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While writing an article about the best paces to buy toys and gifts for kids in Greater Fort Lauderdale, I thought back to all the holidays we’ve celebrated in our family with our daughter. I have to say that looking back, I wish we had not only bought less gifts ourselves, but I also wish she was given less gifts from others.
This may sound stingy, but it’s not. The older I get, the more I realize that gift giving, while wonderful in many ways, should be more about quality than quantity. The extra cash you save from buying less stuff, can best be invested in a college fund. So what are the gifts I believe were the best loved and most useful?
Books
Arts and craft supplies
Additions to collections such as rocks, coins, etc
A really loveable stuffed animal
Music
Travel
Pets
Lessons – sports, musical instruments, etc.
Anything that keeps your child physically active, sporting equipment, a bike, etc
Computer
Giving is indeed a wonderful thing, but buying stuff just to buy it is a waste of money and of our natural resources. Giving useful and joyful gifts is what giving is really about. Don’t you agree?
0 Comments on Toys, Toys, Toys as of 11/30/2012 6:49:00 PM
As an instructional coach, a key part of my job is to encourage and inspire teachers. This is one of my favorite things about my job. It isn’t easy to be the person… Read More →
There's still time for your kids, or you and your kids, to read The Hobbit, the classic fantasy by J.R.R. Tolkien, before the movie comes out on December 14, 2012. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is the first of 3 movies based on the 300+ page book. Librarian Jennifer Kendall, who recommends the book for readers 10 and older, also highly recommends The Hobbit as a bedtime read aloud. There are a number of editions of the book available. To learn more about the ones I recommend and what each has to offer, see my article about the 5 Best Editions of The Hobbit for Young People. They include a deluxe edition illustrated by J.R.R. Tolkien, a paperback edition with cover art by Peter Sis, an edition with lots of colorful artwork by children's book illustrator Michael Hague, and an illustrated gift edition (pictured) by Academy Award winning artist Alan Lee, who has worked on a variety Tolkien-related movie and book projects.
I love nothing - nothing! - more than a good party based on a kid's book. We had two home runs this week. In this post, let me tell you about our latest celebration - Jeff Kinney's publication of his seventh book on 11/13/12, The Third Wheel.
I knew it was going to be good because I lucked out and picked up a 2013 Wimpy Kid calendar signed (in silver, no less) by Jeff Kinney at ALA. That would be the centerpiece of the party that we would schedule on the eve of the book's publication.
We downloaded the event kit from Abrams books to help us decide what games and activities to use at the party. They have always been generous in making bookstores and libraries look good with the latest trivia, games and puzzles. We chose the Shame Game and trivia from this year's event kit; downloaded masks from the Wimpy Kids Club and used the "Worm Chase" activity from a previous party (a picture of a worm colored by the kids and glued on a craft stick in honor of Rowley being accused of chasing kindergartners with a worm on a stick).
It's not a Wimpy Kid party unless we take a toilet seat, prop it atop a wastebasket and let kids chuck mini-cereal boxes into it. And of course there were "Mom Bucks" aplenty that we made and gave out with abandon for any and no reason.
Best of all, School Library Journal and Abrams Books (bless their hearts) made a live webcast of Jeff Kinney available today at noon (our party started at 3pm). During the webcast, I took screen shots and made notes to share with the kids in a word doc. To start the party off, we spent 15 minutes just recapping what Jeff had said. The kids were rapt. The webcast should be available more widely in an archived version in a week or so.
Finally, to the mad delight of the kids, we picked for the lucky winner of the calendar and six magnetic Wimpy kid bookmarks we had purchased. The rest of the kids received a ridiculous but highly prized monkey pen. Everybody was happy and books and literacy = fun won again!
For other Wimpy Kid parties we've done, check here and here .
2 Comments on Diary of a Wimpy Kid Party - Third Wheel Edition, last added: 11/30/2012
Is the Manny Cereal Toss Game idea taken from a particular book in the series? I am having a Diary of a Wimpy Kid party at my library next week and was so excited to read your posting with the great ideas. Thanks so much.
