Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: badgers, bears, cows, drunken revelry, sausage, teeth
This morning when I reached into my coat pocket for my house keys my hand ran into a foreign object. Instead of pulling it out and looking at it I decided that I wanted to figure out what it was by feel (which is sometimes a bad idea and sometimes a very bad idea). The object felt like either a wad of hardened gum or the tooth of a large animal like a deer or a cow or maybe a shark. Both of those things have ended up in my pocket before though not real recently and not without my remembering putting them there. Not wanting to leave myself in suspense I removed the object revealing it to myself.
The object was brown and about an inch and a half long. It looked like a claw from a really big dog or a bear or maybe a badger. “What the fuck?” I said to myself. For some reason I started thinking back to last week when I went out drinking with Don and the guys from Three Floyds. There’s this large gap in my memory from that night to which I’ve been returning every time I find something peculiar or out of place in the house. (That gap is holding some answers–I just know it.) I wondered “Did we run into a bear on the way home?” I’d remember a bear, wouldn’t I?
All of a sudden my brain kicked in and I remembered where I’d seen the object before. And it was from that night we were out drinking. I remembered being at Woody and Anna’s, home of the giant pumpkin, and someone handing me a piece of this rope sausage type stuff they were selling at the bar. Like beef jerky. It was tasty. I ate as much of it as I could but toward the end of the piece my teeth weren’t sharp enough to bite through the casing so I stealthily put it in my pocket. So it was sausage and not a bear claw. That makes much more sense. Oh how that made me laugh this morning.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: beets, bob foster, juice, living room walls, pompeii
Yesterday I ate a hot dog and today I ate a tangerine. What other sorts of food would be available to me if I were to eat only food mentioned in Led Zeppelin songs? (I can think of two more…)
SO. Fun is over here. It’s sleeting outside. It’s cold. For the most part cold equals end of fun.The Lost School band had an outdoor gig at an area co-op grocery store yesterday but it got cancelled because it was too cold and windy. The real tragedy is that, having no good excuse to drag myself to the co-op, I didn’t buy any organic beets for juice time. Now my juice will be pedestrian and flavorless! Well, not flavorless but decidedly less interesting to look at. Beet juice makes whatever you mix it with look like blood and that makes it fun to drink. The crappy weather has only been here for hours and already it is ruining things.
Last night was kind of a harbinger of things to come. It was cold outside and the forecast was for more cold. Sure, there’s going to be some warm days yet but not in a month or so. It’s time to get those indoor projects lined up. I figure I can make juice, which I like to do, and also fix the living room walls.
My strategically placed painting covers a lot of the peeling paint but you can still see some if you look. This is one of those things I’ve been putting off because the longer I wait the more paint will fall off naturally. Also, no one cares what our walls look like. Bob Foster remarked that they look like Pompeii and thinks we should use (or continue to use) the destroyed by a volcano look as a theme for the room. Unless I paint them an entirely different color I don’t think anyone will notice they’ve been fixed, except maybe Bob Foster, and that’s just because he will be disappointed that his suggestion was not taken seriously. So I’ve got a lot of different issues to contend with here. It’s not just fixing the walls, it’s keeping everyone happy.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: energy conservation, frontline, giant pumpkin
Me and Don went out drinking with his pals from Three Floyds Brewing on Wednesday. Don’t do that too often, the bar hopping. That’s why I called in sick to work yesterday. Hope my pecker head boss isn’t mad.
A discovery of note in our drunken adventure was a bar called Woody and Anna’s. It’s somewhere between East Washington and Atwood avenues. (Details are sketchy.) It’s a quaint, friendly little place owned by people named Woody and Anna. I would like a bar like that. Don and I toy with the idea of turning the building that houses my studio into a bar. We’re going to call it “The ‘Vark”. It’s a fun thing to think about until you remember that, in the past, relatively small scale serving of alcohol on gallery night has resulted in the police having to be called. Maybe that isn’t such a hot idea.
But back to Woody and Anna’s and the pumpkin–Every year they have a “Guess The Weight” of an enormous pumpkin contest. Last year’s was 160lb. As you can read from the notes posted on the squash the prize for guessing the weight had been just the pumpkin. Later on, presumably to stimulate more guesses (at fifty cents each)$10.00 was added to the prize pool. Now you’re talking. A couple hundred pounds of perishable food item alone could be seen as more of a burden than a prize.
In other news…Isn’t October taking forever? God. I think part of the reason it’s going so slow has something to do with a little goal I set for myself which is to not turn the heat on in the house until Nov. 1. I use as much electricity in the studio as we do in the house. And I have to heat the studio to 70 degrees from mid Sept. on for my animals. So Madison Gas and Electric is getting plenty from me already. Also, I saw a Frontline episode that made me think about power usage across the board. Did you know it takes a pound of coal to power a tv for four hours? Not that we’re going to go without tv–especially when it’s so cold in the house that there isn’t anything else to do but sit under a blanket and watch it. This weekend we’ve got highs in the 40’s and lows in the 20’s so we’ll see how conservationist we’re feeling then. Testing the limits of human adaptability is fun as long as it’s not absolutely necessary.
