Happy little trees!
(photo via Wikipedia)
So you're home sick from school. The novelty has worn off and you are bored out of your mind. The Price is Right is over, Don Slater has given you the weather, and those pesky soap operas have started. You turn to channel 15 for relief, knowing that you won't be seeing mommy-oriented commercials, even if it means you might be watching something educational instead. You hear something about phthalo blue and happy little trees, and you know it's on: Bob Ross and the Joy of Painting.
As you watch, you feel convinced that you could become a master painter of landscapes, especially ones involving trees, clouds, mountains, and water. You also feel oddly tranquil, calmed by that gentle voice. If you happen to actually be sick, you are almost certainly feeling better at this point.
Things start with haphazard-looking patches of color put on with a big brush. Rough faces of mountains and rocks appear with a swipe of a painting knife. Pine trees come to life with masterful dabs of the fan brush. Not just any pine trees - happy little pine trees. You may even have some happy little clouds floating above your happy little trees. By the time the half hour was up, an entire scene had come to life and you felt relieved that, once again, Bob Ross had done it.
If your parents were feeling generous and it wasn't TCC Saturday Enrichment Program season, you could enroll in a class at Michaels taught by somebody certified in the "Bob Ross method". You would buy all your supplies and then do some wet-on-wet oil painting, confident that all the time you spent watching the show would embue your hands with the power to do exactly the right thing. Mine did come out looking like a riverbend with rocks and trees, although admittedly rather amateur compared to Bob Ross's creations.
Bob Ross died in 1995, but his legacy lives on through Bob Ross Incorporated, who has apparently taken the time to have all clips removed from YouTube. In order to enhance your life, I scoured the web and found you this gem. It may load slowly, but it does the trick. Enjoy!
Edit: After much fussing, it appears that Youku videos don't load in Blogspot pages. Lame. Here's a link instead: Bob Ross paints High Tide
Gifted education, Chesapeake-style
In Chesapeake, once you were identified as a gifted fifth or sixth-grader, you were carted off to Indian River Middle School Annex once a week for GATE (Gifted and Talented Education). This is where you got to do things like design rollercoasters using ACAD...
(not a rollercoaster)...watch decade-old episodes of the Voyage of the Mimi starring a young Ben Affleck...
...learning about orienteering in the common area where the portables were...
(this photograph is factually accurate because about half of us were Asian)...learn to count in Mayan...
...copy Alley Cat from your teacher's 5.25" floppy onto your hard disk...
...take field trips to the NATO headquarters...
...and make an Egyptian (death) mask out of papier mache.
(I didn't think this was morbid at the time)Then at the end of the day, you all trooped back on the bus and went back to your home school to do times tables with the regular kids.
(Photos, from top: NewFreeDownloads.com, Entertainment Weekly, Berkshire Sport, Mexico Connect, Retro CPU, Julia Shea, DLTK)
Middle School Crafts, Pt. 2
Friendship bracelets. You know exactly what I'm talking about.
First came the trip to Michaels for the following supplies:
Embroidery floss in as many colors and varieties as you could convince your parent(s) to buy.
Bobbins on which to wind your newly-acquired floss.
A box in which to store your freshly wound bobbins.You probably taped the knotted end of your newest project to the underside of your desk, to be worked on whenever the teacher wasn't looking. If you were really seriously anal retentive like me, you had a clipboard. After some nimble finger work, you'd end up feeling like you accomplished something and were ready to share it with the world.
Finished product, ready for your BFF of the week. (final photo from wikiHow; all others from Joann product pages)
Middle School Crafts, Pt. 1
I used to eat a ton of Starbursts, especially during fundraising season at school. I would always make a little pile of wrappers on my desk (perhaps to guilt myself into not eating more?) and then toss them at the end of class.
Then one day, a classmate demonstrated how to make an awesome chain out of said wrappers.
Paper folding. It must be an Asian thing. (photo via Candy Addict)