Day Dreams

Whenever I'm on a long car trip and not the one driving I have the same fantasy. I imagine a horse running at breakneck speed alongside the car.

Not right alongside, further off in the distance, but it keeps pace with us. Leaping fences and creeks, weaving in between trees...

I've done it for as long as I can remember. Perhaps as a way to ease boredom. It's a bright sorrel (red, that is). Sometimes there are other horses but he's always out front. Next up behind him is a palomino paint mare, and the rest of the herd is brightly colored with paints and appys and buckskins all manes and tails flying.

I had trouble for a while just recently. My interest and background in animation has had me analyzing the way things move. The animators in Jurassic Park used cheats to make the T-Rex move at 25 mph because it didn't look right. The same with my horse that used to run 60+ mph easily. Now he still runs, but pushed back in the distance in a kind of never ending cinematic pan.

I will share something that very few people get to see. When I was small, about ten, I drew a mare, bright red with a black mane and tail. Her head was too small, and her legs had too many joints, but I thought it was the best drawing I had ever done. I'm still rather proud of her actually. I named her Hurricane Janet, and she formed the foundation for a new breed of racehorses. I called them "Superior Breds," a weak pun on thoroughbred. The first few were pretty thoroughbredy, but I brought in Appaloosas and paints to create a super flashy brightly colored horse. Then I decided began bringing in draft horses to give them feathering and bulk. I kept track of their bloodlines and made crosses back and forth to make sure that the breed stayed pure to itself but could still continue to improve.

I have two notebooks full of hundreds of drawings that (in general) get progressively better. Each one is labeled with its name, gender, and parentage. I kept the thing up for years, well into college. I haven't added to it for a couple years now, but that doesn't mean I'm done.

Mostly I'm glad that I've kept them all. Some of the drawings are pretty awful, and there are a couple that I decided were bad enough that they should be removed from the gene pool, and this is noted on their pages, but I never got rid of a single drawing. I don't have very much of my early artwork, but I'm glad I've held on to my horses.

All Together Now

I have been a neglectful blogger this past month. It's shameful. But things have been rather crazy.

Basically, my time limit for finding a job in Portland ran out. I don't even really feel bad about it because I tried really hard, and I've heard that there are plenty of other people there in the same boat. There just aren't any jobs in Portland right now. Last I heard, Oregon had the second worst unemployment rate in the country. So, not my fault.

So that precipitated a mad scramble to move before my savings ran out entirely. I didn't want to leave my roommate high and dry. Now I'm fixing up a little house in Walla Walla, home of world famous sweet onions, and Bugs Bunny. Also my hometown.

I have very mixed feelings about moving back here. But it does have a good job market (or as good as any job market currently) and I'll have my own house with its own washer and dryer and yard and everything. It's got a great kitchen.

Or it will once I'm finished cleaning and painting. The lady who lived there for the last two decades was a paranoid chain smoker. She never left the house and was terrified of anyone seeing in so she nailed bars (and junk) across all the windows. She also had two dogs that she never let outside. To say that it was gross in there would be the understatement of the year. We scrubbed the walls and ripped up the floors and painted everything with Killz to prevent the stains and smells from coming back. I just finished painting the living room yesterday and I only have the trim in the bedroom, and that'll be half the house done.

I need to paint in the kitchen and figure out what to do with the cupboards. They are a beautiful dark wood, but they still need to be scrubbed thoroughly. We've doen a few tests and the cleaning products seem to be taking off the finish as well. Plus the dogs scratched up some of the bottom ones. I think the wood is beautiful, but painting them would be a lot easier than refinishing them. On the other hand since the electrics and heating system need more work than we anticipated, I'll have plenty of time to work on everything, so I've got time for more complicated projects.

The bathroom is also ripped apart and needs more ripping frankly. The tub surround is completely rotten. Fortunately most of the subflooring is in good shape. I was afraid we'd have to replace some that looked particularly pet stained, but since we pulled out the carpet the urine smells have vanished.

I've painted the living room a creamy pale orange color and the trim is a darker orange called "Tangerine Dream." My grandmother hates the color scheme, but I like it a lot. I'm excited to pull down all the painter's tape in the living room tomorrow. The kitchen will be a pale leaf green with turquoise trim. I think it will set off the dark cabinets nicely. Assuming they stay dark that is. If I paint them they may end up a honey yellow which I think will lighten up the kitchen a lot. It's very dark right now with the dark cabinets and a huge tree that is pretty but blocks any light from getting in.

It's a tiny little house, with just the three rooms (plus bathroom) but it's a good size for me. It has a little yard that is about as gross as the house was, but we'll get it fixed up too. There's also a little garage for my car and another bigger garage that is full of crap right now, but could be emptied out and used as studio space. That would be beyond awesome.

I've got a job interview tomorrow and possibly another one next week. So all in all, things are looking up. I will be glad not to have a roommate anymore and my house is in a nice little neighborhood, that also in the dead center of town so nothing is far away. It's also a short walk from the park and just down the block from my grandmother (not the one who hates the paint). So all in all, things are looking up.

The Liar

I need to get to bed as it's late and I have work to do tomorrow (more on this later). I just wanted to get a quick note down about my immediate impressions having just finished The Liar by Stephen Fry.

I've taken multiple literature classes and had discussions about unreliable narrators. The book is called The Liar, and it is (not surprisingly) about a chronic Liar. Still, finding out towards the end that you've been lied to is a surprise and a bit of a knife twist in the gut. Because it was all so engaging, so good, you want it all to have been true. And of course if some of it is a lie, then all of it might be a lie, and that would be so depressing. It would make our interesting, witty hero into someone boring. I would rather have the lie.

I haven't finished a book and felt the desire to immediately go back and reread it for a long time. But with this novel I feel like I need to go back at once and scrutinize because there are multiple unreliable narrators in this story and I want to rifle through the layers and see if I can determine what is credible and what is not. How much of this story was a lie?

Of course it's fiction. So all of it was a lie. Having read Stephen Fry's autobiography Moab is My Washpot, I know that bits of it are taken from his life, but not much of it. The international espionage was not autobiographical.

I just don't know. I am baffled. I'm not even sure if I find the ending satisfactory or not. I can't tell if it was really clever, or just confusingly muddled. It's a first novel, so perhaps it's a little of both. It was good though. I do know that I like it.

Up in 3D

Not having a job is really stressful. And it gets increasingly stressful the longer it goes on. 

So last Thursday I took a de-stress day with some birthday money I got from my grandparents. Got a haircut, saw a movie. 

The film was Up, Pixar's latest offering. It was quirky and charming and sweet, and blah blah blah. 

I love Pixar and everything they do, don't get me wrong, but I didn't love this film. I mean, I really enjoyed it, and I'd watch it again. But every other Pixar film has wowed me somehow, even Cars. I always come out of the theater blown away by what they've managed to achieve. And this time, I guess it was just stuff that I already knew they were capable of. I do love the storybook world of the film, where absurdities are just taken for granted but even that wasn't really breaking new ground. 

The thing I enjoyed most was the 3D. I love stuff in 3D because I'm a dork like that. But until recently, this film in fact, I have never seen it used in a way that ad

ded anything to the movie. It's always three effects that shoot stuff towards your face in a way that is more distracting than anything, and nothing else because you wouldn't want all the people watching in 2D to miss out on anything. But the 3D in Up wasn't distracting, it was used elegantly (the way Pixar does everything) to enhance the world of the film. 

I'm especially excited because there were previews for a Disney movie in 3D (and a couple others) as well. In the previews before the previews we saw a 'making of" featurette about the movie (about Guinea pig spies) and it looked pretty lame (at least to anyone outside its target demographic). But when we got to the actual previews and saw the thing in 3D it actually looked pretty cool.

I've always ranted that 3D could be a great tool if people would just start using it, instead of making it into a gimmick. And now it looks like they're starting to, which makes me kind of excited. 

Calzone!

If you haven't checked out the blog  BrokeAss Gourmet, you really really need to. I use the site on a semi-daily basis for recipes or just ideas. They have this amazing pizza dough recipe that you can use a million ways. 

Thus far I've made pizza, bagels and donuts with it, and I intend to use it to make an approximation of these puff pastries that my mother used to make. 

But by far the best use I've put this stuff to is the calzone. I did not take a picture of my beautiful and delicious calzone, so I have stuck up the first calzone that turned up in a google image search. This one appears to be pepperoni. I'm sure it's lovely. 

Mine was spinach and mushroom. I had too much spinach left over from another thing I made, and so I shredded it with a knife and piled it with some chopped crimini mushrooms on one half of a disk of pizza dough. I threw in some minced garlic and some chopped onions and some basil (left over from making pesto), then piled on mozzarella and parmesan cheese. I was afraid that I had piled it too high and the dough wouldn't stretch enough to close it up, but it did. I brushed on some olive oil and sprinkled some sea salt and ten minutes later I had a really really good calzone. The bread cooked faster than I thought it would and I was afraid the insides would be under done, but it was perfect. 

The article at BrokeAss suggests you always have a ball of this super easy pizza dough kicking around your fridge, and I am inclined to agree. Especially since all it takes is some dough and some cheese to turn a bunch of leftovers into something elegant and delicious.

Damned Biological Accuracy

You don't have to know me very well to know that I love dinosaurs. I loved Land Before Time, I loved Jurassic Park, I didn't love Dinosaurs, but c'mon. It was terrible. I still thought it was pretty though.

One of my favorite little doodles is a raptor guy I made up after I had a nightmare (well anxiety dream, not so much a nightmare) about being stranded in the desert outside Las Vegas and being chased by raptors. In my dream they were extinct everywhere except right outside Las Vegas and when I woke up I wasn't sure if they still existed or not. It was a unsettling at the time. Anyway, this guy is the result.

Try as I might, for some reason I'm having formatting issues with him and his colors will not come out right. But this is the basic guy. Body of a turkey, hooked claw, lots of fangs. Adorable mostly. Here's his film debut...





This piece was my first experiment with soudn effects in my intro to 2D animation class. I like the stick figure version of this guy. So, everything was great. All was well with the world. Until I saw this episode of Nova. The episode surrounds the discovery of the four winged dinosaur.


Now the awesome thing about this guy is he pretty much proves (though there are still doubters, see the episode) that birds descended from dinosaurs. The awesome(est) thing about this is that it indicates that dinosaurs, at least of the carnivorous two legged variety, had feathers. Which is really cool. The downside is that it means every portrayal of raptors in the media from Jurassic Park on down to my little guy, is wrong. They should have feathers. Which means I need to do a total character redesign. Well, not total. The shape is the same, but instead of buttery leather skin or rough scales, he needs downy mostly useless chicken feathers.

So now I am toying with ways to convey this killer flamingo but still retain a little of that reptilian dignity. It's pretty hard.

But I'm working on it.

Politics; Old and New

I just watched 1776 a few days ago. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it is a musical about the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is really good, despite the fact that most of the musical numbers are tedious (the only really good ones are the one about how John Adams is obnoxious and disliked, and the first one between John and Abigail Adams). 

What I like about it is the way that it portrays the characters who made up the Continental Congress. Names we've heard of and sometimes know anecdotes about but that mostly remain shrouded in a dull textbook fog. I think (hope) everybody knows that Benjamin Franklin was a hell of a character, but what does anybody know about John Hancock except that he had a large signature? And the thing seems to be sunnily patriotic, just as you'd expect. 

Thomas Jefferson, for instance, is portrayed as a distraught lover pining for his bride. And while that's entirely believable, you can't help but think of Sally Hemmings, the slave with whom Jefferson had six children.

But the film gets to that. Because of course it would be impossible to skirt around the issue of slavery in a discussion of the founding of our nation. The turning point of the film comes when the issue is forced by the southern representatives. Jefferson included a passage in the Declaration that declared that slavery was a violation of the inalienable rights of man. Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson (perpetually tortured by the fact that he owned slaves while believing that it was a reprehensible practice that should be outlawed) were staunch abolitionists, but were forced to concede on the issue of slavery because otherwise the South would never have agreed to the revolution.

As the film ends you are infused with a patriotic pride at the high ideals of our founding fathers, and the simultaneous awareness that the issue of slavery will come to a head only a few decades later and split the country in a bloody civil war. And you sort of wish that those high ideals could have been a little higher, that we hadn't made that first concession, especially in the name of freedom.

Over the past couple weeks more and more evidence has been coming to light about the U.S. use of torture on Guantanamo Bay detainees. Remember months ago when it there was a debate about whether or not waterboarding even "counted" as torture? Then debates about whether or not torture could be "legal," Geneva Conventions not withstanding.

Most recently has been the position (usually voiced by somebody on Fox News in a spooky voice) that, "If Your Family was In Danger and you had A Scary Forgiener with Information about the next 9/11 wouldn't you be morally obliged to torture that guy?" The answer is no. Torture, like slavery, is wrong. Period. No matter what the extenuating circumstances. Plus now we have people testifying that first of all torture doesn't really work, that conventional non-illegal interrogation techniques work a hell of a lot faster, and most recently, that people were being tortured (after it had become clear that there was no link between Iraq and 9/11) for information that would tie al Qaeda to Iraq, rather than (as has been claimed) for information about other imminent terrorist attacks. And our Brave New White House, the one that has inspired so much hope and optimism, seems to be adopting the stance that we just shouldn't think about it. "Look to the future," not the skeletons in our national closet, even the ones so fresh they're still kicking.

Simultaneously, there are stories about mistreatment of our soldiers in Iraq by the companies that the government is paying to take care of them. Rachel Maddow has reported two stories recently that I found deeply disturbing. One was about servicemen being electrocuted by their tap water, because of some incredibly shoddy electrical work. The other was about servicemen (in the desert mind you) not being rationed enough water. The water they had was over treated with chemicals and made them nauseous. When they drank local water they got dysentery, and when they appealed to their superiors they were instructed to get it from the supplier, and were forced to steal it.

This is outrageous and disgusting on so many levels. I'm sick of it. And I know lots of people are sick of it. But we can't just shut our eyes and hope this goes away. We have to own this, as a nation. This war, the treatment of our prisoners, the treatment of our own soldiers, is a new national scar. We can ignore this, we can pretend that it didn't happen, but we'll be betraying the core principles on which this nation was founded. We're still struggling with the wounds left by the civil war, the repercussions of that very first betrayal of principle, before the ink was even dry. 

We're supposed to be better than this. We're supposed to be a shining beacon of truth and justice and freedom. We screwed that up, and if we're ever want to represent that again (even just to ourselves) instead of towering hypocrisy, we have to admit our own fallibility,  and we have to do what we can to make sure this never happens again.

I don't know yet quite what this means for me personally. I expressed myself through my ballot last November, and I'm doing it again now. I could buy a bumper sticker, or protest on street corners in my safe and liberal city and be reasonably sure that most everyone who saw me would agree with me and that those that didn't would ignore me, just like I do when I see protestors or bumper stickers. The only thing else I can think of is to donate money, because that's what talks. But I don't have any. So I don't know what else to do besides point these things out. There are lots of other people, more articulate and with louder voices, but my hope is that every voice helps. That if we keep shouting, "We are here! We are here! We are here!" that something will get through. 

Shoes and Ships and Ceiling Wax

I've been putting off an update for about a week. I wanted to write about my birthday, which was two weeks ago, but in retrospect I don't think there's a whole lot there to tell after all.

I went home to visit my family, and let me tell you, the drive down the Columbia Gorge is gorgeous. No pun intended. It beats the old drive from Seattle across Washington hands down. Of course every single time I drive that way (which I have many times since I was a child, but not recently enough to appreciate it) I am reminded that I have still never been to the Maryhill Museum. My mother is a huge Pacific Northwest history buff and consequently so am I, but we've never been. The museum was founded by Sam Hill, as in "what in the!" He had this crazy idea that the Queen was going to come sailing up the Columbia and he put together this elaborate museum in, what was then and is still, the middle of nowhere. That's the abridged version of the story of this guy. There's also a (non working) full scale replica of Stonehenge for some reason.

So on the plus side, my drive is exactly the same length (about six hours) and much more pleasant. On the down side...Oregon is much much stricter about enforcing traffic laws that Washington. It may be that the drive across Washington sucks, so people are more easily forgivin their agregious speeding. The point is that I go pulled over on the way down. There wasn't much I could say, I had been agregiously speeding, so I just handed over my liscense and registration and all that and was polite because cops get too much shit for doing their jobs already. But since I was nice, have a clean record, and it was the day before my birthday I got off with a warning! Hurrah! It surprised me when he wished me Happy Birthday too. I mean, I knew he was looking up all my records back there but it hadn't occured to me that he'd figure that out for some reason. Go figure.

In my hometown it was Giant Yard Sale Weekend and I bought a blender that turned out not to work, and a waffle iron that turned out to be pretty awesome except the waffles always stick to the top no matter how much butter I brush on and I think I'll try Pam next time. Sorry for the run-on. But I paid $4 for both of them so it wasn't too disappointing that the blender had to be thrown away. Especially since the day was miserable and everything got rained out and I was roped into helping my mom at her church's yard sale and by the end they were giving stuff away. I got a really cool (hideous/retro) slow cooker and assorted crockery and a rug, and a TV. The TV wasn't part of the yard sale, it belonged to some friends of my mother's who are working on starting a B&B and they had purchased TVs for the rooms but that was before everything was flat screen, so now they need to rebuy TVs. But this one is pretty new and in good shape, and while it's small, it's a free TV so I'm not complaining.

Speaking of TV. I saw the coolest thing ever. Ever. In the history of Everything. My roommate was watching Nova on Hulu and this episode was on the rotation.

Have you clicked on it yet? No?! The episode title, just to give you a taste, is Astrospies. It's about Spies. In. Space. (Can you hear the "Piiiiiigs iiiiiiin Spaaaaaace" commentary?) Apparently during the height of the cold war, while the Space Program we all know and love was going on, staring all those big names from The Right Stuff, there was this whole other thing going on.

Both Russia and the U.S. were in a race to spies into manned space stations orbiting the planet armed with high tech cameras with computers! in them, if you can imagine such a thing, that would have a high enough resolution to make out the models of cars being driven around on say...top secret military bases. Also, they wanted to shoot enemy satellites out of the sky.

Now of course we all just go to Google Earth and it seems not that impressive. I mean, if you have no appreciation whatsoever for history. But this was such an amazing story I was vibrating in my seat watching it. Also, one thing that was awesome and sad was that one of the Astro Spies in training was/would have been the first African American Astronaut (which has a ring to it) but he was killed in a practice flight which just sucks beyond the telling of it. All of this stuff has just recently become declassified, and it would make a hell of a movie for Tom Hanks to Co-Star in.

And to end on a completely unrelated note, I have opened a store on Etsy! I'm on there as seespotbitejane which is an old name that only makes sense to a friend of mine (well, her and the owner of the racehorse...) because SoupyTwist was taken. I was late to the party I guess. But I've already put some stuff up and have ideas for more, because I like making crafty things but don't know what to do with them after they're made. I'll put up art as well, as I deem it saleable. And of course Astrospies has turned my desire to do one piece about the Atomic Bomb into a series about the Space Race and the Cold War. Because Sputnik was an adorable little satellite.

Awesome. My dog just puked on my bed. And on a treasured stuffed animal from Disneyland that she was using as a pillow at the time. So. I'm done. Have a good night.

Job Search

The job search for Portland is...going. It's hard. I mean, things are tough all over, but I'm almost qualified to do so many things, but not quite. Then there are the jobs that I could do, but they want someone with more professional experience. I'd have some if someone would hire me.

So far I've applied to a grab bag of things. Some I could get excited about, others that I could do really easily and really well but am not that interested in. Today I found The. Perfect. Job. It is tailor made for me. It's a position where I could use all my digital art skills and my audio/visual background, and my writing skills, and the subject matter is something I could get pretty enthused about.

But, it's a Craigslist job. I found it after it had been up for about three hours. That's pretty good in the real world, but in Craigslist job search time the inbox for that job could be flooded with good candidates a couple times over by the time my cover letter and resume reached them. So I do not want to get too excited. Or even excited at all. I've applied for many things and heard nary a reply.

You end up in a continual yoyo of emotion. "I didn't hear back from this job.... Oh hey! There's a new one! That looks good, I'll apply right now!... Oh, no reply from them either. But hey!"

I'm trying to maintain a state of cautious optimism. A sort of Pollyanna-ish attitude that everything will turn out all right in the end even if times are hard now. I think that's actually sort of our national attitude just now.

But it's so much harder with this new job, because it would be so perfect. It's like, it must be a sign, this job was tailor made for me! Except that's not how hiring works. I need to be tailor made for the company, not the other way around. So I return to the cautious optimism, because every now and then, I'll see a 'perfect job' posted somewhere. And eventually for one of those 'perfect jobs' I'll be perfect for them, even if it's not this current perfect job.

But I really hope it is.

Rational Argument

M&Ms.

The blue ones are the best. This is fact. The reason that the blue ones are the best is because they're blue.

The thing is people always want to argue about it for some reason. They'll say, "That doesn't make any difference. They all taste the same!"

Now if you have to be a jerk and argue about M&Ms in this way, the acceptable and logical argument would be something along the lines of, "No, the red ones are better, because they're red!"

That would at least be sensible, still wrong I'm afraid, but I can see where you're coming from. I'm aware that this may sound a bit harsh, but people who don't think the color of an M&M makes any difference have no soul. There. I said it. Now stop picking pointless arguments and just say you like green or something.

-Soupy Twist

Car De-stress, also Happy Easter

Taking your car in for repairs is a harrowing experience. At least it is for me. My last car was good, and ran solid until I hit a deer. After that it had constant weird electrical things wrong with it. Since it broke down in my small hometown over the summer we had only one choice of repair place. They took months to fix it, then it still wasn't fixed and we repeated that process a couple times. Also at some point during their 'repairs' they broke the lock on the trunk. Still not sure why they were even in the trunk.

After that the car continued to have weird stuff wrong with it every few months. The acceleration cut out on the highway, all the lights and dials on the dash would blink off and then refuse to come back on. The horn would blare for no reason. It happened once in the middle of the afternoon, then it began happening more and more frequently until I got a call from campus security at 5 am telling me that it was going off and that there had been quite a few complaints. I solved that problem by yanking the fuse to the horn.

But it jut kept coming. The alternator, then the breaks. It would be something serious enough that the car either wasn't working at all, or wasn't safe to drive. A couple times my only option was to take it to the closest repair place because that's as far as AAA will tow you. Every time they would tell me it was something dire that would cost a lot. I know that I got screwed repeatedly, and that some of these places made things worse. I finally sold the car after I took it in for an oil change and the guys at the garage told me it was leaking transmission fluid and that it was not safe to even drive it the couple miles home. I hadn't noticed a leak, but I had also felt that these guys were trustworthy. I talked to my grandfather about it and he said there was nothing wrong with the car and it was fine. After I got home I kept watching for the leak and it did leak a little bit like one time.  I just was done. I spent so much money that I didn't really have to spare trying to keep that car alive and I couldn't find anyone trustworthy to help me.

I love my new car. It is beautiful and fun to drive and awesome. I'm something of a petrol head despite knowing next to nothing about cars. I love them. My new (used) car has had a couple issues, but they have all been quickly and painlessly resolved by either the dealership where we bought it, or the Seattle dealership. So when I moved to Portland I did not worry. I figured I'd take it to the local dealership and things would be fine.

Of course as soon as I get to Portland some weird stuff goes wrong for no apparent reason. I can't afford costly repairs right now since I have just moved and have not yet found a job so I called the dealership and asked what it would cost to just get an estimate and whether or not they could do billing. The guy seemed irritated that I had called and irritated at my questions. I made an appointment anyway, but I couldn't shake the bad feeling so I went online to look up reviews of the place. They were almost entirely bad. The repairs tended to be dodgy and the customer service was incredibly poor. I was discouraged to say the least. So I googled around for a place that had good reviews, and I found one that had 5 out of 5 stars from almost everyone, except one guy who had called to make an appointment but was put on hold for too long and decided not to go there. I think somebody else didn't like their waiting room. 

Taking your car for repairs is like going in for surgery. Except if the doctor tells you that you need an expensive operation to fix your broken arm but nothing has happened to your arm and it works and feels fine and you came to the doctor in the first place because you had a stomach ache, you can be reasonably sure he's a quack. Not so with cars. 

So I decided to go ahead and make an appointment at the other place. They specialize in VWs and do performance alterations. It was worse than I thought, but they explained what was wrong and what they were doing and they prioritized the repairs. There's an issue with one of the front headlights that requires unsightly duct tape across the front of my car. One of the car's previous owners tried to change the headlight and broke the assembly, now it needs to be replaced and it's an expensive part. They discovered another similar issue, but they acknowledged that neither is an immediate problem. They also had to order a part and I was thinking that I'd be without my car for a week at the least, but I took it in Thursday and Friday morning about a half hour after they opened they called and told me it was finished. They had washed the car and thoroughly vacuumed the inside, and they left candy in my cup holder. 

I realize that candy in the cup holder does not equate to ability to fix my car, but it was quite charming anyway. I like this place. I feel like they were straight with me. I feel like they are trustworthy. They have excellent customer service, and I feel like I can take my car back there again with confidence. And that is a heck of a relief.

Portland!

I am in Portland now, and I have an internet connection. It fantastic. I really love the city already (of course it helps that the weather the last few days has been unseasonably gorgeous).

