Bad blogger! Without the pressure of the actual NaBloPoMo behind me, I managed to skip yesterday's post. It was a long day and the move is so fast approaching at this point, that the stress is building a bit. But I'm trying to make up for it today with a few highlights of our beautiful murals.
Crescent City is very lucky to have an active mural society that creates at least one new mural in town every year. (You can see more murals at that link, by the way.) Some of them are painted and others are made of tiles in a stained-glass style. It's pretty awesome, in such a small town, to have such a wealth of gorgeous murals in public spaces all over town.
Our municipal pool has several murals. Two beautiful tile murals outside:
I love the detail in these pictures, especially the reflections of the boats in the water. Just to give you a sense of the size of these murals, here's a picture of the enormous building they grace:
Inside, the pool is also decorated with two more tile murals in the lobby and one enormous painted mural alongside the pool:
That's our beautiful lighthouse in detail. It's getting too late at night to try to stitch pictures together to give you a single view of the massive pool mural, so here it is in a few pieces:
I took all these while Darcy was taking her swimming lesson. She really loves them and is so close to passing her first level. Luckily, our pool is close to downtown, so even with only a half-hour lesson to work with, I also walked over to one of my favorite painted murals in town. The mural society occasionally does a mural-in-a-day project (which blows my mind). The artist creates the piece and (I think) sketches it on the wall before bringing in volunteers to paint under supervision to get it done in a day. This amazes me, especially when they create something like this:
This commemorates the 1964 tsunami that destroyed most of downtown Crescent City. Just above the small plaque on the right lower corner is a line that marks the high water line on this building. Just below the plaque are the painted names of the volunteers who helped create the mural.
Ah, sweet, sweet November 30th. Last year, you may recall that I had a clever way to end NaBloPoMo. This year, I'm not sure that I can be that clever again. And I still have no photos, so I'm breaking the promise to include at least one more before the end of this whole month of blogging.
The best inspiration I can find for tonight comes in two parts from my friend Karla. She revealed today that instead of doing NaBloPoMo, she participated in the much more serious NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month, the goal of which is to pen 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days. She hit 50,700 this afternoon, so she won! Many congrats to Karla. I considered doing it last year and maybe this will give me the courage to try next year.
The nice thing about NaBloPoMo is that after the last post on November 30th, it's over. It's a complete cycle. I think there's slightly less of that with NaNoWriMo because it's unlikely that participants have penned a fully realized novel, so there's still work to be done, even if you're allowed to set it aside for months at a time instead of mere hours.
Karla posted a link today as well. It was to an NPR story about tiny paper sculptures that have appeared around Edinburgh over the past year. They are truly exquisitely made and as mysterious as they are lovely. NPR provides a link to a more comprehensive version of the story, with many, many more photos of all ten of the sculptures. There's a point to pointing you towards these stories beyond the fact that the artistry and sentiments embodied by these paper sculptures are worth looking at on their own.
When the last sculpture was left, anonymously as they all had been, there was also a longer note. It was written cryptically, but the first stanza (?) read:
"It's important that a story is not too long...does not become tedious....
"You need to know when to end a story," she thought.
Some of you might think it would be great if I kept blogging Every Day, but it would get tedious. Our lives are interesting, but not that interesting!
