Annnnnnd we're back, after nearly a six month hiatus due to blogging hubris once again striking1. As well as severe writer's block.
Quick life update: still job searching, working a local middle school in a study hall, not blogging. There, caught up.
At my job I try to find different activities to keep my students entertained, which can be difficult at times. I use daily brain teasers, word searches, crossword puzzles, I have even had them find and copy words out of the dictionary. Anything to get them to keep their mouths shut. One such attempt involved searching for printable mazes online, difficult ones. Easy mazes simply mean more paper on my floor2. My Google search3 eventually let me to this maze:
It's about as intense as it looks, though not as intense as some others I found, and have really only had a handful of kids seriously attempt it. One of the perks of my job is that it is pretty mindless, as long as my kids are working quietly and not acting like total jackasses there isn't much for me to do. So I decided to attempt the maze. But instead of just picking a path and seeing where it led I decided to black out all the dead ends and reveal the path that way. Did it take a while? Yes. Was I concerned I would make a mistake and ruin hours of work? Yes. But away I went.
As I made my way around the maze I realized that I really like the way it looked. It had a minimalist look that I found fascinating, and it seemed like such a shame to take all the time to fill it in and then simply throw it way. So I began to think of what I could possible do with it, then it hit me, Christmas cards, more importantly DIY Christmas cards (that's "Do It Yourself" for the uninitiated in the crowd). I figured I could white out the words in the start and finish bubbles and draw little Christmas scenes and send them out. Then I took it a little further and decided to draw little before and after pictures in each so that if you followed the maze you would get to the next scene. Lastly I glued them down some red card stock and wrote some messages on the back. It was all pretty easy, now I just need to figure out how to mail them4.
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| The Grey Menace Strikes |
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| A Classic Christmas Conundrum |
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| This was the original card, which is why the pictures flow the opposite direction5. |
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| This is probably my favorite card, I gave it to Abe Corry. |
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| Snowball fight!! |
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| #snowday |
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| You can't go wrong with the triangle tree. |
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| I also like this one. Baby Jesus has the darkest skin, scandalous. |
This is it, I've peaked artistically. At least it has been immortalized on the internets.
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1 Every time I talk about what my next blog post will be about it doesn't get written.
2 In the form of: wads, footballs, airplanes, notes, shreds, and, once, a swan.
3 Literally "difficult printable mazes" or "impossible printable mazes"
4 It turns out it is easier and cheaper just to make some 6.5x9.5 envelopes myself, I hope they make it through the mail okay.
5 Also, because it getting sent to the southern hemisphere. Okay, that's a lie.