But I love it. I love my new apartment and my neighborhood and all the parks. There's an indie comic convention in I think two weeks, and one of my favorite comic artists will be there. I will try to go because it'll probably be awesome.

Then at the end of the month is a national ceramics expo, which will be really cool, plus maybe I'll run into my old Prof there.

I learned about the Ceramics Expo from a brochure someone left at the table outside the really good Bubble Tea place in the cool (relatively speaking) strip mall.

There was also a very friendly (but not in a creepy way) guy named Nick who runs the Karate school at said strip mall. He assured me that the sushi place next door was really good, and got me to sign up for a free karate lesson next Saturday.

I'm kind of an easy mark frankly. I try not to talk at all the the guys at mall kiosks because while I won't buy anything they shove at me, I look like a sucker and they usually refuse to let me leave. I'm just too polite. My last few encounters have made me less polite though. Sorry, no thanks, walk on by, shrugging off occasionally outrageous attempts to call me back.

But Nick was very nice, and I have nothing better to do. A free self-defence lesson sounds fun. I'd like to learn some self-defence. My total knowledge of the subject now is what I learned from watching Miss Congeniality, and a short lecture I went to in highschool where we were urged to jab at an attackrs eyes with our keys. If not the eyes, then go for the solar plexis because a guy on drugs might not even feel it if knee him in the crotch, but if you jab them in the diaphram they won't be able to breath and you can get the hell away.

I don't know whether I'll ever be able to afford actual lessons but it certainly can't hurt to test drive one.

I'm pretty much settled in now. There is still some stuff to put away, and the dog is having separation issues again, which is a pain in the ass. We had gotten over it entirely at the old house, but since the move she can't stand to be left alone all over again. I know how to fix it, but it takes time and neighbors tend not to be very understanding about yappy dogs, especially small ones. But. We're working on it.

But since I've goten here I've been all fired up about art projects. I finally began work on a painting that I've been meaning to start since December, and I worked on another project that has been spinning it's wheels for a couple years now. Part of this may have been a combination of boredom (from having no TV or internet) and procrastination about unpacking, but mostly I think it's that I finally have my own space. There is lots of room to work here and I can fill my space how I choose. I really like it, and I'm excited to see what I can accomplish.

Also, an UPDATE: on the positive reinforcement front! It hasn't been very long, but I really think some of this new enthusiasm has to do with the fact that I'm not constantly putting myself down anymore. It is a little inconvenient because my negative feedback has always been written down, so I've been writing my affirmations as well, so the charcoal sketch for my huge painting has little notes on it like "This is great!" and "Almost perfect!" This is especially problematic as the piece is about the atomic bomb.

Except that I might go ahead and leave them in, just for contrast. I'm a little hesitant about this piece because it's not so much about "The Atomic Bomb" as it is about my recent (last summer) trip to The Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas.

I won't go into the entire rehash of that trip, but it is a really really cool museum. The only problem I had with it was this weird cheerleadery vibe it gave off. There were a couple movies with guys who worked at the Yucca Flats testing facility for 30 or 40 years and they had the attitude that dropping the bomb at the time was the right decision. In retrospect, knowing what we know about its effects, it was still the right decision. We should never have stopped testing, we'd drop another one tomorrow if "we had to."

Now the guys who worked desperately through WWII and throughout the Cold War on these weapons are certainly entitled to their opinions, and they are coming from a much different perspective than I am. I don't even remember the Cold War, though I was born before the end of it. I've never had to know what the fastest route to my local bomb shelter is. But this pro-bomb attitude pervaded the entire exhibit, even the parts talking about all the innocent bystanders (sometimes literally) who were harmed by the tests, let alone the devestating and ongoing affects on Japan.

My painting is something of a self portrait. It depicts a figure standing with her back turned to a nuclear blast, with a hand raised to sheild her eyes. The title will be "Keep Your Back Turned Until The Shockwave Has Passed."

The tests in Nevada (where they were moved after the accidental radiation poisoning of a bunch of Pacific Islanders hundreds of miles away from the original South Pacific test sites) became a tourist attraction. People would stand a "safe" seven miles away from the blast. You had to either put on sunglasses or turn your back, until the shockwave passed.

It just blows my mind. There's a part of the museum where you can experience a simulated atomic blast. They blow wind at you, and it's loud but not loud enough to say, damage the hearing of the average museum patron. The white out is not searing light, it's just a white screen.

And I still thought it was terrifying. I think both my mother and I came out of that theater in tears. It's horrific enough that the government subjected our own service people to it, essentially to see what would happen to them, but these tourists were all civilians.

I also saw some footage of (I think) Nagasaki imediately after the blast. The main target had been (I think) a naval base that had housed something like 10 or 20 thousand troops. In the footage it was just a guy walking around a big empty field, marking out what used to be the perimeter. You just had to take his word that we were looking at anything.

You could see from the angles of char and the skew of windows where the blast had come from on the surviving structures. It was recently declassified film made by the war department, and devestatingly hard to watch.

Sorry, this has gone on a bit too long, like I always do when I talk about this museum trip, but the pervasion of Atomic Bomb imagery throughout our culture, and its history is a subject that is endlessly fascinating and chilling to me. It's terrifying, but also, so cool. It's because I'm a sci-fi geek. I mean, it all ties in with the Space Program, and Ray Bradbury, and pretty much every single one of my favorite B horror or science fiction films. Scarier in reality than it ever could be on film.

My fear with my painting is that the viewer will miss the layers of meaning that exist to me, and see it as yet another sensationalized image of a mushroom cloud. To my thinking, it is the shockwave, not the mushroom that is of significance to the painting, but the mushroom cloud is still in there. But dwelling on potential interpreations of your art works is never a good idea.

One woman I went to art school with was endlessly tortured by that subject. She had a dream of creating work with a universal audience, people from all social classes, all walks of life, from all around the world, would see and be moved by her artwork, and they would interpret it exactly the way she wanted them to.

Some people in the class became quite upset, even angry, when I suggested that such a thing was not only impossible, but that it was rather an offensive notion. That everyone had their own unique frame of reference whether the artist liked it or not. Quite a few of the more starry eyed students had visions of creating art that would move...well they didn't come out and say it, but low income, trailer trash, white bread, inner city, whatever 'afflicted' peoples were out there suffering from lack of art and culture and deep thinking. I suggested that maybe those people found art they liked and that moved them, and maybe it was in a museum, or maybe it was on daytime TV and that each was valid.

