newsletter that was due at the end of October (I would be supplied with all written articles and photographs), and though I knew I would have to be attentive in management of my time, I thought I could manage without too much problem.  On the day I began, I learned two things:  the newsletter was due to be complete by the 22nd of the month, not the 30th or 31st (a slightly tighter squeeze, but one I thought I should be able to appease) and, though I had thought I might start my first day with a complete set of articles and photos to be input into a 12-page layout of my division…great fool, I — only one or two were even written!  Today is the 16th of the month, and to date, I have not received anything but promises.  Instead, I re-designed their membership brochure into something highly functional and was then told to redesign it twice in increasingly less functional fashions, stretching a two-day job into a two-week trial.

I feel I am learning a lot about the industry.

Meanwhile, school is at once overwhelming, and a heady experience.  So far, at least, the quarter is exciting and so are the classes.  With one quarter remaining after this one, I feel balanced on a precipice — at once ready to leap into the real world, and also sure that I need more feathers in my wings first and that the wax has not yet dried nearly long enough.

On the subject of wings, and school and the real world, however, I have finally designed a logo that I intend to be my long-term professional identity, rather than a stop-over until a real logo comes along.  Perhaps I’ll post it some day.

I have not been interested overmuch in cooking over the past week or two–at least not cooking meals and nutritious things.  Baking and notions and culinary adventures, have, however, grabbed my fancy.  I made:

My own chai (for which I will not link a recipe, as I looked at a few and surmised that one simply throws into a pot with black tea, whichever portions of the appropriate spices one desires, and then allows to simmer for a while.)

Pumpkin spice bagels (Two recipes — the first is more dense, and though the blogger comments on the excessive amount of spice, even more would still be appropriate — they were delicious but could have been spicier.  Oh, and the directions were for using a mixer like KitchenAid or Hobart, but you can totally mix and kneed by hand.  For the second, I didn’t have vital wheat gluten, so I ended up having to add a great deal more flour than is in the recipe…they came out quite tender, however…but i think not as sweet as the first set.)

Molasses Ginger cookies (very good, but make sure to read the comments, as they give some pointers that really make the recipe better and easier.)

Other obsessions of late:

Starbucks Salted Caramel hot chocolate.  I know I have mentioned this at least twice before…once perhaps in this very post…but it is incredibly good, if you like that kind of thing.  Which I do.  Almost a little butterscotchy.  Almost tied for the position of ‘favorite drink of the month’, however, is the raspberry hot chocolate we got at Penn’s Colony — it is made locally, but can be ordered online, and is PARTICULARLY delicious mixed in with morning coffee.

The art of Tara McPherson.  I mean, seriously….look at this stuff:

Her work is just kind of awesomely weird and bright and cute all at once, and I love it.

My third obsession of the week is my new sketchbook.

You see, since getting my computer, I have drawn pretty much no traditional art at all…but even before that, pages in my sketchbooks had become far more focused on pages that were scannable line art for finished pieces.  I did not work loose and fill my space…I hardly ever had more than one drawing on a page, much less interfering with or overlapping each other.  I sacrificed loose, care-free drawings in favor of neat, space-conscious work, and that is not what a sketchbook is for.  A fact I realized and bemoaned when I stumbled across some beautiful sketchbooks full of random drawings everywhere.  (I posted about it here)

Well.

I had to get a new sketchbook for unrelated reasons, but the combination of those lovely books lingering in my mind, and the knowledge that a school friend of mine had begun a full on sketch-journal, which she was filling with every medium she had on hand, and experimenting and going crazy, and then seeing the inside of a classmate’s sketchbook…I tore into the pages of my own spiral-bound with a vengeance.  Well..with a couple pencils and a ball-point…but I have been spending free time doodling, drawing and depicting, trying to fill up all the space that pages provide, for the most part…playing as much as I can with ideas of form and shape and concepts of characters and shapes of faces and eyes and mouths and shading and so forth.

Perhaps I’ll post a few pages soon.

And with that, two weeks of my life are mostly neatly condensed into a medium-length journal entry.  So, for now, I shall shower and prepare to meet the day.