Happy Sunday

This is what Daniel thinks I look like in the morning. He’s pretty much right. But what you don’t know is that what looks like a cup of coffee is actually a cup of hot oatmeal.

Daniel is getting ready for February 1st, which is the official Hourly Comic Day, when you make a comic for every hour you’re awake about what happened to you. I agree it’s a smart idea to get your characters set beforehand, or else on Hourly Comic Day you spend all day figuring out how you want to draw things instead of actually doing things.

Therefore in church today I got started on my own characters. The top ones are of me and the bottom ones are Daniel options from which I have yet to choose.

The key is to keep them simple enough that you don’t spend the whole hour drawing what happened to you the hour before, because if you start that you end up writing comics about writing comics, and no one likes that.

This is how Daniel is going to draw us. I really like his characters. I think it is funny that my riding boots are a permanent fixture, because they aren’t. But Daniel thinks it’s hilarious when I wear them because he think I look like a superhero. Only a boy would think of superheroes when he sees knee-high boots.

Speaking of art, I sold a painting today! A follow up from the craft show, which is exciting. It’s one of my favorites from this last round of paintings that I don’t think I shared. It’s on a wood canvas so you can see the woodgrain beneath. I really love the different layering.

Happy Sunday!

Resubmission complete

I sent in my riding test video tonight! (Note the above picture is just a screenshot, or image of the video, not the actual video itself). That means within 2 months I will find out if I passed the resubmission to become a Certified Registered Therapeutic Instructor.

These past two weeks has been very stressful and frustrating with catching up on schoolwork and trying to get the video done, and then it snowing and freezing on top of it all. Ironically, the same weather that delayed the video and cancelled barn stuff also allowed me to catch up on school.

The short story is God is good and provided the right people at the right time to help me out. My stomach was in knots this morning about whether to send the video in because I thought it was too blurry, but conveniently the instructor meeting tonight was lead by the evaluator who failed me at my first riding test, and she looked at the video and said it was fine.

She also said in that meeting, “Since I have to see the Shatners next week…” which was yes, about the only Shatner you’ve probably heard of, from Star Trek, who sponsors things at that therapeutic riding barn. So does Betty White, the awesome little old lady movie star. Isn’t that crazy? Who says that.

So cross your fingers for both me and Daniel – within the next month or so I’ll hear back about certification and he’ll hear back from PhD programs!

“So come all you Asheville boys and turn up your old-time noise
And kick ’til the dust comes up from the cracks in the floor

Singing, hard times ain’t gonna rule my mind, brother
Hard times ain’t gonna rule my mind
Hard times ain’t gonna rule my mind no more”

-Gillian Welch

Stressed

I’ve been pretty stressed this week, being behind on schoolwork disorganized, everything taking longer because it’s snowy outside, and knowing something has to go from my schedule but I don’t want to give up anything. My eye has even started to twitch.

However, today was one of those nice days you drink coffee and are productive and in the midst of it all, somehow, you have all kinds of time. (Or is that called denial?)

 

The clock’s running down
The team’s losing ground
To the opposing defense
The young quarterback
Waits for the snap
When suddenly it all starts to make sense

He’s got all kinds of time
He’s got all kinds of time
All kinds of time
He’s got all kinds of time
All kinds of time

He takes a step back
He’s under attack
But he knows that no one can touch him now
He seems so at ease
A strange inner peace
Is all that he’s feeling somehow

He’s got all kinds of time
He’s got all kinds of time
All kinds of time
He’s got all kinds of time
All kinds of time

[Bridge]
He thinks of his mother
He thinks of his bride-to-be
He thinks of his father
His two younger brothers
Gathered around the widescreen TV

He looks to the left
He looks to the right
And there in a golden ray of light
Is his open man
Just as he planned
The whole world is his tonight

-Fountains of Wayne

The first winter storm of the season

“Accumulations… snowfall totals between 4 and 8 inches are likely… with locally heavier amounts possible.  Hazards… in addition to the falling snow… winds of 15 to 25 mph with gusts up to 35 mph are expected through tonight 
resulting in blowing and drifting snow. Wind chills are also forecast to be zero to 10 below by Friday morning.  Impacts… accumulating snow and reduced visibilities will result in difficult travel conditions into the evening hours.”
-Winter Weather Advisory

What yesterday was delicate light  illuminating the silhouettes of fluffy topped decorative roadside weeds, is today snow lighting upon fluffy fringes. Like those above.

