Drawing boxes in the snow.

The best 5am phone call is one that starts with "Good morning Heidi; we're having a snow day today." In my barely awakening delirium I did my snow day duties from the comfort of my bed, switched the light back off and dozed for another hour. A glorious morning!

Coming at the tail end of two days of running around in the ice and snow feeling a little crummy, an extra 8 hours of freedom was welcomed with open arms. What to do with all of this spare time??

But I get ahead of myself. Lets hop back a few days to my real current endeavor...a new set of classes. I've inadvertently rounded my schedule out with a techy class, a reading + writing class, and a studio class. Excellent balance (kind of like that of my cat who is right now trying oh-so desperately to show his undying love by climbing in my lap...who cares if there's a laptop already there). The studio class is Perspectives and Rendering. Oh. Sweet. Jesus. This is going to be the bane of my existence and my driving passion for the next few months. Mostly because I have basically zero experience drawing, let alone super technical detail drawing, but I am fascinated by this professor and refuse to lose her approval.

On par with my other studio classes thus far, I have to laugh at my homework on the first night; seemingly simple but actually kind of challenging. For intro it was writing the alphabet. For Color Theory it was making a color wheel. Now it is drawing boxes. But not just any box. First you practice making one- and two-point perspective boxes (this is a one-point)

Then you practice making a 3-D grid in a 10-foot scale:

Then plot a piece of furniture into it to scale:

I get to draw more boxes for homework. Lots of them.

So back to this glorious snow day. Of course, I immediately turned to my two tried and trues: reading and knitting. Better yet, working on a mindless project so that I can knit and read simultaneously. Like knitting in the round. So I worked on this Charcoal Man Hat:

Finishing that one up

And finishing up some detailing on this Girlie Lavender Flower Hat

Eventually it was time to venture out in to the ice. Yesterday DC was dusted with beautiful fluffy snow. By mid-day that turned to ice falling from the sky (real fun to walk to and from my classes in) and overnight it turned into some mix of ice and sleet resulting in overall grossness. But there is a killer sale going on at A Tangled Skein and I needed to get to Plaza to get some drawing supplies (ugh). So this Florida girl tried her had at driving on ice (granny style, of course). Despite it's messiness, it was quite pretty.

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I maay have gone a little overboard at the yarn store. But now there are lots of fun (non-hat) projects in the works.

I tend to get into a trend of books from the same region (either by setting or by the author's nationality). Coming out of my Russian kick, I've moved over to the Middle East. I'm midway through Reading Lolita in Tehran and continue to waiver back and forth about it each chapter. Granted, this is coming off the heels of The Places Inbetween and the only thing standing in my way of starting my newest Capitol Hill Books acquisition The Prince of Marshes, so it's a pretty critical locale to be in. But one thing that is certainly feeding my interest is the fact that Azar Nafisi is going to be at Politics and Prose tonight. Looks like I'm going to tempt fate with the ice once more today...



Stay warm! ... And don't listen to Obama when he's making fun of DC. I didn't see his ass slipping down the sidewalk on his way to work this morning. Have the infrastructure in place to deal with this little bit of ice and snow and we might be tough like the Chicagoland dwellers. I suppose he at least gets points for being articulate in his insults, a welcomed change of pace after the last 8 years.