Even though I had the slows yesterday I managed to list some new frogs on Etsy. You don’t have to buy them, just look at them. It’s good work!
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: period clothing, soloflex, tag, virtual couch
Linda of Bella Beads tagged me for yet another one of those tag things. They’re kinda fun so I will do it again. The bare minimum, as always.
1) Right now all of my incoming links to the blog are from stock trading sites and sites that offer tips on poker playing. No idea why that is.
2) My earliest childhood memory is of my mom scraping my shoe against the cement stairs in front of our old house. She was trying to remove a dead worm or worms from the bottom of my shoe while it was still on my foot. I suspect, but I don’t know, that my brother had something to do with the worms being there. I must have been about two at the time. I never asked my mom to confirm this cause I doubt she’d remember scraping something off my shoe 39 years ago. She does read the blog though so maybe she’ll comment.
3) I cannot hypnotize my prey. I have to go buy it pre-packaged from the grocery store like everyone else. I say this to my shame.
4) I think Renee Zellweger looks freakish in period clothing.
5) I think the 80’s were a culturally dead decade that produced the worst music and movies of our time.
6) I think that the guy on the Soloflex commercial who gave all of his fat clothes to his fat friends is the most insufferable human on Earth.
7) I’m afraid that if I give away all my secrets I will lose my mystique and none of you will want to electronically chase me around the virtual couch anymore. Our lives will become repetitive and we will grow to hate each other. So I’m not revealing anything more.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: creativity, dolphins, new ideas welcome, something besides fish would be nice, wet suit
I guess I’m still thinking about that dolphin segment in yesterday’s CBS This Morning Show. Not because I like dolphins (I find them insufferable) but because I enjoy watching people invent tests that measure animal intelligence to see if I can’t get some tips on measuring my own.
On TMS, humans were trying to measure the dolphin’s capacity for creativity. They did this by letting the dolphins play in a pool with a bunch of different toys. They could play as long as they wanted as long as they didn’t repeat the ways in which they “play” (pick up, toss, swim with) the toys. Each unique time they played with a toy the testers reinforced them with a whistling sound. If they did the same thing over and over they had to stop playing.
Since the dolphins are smart enough to understand the concept of “different” and the whistling sound (or something it represented) was adequate reward for their efforts, they invented plenty of new ways to play with their toys. I know “different” and I have a figurative pool with lots of toys in it and I have opposable thumbs. There’s no reason in the world I shouldn’t be able to outshine the dolphins in the creative department. I just have to get me a whistling human in a wet suit to motivate me when I’m making beads.
My Photoshop is back! Hooray! I screwed around a good part of the day yesterday trying to install it. Don finally got it to install today. Apparently there were some programs in my start up collective that were causing it to not open. I never would have thought of that. Anyway, it’s back and Don is great. Now I can show you a picture of a mirror I made for the bathroom.
That’s the mirror outside. This is it in the bathroom:
That’s some hard to photograph glass, there. The little fused tiles are made of black irridized Bullseye and dichroic glass. You glue the dicro on (coated side up) and fuse the pieces face down on fiber paper to make the dichroic sink in flush with the irridized rectangles. Then you grind it and solder it together like a stained glass window. Pretty slick and pretty simple. I used to make these all the time for the shop. They’re purty.
SO, did you know that elephants can recoginze their own reflections in mirrors? That fun fact was on an all-animal episode of CBS This Morning. A teaser for the show promised a picture of a cuttlefish and a film clip of a cute little hedgehog so, of course, I watched the whole thing thinking that there would be more cuttlefish and more hedgehog where that came from. And, of course, there wasn’t because the show was too busy concentrating on…what do you think? Dolphins and monkeys. Always with the dolphins and the monkeys. That grinds my gears-CBS using a hedgehog to lure me in.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog | Tags: cnn, focus group, halloween, joe the plumber
Convo from last night:
Our pal Rick (to Don): You could go as Joe the Plumber for Halloween and have a cardboard sink attached to your back so that when you bent over you would look like you were working under a sink, with the ass crack and everything…
Me: Do you want to go as Joe the Plumber, Don? I can hook you up with a paper mache sink.
Don: Can I have “Vote for Obama” written on my ass crack?
Everyone: AHAHHAHAHAHAH!!!
Yeah, even though it’s pure gold, I don’t think that costume idea is going to go through. It would just result in another ass crack blog post I’d have to bury. Besides, everyone is going to want to be Joe The Plumber.