After warnings of snow and wind and 20 degree weather getting worse throughout the day, the roads were driven by my little Saturn. This is what they looked like in the morning (above). It was a bit hairy because nothing was plowed yet. I’m glad I have anti-lock brakes. The secret to driving in the snow is to go really slowly and brake super early.

This is what it looked like in the afternoon. See, not so bad. The radio kept blaring warnings of impending doom but it never really got that bad.

Driving home it looked like this (above). I went 25-40 mph most of the time. That white streak across the road is a snow river. The wind blows the drifts across the road like a stream.

These are two barns side by side that I like. They are covered in snow.

Today wasn’t as bad as the warnings made it sound like it’d be. I was reminded of  a time I drove to Tahoe with some friends and it took 13 hours and I had to drive on 1 chain from Applegate to the cabin because the other one broke. We had a girl from Indiana in the car and she didn’t understand “why we’d need chains, they’re making too big a deal out of everything, I drive my Camero without chains everywhere in the snow.” Then we were driving through inches and inches of snow, with huge drifts on the sides of the road, through the mountains with cars in chains and 4 wheel drive all around us, and she said, “Well, I can see why you guys need chains…in the midwest when it gets like this we just don’t drive.”

Christmas

Christmas started in Chicago for us. Our flight out of Chicago was an early morning one, so we decided to hang out in the city the day before and stay at a hotel. As I’ve said before, Chicago is a great city with wonderful architecture. I brought my weird old camera with me. It used to be just old, but now it’s weird and old because ever since it got soaking wet it takes weird pictures, which actually turns out pretty cool. However, the fat blue stripe in the picture above is not the camera, it’s the shadow of a building behind the others, blocking the sun you see beaming around its sides. The weird pink is the camera, though.

We went to the Kristkindlemarkt, a bona fide German style market in a little square in the city. I didn’t get a picture of it but I did get a picture of these pigeons huddled around a flame like hobos around a fire. I don’t know what the flame is but I like to think it’s from the Olympic torch.

More pigeons. This is one of the booths that are by every bridge.

Attempted self portrait on the bridge. Only Daniel made it in. My weird old camera’s lens apparently has a closer view than I thought.

The view while sipping out drinks from the Signature Room in the Hancock Tower. The buildings all look like friends.

The sun created it’s own little trail reflecting off windows and buildings.

Then we flew to California! Those are some mountains. Or clouds. I’m not sure which.

The first day after we arrived we went to two breweries up near Santa Rosa, Red River Brewery and Bear Republic (the latter being everyone’s favorite). The guys got beer tasting flights like the above. The table was full of these tiny glasses.

In California we spent much time hanging out in front of one of my favorite fireplaces in the world. The whole 2.5 weeks were a blur of multiple Christmases, and seeing tons of people. It was just enough time to fill the soul up with everything happy and comfortable and family and california and beautiful to go back to Illinois ready to face winter and a lack of nature diversity.

Some time was spent hiking up to the old oak tree. It is a beautiful steadfast landmark in my mind, and our main source of the weather and smog report because from it you can see all the way to some valley – on a clear day.

On some of these walks we met some cows.

This is a portrait of Christmas at Duane’s. It somehow is a double negative of the Christmas tree and windows on one end of the room, and looking out two windows on the other end of the room at the fountain/flowerpot/pumpkincollection.

Christmas at my parents’ house. The hills aren’t green and that is weird for winter in California. It made it feel like summer. Also, this picture wasn’t taken with the weird old camera, but was edited with the amazing Picasa photo editing program! The latest version has all these styles you can apply to your pictures and it’s super fun. I took a bunch of family pictures for my friends and edited them all up with Picasa. Like this one.

So, belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Creative Thinking

I have been reading about new product development all day. I thought this was interesting.