I can't say I have an especially deep interest in today's Picture Book Month theme of planes, trains, and automobiles, so I had to scrape a bit to find a book from my library fitting the topic. The closest I could come was The Adventures of Taxi Dog by Debra and Sal Barracca, illustrated by Mark Buehner:
0 Comments on Picture Book Month: Planes, Trains, & Automobiles as of 11/12/2012 5:57:00 PM
I was a bit shocked the first time Deuce cursed. Deuce isn’t my father, husband, or son. Deuce is the main character in my WIP. After the word seemed to type itself I stopped and hovered over the backspace, considering if I should erase it. A long time ago my language may have been a bit more colorful, but after two decades of raising children and substitute teaching my vocabulary has mellowed until it is definitely G rated. In fact, my rare use of a curse word has been known to silence the entire house, including the dogs. So the cursing felt a bit awkward to me.
I have a terrible ear for music but dialogue sticks with me. Dialogue that may look great written out is often a whole other thing when read aloud while keeping in mind the person saying the words. Deuce, an eighteen-year-old, has a PG, occasionally R-rated vocabulary. For him, cursing came naturally. Without the occasional curse word Deuce sounded like… at worst, an adult and at best, a really geeky teenager. The problem was that I had to put the words in Deuce’s mouth.
Like anything else I’m unfamiliar with, I decided to do a little research on modern cursing. OK, some people would call it eavesdropping but poe-ta-toe – pah-tah-toe. Being a quiet, unassuming person I’m great at eavesdro- um, research. So I became a quiet presence at school events, in malls, everywhere there were teenagers to take mental notes.
I quickly learned that for teenagers most curses aren’t interjections used to indicate intensity, instead they are a type of punctuation, casually used here and there in everyday, unemotional conversations. Then there are the abbreviation type along the lines of LOL (laughing out loud) that developed with the help of texting and eventually moved from texting communication to spoken communication. These were problematic because teens would say the letters and I had no idea what words they stood for…and my teenager wasn’t eager to educate me. Eventually, she did “translate” a few for me. Not aloud and to my face (that would be too embarrassing) but with slips of paper containing translations left on my desk. I think she was worried I would start asking her friends to translate for me. Then there were the words that meant one thing to me but to teenagers…a whole other thing! They were the toughest ones because I wasn’t even sure if they were curse words. Enter my daughter as reluctant translator again. Did you know that curse words popular in England are jumping across the pond? Who knew? Not me!
Of course my challenge of late has been teenage cursing in 2012. But because dialogue is different depending on the year, place, even profession of the people involved there is a constant challenge to make it authentic. So I recommend a three-pronged approach:
1. Talk to people from the group you’re portraying. Of course this doesn’t always work if you’re portraying immigrants to America from Eastern Europe in the 1820s. But for any groups that are available, track them down, meet them, and have a conversation.
2. Eavesdrop. Sounds sneaky but often it’s the only way to get a true picture. Many people have several ways of talking. For instance, teenagers speak one way with their group (other teenagers) and another way with outsiders (that would be adults!). You can also find movies, books, newsreels, etc. of your group – but be wary, authors/screenwriters may not have gotten it right.
3. Run it past an expert. That is, in my case let the teenagers in your life read it and ask them to pay attention to the dialogue. Does it ring true? In your case perhaps a historian, a resident from the region where your WIP takes place, or a member of your character’s profession could give you a final say.
Good luck with your dialogue and I’d love to hear about the dialogue challenges you’ve faced and how you got your characters talking right!
Jodi Webb is a WOW Blog Tour organizer and working on a YA novel (and hopefully a children's picture book if her NYC publisher ever gets her electricity back!). You can check out her book reviews and writing tales at Words by Webb.
6 Comments on Overcoming Dialogue Challenges, last added: 11/30/2012
Jodi--Once I was on a writing marathon, and we stopped at a winery in Rocheport, Missouri. I sat on a picnic bench and soon found that the group of four's conversation was more interesting than the scenery. I started jotting down snippets of their conversation, but I guess they were not as inebriated as I thought they were, because all of a sudden, one of them shrieked, "She's writing down everything we say!" and I quickly moved away.
