Championing the makers, artists, and wanderers in all of us.
I almost forgot about My Photo of the Month. I guess I’m still getting into the habit.
Anyway, here’s my pick for February.
I already shared about my watercolor painting (and you guys floored me with your encouraging comments!) Last month is when I started doing it more frequently, and something about the colors just fit.
Did your February feel colorful?
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Sharing some green with you today from Indiana last summer, specifically from Mounds State Park in Anderson.
Mounds State Park is named for mounds of earth built around 160 BCE by a culture known as the Adena-Hopewell, famous for pottery and mad mound-building skills.
Actually, they could’ve been two separate cultures, the Adena building the Mounds and the Hopewell leaving their more advanced stuff around later. Or the Adena could’ve just gotten Hopewell-levels of advanced over time.
If there’s a new car outside your friend’s house, is someone visiting or did your friend just get a new car? Way harder to clear that up when your friend is 2000 years in the past. So I guess hyphenating the two names is a way to hedge archaeological bets.
Why were they built? Maybe the Adena built them for ceremonies and then they were used for burials by the Hopewell (who may or may not just be the Adena 200 years later). The truth is we’re not sure what all people back then were into.
What we do know is that someone (ok, a lot of someones) purposefully dug out and built up earth a couple millennia ago into mounds you can still see today.
There are 10 of these earthworks in Mounds State Park, and they tend to be crater-like, with the mounded outsides surrounding a depression with a platform in the center.
The largest one has dents in it that align with the equinox, solstices, and rising of certain stars. Known as “the Great Mound,” it is 9 feet tall and has a quarter-mile circumference. So, yeah, whatever the Adena-Hopewell were up to, they were not messing around.
The visitors’ center has displays about the park’s ecosystem and a floor map of how the Mounds align with various astronomical phenomena.
Its observation room has chairs facing oversized windows, giving you a front row view of a pond, birdhouse, and a thick stand of trees, so you can watch for birds or frogs or maybe even deer.
Outside is a cute little children’s garden.
Also at the park is the historic brick Bronnenberg House, which dates from 1840. Compared to the Mounds, though, that seems like new construction.
The White River cuts through the park, and you can fish, as well as camp, hike or picnic. There are trails of varying difficulty levels winding around the Mounds.
Since we were in town for a family reunion, Phillip and I got to visit the park with my uncle, who’s been going there since he was a kid, and my cousin Allison, who made sure to photobomb the butterfly video I was shooting in the pollinator garden.
We started down trail #1 towards the Great Mound and met a harrowed-looking hiker coming from that direction, who asked if we had insect repellent – not to borrow it for himself but to make sure we were protected.
As we approached the boardwalk, we found out why. The mosquitoes were out in force that day. Despite our deet, they didn’t seem to be deterred. I could barely stop long enough to snap a photo without those tiny vampires swarming towards my neck and head.
I wrapped my scarf over my head and tucked my arms inside. Allison laughed at me, but I’m pretty sure it was just that she was jealous of my scarf/mosquito net and not that I looked ridiculous.
We cut our hike short after seeing the Great Mound.
We drove to a spot near the river, where the guys wanted to explore some more. Allison and I decided to take in the scenery from the safety of the car.
I wonder how the Adena kept the mosquitoes away.
Southwest Maker Fest on Saturday had interactive booths, workshops, stilt walkers, craft projects, artists at work, and all kinds of fun stuff.
Since lunchtime was pretty hectic at downtown Mesa restaurants last year, a couple of food trucks were standing by: Burgers Amore (which I was introduced to at Fan Fest) and Queso Good (which I tried at Phoenix Comicon).
I wish I had gotten a shot of the inside of the IDEA Museum, where my workshop was (I had my hands full of craft supplies at the time), so you could see all the delightful creative chaos of the projects going on in there.
For my workshop, I made the project a little less open-ended this time, because too many possibilities can stress some people out.
I showed how to make travel journals out of 2 envelopes folded and bound together.
Some people chose to keep the books blank for their next trip. One attendee covered his pages with red tape; another wove plastic bags together using a plastic-yarn technique they were teaching at another booth and threaded that into her journal.
Both adults and kids got to have fun making stuff, and that was really the point.
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