Jubilee's Jottings

Highlights from each day this week.            Saturday: I worked with Mom in the garden, pruning tomato plants and hauling off weeds. It was companionable to work together.            Friday: I made Swedish apple pie for the first time and really like it. Flour, spices, sugar, leavening and egg are mixed with chopped apples and baked. It is a sensible, yummy desert.            Thursday: I started another book project, which is really fun. It will be writing about my current life as fiction.            Wednesday: Enjoyed my tidy room and a painting mom propped on my bookshelf. I hadn’t known where to put it, and the bookshelf was the perfect place!           Tuesday: Worked on minimalism article for the newspaper and got rid of a few more things out of my room.            Monday: I went to a Sacred Harp singing with a friend. It was a totally new experience and fun at the same time. I sang alto and eventually figured out how to sing with the 4-shape-note system. I’d definitely go again

            What is the most fragile thing? As I put some pencil lead into a mechanical pencil, I wondered if pencil lead was the most fragile thing. But then, there are other thin, tiny things that break easily, like a strand of crystallized sugar. A lot fragile. But, enumerating fragile objects isn’t my point.              So, I think the question is, how do fragile things break? Pressure snaps a twig or a pencil lead. Glass breaks when it is dropped. Hot glass breaks when in contact with cold water. Thread breaks when the tension is too great for the strands to handle. Most lightweight things break when too much weight is applied. It depends on the item.           I think, people are the most fragile things in the world. I can break with too much pressure or tension. I break when dropped or when drenched with cold water when excited or interested. I also break when there is too much on my plate. Even this is not all the ways I can break, but it is an exhaustive enough l

             When I moved home from Harrisburg, I was out of sync with my normal life. Things had gotten piled up and tasks that were once mole hills became mountains. All of my writing was backed up a week or two, along with everything else. When I moved home, I was also working on my room in the singe-wide, making lots of sourdough bread, and things like that.             I got my room ready, moved in, and I began to be able to catch up on life. It was either last week, or the week before that all my newspaper writing was caught up. I worked steadily on my book and began to fall into a routine.           I got my habit tracker back on my phone. I cleared all the previous habits I had listed, and thought I’d start out fresh. Within a few days, pretty much all the old habits were put back to be checked off daily. I brush my teeth after breakfast and floss them. I got back into the routine.           After a few weeks of doing normal, routine things like making my bed each

  I think writing is really a good idea. I do it all the time and nearly every day. Scratch that. I write every single day, even if it is just copying a Bible verse. There isn’t a day I don’t pick up a pen or tap on my keys to string coherent letters together. But different kinds of writing produce different results.  When I write for my newspaper, I am presenting new-to-me facts in a way that is (hopefully) understandable and interesting to the reader. I do not include my opinion in the articles as far as I know, and I am not basing much or anything of what I write on my personal experience. While my writing ability has dramatically increased in the last nine months of writing for the newspaper, I am not ashamed of the first articles I wrote, since there isn’t any opinion.  When I work on the magazine, I have a specific genre to stick to. I am not teaching, but I am, to my best ability, sharing what I have learned and what I think about it. Because Deep Encouragement is about en

I’ve been learning about faux-calligraphy. At least, I watched two tutorials of it and went back to doing what I was doing before. Faux-calligraphy or fauxligraphy is the art of using any pen and making it look like calligraphy by thickening the down stroke, like a brush or brush pen. I had been trying to do this for weeks, and I realize, I was doing it wrong.  I was thickening the up strokes, instead of the down stokes, and it didn’t look that great. The more recent ones, done correctly don’t have much more skill than the other ones, but at least the shading isn’t haphazard. It’s fun.  It is also bearable to get back into working on my book. I can’t really say it’s fun, because it’s not. Sometimes it’s unbearably difficult, because I’m working on my life story, and some parts of life are just difficult. But fauxligraphy is a way to enjoy the art of creativity, even when my job isn’t the easiest, because it’s not.  The lines in my words look a little shaky. (I can’t draw a stra

One can never know the effects of humidity until painting, especially with semi-gloss paint. It was a terrible disaster.  I had bought and found some furniture to go in my new room. The newer pieces were brown, stained wood which I did not want color wise. So, I planned to paint the pieces. I started the by sanding and priming the finish. After 24 hours, the primer scratched off very easily with my fingernail.  Horrors. Now I would have to scrap off the paint and strip the finish off. The only problem was, it had been raining for two or three days straight, and was raining when I scratched the paint off. Well, maybe it was the humidity.  I waited until after the weekend, and the paint didn’t scratch off so easily. It should be fine, so I painted on the primer without any horrible scraping to do. I painted the first coat. It was a fine, cool day but damp. The temperature was great for drying paint.  I painted the first coat on my dresser, bookshelf, and bed frame. I thought th

Paint Roller Art  I have worked really hard on my room—in spurts. But that is how I work anyway. So, while my family went to an event, I stayed home to avoid the major crash that comes after being with lots of people, since I just did it the beginning of June. I had a few days to work alone.  I had already gotten the drywall mudded. I was waiting on determination to arrive so I could get my walls sanded to move on to texture and paint. The sanding stood in my way for weeks as I hate the sound of sanding. When I sand, I have to wear ear protection, so I don’t go insane with the terrible scratching sound. I finally got to sanding—rubbing the wall with my sanding sponge with all my might. Then, I could get to touch ups and texture.   Touch ups in the mudding were super annoying, since they didn’t look great. Finally, I decided to get texturing. I worked until 2 AM carefully rolling the texture on. After all the texture was on, I did some light sanding, more touch ups, and then it was