Most people think reproductively—solve problems in ways that have worked for us in the past. Creative geniuses think productively, rethinking how to visualize the problem. Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman called it “inventing new ways to think.” For example, what is half of 13? Most of us would say 6½. But by redefining the problem we can identify other solutions.

• One half of “thirteen” is “thir.”
• One half of “1-3” is “1.”
• Cutting XIII horizontally through the middle gives VIII.

Can you think of others? The key here is to keep looking, even after you have found a solution!

[Crawford, C. Merle. New Products Management. 10. VitalSource Bookshelf. McGraw-Hill Learning Solutions, 2011, Sunday, January 08, 2012. <http://online.vitalsource.com/books/0077586832/id/ch04fig01>]

Welcome 2012

Today it was 40 degrees and we had this beautiful sunset. I couldn’t think of a better welcome home from DeKalb. Coming from a warm lovely two and a half weeks in blessed California, I was seriously not looking forward to returning to the cold, to having winter for 4 more months, to our not sunny apartment, to everything in DeKalb that I make a big deal about even thought it’s not really that big a deal. Then on the plane I went over these supposedly big issues I’d been avoiding thinking about all break, wrote out the truth about each one, and what I CAN do about each one, and actually felt better.  Sometimes you just need to get it all out, realize what reality is, realize what you can and can’t do about it, have a plan and leave the rest to  God. And then in DeKalb it’s been in the 40′s, and I got to ride outside with the sun on one end and the moon on the other, drive home to a beautiful sunset, and realized we’ve lived in our apartment long enough that it’s warm and cozy now even if it gets no sunlight. Someone at the barn said spring usually comes in March, and it would be amazing if we got away with a mild winter like this, so I’m crossing my fingers and toes and praying. And this is after the weathermen have been predicting for the past few months that this is going to be the worst winter ever. My bank teller lady told me that weathermen are right around 85% of the time. She said, “If I’m right 85% of the time I lose my job.” I said, “Airline industries have to be right 100% of the time.” She said she guesses it depends on the industry. I think weathermen need to up the ante. I worked with a guy that had his degree in weather at Outdoor Science and we’d ask him the weather forecast all the time but the only thing he’d ever say, with one finger in the air and a mysterious voice, was: “I’ll tell you this, the weather is always changing.” He’s the only weatherman I’ve ever trusted.

That’s DeKalb tonight, again. I feel like our trip home was bookended by beautiful sunsets. One of our last nights in California looked like this:

This was a really crazy cloud formation that apparently was the talk of the valley. It made the news here and people posted facebook pictures here. Supposedly it was formed by moisture and wind, the weatherman said, which doesn’t make me any more impressed with weathermen than I was before because I could have told you that. That reminds, there were some other cool clouds a month or so ago near DeKalb that I took a picture of. They had all these crazy holes in them, like someone had poked their finger up into them.

Okay, so the truth is that I finally figured out how to get pictures off my phone and onto my computer, which is where all these came from. I’m just so excited to share them, I’m going to keep on going. This is a picture of our groundhog friend back in spring. Right in the middle of the picture there is a hole in the grass, to the left of the tip of the concrete slab. That is her head sticking out. I think it’s a her because once I saw it outside of its hole and it was missing a lot of fur off its sides, and I like to think they’re like rabbit does that pull their fur to keep their babies warm. We job by here every time we go the gym and saw her often. We couldn’t get over how HUGE groundhogs are!

This is a mommy duck and her babies. They were trying to cross the street for no apparent reason other than to go to the liquor store. It was quite the ordeal, because cars are quite a bit bigger than ducks, and create enough wind to send baby ducks toppling over. So I stood as close as I could to them and tried to keep cars away. You’ll be happy to know they all made it across safely, but there were a few topples.

Well, I’m sure you want to hear about Christmas, but seeing how I’ve taken up enough room with my camera pictures, I’ll leave that for next time! In parting, I wish you all a Belated Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The People

The Prairie. 

“In the end, you need to master your craft, get over it, then focus on the people.”

— Larry Legend

“It was novembering hard outside” – R.H.

