My late lamented mosaic dragon, 1998.

In the late 90s, I was living in a 4th story walk-up in Chicago. Following an altercation with a previous friend/tenant, my roommates and I found ourselves without a coffee table. I came up this old door in an alley, dragged it up the stairs, and spent a couple weeks piecing this mosaic together and building a table under it. Although I did everything wrong, and the table itself wasn’t that wonderful, I was extremely proud of my work. I had this table until about 2003. In grad school, I had a close friend who was blind, and it got a little painful and tiresome to watch him walking into this coffee table every time he came over. I pushed it into the corner and tipped it on its side to accommodate him, and left it that way over the summer when I went to study abroad. In the sweltering humidity of an un-air conditioned Michigan summer, the wood swelled and shrunk with the changes in temperature, and the mosaic fell out. I tried to repair it but it proved impossible. This photo is all the remains of the excellent mosaic table.

Dragon Kite! 1991. Sort of banged up but still cool. Probably would still fly. 

My high school offered a gym class (not for freshman, who had to run the mile and lift weights and do all the horrible stuff the state of Illinois required) called Unique PE. We called it Gym for the Non-Competitive Student. This is where all the hippies, Goths, and burnouts ended up. No dodgeball here. We learned to walk on stilts, ride a unicycle, and juggle. One of the units was to decorate and fly a kite. Somehow, I was the only person who actually did it, using markers and colored pencils to draw this fantastic wyvern. The kite only flew for about 10 minutes, since our gym periods weren’t that long when you factored in changing clothes, and no one else had completely the assignment, but it did fly. Then, I put it away, to keep it safe from kite-eating trees.