Yes, eavesdropping. It's marvelous to give you ideas as well as a way to flesh out your characters.
One of the characters in my WIP, a minor character that provides contrast to my MC, is this lovely, voluptuous full-bodied personality. Her dialogue has been fun to write and is a reflection of several people I've known (and wish I was more like!) It was fun to channel the bodacious people in my life.
The main thing for cursing young adults isn't whether they curse -- we do -- but when and where. We'd never let some of the words between our friends leak into conversations with parents or teachers. Who people are talking to is important to authenticity when you consider what they're saying.
I've used urban dictionary.com figure out some of the things said/written at my daughter's middle school. For example, in her yearbook a lot of kids wrote "HAGS" and I was concerned about what that was. Turns out it means "Have a good summer." ;)
These comments are great. I can't say I have an exciting dialogue story, but I am "LOL" at your daughter leaving you slips of paper with translations on them. :) Now that needs to go in a story.
For the past three Nanowrimo events I've worked on a Dystopian but was unhappy with its progress until this year. This year I revamped the story almost completely using outlining techniques from K. M. Weiland's book Outlining Your Novel and the current story suddenly unfurled before my very eyes. If you haven't used this book and are having trouble "finding" your story... Continue reading →
Emma Watson is taking part in promoting Lancôme's new makeup collection, In Love. Photo shoots and filming are underway for the spring 2013 promotions for this new line. A few photos from these shoots have been released online, and can be seen here.SnitchSeeker reported:
Emma’s favourites from the collection include: Lips enhanced with a hint of Baume In Love in fuchsia, “Rose Macaron”, contrasted with eyes framed by Ombre In Love, “Sugar Rose”, before being finished with a graphic line of Khôl In Love in turquoise, “Jade Crush”. Cheeks are pretty as a picture in vibrant Blush In Love, “Pommettes d’Amour”.
Thanks to SnitchSeeker for the heads up!
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Imagine that you could interview Milt Kahl at the height of his powers and ask him anything you wanted. That’s the opportunity a little old lady in Dallas got in 1973. Andreas Deja recently posted the segment on his goodie-filled blog, and even by the low standards of local television, it’s a disaster.
Resembling a bad sketch-comedy routine, she asks Milt nonsensical things that only vaguely resemble questions like, “How far back do they go? Do they go back…what are some of the …Nutcracker?” and “Do you think it’s an inspired thing that they get these characters?” One gets the sense that Kahl would have decked the lady had the interview gone on a minute longer. Perhaps the reason she’s wearing dark sunglasses indoors is that the last person she interviewed gave her a black eye for her utter lack of journalistic ability.
The saving grace is Milt doing his famous eyeglass-dangle at 1:15, not to mention that fabulous patchwork sports jacket.
And Bid Him Sing: A Biography of Countée Cullen by Charles Molesworth considers the extensive body of work and unpublished correspondence, as well as the life of Harlem’s legendary poet-citizen. Cullen’s volume Color (1925) was a watershed moment for the Harlem Renaissance; his translation of Euripides’ Medea was the first by an African American of a Greek tragedy; and his tumultuous existence, which included distant ties with his mother, a short-lived marriage to the daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, and an untimely death at the age of forty-two, shadowed his role as one of the chief voices of his generation.
A complicated life often demands more than simple illustration. This is evident in Molesworth’s biography, but also in the unattributed cover image gracing the book. The sketch of Cullen, credited to the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian, is by German–American artist and designer Winold Reiss (1884–1953), who painted over 250 images of Native Americans (most notably the Blackfeet), traveled to Mexico to portray Aztec revolutionaries, and contributed dozens of portraits of Harlem Renaissance figures during the first-half of the twentieth century, when racial prejudice and tensions undermined much of American culture. His interior designs ranged from cafes at the Hotel St. Moritz to murals commissioned by the Cincinnati Airport, and his illustrations graced the covers of mainstream magazine’s like Scribner’s.
