Five days until my trip, and day two of ghastly headache. I didn’t get much work or much packing done as a result; I didn’t want to stay at the computer too long or move around too much.

I’m thinking about what to pack, though, and I definitely will pack a journal. I’ll pack this one:

My cousin Zee gave it to me for my birthday. It’s handmade and, I think, from the Philippines. I know for certain the handmade-with-recycled-material pen holder was.

I’ve filled only the first page so far:

The date and the name are from my testing of a calligraphy pen that I bought myself. I didn’t like how the ink spread on the page, so I didn’t do much more with the pen after that. When I played around with it on some other bit of paper some days later, the ink wouldn’t flow, so I shook the pen and wound up spraying bright red ink on my blanket, which I’m sure the laundress will find interesting and strange, if not downright icky.

At the bottom of a page is something I sketched out last night to test my new waterbrush pen, which I’ll be bringing with me on the trip with my watercolor pencils. This way I can avoid bringing a brush and a little bowl, which really don’t travel as well.

Below the red date and name and above the test drawing, the writing that looks like Graphic is my attempt at making Graphicfantastic an ambigram. I ran out of space, obviously, and I didn’t do nearly as good a job with it as I had hoped.

Here’s Graphic:

And here’s Fantastic:

If you look closely and past the black ink, you can see all the pencil marks that I’ve erased as I figured things out for the ambigram. I plan to work on it some more, perhaps scan it, trace it in Illustrator, put it all together so that it fully reads Graphicfantastic, and then fine tune it and make it a secondary logo for my work site. Not too bad a start, though. When I showed it to H.E., he marveled and said, “Jeez! What kind of mind would you have to have to design something like that?”

Um. Not quite sure what to say to something like that. Twisted, maybe?

I’ve also been thinking about my crafts. I haven’t been able to take up any new crochet or knitting projects because Sox loves to get into the yarn. He naps downstairs during the afternoons, though, which gives me a lot of time to myself, but I’m reluctant to start anything that will require counting stitches because if he shows up suddenly, it means I’ll have to stop in the middle of a row and lose count.

So I’ve started the next best thing — a latch-hook rug:

Most of the yarn is encased in plastic, all packaged in small bits. No long, stringy thing to dance in front of Sox’s eyes, teasing him. He still gets a little excited watching me work, though, and he’ll often end up lying down on top of the papers instructing me which colors to use where, or on top of the rug itself. Sometimes, he’ll even nibble at the mesh, which is a big no-no; that’s when I put away the latch-hook kit and move on to something else.

I think I will pack something to crochet for the trip, though, for those times I get lazy or bored and want to do a little crafting under the sun with my mom and my aunt.

Share this post: