The Center of the Anomaly

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As noted in a previous post, Lemur King wants me to talk about myself.  Here are the rules: 

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you’d like.

Just to make sure rule one is in full compliance:  Lemur King’s Folly. 

And, just to get rule five out of the way…

Seven facts!  Gracious, that’s a tall order since I’m not all that interesting, and what I do have I already put in my “User’s Manual”.  Hmm.  Ok here’s something. (more…)

I watched a show on the History Channel this morning about Doomsday prophesies of the year 2012.  According to the Mayan calendar the End of Times is December 12th 2012.  There were others too that point to this same time period where there will be great geological and / or political upheaval.  Among those noted:  the I Ching, Hopi Indian prophecy, web-bots, Merlin, and of course, The Book of Revelation. Although I thought they kinda shoe-horned that one in since it’s rather vague about a specific date when it hits the fan.  Conspicuously absent was Nostradamus in the lineup.  I was surprised.  Perhaps he had a different date that would mess up their 2012 theme. 

That kinda sucks that they predict World’s End during the Christmas holiday week.  I’m always on vacation that week.  Anyway, we all have only 1,642.97 days to get our shit in order.  I’m marking my calendar.  How about you?

Lemur King tags me with his meme.  I’m near the end of a book, so no blogging right now, but I acknowledge his tag and will fulfill soon.

I don’t need any furniture, but by golly I’m going look at some a big ol’ buttload of it.  The World Market Center is open to the public for this weekend, and the Parental Units and I are going to wander around in it for a couple hours.  Check out the Wikipedia on the World Market Center.  That place is HUUUGE and it’s getting even bigger next month when they open the third building.  Rod Stewart will play the opening it seems.

Usually the place is only open to furniture dealers but twice a year they have a big clearance sale and they charge you 10 bucks a head just for the priveledge of walking through the doors.  Like I said, I really don’t need any furniture, but hey, who knows?  I might find a bargain I just can’t refuse.

****Update****

Shopping was limited to the first and second floors of buildings A & B.  Not all the displayers participated in the sale, but It was still HUGE.  We spent the better part of three hours there going through it all.  There were some deep discounts on the floor samples around (40 - 50%) but the vast majority wasn’t in a style that really appealed to me.  The stuff that did was still to expensive for me.  I didn’t really need any furniture anyway.  But…I don’t like my coffee and end table anymore, so I had my eye out for possible replacements.  I didn’t see anything that interested me though.

I did find something else that really interested me in one of the first showrooms we entered: a leather turtle tortiose ottoman.  It’s really, really cool but I can’t get the image to load for some reason tonight.  I’ll try again tomorrow.  Anyway, the price for it is $500+.  I have no place for it.  I don’t need it.  The cat would just scratch it up anyway.  My parents bought a really nice jewellry box there and my Dad found out that they were willing to bargain - $475 to $310 on the box.

I don’t need no damn leather tortise ottoman.

I am not dead.  Nor pining for the fjords.  Gotta run for now, but I will put something up a little later.

I’m in the process of buying a new computer.  Because of the weekend / holiday I won’t be able to get it have it up and running until sometime Wednesday.  It’s $1400, which wouldn’t be too bad if I could actually use it to play games, or surf the internet with it and whatnot.  But this one doesn’t do any of that stuff.  It will just tell my car when to shift gears.  That’s all it does.  This cuts rather severely into my toy budget, and it’s not a very fun toy at all.

In other news, I’m in the process of watching some watercolor instruction videos I bought and they are quite the eye-openers.  They are really showing me a lot of the things I’ve been doing wrong and why I’ve been unhappy with a lot of the stuff I’ve done so far.  With the new techniques I’m learning I should be able to start putting out some really nice stuff a lot faster than I used to.  Hopefully.  Stay tuned!

Let’s take a closer look at those tree forms.

Now that I look at them again they’re kinda Dr. Suessish.  Hm.  We’ll just keep that to ourselves m’kay?

Looking around on my palette I knew I couldn’t go with any cool shades, so all the blues and greens were out.  Considering my sky anything in the yellow realm was right out too.  That left the browns, reds and maybe violets.  I started to play around with some more of my quinacridones on separate paper.  Q.Magenta and q.burnt sienna made a beautiful color that really stood distinct from the sky.  I practised some strokes, decided on a mixture and went for it.  See the results below the fold.

(more…)

It’s been what?  9 Days since a post?  Jenkies H. Crackers.  Not only that, but we’re already through a goodly chunk of 2008 too.  That’s just crazy.  Not much excitement here at Casa Del Yorl, so days drift by unremarked.  Time to make some remarkes then.

