Amazing Things

Hi Everyone,

When I was in Lacoste, I took a bookmaking class. We made several small books to practice binding techniques, and I wanted to find the best use for them. They were too small for my normal journaling or sketching habits, but I didn’t want them to sit around being cute but empty (I feel the same way about books as I do about people).

At the time, there were several frustrating scenarios that I was dealing with and it was easy to get bogged down with them. But I didn’t want my time in Lacoste to be wasted: I was doing art in the south of France in the springtime and that was AMAZING. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized I was experiencing tons of amazing things everyday. In the end, I decided to use my journals to write down one amazing thing -- the most amazing thing -- that happened each day. I found that doing this made me more open to remarkable occurrences and that ending the day with a specific example of something truly wonderful caused any frustrations I had to take a backseat.

My two most recent Amazing Journals

Here are some of the most interesting entries from my Amazing Journal from the last few months:


August 3: Today I hit Matthew in the arm with a bag of tortillas. It was so much fun I did it again to his other arm.

August 20: Today, Judi and I were unpacking some pedestals for the gallery and they came with ziplock baggies which each had five binder clips, one screw and a Jolly Rancher.

August 25: Today, about 30 minutes outside of Wenatchee, our bus got pulled over. After a few minutes, the driver got on and asked if a Mackenzie so-and-so was on board. No one answered, so he said everyone who had gotten on in Wenatchee had to raise their hands because there were two extra passengers. Two girls got up and went up to the cop who had boarded the bus by this point. He took them away.

August 27: Today Katie Stout told us that she knows someone whose friend got to choose her name when she was six. She chose “Beanbag.”

August 30: Today Elizabeth told me that her husband, who is in the Coast Guard and is learning to deep sea dive, is in charge of buoy tenders, the boats that maintain the buoys along the coast (among other tasks). I’d always wondered who did that!

September 2: Today I learned that James and the Giant Peach is on the list of banned books. What on earth for? How could you get offended by a fictional giant fruit?

September 3: Today I learned that while in remote Indonesia, Luca found a bunch of WSU sweatshirts. What?!

September 4: Today, while Krisi and I were walking, I found a tiny snake (about 2.5 inches long). Its front half was black and yellow and its tail was baboon-bum blue. It really looked like it was two different snakes fused together.

September 5: Today in Home Depot, Matthew and I stumbled across two employees cutting a gigantic onion with a pair of oversized shears.

September 7: Today, as Becky was driving me back from the airport, there was a road sign (lit in red letters) that said “September is preparedness month. Plan ahead and be prepared.”

September 16: Today Jonathan Mayer told me that NASA spent millions of dollars trying to develop a toilet that would work in zero gravity. The problem was that it had spinning blades (to prevent poo from getting loose) so nobody wanted to use it. It turned out that the astronauts were just wearing diapers.

September 18: Today two Christians accosted me in Forsyth and asked to do a video interview of me. They asked me 1.) “Do you think you could love someone unconditionally?” 2.) “How are you prepared for the Day of Judgment?” and 3.) “Do you have any siblings?” They then told me that a huge group of people in the park were doing a Nordic dance. Upon further investigation, I realized that they were essentially jazzercising to Christian music.

September 24: Today I learned that the average college-educated native English speaker has a conversational vocabulary of about 30,000 words. Level 2 students in ESL have 2,000-4,000. Wow.

October 1: Today Cindy told me about how when she asked her nephew what he wanted her to draw if she could draw anything for him, he said without any hesitation, “God’s thumb.”

October 9: Today I learned that SCAD has an intramural Quidditch team.

October 17: Today Becky told me that when she was little, her family found orphan guinea pigs in a dumpster in Canada and they smuggled them across the border by having her grandfather keep them tucked in his shirt.

October 18: Today as I was walking back from Kroger, the bag I was carrying kept catching the breeze in just the right way so that the little plastic flaps kept making kazoo noises.

October 21: Today I learned that Professor Drummond was taught by Quentin Blake!

October 24: Today in church, one of the hymns we sang was written by someone named Augustus Montague Toplady.

Have a good and amazing week! Happy Halloween!

Sarah/Mouse

ps: I discovered a great website this week that gives a “Wonder of the Day.” Each day, a different question is posed along with an accompanying YouTube video, an explanation of the answer and activities that kids can do to further investigate the topic. The website is intended to promote curiosity and learning between parents and children, but it’s also pretty interesting for those of us who don’t fit in those categories. The website is: http://wonderopolis.org/.