Apparently, I have come to love the Daily Create.  I finished ds106‘s Weekly Summary for last week a little early, and didn’t include Friday’s or Saturday’s assignment, so I’ll include these here, just for my own sake if nothing else.  I like the idea of being able to use Categories and Tags to see all of my work this year in one place.  So, I’ll try to briefly walk through the six daily creates I’ve done since last week.

Last Saturday, the assignment was to make a photo containing or suggesting fire and/or smoke.  Pyro that I am, I decided that this would be a great excuse to catch a leaf on fire outside and catch a singular object on fire next to the rest of nature untouched.  Unfortunately, by the time I got outside to do it, it was dark, and my little Android-that-could wasn’t capable of capturing much very well.  On top of that, I’m positive it was one of the most humid nights of the year so far.  Getting the leaf to catch more than an ember around the edges was beyond tough.  So what I ended up with was more of a singed leaf, which I suppose suggests fire and smoke.  I almost didn’t post for this date, but decided that I liked the way the scene trailed off into dark, and that if I’d tried it, I may as well document it and provide myself the chance to watch as I improve over time.  So here’s my slightly-singed leaf.

Sunday, the assignment was to simply draw a place where you want to go.  Personally, I’ve always wanted to cruise around the coastline of Antarctica.  I just think it would be so beautiful there, even though I don’t like being cold at all…I think I’d be willing to rough it for the sake of being there.  I had this idea in my mind all day, however it was one of those days where I never had a minute from the time my alarm went off till I collapsed into bed that night to do anything more than breathe, so I was beginning to think I wasn’t going to be able to do this assignment.  So, I asked my family member for any kind of writing utensils they had.  I ended up with some highlighters and a red pen.  So I went for it.

I hope you like my poor little lonely, messed up penguin. He’s the only thing that gives the rest of the squiggles any kind of context or meaning.

Monday was my absolute favorite: take a photo showing the wide open space, the great outdoors.  Here, I cheated a bit, because I didn’t want to post a photo of my own yard on this forum, because of security purposes, but I wasn’t really going anywhere else that day.  So, I cheated and grabbed my current desktop photo and uploaded it.  It was from early December less than a year ago, when my husband and I went on a local hike.  We ended up being later than we meant to, but these beautiful images when we reached the fields were beyond worth it.  Scenes like this touch my heart more than almost anything else.  I mean, if my crappy Android could do this…

Tuesday‘s was a lot of fun.  Make a video of someone who is genuinely confused.  I let this one stew around in my head pretty much all day long and worked on this one mentally before deciding suddenly that night to catch bugs chasing a light, to their own detriment.  I can think of no better example of conclusion than this.

And then we have Wednesday‘s photo.  On this day, my son was returning home, who had been gone on vacation with his dad for about 6 days.  I admit, it was hard to pretend to focus on much other than that.  How silly to not do this day’s assignment, as all it required was a picture of something spinning.  But again towards the end of the day, I realized that it could be kind of awesome to make my daily create photo one of him playing with a spinning toy.  I decided that if the entire point of ds106 was to improve your ability to tell your story via the digital world, then there is no shame in allowing the most important story in my life play a role in my daily create projects.   So, here’s my gratuitous photo of my beautiful 6.75-yr-old baby boy, happy to be back in ‘my good old familiar state of Virginia’ with his Mama, having a blast spinning various toys for me as I take pictures of him. I know this one is blurry, but it actually caught the look of his delight on his face rather well, despite the blur, so I kept it.  The spinning top is pretty clear, too. :)

And then, there came a few days where I decided to experiment with holding off on doing the daily create assignment until after I’d finished the rest of my homework.  Obviously, that never happened.  I’ve come to realize that that is never going to happen.  I’ve also decided that perhaps the 15 minutes it takes to do the daily create every day would make a wonderful break from my homework for my other classes, so you won’t catch me forcing myself to skip tdc again any time soon.

I came about that realization sometime around the moment Saturday night when I was once again trying to finish reading one of my books and falling asleep.  As the book drooped over my head, and I fought to pull myself back into consciousness over and over again, I was reminded of tdc assignment for yesterday, to take a picture of something being worn as a hat that has absolutely no business being worn as a hat.  I decided that I didn’t care that I couldn’t stay awake enough to read my book – I knew I could stay awake if I were working on a tdc assignment.  And I really wanted to do it.  So I did.  Of course, this would have been a tough shot to take if I had to do it on my own, so I enlisted my hubby to help me take this shot.  The photography and the name are his ideas, but the actual idea for what to wear on my head and how are all mine. So, we present to you, Facebook:

Once again this week, every time I did a tdc assignment, it was a total blast.  But aside from the way that it encourages me to be creative every day, I also appreciate how it’s forcing me to learn how to organize my time a little better.  Coming back to college after being gone for almost 10 years is daunting, and needless to say, I’m rusty.  But this side of the class has reminded me to do the daily small assignments first, and then do as much as you can on the longer-term assignments after those.  Seems like common sense, but when you’re panicked about coming back and trying to make sure you get it all right…well, you tend to mess things up quite a bit.