More on Reiss’s role in the Harlem Renaissance comes from an introduction by Jeffrey C. Stewart, Reiss scholar and author of o Color America: Portraits by Winold Reiss (Smithsonian Institution, 1989), and Winold Reiss: An Illustrated Checklist of His Portraits (Smithsonian Institution, 1990):
In 1921 he visited his native Germany on the only trip he made back to Europe. Here he drew many portraits of German and Swedish folk types and colorful characters. After his return to New York City in 1922, he was chosen by the editor of the social welfare journal Survey Graphic to portray the major figures of the Harlem Renaissance for a special issue entitled Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro [March 1, 1925]. Dr. Alain Locke, Howard University philosophy professor and literary critic, was so impressed with Reiss’s portraits that he chose him to illustrate The New Negro: An Interpretation [1925], the most important anthology of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1926, Survey Graphic asked Reiss to illustrate a special Pacific issue with portraits of Asian Americans.
As Reiss wrote in the September 1950 issue of The Native Voice, “To understand life, we cannot have prejudice.” Many of Reiss’s most iconic images stem from his work for Locke’s The New Negro, including his portrait of Locke himself (below). Perhaps more fascinating, though, is the role played by this German immigrant artist in helping to visualize race at a moment when one of America’s most important black arts movements gave us the permission to truly see ourselves as a nation, which could, as Cullen wrote with anger and earnestness, “make a poet black, and bid him sing!”
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It’s a #UPWeek blog tour this week, part of the ruckus for AAUP’s University Press Week—celebrating 75 years strong since the founding of the Association of American University Presses. We’ll be joining 25 other UPs in highlighting the workings of the university press blogosphere. Five of our sisters-in-arms were featured today, and here’s a wrap-up of what they had to say about why university presses matter:
At the Harvard University Press blog, Anthony Grafton, past president of the American Historical Association and longtime HUP-author, recalls how university press books introduced him to a world of discovery and argument as a young man—and continue to influence him still.
(One of our favorites) Author Jack Halberstam takes on the theme of the university press at the Duke UP blog, emphasizing their role in disseminating both radical and slow knowledge during a time when literacy is on the line.
At Stanford University Press, Steve Levingston, nonfiction editor at the Washington Post Book World, looks at some recent university of press hits from the Political Bookworm blog.
Claire Bond Potter, author of the Tenured Radical blog, considers how and why university presses are sustainable presses for the University of Georgia Press blog.
And finally, Ned Stuckey-French and Bruce Miller offer a bit of a manifesto on why we need university presses—the University of Missouri Press knows this better than anyone lately, and the authors’ collaborative take on their blog isn’t to be missed.
For a full schedule of this week’s blog tour, click here.
Okay! Great discussion from last post, and I'd like to continue it on a couple of points. Sorry this is a long post. And please know that when I ask questions, I'm sincerely asking and not being rhetorical or sarcastic. I think there's room for discussion and I like to know what you think. I'm not writing these posts in order to promote Twilight or any book. I'm not the least bit bothered by anyone not liking them. It's impossible for any book to appeal to everyone. But what does bother me is how not just widely acceptable but laudable it's become to unkindly ridicule and even hate the creator of the series and anyone who like the series.
I think it's a lot easier to believe that those who think differently from us are brainwashed or stupid than to try to understand them. But trying to understand is the only way to have empathy, to be genuinely kind, to live in a world of friendship, compromise, and respect. (more on this in another post, if you'll permit me. it's been on my mind a lot through the past election.) And Trying to Understand is what reading books is really good at.
I think the most crucial point that came out of the discussion is the idea that Twilight can be a damaging book because Edward and Bella are in an abusive relationship and this can lead girls/women to believe that such a relationship is okay/desirable.
Let me deal with one (just one, please!) point that some use to illustrate that Edward is controlling and abusive, just as an example: He always wants to drive. He never wants Bella to drive. If I had a girlfriend who told me, "Man, I really like this guy, but whenever I want to drive, he insists that he do it. It makes me feel like he thinks I'm weak and useless." I'd be like, "Girl, kick him to the curb!" Unless…
Yes, unless. I think you absolutely have to look at context whenever criticizing a book. Unless the guy is a supernatural being with laser-fast reflexes who is factually a better driver than anyone on the planet, and the girl is clumsy by nature, and the guy watched her almost killed by a car once and is so desperate to protect her that driving seems like one small thing he can do to keep her alive. And this situation could never, ever happen in real life.
