A funny thing happened to me the other day. I had just gotten home and was coming up to my door when a page from a book fluttered by and landed right in front of me. I looked around to see if the whole book was around but I didn’t see anything else save that page.

A bit torn, a bit faded but I was intrigued. Funny enough, the first line on the page started “I was used to the occasional weird experience,” and the chapter heading was “Three Old Ladies Knit the Socks of Death.” I just knew I’d stumbled across a treasure.

I went inside my home and just started thinking about it. Was it from an old classic? A hard-to-find mystery? A forgotten loved book? Was I meant to read this? After a while I couldn’t resist any more and I had to Google it. I was hoping this was going to send me on a wild hunt but immediately I found out that my mystery page was from The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan.

Well, so much for a classic mystery or some obscure tale. The Lightning Thief is not on my TBR stack, I don’t know maybe it’s a sign that it should be. What do you think? Anyway, I still had a fun time trying to make a story for this book page.

How about you, have you had anything similar happen to you? Did you end up reading the book?

Oh, and I’ve since added the page to my ephemera collection as I’m sure it’ll find its way into some of my visual journaling.

Not only were the temperatures high this weekend but it seemed like everything I was doing was just reminding me of how hot it was.

First, I did go to yoga class but for some reason on Saturday the room just seemed a bit warmer than usual. Not bad but given that the Saturday class is a bit more intense I really felt like I got more of a workout this time. Of course I thought I’ll treat myself to a stop at Frugal Media afterwards.

Well, I guess their AC isn’t the best because I couldn’t stay at the store too long. It was so warm there. I did find a copy of Eva Trout by Elizabeth Bowen. I know I heard about this book from one of my blog friends. It sounds like a wonderful story so I’m happy to add it to my collection.

The highlight of the weekend of course was going to my encaustic painting class. I loved it. We learned the basics on beeswax, resin, and pigments. Our instructor gave us two small wood boards so we could try our hand at encaustic painting. She had tons of found objects we could embed into the painting, tools to “scratch” away at the wax, and she showed us various techniques for layering paint. It was a blast.

Here are the two boards I played with. As I’ve said before, I’m not a painter but I do love to collage and play with paints.

The studio where I took the class didn’t have AC either, just a lot of fans blowing, so you can imagine how warm it got what with the skillets and hot air guns going on. Anyway, I don’t know if I’ll do encaustics again but it was fun and it’s definitely something I can revisit later either with the instructor or with this book she recommended.

Finally to wind down the weekend I picked up a new book, The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis, and oh my goodness, it takes place in the summer and the first few pages are all about the heat. What can I say, I think I’m just ready for our vacation which is coming up in a couple of weeks. For now, I guess I’ll just go have some dulce de leche ice cream and pretend I’m someplace cool.