“Nnvsnu the Tsrungh stayed with me, however.  Poor bastard, I thought, stuck down there in the blughole of the universe, ceaselessly spinning his mind like a prayer wheel as he transmitted the mothercode.”
- From Russell Hoban’s The Medusa Frequency

Cindy has asked me to do a blog update for her.  I think it is because I plaintively told her that I was waiting with baited breath for her next blog update.  I think I am going to do it, though, just because.  After all, it is not a bad day for me to splatter my musings onto the blogodrome.  It is, after all, a day for gin, a day for mourning, a day for Russell Hoban.

“Rolling in the rocking sea, green-slimed and barnacled, the great head filled my vision.  It was a human head, rotting and eyeless.  It was enormous, a floating island over which seabirds wheeled crying under the heartless blue of the sky.  I tried to climb on to it as it rolled but my fingers slipped on the green slime and I scraped my flesh bloody on the barnacles as I fell back into the water.  The great cavern of the mouth opened and showed its white teeth, its red tongue, its cry was like the rending of mountains …”
- From Russell Hoban’s The Medusa Frequency

In college for a year Joshua Smith was my roommate.  Josh and I share an irrational appreciation of literary apotheosis: that feeling of being stretched out by Art so that you settle over everything like a thin sheet of staticky cotton and you don’t just experience the world but you wrap around it.  Anyways at one point Josh and I were both immersed in Watership Down and one morning during this phase Josh emerged from his room, hair askew and haggardly bathrobed, owl-eyed and enraptured.  As I gazed at him through one bloodshot eye (having stayed up late the night before with my roommates drinking whiskey out of glasses that used to belong to Larry Flint and discovering that San Diego is Cowslip’s Warren) he brandished his worn dogeared copy at me and he said to me “Daniel,” he said, “This book is not about Bunnies.”
“No?” I asked.
“It is about us.”

Russell Hoban, who died today at the age of 86, wrote about me also.  Well, about me and Nnvsnu the Tsrungh.  Me and Nnvsnu the Tsrungh and castrated Jews on pilgrimages to Jerusalem and post-apocalyptic puppet shows and map makers and lions and Elijah.  You may know him as the author of the Frances the Badger books.  While I delight in his children’s books, if you have not experienced his novels, you have deprived yourself.  The man has died, and we have lost something good.  The Lord giveth…

“If you cud even jus see 1 thing clear the woal of whats in it you cud see every thing clear. But you never wil get to see the woal of any thing youre all ways in the middl of it living it or moving thru it.”
- From Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker

I ask Cindy what sort of things I should bllorg about when I acquire the task of bblogring for her and she encourages me to report.  That is, she encourages me to give the whatwherewhenhowwho of our Midwestern Linsenlife.  Actually, to be fair, she has figured out my pattern of asking for clarification, and now gives me very specific directions, the way you give directions to a slow child (not “clean your room” but “fold your clothes and put them in drawers, throw the garbage in the garbage can, put the toys on the shelf, then vacuum the floor “).  Today she said “write about Russell Hoban, and Star Wars, and Urban Planning.”  The Russell Hoban part probably makes sense to you now, but what the Star Wars and Urban Planning means is that my semester is over.

Some of you may not know what a semester is.  Well, of course you know what a “semester” is, but idiolectical translation is an ethical issue, I think (that is something I decided this semester) and so I will make your task easier.  A “semester” is 15 weeks of feverish searching through obscure philosophical articles to discover what you need to read to understand a topic.  It is 14 weeks of shouting translations of 1^st order predicate logic at undergraduates who think you are an asshole because they got 8 points out of 112 possible on the last test.  13 weeks of drinking in bars with the other GAs bitching (justifiedly) about the freakishly lowered standards of university education and the exploitative policies of higher education in America.  12 weeks of saying “oh shit I need to figure out what my papers are going to be on.”  Also etc.  This semester I got to write about surgical trepanning, dam engineering, and the crotchetiness of logical positivists.

In other news, the Wandering Jew thrives in its water bottles, and will be transplanted to new soil soon, there has been a worm diaspora (not a migration, but more of a Babylonian style relocation), and I am more of an asshole (at least attitudinally on the inside) about municipal environmental issues than ever.  I am also enamored of the relationship between formal systems and natural language, and plan on learning lambda calculus over the break (don’t worry, I still love Cindy more, and I don’t think it is possible to be unfaithful with a formal semantic system).  Oh yeah, also William Butler Yeats.

