L.A. Day

I made the logical pilgrimage to the Pinata district on a blustery February day. I, for some odd reason, thought I should walk there from my friend Dan's place up in Silverlake, so it was a bit of a treck to what turned out not to be a great photo opportunity because shop owners would shake their heads as soon as they saw my camera, but here are a few surreptitious shots anyway.

pretty smacking devices.

OoH! Orca! Kinda like a Shark!

After that I ventured back into the Fashion District, where for some reason I had never been before. Truly overwhelming, how every notion I've every longed for could have its own store!  Button Store!  Ribbon Store!  Artificial Fingernails by the pound! Rhinestone design Store! 

And there were all these bolts of fur out on the corners, blowing in the wind.

So lovely. But, once again, people objected to me taking footage of their product without buying it. 

So I walked to the toy district.

And then, very slowly, walked up the hill home. I was completely exhausted from research. 

Possible Thesis Images

This is a collect the dots email.  You find connections between all these things and you get a prize! You get to write my paper! 

Signs at the Craft School.

While I was in Portland I took a friend up to visit Oregon College of Art & Craft, one of my Alma Maters. Here I found this little sign, which makes me so very happy. It's like a little Wallace Stevens gratitude poem.  I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that my last semester's mentor wrote it. 

Second Draft Distraction

For most of the month of February (and a good portion of March, actually) I stayed in the "Garage-Mahal" backyard garage apartment of Miss Rory Sparks, in the process of tiling her wet-room bathroom in exchange for some of the rent and an incremental amount of beer money.  I did not design the mosaic, but I dutifully chipped and smashed and placed many a tesserae along with a few diligent, if short attention spanned, friends and admirers of Sparks.

After the first very, very long day of tiling parts of the walls looked like this. 

Almost 4 weeks, 25 pages of thesis writing, 15 episodes of the program "Connections," "Translevania 6500" (a terrible movie),"First Eden," "Living Planet," "Attenborough's Arc," "Ways Of Seeing," some other random british television series' parts, 6 episodes of On The Media, a couple episodes of "First Life," along with exhaustible hours of Pandora country music, and most of the space had pieces of tile adhered to it!

I really like my Portland friends.  They make me drawings like this, which depicts how cowboy bottle of gin or vodka gets together with vermouth to make martinis at the chalkboard honky tonk.

But if you count the hours I actually spent a lot more time with this cowboy than anyone else. 

And that's just the way I like it!

We all need breaks....

After my long weekend at home in Tri-cities I returned to Portland to sublet Rory's apartment. To cheer myself up I painted my nails. Only on my left. That helped me write, oh, about the first 5 pages of my initial draft. 

But in order to actually get the ball rolling I had to go to the beach.  Because I hadn't been before, I decided to visit the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport. And look who I found! The fattest great white model I've ever seen.  There were also huge megalodon jaws that I somehow forgot to take a picture of.

These jellies were more fun to watch than just about anything in their lovely blue enclosure.

This lil guy was smaller than my phone.

But these were the stars of the show.  The Aquarium has three huge tunnels one can walk through where things swim all around you.  Of course, I was most interested in the Leopard Sharks, who proved remarkably difficult to take stills of. 

I did slightly better with video, and this is also the lighting effect I'm imagining, though slightly brighter, to have in 301. 

(The little kids voices are also pretty great).

I've become very excited by these heavily patterned, very long, skinny sharks.  I think they will work perfectly for the project, since they aesthetically challenge what people think of when they think "shark."  Folks generally think great white, right?  But these svelte, almost triangular creatures are just as much sharks, right? If I say so?

Being at the beach was fantastic, because thoughts are just so much easier near sea level. And I've now caught up to the Shark BBQ place I left off on over a month ago! 

Home for a packed Weekend.

So, one packed weekend on the cusp between January and February started with helping Mike buy a surfboard.  One thing I am really good at is helping boys buy sporting equipment.  The guys I know who haven't taken advantage of this aspect of my character have truly missed out. I'm so good at convincing people it's ok to do what they want. 

Not too bad at taking pictures of mountains while driving either. OHMAN!  Look at that beautiful day?  what people don't know about Portland, and Oregon in general, is that the really beautiful days are all in February, when you least expect them.  

And this is why I was headed home.  My grandfather's 90th birthday!  I can not be denied- I have his nose right on my face. 

Also our annual Scottish dinner had to be hosted. Scotch eggs needed to be fried.  Someday I'll actually eat one of these things. Instead my skin just suffers the consequences of using a fryer. 

***

Saddly, other news.  I had to euthanize Bixente Liazaru, the wonder hedgehog.  He had developed mouth cancer, and though he was obviously glad to see me, he was fading fast. This is the last picture I took of him while he was still his happy, fearless self.

He was my company for thousands of miles, and a fantastic friend.  Here he is with Mike visiting  Stonehenge in the sunshine. I miss him terribly; every time I see a toilet paper roll or a spider I get a lump in my throat.  It's been hard to write my paper without his little cuddling support. 

The Nouveau Sous L'Eau project is dedicated to him, my favorite four-legged intrepid explorer.  I buried him in the yard on Groundhog's Day, coincidentally. He would never have noticed his shadow.

Westward Bound

The last morning in the fridge I found Natural Bliss next to a nice firm cucumber.  Wonder if I would have enjoyed my trip more if I had, er, um, utilized this combination. 

We had a rainstorm the day before I got on a plane, and the clay got all stirred up.  Apparently it was reaching Charlotte the same time I was. 

This might be the Grand Canyon, but how can you be sure when you're in a plane?  All I know is around Phoenix it began to look like home...

I was glad to board that 3rd plane set to land in PDX; had been a long time since I had seen so many different colored faces. By the time my 14 hours of travel came to an end I was positively glowing to be   back where it was misty wet.