What's up with Midnight?

Continuing the backstory...

It is my nature to be nocturnal, and I worked nearly 20 years on the night shift by choice. For years I slept during the day and worked or was up all night-even on my days off. Weird? Well...kind of. I also have had a lifelong fascination with horror fiction, scary movies and generally anything dark and frightening. Not only that but...I attract the odd and strange. My friend Monique years ago termed me a "weirdness magnet" and its true. I have had so many bizzare things happen to me and around me that I take it in stride (most days!).

You might call me "Gothic" and you wouldn't be far wrong, but these days I'm not really as outward with the trappings of the lifestyle as I once was. Black still ranks high on my list of favorite colors though and I embrace the darker side of things (including humor), but to look at me you wouldn't know it. I channel my gothic tendancies inward nowadays, and into my art.

Media Nox (latin for "middle of the night" or "midnight") has been part of my email address from the beginning, and it always seemed to fit. Years ago, I fantasized about calling my whatever this is "Media Nox Designs" and that still might be the umbrella term for the studio...but like me it has evolved. Fire has come to sigify many things in my life and I wanted a way to honor that, so I started tossing around the name "Apprenti d'Incendie" for the lampworking stuff. That name partly grew out of my family history research, as I found out that one of the lines in my mother's family goes back to pre-Dark Ages France. I thought that was pretty cool in itself, and wanted to bring it out to the modern day...since I also think of myself as a sort of "perma-newb" in most anything I do (there is just no way to learn everything-plus I think when you reach the point you say to yourself you*have* learned everything-that is just another beginning because you really know nothing) and a lifelong student I wanted to somehow add that to it. "Apprentice of the Flame" became "Apprenti d'Incendie" and I was off and running.

Bead of the Day:
"Wash"
Vetrofond Jungle Twilight on CiM Hades...makes lovely leaves to float on the wind.
Pardon the lint, this was a test picture and not meant to be the final print.
Plus, every scrap of dust in a 3 mile radius knows when you are trying to take a picture of a shiny black bead and flocks right to it.