"Toy"

Does Play Doh count as a toy?  I love the smell and the cool feeling of the stuff.  Something I love quite a bit less is Sculpey or Fimo clay, but that has the benefit of hardening in the oven.  It doesn't smell nearly as good though, raw or cooked.

One of my coworkers has been clearing out a house lately, and she's been bringing me presents every day.  Amongst the many interesting things that she's brought me is Fimo clay, and like the child that I am, I've spent my evenings making completely useless items with oven-hardened permanence.

There's a little sadness behind the house cleaning.  The adult daughter, got cancer and died.  A couple of years later, her mom got another kind of cancer and died.  No more family, the friendly neighbor inherited, and the house full of stuff is getting cleared out by my coworker -- and I get Christmas every day in January.  Woo hoo!  I'd like to think the daughter is happy her things are going to a kindred spirit instead of to the dump.

I haven't been in the house, but there's a castle room where medals from Pennsic wars tell a silent story of medieval wars in Pennsylvania hosted by the Society of Creative Anachronisms.  I'm told the proper way to display those medals are in cleavage.  I passed the medals on to someone with more ample cleavage and actual Renaissance costumes.

I've gotten a turtle quilt, necklace, and coffee cup, a smiley cup, giant sketch pad, a pointy silver thing that I was told to use on my voodoo dolls... Just to be clear, I don't actually have voodoo dolls, but my need to vent frustrations is obviously apparent.  I may have made stabbing motions after a meeting recently.

In any case, I have some new toys, and tv time to play with them.  I made feathers.  I made an atom, a flower... who knows what else will get oven-hardened next?

I'm a bit frustrated with my atom.  I wrote recently about my bag of copper wire that's begging for an art project.  My brother whipped out a tree, and I suppressed some 3D jealousy.  The best I can say for my wire projects is that I embedded wire into my atom parts so the electron bee has a stinger and antennae and all the atom parts have copper loops to hang them.  What I really wanted was wire circles for them all to rotate around and jiggle, but I was foiled by my lack of technical expertise to make this all work.  Now I'm intimidated by my greater goal to make a copper wire mobile, perhaps with Sculpey adornments and counter weights.

He who taught me about atoms might argue with me about my atom interpretation.  The parts all have names of people who play those kinds of roles in real life.  I figure the feathers are illustration in another form because I just painted with clay instead of paint.

What kind of toys do you play with?

"Invention"

My lamp broke.  It's a cute lamp so I wanted to fix the stability of the rod holding the bulb and shade.  I've tried to fix it before but the parts are too old and worn out for a lasting repair.  This time I figured I'd fix it with copper wire because there's been a bag of old copper wire by my door ever since the electrician was here and said "Recycle this.  Copper is worth decent money these days."

I suppose he's right, but I looked at the messy pile and envisioned cool projects which would be wasted in recycling.  I encouraged my brother to do something with it, but it's just been in the doorway without becoming art.

I fixed the lamp, no problem.  A stupid amount of time later I kept asking myself why I kept stripping the insulation off the old wires, especially since it's probably asbestos or something.  When I got a blister I thought surely that's time to quit stripping wire.  I couldn't help myself.

Part of it was the vivid memory of Grandpa's basement and seeing his supple wire with cloth insulation.  The memory was so vivid that I wanted to stay in that place, smell the familiar smells, feel the immediacy that Grandpa is still alive.  It just felt good, and I kept tearing my hands up on wire, but I didn't actually create anything.

Sometimes I think that I'm neither creative nor inventive, and respect the people who are these things.  Then I realize that since I know a lot of creative and inventive people, my comparisons are skewed.  I'm more inventive than some people in the wider world, I just don't notice it in myself because my inventions are little, problem-solving things.

The handle on my tea kettle broke?  No problem, I'll make a new handle.  I want to put all my computer stuff in a tiny room?  That's not a problem either.  I'll make some shelves out of boards and metal electric boxes.  And so on.  See, I'm cheap and won't go out and buy a new tea kettle or a custom shelving unit, therefore I have to be inventive.

It's part of the fun for me at garage sales.  I saw a metal grate with a heron on it and liked it.  Maybe everyone else who went to that garage sale just saw something heavy and impractical.  I turned it into a garden gate which I see every time I pull into my driveway.

Grandpa was like this, Mom's like that too, and so I figure it's in my genes or in my examples that there's no good reason to spend money on stuff that you can do for cheap or free.  And then I spend too much time stripping insulation off copper wires with some vague thought that there's a gem in the mess.  I also think wouldn't it be cool if I electrified my unknown gem. 

Yeah, sure.  The wire is back in its bag by the side door.

Not sure how the snowflake factors in, but IF took too long to give me a word and I made this while waiting.  Now I have other things to do and figure we'll just call snowflakes one of God's inventions.