Blessed Are the Curious

Some strange things have happened to me lately.

I'm a curious person by nature. If I do have a spirit animal, I'm going to go ahead and guess that it's a cat, because my curious nature has most definitely shaped my life.

I come from a puzzle-loving family. My dad is a mathematician and cryptographer, and so we always had puzzle books. Crossword puzzles, logic puzzles (my favorite) and tons of science books, books about animals and birds. My early love of detective work led me to a lifetime relationship with Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie. As an adult, I still love mysteries and puzzles. I'm a subscriber to Mystery Experiences - and I get a mystery every month in the mail - they are fantastic. I'm a puzzle addict too - and I dearly miss Games Magazine. If anyone knows anyone that used to work there - tell them I'll help start it back up.

In the book department though, I now love real-life mysteries. I love non-fiction, and books about nature and behavior and forensics and disease - I'm a die hard Richard Preston fan - I miss him.

But the last two books I've read have had strange real-life parallels. I told you about Pets on the Couch - that fascinating book about pet behaviors, causes and treatments. Well right when I finished that, darn it if I didn't have two friends with pets who experienced things in the book - things I'd never heard of before I read it.

Then, I started reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. Disclaimer - she sounds a little sanctimonious in parts - but it's a really, really good book about the food supply in the US, which you know is a topic of mine. Well right before I started reading this, I discovered much to my chagrin, that I have become lactose-intolerant. Then, just yesterday, I get to the section of the book about this exact thing - and learned a ton! Really fascinating. It does make sense that you normally wouldn't need the lactase enzyme after you were weaned, right? So as you get older, you become less tolerant of it, which makes perfect sense. Of course some people tolerate it all their lives, but that's uncommon. But people have a bond with cow's milk, and so that's why you see so many people who are lactose intolerant - my sister, who always hated milk will be feeling pretty smug about all the times she yelled that she WASN'T A BABY COW at my parents.

Anyway - there's a law that covers this phenomenon where when you hear something for the first time, you INSTANTLY hear about it again in short order, and how it's just a coincidence, but it doesn't feel like one. It's called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. That's fun to say, right? As a person who excels at pattern recognition (which is why I always wanted to be a detective), I was thrilled to find this explanation in this article:

"The reason for this is our brains’ prejudice towards patterns. Our brains are fantastic pattern recognition engines, a characteristic which is highly useful for learning, but it does cause the brain to lend excessive importance to unremarkable events. Considering how many words, names, and ideas a person is exposed to in any given day, it is unsurprising that we sometimes encounter the same information again within a short time. When that occasional intersection occurs, the brain promotes the information because the two instances make up the beginnings of a sequence. What we fail to notice is the hundreds or thousands of pieces of information which aren’t repeated, because they do not conform to an interesting pattern. This tendency to ignore the “uninteresting” data is an example of selective attention."

It's like our brain is giving us sponsored posts.  OMG what if our brains turn into Facebook feeds - and the most recent posts are no longer at the top and it's full of sponsored posts?? Scary. :) Sorry if you're crying right now.

Anyway, all that brings me to the sweet stamps I used today from Joy Clair. I'm hopping with them today, and I LOVED this so much. I wanted to take this little image and build an adventure around it with watercolor. So I did. This sentiment will be in my faves for a long time.

InLinkz.com

SO cute - little guy off on his adventure!

I watercolored him with my Daniel Smith watercolors and then painted a scene around him. Speaking of Daniel Smith - I accidentally started a pretty large watercolor split group after splitting some paints with my friend Lori. Now we have dozens of people splitting tubes of watercolor to get these paints economically. I'm enjoying it. If you want more information, you can request to join the group here.

Now I'm part of a hop again today - I'm hopping as a guest of the MISTI design team all April, so there are some fun things coming up! Today we are hopping with the sweet ladies from Joy Clair - another set of new friends I made at CHA.

Of course there are prizes to be had, since it's a hop, so be sure and stop by everyone's blog and leave a comment for a chance to win your choice of an original or mini MISTI, and (2) $25 gift certificates from Joy Clair. For the MISTI giveaway, winners will be announced here.

So check out the rest of today's projects! First up, my sweet friend Ilina!

Ilina Crouse

Martha Lucia Gomez

Jeanne Streiff

LeeAnn McKinney

Maureen Wong

Kerry Urbatch

Lydia Fiedler

Lori Kobular

Kia Gibson-Clapper

Donna Idlet

Ceal Pritchett

Lindsay Adreon

Dina Kowal

Helen Gullett

Giovana Smith

Jessica Pascarella

Stephanie Severin

Steph Ackerman

Amanda Woodruff

My Sweet Petunia

Good luck! :)

Loveyameanitbye.