Productive Groundhog Day

Happy Groundhog Day! I've been having a super productive couple of days - Yesterday I mailed in my health insurance application, picked up the first of possibly many applications for a second job, and did a load of laundry, and today I went through all my clothes to see what was in good enough shape to take to a consignment shop, did two more loads of laundry that included my bed sheets, and cleaned up my closet a bit, in the process of which I found this awesome old trunk that I assume was my dad's when he was a kid because it had a bunch of "Boys Life" magazines and really old Tarzan books and books about outdoorsy stuff inside it:


I took all the stuff out of it and put it in bags (which still reside in my closet...) and it needed a good wipe down with a wet paper towel, so I did that and also put a bunch of incense sticks inside it in hopes of getting rid of the intensely musty odor that greets you when you open it up.

The funny thing is, I've been craving a trunk like this lately. Not that I would have bought one, because to be honest I really don't have room for one! But I was window shopping around Craigslist just to get some sort of satisfaction. I love old trunks!

I have to go to work in a little while, so I'm going to sign off now and see if I can't get anything else done before then.

Onward!

Unfortunately, I don't have anything super exciting to tell you in my first blog post of 2010. That's the reason I haven't updated since the last day of December - I was waiting until I had something at least moderately cool to gab about, but my artistic life as of 2010 is exceptionally dull so far. I am well aware that I have no one to blame but myself for my lack of action, but in the words of Oscar Wilde, "It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating." I know my job is only part time, but it sure seems to eat up a lot more of my day than the hours I get paid for...

Anyway, I suppose I could tell you about one of my Christmas gifts. One of my cousins got me this book for Christmas:


I cannot tell you how ecstatic I was upon receiving it. It is not typeset - it is written by hand, and it has tons of hand-drawn images and a sheer buttload of information ranging from the bare basics all the way up to reticello and mold-blowing. After you get through the 270 pages of the main part of the book, there are then sections on tool care, health and safety, a glossary (including the term "glass bug," haha), an index, a section for your own notes, a directory of sources, suppliers, organizations, schools and book dealers, and even a "scrapbook" section which features a bunch of quickie how-to drawings of things like dragon-stem goblets, piggy banks, and "good-for-life" homebrew bottles. Awesommmmme book... It has crossed my mind that this would have been a really good book to have had as a textbook back in college. Oh well, it's mine now! Bahaha. (Thanks Liz!) Onward!

San Diego Part 3: All the Rest of It

The tiniest pine cones I have ever seen.

Obligatory seagull photos.

On the way to Mt. Palomar observatory. The first trip was unsuccessful, as the observatory was closed due to icy conditions or some such, but the second time we went it was open. Although it was a very cool thing to see, huge and with lots of cool scientific feats involved in its construction, it was fairly anticlimactic - sort of like an hour and a half drive to a small museum.

At the observatory. I think it was more than 5,000 feet above sea level (thus the snow). No one was around but us really. Inside the telescope was this massive glass lens that was casted in Corning (I think it was some odd thousands of tons heavy, took three trucks to transport it up the mountain, one pushing behind the one that was carrying it and one pulling from the front, and it took around ten years to cold work/polish. Something like 10,000 pounds of glass was polished away. It was pretty insane.)

A fat and happy squirrel at Spanish Village Art Center in Balboa Park.

San Diego Part 2: Seaweed

Yes, seaweed gets its own post. I've seen seaweed before, but never like this. This here is legit SEAweed, from the freakin' ocean. None of this lake business. It looked like aliens. Or sea spaghetti with a goiter. But it was quite pretty. There was a tropical storm that hit the day we arrived in San Diego, and I guess all the wind caused crazy waves which carried all this seaweed onto shore, and it was lying around in huge heaps everywhere on the beach and there were these giant trucks and fork lifts going around cleaning it up. It looks like it misses being underwater. It's not used to gravity.

San Diego Part 1: Art Stuff

Here is some of the awesome artsy stuff I saw during my week-long stay in San Diego:

By Leonardo DaVinci. We went to the DaVinci exhibit at the Air & Space Museum in Balboa Park. They had a bunch of models of his inventions set up for the main exhibit, but I was more attracted to the series of sketchbook drawings put up in one of the corners.

Awesome. Seen at Spanish Village Art Center in Balboa Park. I forgot the artist's name. It was something Russian-sounding. I'm so bad about writing things down... Sorry artist, your work is excellent!

This is a not-so-excellent photo of the small hot shop area that was set up at Spanish Village Art Center. No one was using it because the lady who ran it was ill the day we visited (go figure), but it's used to give introductory glassblowing lessons.

And here are a few corners of one of the galleries in Spanish Village. (Spanish Village Art Center is pretty sizeable. There are tons of little galleries to check out, and multiple artists per gallery.)

This piece was one of the ones that particularly struck me. I used to work mostly in 2 dimensional mediums, and this was a nice example of drawing in something that is normally a 3-d medium. I just appreciated it. Yeah, glass powder!

And here is a glass that I gave my brother for Christmas one year that I drank out of while I was there. That was nice. I love that I can give people functional things like bowls and glasses that I made myself and can actually be used on a daily basis, or at least frequently.