Wake up sleepy head

Choir Memories

This last weekend Joseph and I went to a performance of the choir at the Institute of Religion here in town. We don't go on dates very often, so this was fun on many levels, not the least of which being that we left the kids home with someone else.

It also brought back a lot of fond memories for us, as we were members of the choir in the Seattle Institute of Religion. Strangely enough, the director there actually moved here a year before we did, and is directing the choir here.
Here I am in the choir the first year I joined, 2001-2002:


What, you can't see me? Yeah, my roommate took this picture. I promise I am under that white arrow over on the right. It really wasn't that dark there, the photo is just bad.

Sometimes I'm still surprised that I was ever a part of something like this. I never considered myself the 'performing choir type' in Utah: I'm not blonde, and am certainly not perky by any sense of the word. (Not that there is anything wrong with those attributes :)

But it was different in Seattle. The choir ranged in age from 17 to 32, but most kids were around 25 and were more mature than the under-21's where I went to college. Many were students at UW, Seattle Pacific University and other smaller colleges in town. But there were also people like me who weren't attending school at all and worked all day. There were several married couples, and that year I think there were about six girls who were expecting their first baby! I always wondered if people realized they were married.

The choir we saw on Friday is excellent; everyone seemed talented musically as well as in dance, speaking, etc. It was what I expected to see. But in Seattle we were not required to audition (or I'm sure I wouldn't have been able to join. Hello, I still can't sing well.) This resulted in a much broader spectrum of people and attitudes, and a much larger choir: there were well over 100 members.

It was something big and exciting, and we felt like we were a part of something important. Unity was emphasized, and for many the choir was like family. The rehearsals were once a week from 7:00PM until after 9:00PM; before tour dates they had very early morning rehearsals as well.

The first six months I was catching a bus through downtown Seattle to then catch the ferry home to Bainbridge, after 10:00 at night. I loved every minute of it. When I moved into the city, not too far from the UW, I would walk home from rehearsals in the dark, often taking a detour to go look at the water before I went home for the night. Maybe not the smartest thing, but I recall those being some of the most beautiful peaceful walks I've ever had.

The second year I was in the choir, Joseph joined with me while we were dating, and then we married and still fit right in. It was still a great thing to be a part of, but in some ways it was more stressful as a married couple! We went on tour that year to southern Washington and northern Oregon. Here is a picture of our choir in Portland:


Do you see me this time? We are just above that blue arrow down there. I was excited to go on tour but a little sad that I didn't get to go the first year for various reasons. I missed out on the group things that people do, because choir members were housed in people's homes and the married couples were generally just with their spouse.

I credit my membership in the choir with helping boost my social skills which were still somewhat lacking even after college. I also gained better leadership skills while on the Choir Committee. Probably the most important thing I was given at the time was a positive attitude which helped me be in the right place at the right time to meet my husband.

Our simple date last weekend may have been more exciting for us than the rest of the audience, who knows. They did a program very similar to the one I performed in that first year, and I was so happy to have all those memories flooding back. What a great time!

Dumb Arguments

Do you ever find yourself having really ridiculous arguments with people, especially when you're tired? Those of you who are married probably know this tune well, but it also exists between siblings or perhaps close roommates.

Joseph and I argue about really dumb stuff all the time. And when we're tired, these "discussions" get a little corny to say the least, though we sometimes might only see this in retrospect.

Case in point. Last night after Joseph got home from work at midnight, we were playing a vocabulary game online, that I had discovered through Tirzah's blog. Its cool because it donates food to world hunger when you play it. Really.

So anyway, after we were done playing I asked Joseph if he had had fun learning new words.

"No, it was dumb." He was just trying to get my dander up. "I have a book at school about how to learn vocabulary, I should bring it home for you, " he added.

Excuse me? I replied, "I already know how to learn vocabulary, its really easy for me. I'm the smartest person in the world!" Yeah, I said that.

"If you're the smartest person in the world, how come you didn't know some of the words on the game?" He thought he had me there.

"Because no one else in the world knows those words either, " I answered smugly.

"What about the people who made the game? They had to know the definitions of those words. "

"Nope. They had to look them up in a dictionary. So there." Oh yeah, I had won.
.........................................................................................................................................

Another late night (we have a lot of these) I had said or done something to annoy Joseph (I don't remember what.)

I was sitting at the computer at the time, and he had tersely told me, "Don't go look at my blog."

"Why," I asked in mild interest, "did you do something new to it?"

