Even more from April

April was busy month, from beginning to end. On Earth Day, Keep Morgan Beautiful (KMB)  co-hosted a community shred at the downtown Town Park in Madison. CINTAS Document Management gave us free shredding services for anyone in the county that wanted to get rid of personal documents - fast. It was a great Spring Cleaning event, along with pick up of hard to recycle items by the Morgan County Solid Waste Transfer folks. Pickup of unneeded or expired prescription drugs was also made available to folks by a GBI representative.

At the end of the month, KMB set up a tent at Madison Fest in the Children’s activity area.  Our tent was beautifully decorated with Earth Day Posters by the Boys & Girls Club of Madison and Morgan County.  Our hands on project for children of all ages was to make bio-degradable seed starting cups out of recycled newspaper.  Once the cups were made, they were filled with potting soil and planted.  Information on composting, making seed starting strips from recycled newspaper and even worm farming was shared as well.

A rite of Spring....Morgan County hosted the Bicycle Ride Across Georgia Spring Tuneup again this year.  To celebrate the eighth year of the Steffen Thomas Museum serving as a rest stop at this event, Linda Thoman painted and donated “Bicycling Across Morgan County”, an original oil.  The winning ticket was drawn at Madison Fest on April 30th, 2011.  The winner, Mary McGill just happens to be a Brag volunteer and STMA docent who bought her ticket to support STMA educational programs.  The painting is yet to be finished.  It was designed to be personalized to put the winner in the picture!

At the Boys & Girls Club, the art kids finished the banner for “Harvest of the Heart”, a community initiative to grow and share food with those in need. We studied and painted fruits and vegetables for several sessions before we rolled out the nine food banner for the kids to embellish. The banner was presented to the non-profit organization at the Community Shred, where a canned food collection drive was set up.

May is “finish it” month for lots of projects. School ends, and the Steffen Thomas Museum of Art’s Crossroads School projects are coming to conclusion.  The students have been working on more furniture to brighten the DFAC’s children’s waiting room.  We finished the recycled table (restored by Dan Thoman) by creating ceramic tiles (with the help of artist Elizabeth Collins), grouting them to the table top and painting the rest of table in bright, coordinating colors.  The toy box (built by Dan Thoman) is painted in cheerful colors and design.  We primed the bookcase (built by Dan Thoman) which is on the agenda for students to work on next year.  Throughout the year, we’ve taken a little bit of time each week before art class to talk about environmental matters.  Linda did her last “Recycling Minutes” segment at the school last Wednesday.  Next week we celebrate  with a recycled art display, awards and refreshments. Then, school’s out for summer! 



I did get the opportunity to spend an afternoon on the deck photographing birds.  Here's a female ruby throated hummingbird.  Enjoy.