They didn't like that idea, but I didn't like their condescension. I make art to please myself chiefly, but with the hope that it will please others. I don't believe I'm bestowing a gift on anyone (except occassionally my mother). I don't expect them to be deeply moved (in a breathy voice). If anyone was ever deeply moved by my work I would feel humbled and grateful, but it's nothing that I except from my audience as my due.

Anyway, this started out as a cheery quick little post about how much I'm enjoying Portland now. It has rather outgrown that. Daresay it has become something of a monster. But now it is getting close to 2 am and I need to go to bed (not to mention give my wrists a break since I have yet to find and unpack my wrist rest thingy). I feel like something of this magnitude needs a snappy signoff. So I am stealing one from Messrs. Fry and Laurie.

Soupy Twist.

Creative Process...

So, after brooding on a rather offensive commercial that I saw, I have struck upon and idea for comic (and eventually possibly film) project. It's a bit of a horror movie pastiche. I was thinking sort of Werewolf, but it's probably more Jekyll and Hyde. I did a little sketching, some concept art, if you will, to start feeling out the main characters and I thought I'd share. Sorry to be so coy about the subject matter, but I'd rather get it more hammered out in my brain, although you may pick it up from the art.

And just for the heck of it, here is a study I did of a cat's eye. I wanted to get in some practice with digital painting. It's amazing how big a difference teh squiggly lines in the eye make. It just doesn't look lush and shiny without them.




Mine is the one on the left, in case you couldn't tell. I think I messed with it a little too much.

ETA: Wow the formatting on this came out all weird. Oh well, Blogger was being weird. Mine is still the one on the left.

Airport Epiphany (My Foray into Positive Rienforcement)

So I've posted about this on my personal friends and family blog, and nobody cared about it there either, but too bad.

I just got back from a rather hellish road trip. A friend of mine was moving across country and needed someone to help drive the U-Haul. I agreed because that's what friends do. I will explore this trip further in comic form in a future post. The one bright spot was that during the trip I was reading Karen Pryor's book Don't Shoot The Dog.

I've been exploring clicker training/ positive reinforcement training since I acquired my dog. She was my mother's dog (we got her my senior year of high school, so I've known her all her life and had a hand in her early development). Mom gave her to me because she didn't want me to be lonely since I'm living by myself now. I haven't been able to have pets because of college, then the no pets apartment I had, and I kept thinking I would get one later. Well, I got sick of waiting for a whole bunch of things (ability to take time off, to have a pet, to have a social life, to have my own private living space) all at the same time and it's all still shaking down, but a part of that was that I got the dog.

Sorry, slight detour. I just got done making chicken-fried pork loin and mashed sweet potatoes for dinner and it turned out Delicious. There is nothing a potato can do that a sweet potato can't do better. Who needs dessert? They're like candy. Anyway, the dog...

She never had much in the way of training (except during her stint as Toto in a local production of The Wizard of Oz, in which she was fabulous). She's very friendly, well socialized, quiet and generally well behaved and also too small and ridiculous to be intimidating to anyone (apricot miniature poodle) so she generally went without and no one really felt the loss.

Well, she'd also lived in the same house and with the same people for almost her entire life. Moving in with me was a jolt for her I think, and though she'd never had issues like it back home, she developed some separation anxiety and couldn't be left alone without barking shrilly and constantly for as long as I was gone.

I've never done any dog training before. We'd had dogs my whole life as a child, but nobody trained them aside from 'sit,' I don't think either of my parents had any idea how and I certainly didn't. So now here I am as a full fledged adult (I don't even qualify for my mom's health insurance anymore) and I have a problem pet. My GF, who knows kind of a lot about positive reinforcement training for a layperson, gave me some reading material and helped get me started.

I really like it. We both do (me and the dog). It makes every training session a game, and I can see Amelie (the dog) thinking her way through problems. There's no pushing or shoving the dog into position, no choke or shock collars, no punishment which means no yelling or guilt. Besides, punishment doesn't teach you to do anything except avoid punishment. I do feel occasionally rueful when the dog gets into food that I didn't put away properly, but I recognize that the fault was mine and not hers and that there's nothing to be gained by getting mad.

The best part is watching her think her way through the puzzles in front of her. I can watch the gears spinning as she tries to figure out what to do to make me click, and it's really thrilling to see the "ah ha!" moment when she figures it out.

Recently I've feel like I've had my own little "ah ha." When I began all this I sort of grasped the theory but was a little bit lost when it came to figuring out how to get her to do what I wanted her to do so I could reward her and get her to do it again. Before when she'd stare at me blankly, I'd just stare back. Now I still don't always know what to do, but I feel like I can figure it out. If she sits and stares at me I know I need to get her moving somehow, if the treat gets too distracting I need to figure out a way to get her to focus on me, that sort of thing.

Of course part of my success probably rightly belongs to Amelie. She's figured out how the game works now. She'd never been asked to think, or be creative before and I think I'm getting it now because she's worked it out first.

The problem I have is that I try to explain how cool this is to people, but they don't get it really. Today's big breakthrough was that we figured out how to pick up a barbel. I'm teaching her to play fetch. She never figured it out on her own, and until I started researching dog training I had no idea it could be taught, but, of course it can.

But it leads to conversations like this;

Me: OMG! We had the BEST training session today! It was so cool! We're making so much progress!

Bystander (only mildly interested in hearing about my dog to begin with): What did you teach her?

Me: She learned to pick something up! In her mouth!!@1!!

Bystander: Uh...

But seriously, everyone should try this. If you don't have a pet, try it on your children or spouse, or someone else's children, or random wild animals in your neighborhood (small ones that won't attack or give you rabies), or go buy yourself a mouse or a fish, or just anything. It's really an amazing bonding experience.

Which brings me (sorta) back to Don't Shoot The Dog. It's about positive reinforcement training, and how we learn, and how to teach someone to learn. An offshoot of the work of B. F. Skinner, and an important text in it's own right. I think that this book will be/has been quietly life changing for me. It has taught me a lot about the way people interact with each other, and how I can communicate more effectively. My mother is a school teacher and has a degree in behavioral psychology. She studied Skinner et. al. and says that his theories affect the way she interacts with people on an everyday basis. Me too.

There's an anecdote in the book about a man who decided to improve his squash game with positive reinforcement. Instead of berating himself for bad shots he began commending himself for doing well. His game drastically improved and he began beating people he couldn't compete with before. And he was always faintly smug when they got mad at themselves on the court. At first I thought it was a charming, telling anecdote. Then, sitting in the Denver airport with my makeshift sketch pad and waiting for my flight back home after the road trip from hell, I realized that I could apply this lesson to myself.