"No, I'm just mad at you so I don't want you to look at it," he answered somewhat sheepishly.

"Fine," I answered. " I'll never look at it again. And I'll tell everyone on my blog not to look at it ever again either."

This elicited a wail from my husband, "No!"

"Yep," (I was just warming up), "I'm gonna tell people you put naughty pictures on there so they shouldn't ever go there at all."

"Oh yeah?" His hackles were rising. He he.
"Well....I'm gonna post a video on your blog of people fighting, and people will think you posted it as a way to say, 'This is you and I'm gonna beat you up if you look at my blog'."

This made absolutely no sense and we were kind of laughing now, but I still replied, "People who read my blog would like a video like that. They'd think I was really cool."

End of argument.

Playing with Photos

what do you think?



How about these variations, from Picnic Point Beach 2007:


Elora loves grandma. I put this one on a magnet to give my mom for mothers day.

What about these? They're from Meadowdale Beach 2006:






This Photoshop stuff ain't so bad! Maybe I'll do some more later.

Country Dancing

Elora's daddy is teaching her young. Hmmm, I wonder if preference in music is reversible?
ps- excuse the shambled state of our living room.

Should I be worried?

I just stuck some dinner in the oven, and noticed the faint smell of wasp poison lingering around the appliance. Should I be worried?

Last summer when we moved in, we kept finding one or two wasps in our apartment every day, usually hanging around the vicinity of the kitchen windows. I would catch them with a cup and a piece of cardboard and toss them out the door so we could go on with our lives. We thought maybe they were slipping around the window screens somehow, but after about a month we figured out that they were coming in through the fan vent above our oven.

This is a round opening in the ceiling above the oven, with a grate to cover it. Beyond the grate is a greasy dirty fan that carries away the smoke of burnt dinners, and beyond that is a pipe that leads to the rooftop. I'm not sure how it is covered on top, but I assume its another simple grate of some kind.

When we called facilities (we live in student housing so we get help with stuff like this for free, its pretty nice) they came and took apart the fan, thus discovering an actual populated wasp nest built inside the pipe! They sprayed it and dead wasp husks rained down into the worker's open garbage bag -and on the floor and the stove too. Yuck.

Except for the fan not working for another month (it must have shorted or something) we were very happy to have no more killer wasps. Joseph was happiest, because honestly, he's much more scared of them than I. He thinks he's allergic. I'll leave it at that.

But now that the weather has been warming up we have been slightly distressed to find the random wasp wandering around our kitchen every so often. They're usually walking instead of flying, a testament that there is still poison up yonder pipe, but the fact remains that they're coming back! I can only imagine the surprise Joshua would get if he decided to pick one up to pop in his mouth, as he is wont to do with interesting objects on the floor.

So yesterday we called facilities again, and they speedily appeared with a can of wasp spray handy. The man this time was going to spray on the fan until I mentioned that the last fellow had taken it out first. So he did so, and this time, thank goodness, he actually broke down the nest and disposed of it. They didn't do that last time....something about how it wasn't necessary because they don't come back. Hmmm. Yeah, lets leave it inside the apartment.

Anyway, he was nice enough to sweep up most of the mess (the last guy didn't) but I was left the job of clearing more rotting insect husks out of the burners. I soaked all of them in the sink for an entire day to try and get the poison smell off.

Maybe I should be worried. Nah.

Portrait #2: Not so easy

Remember this girl from last time I was drawing? I've been working on her portrait. I no longer have this drawing because it was on the back of the first portrait, but I figured it wouldn't be too hard to start over.


Boy was I wrong. Last time I kind of skipped over the initial drawing phase in my post, but its actually the most important part of the picture. No matter how good you are at blending colors or drawing hair, if the features are off - mouth crooked, nose too long, etc - then its just not going to look that good.

I don't know if other creative types have this problem, but sometimes you just have an "off" day. Or two. That is what happened here. No matter what I saw in my head, it just wasn't getting translated to the paper. Real portrait artists don't have to erase, and usually don't have to start over. Yeah, that wasn't me. See all the starts I made on this one? (If they're hard to see, just click to see a bigger version) :

The first one had a tiny face scrunched in a big head. Start over. The second was way too big on the paper, and I was already having to erase too much. Start over. The third wasn't looking too bad, and I was measuring everything to get it right....but then I noticed that it was HUGE on the page. Start over.

