Serial killers, rusty metal, and a text from the White House

Has it really been 10 days since my last post?? I wish I had a good excuse but all I can say is I forgot to blog. Well, that and the fact that nothing has happened to make me think oh my gosh I can't wait to write about this, so technically it's not my fault. It's yours. I can't help it that all the people in my life are boring and not doing anything blog worthy right now. Although I have a feeling that will be changing shortly since Taylor will be having a house guest over the weekend. This is a young man she met on the internet who is flying in to meet her in person and will be staying with us. I can't even begin to describe the weirdness of it all. This could be a very bad thing or it could be a very good thing and I am equally concerned about both outcomes. I honestly don't believe this guy has misrepresented himself and will turn out to be a 40 year old serial killer or anything like that. But just to be on the safe side Jayson has stocked up on ammo and pre-dug a shallow grave in the backyard. We're just good parents that way.

For the past week or so I've been busy making pendant necklaces out of hardware, rusty metal, junk I've collected over the years, and these sparkly vintage glass rhinestones that I found on eBay. I love how they're turning out and I'm having fun making them. I usually don't sell the stuff that I make because then it feels like a job and sucks the fun out of it. But I've made an exception for these and put them on Etsy because, really, how many necklaces do I need?

Hopefully someone will come along and take these off my hands so I can move on to the next project. But not until I use up some of the cool plumbing and electrical parts I picked up at Lowe's today. Lowe's is just one huge art supply store for me.

When I finished at Lowes, I had a couple of other errands to run and found myself driving up Cameron on my way home. Cameron is a street that has a lot of industrial businesses, used car lots, salvage yards and other unattractive businesses that might be out of place on prettier streets. It also has more than its fair share of abandoned warehouses and other buildings which can serve as a really good source of free art supplies. It was an overcast afternoon and I had some free time so I pulled in next to a row of abandoned buildings with gravel parking lots and spent a good hour or more scavenging for treasures.

I didn't find a lot of stuff I could use for jewelry since most of it was too big. But I could probably use it to make some fun assemblages or something like that.  I found a couple of bottle caps and washers, several bolts and lots of chunks of unidentifiable broken rusty metal.

I'm not sure what it is about rusty metal that I love so much. It might be the colors. I'm fascinated by all the different colors and textures in a piece of rusted metal and how nature created them all by itself. I like how some metal corrodes and starts to break down when it rusts and other metal builds up layers and layers of rusty gunk until you can't tell what the original shape was. It's just beautiful. And playing with it forces me to keep my tetanus shots up to date so that's practically a health benefit.

Any time I'm scavenging or dumpster diving I tend to lose track of time and before I know it a couple of hours have passed. I tell myself that I'm allowed to stay and keep digging until I come across something that grosses me out. When that happens, I take it as a cosmic sign that my time is up and I need to go home. I almost always run into an animal of some sort but I'm usually okay with that unless the two of us are confined together inside a dumpster. When that happens, I leave and give the critter their house back.

Today I didn't see any animals but I did hear a good bit of scurrying when I got close to the bushes. Then my imagination took off without me and I started weighing the odds of me finding a dead body on one of my adventures. How gross would that be? I wondered if I would freak out or if I would be calm and I wondered what I would say when I called 911 and if they would play that recording when the incident appeared on Forensic Files and would I have to appear in court when the murderer was found and goes to trial and if so what would I wear? Then I was horrified to think that maybe the police wouldn't let me keep my rusty metal treasures since they were found at a crime scene and they might even get confiscated for evidence and how cool would it be if I just happened to pick up a piece of metal that contained the forensic evidence that solved the whole case?! Then I would be famous and everyone would know me as that woman who solved that murder case while looking for art supplies then all the best art galleries in the country would be calling me and begging me to let them do a show for me at their gallery. And then the White House would text me to try to commission an original sculpture for the White House lawn but of course I would refuse and when they said I could name whatever price I wanted and they would pay it, I would tell them that they must lift the drilling moratorium and compensate everyone who lost their job because of it and Obama would have to hold the biggest press conference ever where he would admit to being a total jackwagon and he would have to use the word jackwagon and look genuinely remorseful while doing so.

Right in the middle of Obama's press conference I got jolted back to reality when I ran across my cosmic sign that it was time to call it a day. My sign was not overtly gross (like the occasional condom or syringe that I run across) but it just looked like it could represent something potentially gross. It looked like one of those tyvek wristbands like you'd get at a bar to show that you're of legal drinking age. So I've heard. But this one had "XXX" on it which made me wonder if it was from some kind of sleazy adult theater or something and why would they need wristbands and did I really want to explore this line of thought with the mood my imagination is in today? Not so much. I tossed my goodies onto a towel I keep in the floorboard of the backseat for just such occasions and pulled out into traffic. I was satisfied with all the fun stuff I found but didn't give it much thought since my mind had already locked onto the next errand for the day. I simply had to find something decent to wear to court.