I don't make that point to try to convince those of you who think Edward is abusive and bad into believing otherwise. You have every right to think that. Reading is intensely personal. What I'm trying to do is ask, can you see the other side? Can you squint at it and sort of understand why maybe some people don't read the book the way you did? Is it possible that one might be aware of the signs of an abusive boyfriend and yet in the context of the story and the characters view their actions as rational and interesting even if they wouldn't be outside the story? Can you allow that some might actually like Twilight without being brainwashed or stupid? And to take this broader, can we all try to imagine that anyone who holds different opinions than we do might have valid reasons for those opinions and we can still respect them?
I absolutely do not want to get into a point-by-point discussion where people list the parts of the book that bother them and others defend those points. There are many places on the web where you can do that. Here I want to use Twilight as a springboard into a larger discussion. Is Twilight harmful to young readers? One of the main issues so many of you said you have with Twilight is that "it sends a harmful message to teen girls" and it can dangerously convince teen girls that an abusive relationship is desirable. It's interesting that no one (not here, tumblr, twitter, or Facebook) has told me that Twilight negatively impacted them personally, that they got/stayed in an abusive relationship because of Twilight, only that they worry that it would have that affect on others.
What I want to know is, is that a legitimate concern? With over 100 million books sold, if this is a real danger, we should have some data on it. Please add a comment if you have firsthand knowledge of such an instance, I would love to know. I've heard from one person who has a friend who was in an abusive relationship who had read Twilight and compared the boyfriend (in a positive way) to Edward. I've also heard from several people who said they were in a bad relationship when they read Twilight and reading about Bella and Edward made them reexamine their own relationship, recognize the guy treated them badly, and decide to end it. So far, in my personal experience and in talking with many people over the years, I don't have reason to believe that reading Twilight has influenced readers into getting/staying in an abusive relationship. But this is a very serious concern, so I think it's worth discussing.
I have no doubt that books influence us. They'd better! They have power. But in my experience, the power books have is to make us think. We think about something, perhaps in a new way, and maybe decide to change our mind. Or we think about something we already believed and that process helps us confirm our previous opinion. I don't know of any instance of a healthy individual who was over-influenced by a book or damaged by a book in that it provoked them to make damaging choices. I think that's giving too much power to books and taking too much away from individuals.
Uncle Tom's Cabin changed the world. It didn't trick people into acting like any of the characters. It presented the issue of slavery through a story so powerful it helped the readers think about it deeply, reexamine things, force them to form an opinion. It provoked just as many readers into becoming firm abolitionists as it angered firm slave-owners. It didn't blind readers and turn them into imitators of its plot and characters. Again, it made them think.
When I talk to a teen girl who has read Twilight, she will be able to tell me why or why not Edward is an ideal boyfriend. She's thinking about it. And not in isolation. In concert with her life experience, with other books she's read, with conversations she's had with others on the subject. Thinking about things, talking about things--in my mind, that's all very good.
I don't mind that people use Edward's behavior in Twilight to outline possible abusive behavior. Any way to get that message out is fine with me. More people are talking about it, more people are aware of the signs of an abusive relationship than they were before. Great! But is reading about this relationship damaging girls? I think we need to be fair about declaring the Bella/Edward relationship as a harmful model.
Let me outline for you a relationship I'm in right now. There are two people in my life who I love so much that I think I would die if I lost them. And it's mostly great. We laugh together, they tell me they love me and kiss and hug me. But sometimes they hit me. They hit me in the face with bottles and books and telephones. They make messes they expect me to clean up. They demand food and if they don't like it they throw it on the floor. They can be angry and mean and bite, but if I even leave the room, they cry and cling to me. Out of context, it sounds abusive, but since they're my toddlers, it's a really bad example of abusive behavior. Admitedly this is a ridiculous, an extreme example of taking something out of context. So let's look at other ones.