My sketch books are full of self-abuse. If I'm frustrated with a drawing I'll write "Anna sucks today," or "this sucks" or "why can't I draw today?" or longer more vitriolic things. I don't get particularly worked up (except sometimes when I'm really frustrated) and it's all mostly tongue in cheek, but there are lots of times when I go for a while without drawing. Weeks even. I love to draw. I want to make it my life's work. Why then do I put it off? Sometimes I chalk it up to laziness and wonder if I really have what it takes. Now I think this reaction may have to do with a self imposed negative association, when I draw I feel bad if it's not good enough.

Wouldn't it be better to feel good when it is good enough? The two ideas sound the same, but they aren't. It was one of those revelations you have where you wonder why you didn't see it before when it was so incredibly, glaringly obvious.

So, sitting in the Denver airport, I decided. I will never ever write anything mean about myself in my sketch book again. I will write positive things. "Good job," "This turned out well!" "I like this line." I think that this will make a big difference in my art, I think that I won't feel so stifled, or so quick to give up on projects that aren't going well. Anyone who flips through my sketch book will think I'm dreadfully narcicistic, but that's what everyone already thinks about artists anyway. Hopefully I'll learn as quickly as the dog.

Cash for Laptop Update or Requiem for a Satellite

So the box came today. It is all beat to hell because they reuse them. I put my laptop and its cord in there and made sure everything was snug, then I taped it up. I used a little extra tape because it looks like in some places the tape is all that's holding this box together, and it was my way of giving back.

It made me feel a little nostalgic though. The first year I had this laptop the screen cracked in this horrible way and I had to send it to be repaired in a box like this one, but new. It came back with a wiped hard drive and a new motherboard.

It had a nice run. I mean, 4 years is good for a laptop. After it died I dragged its carcass around for a couple more years since I didn't really know what to do with it and didn't want to just throw it away. I'm a little sad boxing it up like this to get rid of it once and for all.

But really, it has to be done. It would be foolish to move it again. As I finished taping it up I found myself humming, "Take Good Care Of My Baby," which is maybe a little bit sad. It's a broken computer for god's sake. But it got me through college, I wrote all my papers on it, and it was the only screen I had, so I also watched all my movies on it. I took it places and it was my source for news and communication and all sorts of things. It was a great computer, but I think it's time to move on.

It's always everything at once...

It's hard to write about art when you aren't doing much of it lately (although I have some ideas for crafty stuff to put on Etsy).

I've spent the last two weeks driving back and forth from Portland. I have secured a nice apartment in a nice area and I am super excited to move. I like the city better every time I go there. Every single person I've told, (with one exception) has been excited for me and exclaimed over how much they like the city. I've spent the last six years Seattle or Tacoma (which is like Seattle but with self-worth issues). There's lots of stuff that I like about Seattle, and I've always said that it's a nice place to visit...but I wouldn't want to live here.

Portland just seems like a friendly and pleasant place. Plus it has Powell's. And a volcano inside the city limits. A volcano. There's a vet hospital and/or pet store on every corner where there isn't a park, and they have public transportation. I mean, Seattle has buses, and I'm from a place with no public transportation besides the one little bus that drives students and the elderly the 45 miles into town so they can go grocery shopping, so Seattle's public transportation seemed good enough to me. But other people from other cities seem to constantly complain about it, so I'm excited to see how much difference it makes.

The only thing I'm not looking forward to is the actual moving. I need to throw a lot of stuff away, and send more to the Goodwill, and maybe sell some stuff on Craigslist. My really broken laptop that I've dragged around for the last three years or so, I decided to send to cashforlaptops.com. They recycle/properly dispose of them, which I was never sure how to do, so even if I don't actually get cash back, it'll be out of my hands and in the hands of someone hopefully competant. I'll let ya'll know how it works out.

And speaking of just random stuff, I just started playing PMOG! It's a Passively Multi-Player Online Game, where the whole of the internet is your game world, and you play by surfing the way you normally do. I've been enjoying it.

I've finally got a picture of my cardboard dragon in progress, but my internet lately seems to be thrashing in its death throws (I hope it's the internet and not my computer...) and uploading it is currently an impossibility. Next time. I should finish it before I move, I can really justify hauling all that cardboard that far...

Crazy Kinda Poetry

Yesterday my girlfriend and I went to see Lucy's Legacy, the current main exhibit at PacSci. It was really, really cool. The first half covered the history of Ethiopia which was pretty cool in its own right, 3.8 million year old bones found there not withstanding.

The second half was about fossils, and how they're dated, and how they could tell that Lucy was a biped based on the position of the skull in relation to the base of the spine. There was a cool CGI animation of the skeletons of a chimp, a human, and Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), and how they (probably) walk. There were cool skulls from various species of bipedal primates, some of whom went on to evolve into us, some of whom did not.

The actual Lucy was, well... a box of dimly lit bones. But the exhibit did a fantastic job of making you feel the import of this discovery. I got teary. There was also a really cool life size sculpture of Lucy. There was an exhibit past the gift shop (where I manfully did not buy the "I Love Lucy" t-shirt, no matter how awesome I thought it was) all about the sculptor and the work he's done around the world for various history museums and things and that was pretty cool too.

Anyway. After the exhibit we went to the ballet (Jewels, for people who know stuff about ballet). The GF is a ballerina and she was excited that this one had no plot, just choreography. She said when she listens to music she imagines the choreography in her head, so this would be simple since she wouldn't have to make it up herself.

I had never been to a ballet before. Well, ok, I went to the ballet version of Edward Scissorhands at the 5th last year, but I'm not sure that counts. I shall be honest. This was not the best ballet ever. I enjoyed it, there were some cool parts, but the music was too quiet. You have a stage full of people floating around basically doing insane things and making it look ridiculously easy, but when you can hear each "thud!" when they land it ruins the illusion somewhat.

In the first movement though, they were wearing the style of costume that all of Degas' ballerinas had, and watching them I itched for my sketch pad. No wonder he spent so much time studying them. And of course being a genius and a bastard he was able to capture all the perfect floaty movements they made. I am now doubly resolved to get permission to sit in and draw at the GF's dance class.