So Halloween is coming up. We now have kind of a “thing” we do each year which is go to this bar called “Cully’s” (in nearby Stoughton) for a party. (We went for the first time last year so if we go again it will be a tradition.) Last year, you may recall, after multiple assurances that he was not going to dress up, Don went as Osama Bee Ladin (that’s Erika in the pic). A very cute idea, that. Not wearing a costume to this party is not a huge deal but, since I’ve got all this technical knowledge and all these materials at my disposal, it makes me feel kind of inadequate as an artist when Don is able to come up with a tangy idea and I’m not.
I’m toying with the idea now of going as that box that CNN has down at the bottom of the screen (during the debates) that reflects the likes and dislikes of their focus group. I like that box. It is a new addition to my reality that I made a few weeks ago when I started watching the news in earnest. I rather like the thought of a box-like structure keeping me spatially separated from people, but I think, depending on where the arm holes go, the box might separate me spatially from my drink as well. So that needs work. It’s just good to have an idea, for once.
Almost forgot! There’s a sale in the Etsy Store. Of course there is! Out with the old, I say, (I hope).
Bob Foster- “Hey, Sean, I had a dream about you last night.”
Sean- “Was I killing someone in it?”
Everybody-”AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!”
Thanks to James Lee for writing that one down so we would remember it.
So the other day this fellow, a landscaping guy, was working on burying drains that hook up to our downspouts. A building inspector shows up and the guy just takes off. That was our first clue that maybe things weren’t going exactly to code. As long as the situations are corrected by Friday we’re not going to get fined. That is the important thing. We haven’t paid them yet-that’s the other important thing. And the yard looks great–they did a stellar, stellar job–which makes you wonder why anything would have to get fucked up in the end like this. Oh well. Who has the time to worry about every little thing that fucks up. I just thought that it was kinda funny that the guy ran away. That’s what I wanted to tell you about.
Photographic documentation of our illegal drains is conspicuously absent because Photoshop suddenly decided to stop opening on the studio computer. In order to put some stuff up on Etsy yesterday I had to bring a disk of pics to plug into the old, old, old, gigantic dinosaur Dell computer at the house. That thing, god bless it, it still works reliably but it’s functions are accompanied by some pretty mysterious noises. If ever I have to use it regularly I swear I’m going to attach a crank (like from a meat grinder or something) to it so I can get some exercise and make believe I’m helping while it wakes up from it’s slumber. (Like mocking Don when he’s tired, mocking helpless machines is fun for me.) The computer took 12 minutes to email pictures to the store which is somewhat longer than it takes me to walk there.
So even though the spending caps have been put on everything I had to get a copy of Photoshop 5.5. As far as I’m concerned, Photoshop is more essential than food. Mostly because, when things go well, it’s how you pay for food. It’s also harder to get for free than food is. My friends and my parents and nearby anonymous garden owners all have food, but no Photoshop.
Version 5.5 is what I learned on and it is all I want to use. We had someone install version 7 on that piece of shit Imac that died years ago and I never used it because paint bucket and gradient were on the same button. I couldn’t get past that. Those are the ones I use all the time! The have to have separate icons. So the bad thing about new, 10 year old soft ware is that it’s hard to find. The good thing is that, because no one wants it, it doesn’t cost that much.
And so, the morals of the stories are: Pictures will be back in the blog soon. Even though it’s fun, it’s not nice to mock things. Make sure your landscaping company is registered, and watch out for Sean.
Filed under: Bloggidy Blog
In the spirit of posting “before” pictures in a place that I can find them again, here is a picture of our upstairs hallway. You can see the chimney behind that wall there. That’s where the wetness is localized. When we moved in that wall had a small amount of water damage. We assumed it had something to do with the old chimney, because it had no mortar, so we had it lined 3 yrs ago and then rebuilt the outside part the other month.
So that wall is now about as wet as it has ever been, even though it hasn’t rained in a while. Since it’s about the consistency of craft foam I pick at the paint a lot when I’m walking by. I like to pick. The other week we cut a hole in the wall to see what was back there and did re con up in the attic to find out where all the wetness was coming from and everything was dry as a bone. The roof is unbreached. Don cut into the attic floor above the wall and it was dry there. You’d think you’d see mold or stains or something, somewhere. So we’re still betting on condensation issues and also leakage that occured before the chimney was fixed. The chimney is almost completely exposed through out the house so it’s easy to see that it is also dry in the basement, dry as it goes through the kitchen and dry as it goes through the attic. It’s only covered for the eight or so feet behind this wall, which now is almost not a wall at all.
We’re not overly about repairing this thing because 1) We earnestly believe that the worst of the wetness is over and it has to dry out this winter 2) It’s upstairs so it practically isn’t in our reality and 3) There’s just other stuff to do. All I’m saying by posting this is don’t be surprised if, one day, the figure of a weeping saint appears magically in the picked off paint on the wall. Because that would explain everything.