Then I had a brilliant idea. The first portrait that I no longer had was looking better and better. So I printed it off the computer, and used some carbon paper to trace it onto my page. Its not cheating if it was your own art to begin with. (Actually, many artists use that technique, but it can become a crutch if you do it too often.) I changed the angle of her head which was the main problem, and changed the shape of her eyes and jaw slightly, to give her a younger look.
The paper slipped while I traced the nose, so I hoped I could get rid of that later, but it wasn't too bad.
I could finally do the fun part!

My main worry at this point was that it would turn out too cartoony. The measurements weren't exact, which works for me; when I focus too much on being exact it turns out like some of those first drawings. But I noticed the eyes might be kind of big. Generally, they say a face is five eyes across, but on little kids you can make the eyes bigger than normal or it won't look right. So I trusted that this was true in this case and just ignored it. Can you kind of see the double line under her nose where the carbon paper slipped?



Once I started putting colors in, the eyes weren't so distracting. I didn't color the hair in as quickly as last time, because she had a lot of blonde highlights, and I didn't want to accidentally color in dark where I wanted something light. You really do want to avoid erasing too much, it messes with the quality of the drawing. At this point I decided the real nose was actually a little wider, and her mouth was a little different so I adjusted them accordingly. One of the eyes was bothering me too, but too late to change that now! ( I don't know why, but the color quality scanned in weird on these, sorry.)



I was liking the hair now. I needed to put some color behind her, but didn't want to go too dark, as she had some whispy pieces of hair that I might want to put in later. I used purple instead of blue, which I also used throughout her skin tones. It seemed to compliment her warm hair color better than tons of blue would. I used a lot of purple in her hair too. For the warm colors, I used a light olive green color; I didn't want to use so much yellow or orange because then her face would just look like her hair.



She had an odd expression in the photo, where you could vaguely see some of her teeth. I have never seen another picture of this girl and have no idea what her teeth are like, so I needed to be careful with that. If you guess and put in too much detail inside the mouth it will look wrong to the family, but if you just color it all in dark she'll look toothless. Right now the teeth are showing too much, so I went with a dark color on top of a slightly less dark color, which implied teeth without actually rendering them. (Below) (Oh, I figured out why they were scanning funny, and these last two are 'fixed'):



In the photo, she was partially behind her little brother so I couldn't see how her sweater came together in the front. Thats where a sketchy style comes in handy, because it looks okay that her clothing isn't completely finished. I realized also that the right side of her face was darker because of a slight shadow from her brother. It didn't make much sense visually in this single portrait, but I wasn't about to do it over.
Between this point and the end, I decided her jaw was still too wide. It wasn't too hard to fix, as I just had to bring in the shadow under her jaw to make the chin narrower. However had it been the opposite problem- if I wanted to widen her chin- I probably couldn't have done it. That would have required erasing all the dark shadow, and you still would have been able to see it on top of her chin. Not happening.






This is the final version. I did throw in some blue to separate her skin from her hair a little bit, as they were so similar in color. You can see the narrower chin, darker teeth, and some yellow in the shirt to match it with the rest of the drawing better. I also put a touch of blue in to the purple background to make it slightly darker.
It doesn't look like it, but I actually spent much more time on this drawing putting in color than I did on the first one; the layers are just so light its hard to tell how much color is really on there!
If you look really close, you can see the line under her nose still...but there is enough other detail that you don't see it unless you're looking for it.

I wish I would have signed it somewhere else- it looks a little tacky on her shirt like that. But if you sign too far off to the edge it gets cut off or covered up when the drawing gets framed.

In the end, I'm happy with this drawing, but it was definitely a lot of work! I hope the next one goes better. (I'll be doing thirteen total.)

This is such a filler post

I've probably done one of these before but Kiera tagged me a while back so.....

4 Jobs I’ve had:
-Secretary for Food Sense at WSU Extension office, Everett WA
-Clerk at Airborne Express corporate offices, Seattle WA
-Darkroom Tech, SUU
-Art History class TA, SUU

4 Movies I watch over and over:
-Mr. Bean, the complete series (Elora thinks he's funny)
-Cinderella (because Elora watches it 3 times a week)
-Jungle Book ( this too)
-Jack-Jack Attack/ Boundin' (from The Incredibles extras..Elora likes them better than the movie)

4 Places I have lived:
-Cedar City, UT
-Bainbridge, WA
-Seattle, WA
-Everett, WA

4 TV shows I watch:
-Lost
-Little House on the Prairie
-Reaper
-Monk

4 Places I have been:
-Victoria, Canada (twice)
-Grand Canyon (four or five times)
-Yellowstone (four or five times)
-Redwood Forest Paul Bunyon statue