It could be a game! Choose a novel. Take the actions of the character out of context, list them, and align them with an anti-social, abusive, unhealthy behavior. Take for example Katniss, a character often lauded for being "strong" in contrast to Bella being "weak." Out of context, Katniss is an extremely unhealthy, murderous, psychopathic personality (especially in the third book). This is not a criticism of Hunger Games, which I loved. I just want to make sure we're being fair. Bella is often condemned for not being a good role model for girls. Is Katniss really the best role model? Why are we more worried about what Twilight is "teaching" teens than what Hunger Games is teaching? Because the context of Hunger Games is further from the real world than Twilight? Are vulnerable naive teen girls able to distance themselves from some stories like Hunger Games but unable to do so with Twilight? Why?
Will reading Harry Potter encourage children to engage in witchcraft? Will reading Romeo & Juliet encourage teens to commit suicide over love? Will reading ANY of my high school English texts convince girls that they are lesser beings than males, unworthy of having their own stories, and worth only being a love interest or model for bad behavior? Does reading (and loving) a book make us into different people than we would have been? What effect does it really have? Are some right to be genuinely concerned that Twilight will lead impressionable young girls into abusive relationships? Or convince them that the abusive relationship they're in at the moment is actually good for them? Has this happened?
I think these are fair and complex questions, and perhaps impossible to answer fully because we don't read in isolation. Everything we read is in conversation with everything we've read/experienced before and during and after. If there's a teen girl who locks herself up with the Twilight books and reads nothing else and watches nothing else and will interact with no one then GET HER TO A THERAPIST. (Also if she isolates herself and only reads Fitzgerald. Or Austen. Or Shakespeare. This behavior is never healthy.) My opinion is that a story's purpose is to be 1. entertaining and 2. good to think with. If a story has an agenda so strict it tries to control the reader and doesn't allow a reader to think, then it fails. I don't think a book's job is to provide perfect role models (if we took the time, I bet we could name hundreds of bad role models in excellent books). But I don't think Twilight has an agenda or is trying to portray "do it like this" morals. I think it's a story, for some an entertaining story, that has provoked a lot of people to think about something they hadn't before.
If you're interested in this discussion, please read the comments from my last post. I wanted to quote them all! Thanks for your insight. I want to end now with an email I got from a teenager that beautifully exhibits how books make us think.
You have been talking a lot recently about whether Twilight is the direct cause of abusive relationships, and I agree a lot with what you have been saying/asking. You asked if young reader emulate characters, and personally I can say that to an extent I did exactly that: after reading a book I frequently think about what I admired about characters, and try to become more like them - or the reverse, if I identify with a trait that I don't like I have found books can be helpful for working through those. When I was 13 I was (I think, I guess I will never know really) very close to developing an eating disorder, but I read a book in which the main character went through that, and it made me ask myself what it was I was thinking. I read every book I could find with character going through similar problems. At first I think I was trying to find a story where it ended well for the girl, where it was a positive thing, but I never found one. Gradually it become about finding ways to change my thoughts so that it was not an option. I didn't feel like I had anyone I could talk about these issues with, and I don't know what would have happened without those books. Around the same time I read Dreamland, by Sarah Dessen. I remember pausing after reading the chapter where Cassie's boyfriend first hits her and thinking something along the lines of, if I had a boyfriend I wouldn't care if he hit me, at least he would love me. That thought scared me, and in a lot of way I think it was a turning point, because I started to again think about the self destructive path I was potentially on. (I have never been in an abusive relationship so that has never been tested, but it still scares me sometimes when I remember the fact that I am still not sure how I would respond to that situation.)
I read Twilight a year or so after most of this happened, and I was still sort of struggling with these issues. I didn't think of Edward as abusive, and I though he was a perfect boyfriend. Later after hearing people discuss him as abusive it scared me again: was I idealising an abusive relationship, as I know I had done in the past? I still don't really know. But I do think that the books aren't the cause, for me they have helped identify already existing parts of myself, and also work to become a better. I think, while books are clearly powerful teaching tools, external factors are always going to be the real driving cause.