I finished and poly coated the trebuchet the weekend before last.  It looks great!  I also found a sack of steel pachinko machine balls I’ve been carrying around since the 70’s and they’re perfect for the ballest bucket on the catapult.  I had to fiddle with the string lengths again to get it to fire right.  I also lost the red clay ball that came with it for a while and had a hard time finding just the right object for size and weight.  I turned out that a small spool of thread was just right and it whipped it right across the room and thwacked into a wall 20 feet away.  I’ll get some video of it and post it soon.  Promise.

What else?  Oh, the watercolor class is over.  Yesterday was the final Class Critique for the regular students.  Zwups!  I thought the final day was this Wednesday.  I wasn’t finished with the painting I was working on and didn’t bring any of the others I did this semester so I didn’t participate.  I just worked on the painting instead.  It still isn’t finished, but it’s getting close and it might be the best one ever.  I’ll put up another post about that in a bit, because it’s gonna be kinda long. 

That’s it for now.  I’ll type at you later.

Been busy. I test-fired the Death Star trebuchet at work and I was disappointed at first. The instructions said to fill the bucket half-way with gravel or sand (I used sandy dirt and gravel) and it had no oomph whatsoever. The clay ball only went 5 feet or so. Filling it up more did little to boost the distance really. One guy suggested putting coins in and he had a bunch of pennies so we put a bunch of those in on the dirt. We started to get some distance finally - 10 feet or so. Still, not the 20 as promised. Obviously we needed more weight. I dumped out the dirt and rock and put all the pennies he had and tossed in a few more coins. I cast around for more metal stuff and eyeballed my paper clips. Then I found my screwdriver/socket tool - ha steel! I threw the sockets and screwdriver heads in. Coin Guy had a small faucet head and I put that in too. That bucket was a lot heavier now. I set it up and let her rip. MUCH better! Big height too! Too high though. I was launching off the top of a long table and the ball was hitting a ceiling beam. I put it on the floor and launched from there and got a distance of 15 -16 feet. I was still getting a lot of hight that should be going for distance. I played around with the string length and by lengthening just a little bit I got a nice ballistic arc and BAM! 20 feet! Huzzah! No, I didn’t get any video of it because I suck. Soon though! Plus, I want to get it finished so it looks pretty for the camera. This weekend, I promise.

On the watercolor front: I did a couple and they suck. Oh yes. They will not be posted. I wrote earlier about stretching a half-sheet of the Arches 300 lb in my new frame and I was really eager about trying it out. I also dropped a chunk of change ($130) on new paints that finally came in late last week. I fooled around with color swatches on some small samples of the 300 lb paper I was going to use and had some disturbing results. The colors went on beautifully, but as they dried they kind of “broke up”. White specks started popping through. It was fibers of the paper. When completely dry the darker color swatches were shot through with white specks. They looked really bad. I could get rid of them by re-wetting the painted areas, but that’s not such a great thing when doing watercolor.

Monday evening I went in to class but forgot my paper sample with the swatches. I did some more on another piece and showed the problem to one of the other advanced ladies. She didn’t know what the problem was, but she never paints on 300 lb paper. The other lady who does didn’t show up. The instructor was busy with the class and didn’t have a much time to look at it. Well, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time and effort planning a real detailed painting where this was going to be an issue so I just quick sketched another tree (with foliage this time) and painted that. The sky went in ok but I was doing wet-in-wet there and didn’t have much of “The Problem”. The tree went in okay, but I went over it a lot. It was very smudgy by the time I got finished. Meh. I’m not getting the real quality I’m trying to get. I didn’t like the result. I didn’t have a lot of problem with “The Problem” in the rest of the painting either though. I think the soaking and the stretching solved a lot of it. It was a beautiful stretch job though - that paper was completely flat the entire time and came out that way with a neat crimped edge.

I threw a piece of 140 lb paper from my Canson block in the next night. It wasn’t long enough though so it didn’t reach the stretchers on the short ends. I did a quick non-tree painting with the new paints, mostly just playing around and trying some new things. I had buckling issues on the unsecured ends as expected. There’s no trace of “The Problem” with the 140 lb paper.

The lady who works with the 300 lb paper showed up that night. She didn’t know what “The Problem” was either, but she works very wet when painting. Nnnn. Actually, as I type this up I think I know what is going on here. In another post Weasel talked about problems painting on papers with sizing. I just remembered the other women mentioning a while back that she typically soaked her paper in the bathtub for an hour or so and then drying it out. Hmmm. Anyway, she gave me a sheet of another brand of paper to try - Kilimanjaro. It’s softer and smoother. I’m putting it into the frame now.

Well, that’s it folks! I’ll type at you later.