mycalicocat

Seems like BarelyBlogging had a bad week. Me too, except it was better than the week before. I know that sPorcupine didn't think much of hers. So it goes sometimes. But while many people find Friday evenings a time for happy hours and such, I tend to have had about enough of the making-a-living part of my life.

I have some tried-and-true tricks for this.

Number one is to disengage --remembering that there is an entire world out there full of movies, music, literature, history, art, faraway cities like Katmandu or Bangalore, oceans, porpoises, giraffes, sand, mountains, tigers sleeping in the jungle, red pandas, etc. plus about a zillion people who never heard of me and would be bored out of their minds with an account of my day, and I should "change the subject in my head" to something more interesting, more enlightening or more entertaining than my job and its daily doses of nonsense.
I have gotten very good at this over the years, because if I don't stop myself, I have a tendency to finish the meat and chew on the bones when it comes to problems.

Number two is to do my custard pie meditation. This involves imagining having an endless supply of custard pies and being rich enough to pay somebody (possibly a really annoying clown or a mime) to throw pies into the faces of various persons on my list. At one time the list when all the way back to second grade, but I have let some of that go.
I have another good fantasy which is called just driving west all the way out to the Pacific coast, looking at little towns along the way.

Number three is to remember that "the evil of the day is sufficient thereof" which is to remind myself my time is too precious to give any problem or aggravation more of my time than it absolutely requires.

Number four is to recite to myself a line from Yeats --
"When such as I cast out remose,
then such a sweetness flows into the breast;
We must laugh and we must sing.
We are blest by everything,
and everything we look upon is blest."

Here is a story about Nora-Endub's art show from the Danville newspaper
I have tried to get the photos onto my blog but haven't succeeded.

Nora Weston says she sees herself as a storyteller.
(Jennifer Brummett photo)
Worn Bricks, by Nora Weston. (Jennifer Brummett photo)
Tuesday April 25, 2006
DHS student's artwork a blend of hand-drawn and digital
By JENNIFER BRUMMETT
jenb@amnews.com
Nora Weston is a storyteller. She is not content to have artistic images that stop inside a frame, she says. Weston likes the art she creates to be part of a larger story, although they also should be able to stand alone.
"I like art to have a point, to know why I'm being told to look at it," explains the 16-year-old, who has her first formal exhibit running currently. "I want to have learned something at the end of it."
She says if she's just made something "pretty," she feels like she's "cheating."
"It's not all that special to so something that's just pretty," Weston notes.
In her artist's statement, Weston says she started drawing when she was little, but didn't do it "seriously, passionately" until she was in eighth grade.
"I mainly drew characters from my head solely for my own amusement," it reads. "I still do this, but now I work more for the amusement of the viewer."

A glance at the works in Weston's exhibit and the accompanying commentary with the works supplies a novel combination of elements and a meticulous attention to detail: sulfite paper; graphite on Bristol paper; line art in pen - or pencil - color in Photoshop Elements. Weston explains Bristol paper is an art paper that is thick and acid-free, "good for graphite. Sulfite paper is good for pencil drawings, she says.
"It's good for blending, but hard to erase on."
Weston does a lot of drawing by hand, she says, by Photoshop Elements enables her to do coloring.
"I never found a mode of coloring I liked," says Weston, who is on the forensics team at Danville High School and takes Art I.
"Photoshop is a good way - it's smooth. ... I like pieces colored in Photoshop."
She likes both black-and-white and color work.
"Black-and-white is very elaborate and detailed," Weston explains. "I usually do color work in Photoshop."
Weston says she draws on a Wacom Graphire tablet, a stylus.
The drawing goes into the computer, she says, and she works on it in Photoshop Elements, software she started with when she wanted to do a comic that ultimately she abandoned.
However, she still wants to get into comic-making, animation and illustration. Jhonen Vasquez is a favorite comic creator, and she reads newspaper comics, a few manga, and several Web comics as well. Vazquez writes "very intricate story lines - not too heavy, not too dramatic, and mostly funny," she says.
Weston also has started another comic recently. "It's figured out in my head," she says.
More of Weston's artwork can be found here.Copyright:The Advocate-Messenger 2006

Today while I was writing a story about pasta salads I heard on the scanner that a church roof had collapsed, so I got my camera and drove about 16 miles and took pictures of cops and construction workers and ambulances and got some notes and then I drove back and went to work on my pasta salad article again.

