Postcards from the Deep

Back from my hiatus and I come bearing art. The local humane society is having an art auction and I decided to donate some work. I have a painting and an ink drawing in the works, but I'm also making a series of little 3x5 drawings that I call collectively "Postcards from the Deep."

This guy is the Nautilus. I've done a series of weird and awesome deep sea creatures. The best ones of course, are those that phosphoress. Spell check doesn't want to give me that word but I'm sure it's a verb and it looks correct to me. Spell check didn't want to give me siphonophore either. Another one of my pieces is a siphonophore. They are cool glowy things. They are listed as probably the longest animal in the world but they're kinda like coral in that they are actually a colony of small animals. So in the world record length sense that seems kind of like cheating. But they are really cool.

Anyway, the rest of my sea creatures can be found here.

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.

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.