Pi Day

First off, Beware The Ides of March!

There, glad we got that out of the way. As hopefully everyone knows, yesterday 3/14 was Pi Day (also the birthday of one Albert Einstein). To celebrate, I baked this delicious peach pie. It was (and continues to be) very good. I was quite please with the way that the lattice turned out.

I actually quite enjoyed Pi Day. It's a worthy holiday (like Talk Like a Pirate Day, Sept. 19) and you can't forget the date because it's 3.14. Imagine the Pi Day celebration in 2015. Eh?

Anywho, I plan to incorporate it into my personal roster of celebrated holidays. It can take the place of Easter.

In other news, Daylight Savings sucks. My current job starts at 5:30 in the morning. The worst part is this weekend I was starting on Sunday after coming off almost a week and a half of being out sick, so I'd been staying up and sleeping in later and my sleep schedule was already messed up. As far as I'm concerned, everyone has an excuse for being an ass for the next couple of days. I will attribute any cranky mood to Daylight Savings. Which is lucky for one of my coworkers because otherwise I would have been forced to ask who pissed in her cheerios this morning. It's been a couple days of this sullen attitude from her and I'm about done with it.

But maybe she'll cut loose on St. Patty's and calm down. So glad spring is here!

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.

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.