This is on the order of being a Jane Austen fan on the one hand and having industrial strength jumper cables on the other.


Please think of two things about yourself that are in startling contrast (or might seem to be to some)

Also if you are in possession of the Houston Home Journal tomorrow, check out the column that is entirely about E.J.

i'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

(anybody know who wrote that?)

I have had a preposterous, tiresome, frustrating and annoying month of overwork which I started extricating myself from two weeks ago and am now done with except for one onerous project which has the good quality of being do-able, and being finished when it's finished -- which will be sometime today.

That said, I came home Friday feeling liked been stomped on by a bunch of rhinoceroses, and but have had an Unday since, a version of Saturday that involves not even being a responsible adult or a civic minded person. Now, I need to get my life back, which includes getting my blog back and will throw out some topics and hope to lure you all back into a discussion, either by getting you to make inadvertent personal philosophy statements, or by getting you to talk trivia.

What is the purpose of life? As you've gotten older (IF you are getting older) have your ideas about that changed? Have your values changed?

What are your favorite absolutely simple and good things to make and eat when you are by yourself?

What’s the best ice cream there is? (I’m voting for Ben and Jerry’s butter pecan, but assume there are some chocolate freaks out there)

Who's your Person of the Week?

Mine is Wen Yi Wang, the woman who just stood there and yelled at the president of China about his persecution of the Falun Gong sect, with our president standing there as well. What composure! Events like that are all so organized and full of pomp and circumstance and she just stood her ground and yelled out what she thought needed yelling out. She yelled at Bush too. She was arrested of course, since we can’t have freedom of yelling at heads of state, but was interviewed later, and I much admired her composure and courage and her yelling until the police took her away. I can really identify with that, but would never have the chutzpah to do it.


Has anybody else bought a stationary bike –exercise thing and wound up using it as a clothes rack? Or, putting it another way, have you ever had a big enthusiasm that fizzled out?

I realize this is random, but I am in the process of pieces of my one-and-only brain back together with Gorilla Glue. All comments welcome.

My kitchen floor is now covered with hard, uncooked egg noodles.

Fitz the Cat is a fierce hunter who doesn't want to leave the house. Today, while I was putting away groceries, he captured an entire bag of rotini and fought it fiercely around the kitchen. I haven't yet checked to see whether, in the end, he got the bag open.

I hereby call for all readers to share the silliest thing their current cats have ever done.

Hi everybody –
The blog has been largely forgotten for a couple of weeks because I took on a new job, which has chewed up all my time, not because there’s been a lot of news (The news stopped the day I took the job) but because I’ve had, like Rumpelstiltsken, to weave gold out of straw, and also because I've got a help shortage.

I was in Barely’s domain today, covering the County Commission meeting. The high point was when they read a resolution supporting organ donation (This being Organ Donation Month) and the Chairman said to Commissioner McMichael, “I don’t think they’d want your brain,” to which Commissioner McMichael responded, “I sure wouldn’t want your ears.”

I’m not sure whether he was referring to the chairman’s deafness or to the fact that his ears stick out, but anyway, that’s the kind of news I get to report. (This levity will be reported (with brevity) as a brief.

We also had a story, which I was not fortunate enough to write, about the Governor neutering a puppy. This was one of the gifts people drew chances for or silent auctioned for at the “Fur Ball” to raise funds for the new animal shelter, and I personally had grave doubts about whether the Gov.’s veterinary license was still valid. (How would one check on such a thing?) Anyway, I will post the pictures later of the Gov. suited up to “assist” Dr. Westmoreland, and our State Senator, in suit and tie, standing at the south end of said puppy looking distinctly queasy. It is one of my favorite news pictures ever.

And we had pretty good coverage of a protest that never happened (also not written by me). First it didn’t happen in front of Warner Robins PD, and then it didn’t happen on a larger scale in front of the courthouse.. This had to do with one Mr. Felder, who is apparently being prosecuted despite his innocence. First, it was going to be a big one, and nobody came. Then the guy who called the first time called us back and said it was going to be a “real live protest” like the ones they used to have, but nobody came again except media and law enforcement.

Anyway, we work with what we’ve got.

I invite comments on why community newspapers continue to exist. Is it because we don’t charge for engagement announcements, because we put birthdays on the front page, or because television stations have not yet figured out how to run legal ads?