But the really nice part of the evening was the walk back to parking. We discussed the ballet, and I decided that though the ballet was not as awesome as the exhibit (and perhaps a bit of a let down to the GF) that there was a beautiful symmetry to all of it. We started with the very roots of humanity. Walking upright freed our arms and fingers from bearing loads, allowed them to become more delicate and dextrous, and to use tools. It freed up our diaphrams so that we could develope speech, and song. And then to close the evening we rejoiced in a pure expression of all those qualities and abilities that are unique to our species.

Lucy's legacy indeed.

I should really be in bed instead of overthinking things

So I was looking at the work of Gretchen Gammell, who is an artist I greatly admire, and I sort of know because her mom was childhood friends with my mom. Her work is seriously fantastic, and I think if I had the money I would buy one of her paintings for my mother, who would love it.

I think to look at her new stuff, perhaps every 6 months. This check in, her latest stuff is really good, and there were a series of portraits, one of which really spoke to me, if it wasn't sold already, that would be the one that I would buy. This is one of those, "I wish I had painted that" sort of things.

I think I'd like to paint a variation of it as a self portrait. I'm trying to decide how that would work out ethically. I mean, it would be part master study, and part homage, but I'm afraid it would just look like plagiarism. A great fear of plagiarism was instilled in me at college. I was terrified of not properly citing my work, of thinking that I had thought of something myself and writing it down and then realizing that the idea had come from somewhere else, of not being sure that enough of an idea was mine and not making it clear where the components had come from.

We had strict policies about academic honesty, and I was still prone to anxiety freshman year when I had the scariest (and most awesome) Prof ever, who banged on a table (not with his shoe) and yelled at us on the first day of class, just to get wusses to drop the class. Then on the last day off class he gloated about the five who had dropped at the beginning. He made quite an impression. They missed out on a hell of a great class.

So I am torn about this painting that I want to do. Even if I never sold it (a distinct possibility) it would still bother me. Of course Gretchen's work (see I don't really know her, but I know enough to be on a first name basis) is nothing like my own would be, even with her influence. I love it, but her style is not my style, by a long shot. It would be the pose and the subject matter that would be reflected.

It makes me think of that exhibition just at the SAM about the roots of Impressionism. The had a bunch of paintings that had been basically copied, but by the impressionists in their own style. I guess when artists plagiarise, it's called a study.

And my drawing instructor did tell me that I needed to do more studies. Of course he told everyone that. But that doesn't make it not true.

So, Ranygazoo...

Why Ranygazoo? What does that even mean?

I love this word. I love words in general, but this one particularly.

I took ranygazoo from one of the novels of the late great P.G. Wodehouse. It was one of his Jeeves and Wooster stories. I can't remember which one, only that there were wacky hi-jinks and numerous comic misunderstandings and Bertie Wooster had once again landed himself 'in the soup.' As they apparently used to say. Jeeves, of course, put everything to rights by the end of the story.

Not that that narrows it down.

I have never heard or seen this word outside that one story. If you Google it a few definitions come up; a prank, horseplay, nonsense. It's confirmed as 1940's ish slang, so I don't think Wodehouse made it up.

In the context of the story Bertie describes his current hilarious misfortune as "a right ranygazoo." It puts me in mind of Oliver Hardy turning to Stan Laurel and sneering, "Well here's another nice mess you've gotten me into," while they're both dripping wet with paint and chicken feathers or something.

So. All that aside, the real reason I picked Ranygazoo as the name for my online space is that it's fun to say. The way I pronounce it (which may or may not be correct, but I'm not going to stop) is RAN-ee-guh-ZOO. Say it a few times aloud, linger on the zoooo. It rolls off the tongue so pleasantly it doesn't even matter what it means.

I love Wodehouse, and British comedy in general, and I'd considered using some Wodehousian word or phrase when I stumbled upon this one and fell in love.

Every Which Way

So I have found a few jobs that I want to apply for. The postings are a little old on a couple of them, but I think I'll still give it a shot.

I worked late this evening. When I got home I looked at the most recent job post. I spent some time researching the company. I don't think I know enough InDesign, but it came with the CS3 suite that I have so I figured I could do some online tutorials to figure out the basics.

Then I was torn about whether I should work on that, or my website. I need to make some Flash content for it. Then I remembered that I have some figure drawings that I need to scan for my portfolio, and I realized that I still need to put together a portfolio pdf. Some of the stuff I want to scan is in the trunk of my car, and I thought I'd go get it, and since I was going out there anyway I might as well take out the bundle of shrink wrap from the new matress I bought a while ago. It's pretty muddy so I was going to change my shoes, then I thought I should change my pants since I was wearing my pajama pants, and I think I exhausted myself with all the thinking.

It's 10 pm. I worked a long crazy shift today. All my housemates are in and out with partying since its the weekend. I am in my pajamas, and I'm probably going to go to bed in the next hour or so. So I decided not to do any of those things. Monday is my day off and the only errand I have to run is to go to the post office to pick up a mysterious package. Ooooh...package. I haven't ordered anything, and no one has told me that they've sent me anything, so I've really no idea what it could be. Probably something official and ominous.

But anyway. After I post this, I will probably go get some mint chip ice cream, then read a bit, then go to bed.

In my next post, I shall explain the title of this blog! Hurray!

A Belated Introduction

I am Anna Froese, this is my blog. Today I am officially withdrawn from my old school, and on the job market. I am really excited about not having homework. School and work and homework was a major drain. Now I have a dog, and free time, and I can paint or sculpt or draw or whatever, and it's not more work.

I really want to get my oils out again. I was going to this weekend but I got side tracked. I ordered a box spring from IKEA and it came with all this cardboard that I hate to throw out because I always think cardboard could be used for something. I got out my Exacto knife and drove to the book store to get hot glue for my glue gun and started building a dragon.

Cardboard and hot glue sculpture is a lot like steel sculpture. It has the same elements of danger, with the likelihood of cutting and/or burning yourself severely. But it's a little less labor intensive, and requires far less heavy equipment and protective gear.

It is proportionally not quite as much fun. but the dragon I'm making will be cool. I wanted to add a photo of it in progress, but my camera battery has died, so instead you get a doodle of me and my bad haircut and my glue gun. Ciao.

First Post and I have no creative title.

Wow, my very own blog. I feel so hip and with it. Or something. It's what all the kids are doing these days, or so I'm told.

I suppose it's something to do besides work and Crayon Physics.

This blog is my professional presence on the web since I am never on Facebook, and Deviant Art just isn't very professional. Right now it is a work in progress, with bits and pieces coming together from various places. I've no doubt it will be up and running in an official capacity soon.