4 People who e-mail me regularly:
-Dad
-Joseph
-Grandma (mostly forwards)
-Kiera

4 Favorite things to eat:
-Sweet Potatoes with pineapple and brown sugar
-Ice cream with OJ
-Spaghetti that Joseph makes
-Homemade Pizza

4 Places I’d rather be:
-Golden Gardens Beach, Meadowdale Beach, Stevens Point, or Mukilteo Beach in the summer
-Lake Washington canoing with Joseph in the summer ( I did this with friends but never my husband)
-Hiking Zion with Joseph
-At a movie with Kiera and my other siblings. (we all have the same sense of humor)

4 Things I look forward to this year:
-Family reunion in July (I missed the last two)
-Indiana Jones movie and Harry Potter movie
-Maybe a short road trip this summer (Joseph has never been to Yellowstone)
-Joshua learning to walk and maybe getting some hair.

Snapshots

mmmm Stolen chocolate is the best.

Come shoe shopping with me!

I never thought I was a shoe person.

You hear about girls being obsessed with shoes, and owning hundreds of colorful pairs, but thats never been me. I don't care for pumps, flats, heels, sandals, or anything else that is going to hurt my foot in anyway. I own one brown pair and one black pair of dress shoes for church, and they are pain-free thank you very much.

Sporty shoes don't float my boat either. In fact they leave a bad taste in my mouth reminiscent of the dirty gym floors in hated P.E. classes.

However...I've come to realize I do have a thing for the casual variety. I don't buy them in mass quantities ( far from it) but I do enjoy a jaunt down the shoe aisles on occasion.

Perhaps my shoe choices are a bit....juvenile. My kids will probably be ashamed of their mother when they're old enough to notice such superficial things. Here, let me show you what I mean.

I got these during the big ska punk revival of the mid nineties:



Aren't they dandy? Granted, I rarely wear them because they don't match too many things and they don't have enough ankle cushioning for extended wear...but whenever I recall that I own them I wear them with pride.

Then there are these, some of my most favorite shoes of all time:




Aren't they awesome! These match even less clothing items than the others, especially because a bunch of my old clothes no longer fit me, but they are so cool! You may see that there is a little bit of duct tape peeking out of the mouth there. Yeah, thats because I destroyed the backs of these by putting them on without untying them first. And they're half a size too small. But they went great with my pale green pants in college. (I realize green doesn't seem like a great color to go with these, but leave me alone. I'm an artist.)


Generally, I have only one pair I wear every day, and usually this pair of shoes is a pale sky blue. Sky blue is a happy color. These are my current pair:


As you can see, they are falling apart. So I have endeavored to find a new pair, one that I can be really excited about, just like I was with the shoes previously mentioned. Surprisingly, I found quite a few online that have got me all atwitter. Not surprisingly, I'm having a hard time convincing myself to spend more than twenty dollars on a pair of shoes.

Check these out:

I LOVE that gradation from orange to brown. Its so artsy! I learned that I should own a pair of Kangaroos, because I found oodles in this brand that I would wear. These were even better:


Ah, one of my favorite color combos. Both these pairs ran around $50...less than others I saw, but they'll probably fall apart like the blue ones I have. Do you think they're worth it? They're so pretty.


These are also Kangaroos, but a little more subtle in their color combo:


Hmm pretty cute. But not as cute as this snazzy number:



I adore these. But then I realized they're in the same category as the orange/blue shoes I already have: they don't match too many things. Darn it. Does someone want to get them for me anyway?

The following were pretty exciting when I came across them as I've loved plaid since my childhood. They made me think of early Gwen Stefani, who's pants I always coveted. Don't judge me. But these don't come in my size. An all to common problem:




Unfortunately neither did their sister pair in the colors I loved even more. Sigh:



Why does everything only come in sizes six and seven? Nine and a half is a perfectly normal size. Finally, there were two pairs that spoke to me because they were unique, sophisticated, more adult, and different from my other shoes. Can you believe these are going for over $80?:



I love them,but I'm afraid of that eighty dollar strap snapping. I found this last pair when I researched Naturalizer shoes, after I saw some on Jill's blog. I'm really tempted to get these... they're so bowling-shoe-esque. I love that. But they're also a bit pricey. What do you think:



Anyway, I haven't convinced myself (yet) to purchase any of these, but I may get to that point soon. Do you like any of these shoes, or is my taste in shoes just a little too different for the rest of you?