Using a conversational style, regular "important" history and background - like former jobs, college, and marriages - is mixed with more personal information about our nation's Presidents. Each man is afforded only a few pages, keeping the descriptions tight and the book easy to dip into, making it a great selection for the classroom. The illustrations have a caricature feel to them incorporating hobbies, favorite things, and places. Some have backgrounds that fill out the places where they are from, but not all. There may be some sly digs like "A man of many appetitles, Clinton loved to schmooze." but the book doesn't shy away from mention of his affairs and impeachment hearings. As a sample of the writing on our still-current President Obama: "He tries to be healthy, but it's not entirely clear whether his promise to quit smoking has worked out. He eats salads, zucchini quesadillas, and Michelle's shrimp linguini, but never beets - he hates them." Fun insight combined with standard biographical facts offers a unique perspective in a concise and interesting book.
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1 Comments on Nonfiction Monday: Lives of the Presidents, last added: 11/30/2012
Drawing a little peppermint candy. Its starting to 'get there'. There's really not much there, colorwise. Its all white and clear, then those pops of red. So its a challenge! I'm using Polychromos and Lyras so far. And its 6 x 8 (well, the paper is 6 x 8. The candy is about 5.5" wide. Which is about 3 times actual size.)
Here's how it looked before I started adding the red. I wanted to establish the values in the twists and fold and shadow before I got into the fun color part.
And here's how it looked when I'd barely started - and this is darkened up quite a bit just so it would show up on the screen. Very very very light applications of soft greys to get it going.
What's funny is that I don't even like these candies. I'm not a 'mint' person at all. But I think these are really pretty to look at, and after all, it is almost Christmas, so I thought I'd do something seasonal. I'm thinking of doing some little cards with this image, if there's time. Meanwhile, I have a whole bag of these in the cupboard, which are in no danger at all of ever being eaten (which I can't say for anything chocolate!).
1 Comments on Peppermint, wip, last added: 11/13/2012
Today's EXPLORING NATURE podcast was devoted to climate change. Hurricane Sandy brought this issue to the fore. There is no more urgent issue than climate change. Worry about whether Iran develops a nuclear weapon pales next to climate change, which will have devastating consequences for the entire planet if governments don't address it. The two governments that most urgently need to address climate change are the United States and China. Yet we have some politicians and the fossil fuel industries that refuse to recognize the seriousness of climate change. They are stuck in denial and in an anti-science attitude that endangers all life on Earth.
The science and signs of climate change are out there. The scientific community has been in agreement about climate change for some 40 years. The changes are accumulating rapidly, more rapidly than originally predicted. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2000 to 2009 was the warmest decade ever recorded. If people keep on adding greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at the current rate, the average temperature around the world could increase by 4 to 12 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100.
Increased temperature affects the oceans, weather patterns, snow, ice, plants and animals, including people. As the top layer of the ocean gets warmer, hurricanes and other tropical storms grow stronger with faster winds and heavier rain. That's what we saw with Sandy.
Since the 1980s, the U.S. has experienced more intense single-day storms that are dumping a lot more rain or snow than usual.
In the past century, there has been about a foot of sea level rise in the New York City area, and this figured in hurricane Sandy with the storm surge added to the normal tidal surge, producing devastating flooding for New York and New Jersey.
Melting sea ice is also a factor and will continue to be a factor in the world's coastal areas where so many large cities are located. Arctic sea ice reached its lowest seasonal minimum since satellite data began to be kept in 1979.
Summer 2012 was the third hottest on record.
The trends of wilder weather and greater temperature extremes are expected to continue. Exactly what climate scientists have been predicting for more than 20 years is happening. Everyone needs to pay attention and pressure their governments to do something about it while we still can.
0 Comments on Climate Change is the Greatest Threat to Life on Earth as of 1/1/1900
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Is the Manny Cereal Toss Game idea taken from a particular book in the series? I am having a Diary of a Wimpy Kid party at my library next week and was so excited to read your posting with the great ideas. Thanks so much.
I've been using it awhile so first or second book for sure!