“Sharna pax and get the poal
When the Ardship of Cambry comes out of the hoal.”
- From Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker

Now I suspect that most of my wife’s audience thinks, on the rare occasions when I take the proverbial wheel, “well shazwaggles!  I hate it when HE writes these things.  He curses like a shy sailor, and rambles in non-speak and crypto-jargon, leaving me empty of any edification (which, of course, is why I eat blogs in the first place).”  Well I am only a proto-man, and I have no edification for you, but I think, if you squint just enough, you can see that I am gesturing toward it (and not obscenely).  Read Russell Hoban.  The man had a gift.  Also, for the rest of your appetites, listen to Orlando di Lasso, drink Gin with some tonic, and smell your Christmas trees.  The year is dying, and as for me, I fully intend to enjoy our time at home for the holidays, gripping my sister’s dogs firmly by their chin scruff and looking deep in their eyes, demanding the 1^st knowing.  I only hope you can throttle life as effectively.

‘Why are you weeping?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
‘I am suffering from an attack of history,’ I said.
‘It will pass,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
- From Russell Hoban’s Pilgermann

Read any good books lately?

Why yes, yes I have. A friend from the barn who is in a book club gave me two of the books to borrow, and being as they’re borrowed books, I had to read them quicker than I normally read my own books (aka within a few months). And I read them really quickly because they’re so good and suspenseful, the kind you can’t stop.

The first one is “The Covenant” by Naomi Ragen.

It’s about a Jewish family living in Jerusalem in the turmoil and terrorism going on there. It’s a pretty recent book so it gives you a good picture of what many peoples’ lives are like over there, which I can barely begin to imagine. The story goes like this: the father and daughter are kidnapped by terrorists while the mother is very pregnant and goes into labor from the shock, then her grandma and her grandma’s 3 friends from the Holocaust concentration camp work together to try to save the family through all their little connections. That last part seems a little radical and hard to believe for me, but whatever, it happened. This book is definitely suspenseful and informative, though it’s not a true story, but I’m sure many similar ones have happened. I’m not sure what else to say about it, except it’s better than I thought it would be from the book jacket and worth the read.

The second one is “These Is My Words” by Nancy E. Turner.

Within the first 10 minutes I couldn’t put it down, unfortunately for my craft show booth. It is Harry-Potter-style-all-I-want-to-do-is-read-my-book. It’s about a woman’s life in the wild west Arizona Territories of the late 1800′s. I would say it is the closest thing to a romance novel I’ve ever read, but so much more, because it goes into detail about the pioneer life and is written so well and with such voice and with such flow and tying together of things. It is written in diary form the way the main girl speaks, and she says so much with so few words. For example, “As I was sitting on their tiny stool to have my feet measured, the Chinese family gathered around and talked in their little bid sounds and smiled, and they offered me a cup of tea which was very good. Well, I have got my skirt lifted for a little bit for him to measure my feet, and there is that soldier boy who thinks he is friend with Doc Holliday peeking over a harrow hanging off their wagon and grinning at my ankles like he is seeing something fancy. I said to the Chinese mama, even though I know she doesn’t understand, that he is a scoundrel and I pointed to him and made a frown. Well, she took off after him and chased that boy from their wagon like he was a snake, all the while scolding him at the top of her voice. I can see we will be friends and she looks after her children just like all Mamas and Papas do” (p.39). Yes, there are Chinese Immigrants on their wagon train and yes, I can imagine exactly what that scene looked like in way more words than the one paragraph holds. The main character also uses these great words from back then that I want to use all the time now, like “I am purely outnumbered” (p.2), “got in a quandry” (p.2), “fellows” (p.6), “I will sorely miss his little puckery smile and all” (p.10), “This contest is plum foolishness to me” (p.30), and things like that. And look at that, I’ve almost written a whole paragraph about it. I was ready to turn you over to this great review instead of writing my own because I spent too much time getting lost in the review lady’s blog instead of writing in my own blog.

Anyway.

Those are two enjoyable books to read, if you’re looking for some recommendations.

Also, just a warning, you might cry if you read either of them.