Don't Call It A Countdown - Day 4 - Hockey Edition

Steve and I just watched the first episode of this season's 24/7.  The Flyers/Rangers road to the Winter Classic.  (Aside:  I find the commercial for the winter classic with the little song and the cameos and whatnot insanely entertaining.  And catchy.)  Since Steve and I have been together I've become a hockey fan so these things interest me now.  And frankly I'm sorely disappointed in the Twins right now.  I mean seriously.  You couldn't do better than 30 million.  Really?  I mean honestly you could have done a telethon and probably gotten half of that.  Fail, Twins.  Fail.  But honestly, I'm kind of so upset about that I don't even want to talk about it.

What I learned about this episode of 24/7 is:  I probably shouldn't watch it.  For the same reason it's bad for me to watch Planet Earth.  Yes it's awesome.  Yes I really enjoy it.  But every time I start to think "awww, that animal is so cute" it gets eaten by a wolf or something.  And then I'm sad.  I root for the wrong animals.  It's very disappointing.  

Tonight 24/7 started, some hockey player started talking and I said "he's kind of cute."  Then Steve said "yeah, he's out with a concussion now."  

Oh.

Then later on they were talking about some dude on the Flyers who's apparently, like, really good at hockey.  Sweet.  Then he talked for a while and he was pretty modest and fairly well spoken and I thought to myself "he's got a nice smile and a cool accent.  I like him."  Then they showed the footage of him getting hit in the head and getting a concussion.  

It's like the animals in Planet Earth.  When I start liking somebody in 24/7, they get a concussion.  This is not cool.

I know what you're thinking - the likelihood of hockey players getting concussions is pretty high.  I say this: The likelihood of animals getting eaten is pretty high too, it still sucks.

Extreme close up of the vase filled with ornaments that won't fit on our tree!  (In my head that was in the Wayne's World voice.)  I like the colors.  Plus! Glitter.  So, you know, that makes a mess out of everything.  Anyhow, I like it.

The other day I sat down to transfer some pictures from my camera to my computer.  I had taken a few in the couple of days beforehand and thought I had a few others as well.

Turns out I hadn't transferred pictures since early May.  Whoops.

I don't know, it's like I was getting ready to bike from Duluth to White Bear Lake or something.  WEIRD.

So yeah, I don't really have much to talk about.  I tried for a while today to try to think of something interesting or funny to write about and well... I've got bubkis.

In other news, I like that word.

Anyhow... the whole reason I transferred pictures in the first place is because I wanted to play with some photos of gummi bears I took.

Yeah... you read that.

But you're kind of smiling now right?  I mean... they're gummi bears.  They sort of make you giggle right?

Ice Trip

A little over a week ago I went and got myself a car wash.  I was thinking about it anyway because after a winter of salt and grime and what not my car was looking more beige than silver.  Even when it's clean it's really in-between the two.  Still, it looked really, really beige.

Then when I was getting gas the auto fill thingy didn't stop when it was supposed to and ended up dumping what I'm estimating was about a dollar fifty worth of gas (so really not that much.  Ha! Topical sarcasm!) on to the ground.  So then my car also smelled like gas.  Car wash was a must.

Part of the wash was some kind of Rain-X sealer thing at the end.  So when it snowed a few days later (of course) and then more or less immediately melted there was still water in little pools all over my car.  it ended up getting cold enough to frost overnight and it created some of the coolest, weirdest looking frost I've ever seen.

The trunk of my car all looked like this.  These were the bigger of the puddles really.  The roof and the hood of my car was covered in much smaller puddles that had some really funky frost crystals developing on and between them.

This was on the back window of my car.  I like how the tinting on the window gives the edges a light blue effect.

This is a close-up of one of the bigger puddles on the trunk.  I'm not saying, I'm just saying - that's a freaking cool picture in my opinion. One of the things I really like about all of these is that they look black and white, but really they're just white and grey on other grey.

This is on the hood of the car.  How cool is that?  It's like there were hundreds of little mohawks all over my car.

 No seriously.  I get that it's ice and by all accounts I should have just been annoyed with it (and I kind of was, I hate scraping my windows with a passion) but it just looked so freaking cool.

Come on.  Ice crystals.  Growing upward.  On my car.  Okay... so maybe that's really only enough explanation for me to be fascinated with it... That's fair.  But the point it I was fascinated by it.  

Then while I was playing around with a couple of these in Photoshop I started noticing that maybe, if I started playing around with some filters and colors, messed around with the contrast a little bit...

These could be seriously trippy.

And well... I like trippy.

From Art to Zombie Ghosts - My Appreciation for the Little Things

A long time ago - back in the idyllic, golden days when I talked about art all day and drove my roommates insane with art fun facts and crazy color-coded post-its helping me study for exams (it made sense to me.)  In the before times when I didn’t really even know what an expense report was, let alone have the faintest notion of the (roughly, without a hint of hyperbole) six hundred and forth-three thousand different ways one can be done incorrectly  - I once had an argument with an entire art history classroom, including one Polish professor who I’m pretty sure was and is at least partially insane (in the best possible way, of course.)

The topic of discussion that day, and the subject matter upon which I apparently had a different opinion than that entire collection of mostly intelligent people, was Georgia O’Keefe.  It still sort of shocks me that I went to a women’s college where we were taught and asked to think critically (that’s not the shocking part, shut up) and that whole classroom was so completely convinced of the ready-made explanation of Georgia O’Keefe’s art.  

Alright, let's just get this out of the way right away. Yes, a fair number of O'Keefe's most recognizable work - particularly those depictions of flowers as if seen very close-up kind of look like vaginas. Because, well, when you think about it a lot of flowers kind of look like vaginas. Kind of where that whole "blossoming flower" analogy came from. It has become a widely accepted opinion that O'Keefe's intention was to create just that impression.

I'm not sure I agree with that conclusion. O'Keefe's husband and promoter, photographer Alfred Stieglitz frequently highlighted her work in his galleries that no doubt helped her reach the level of acclaim she did. However, O'Keefe was one of Stieglitz's favorite subjects for his own work and he, on occasion, hung O'Keefe's work amid his own, revealing depictions of her. Even in the 20's, sex sells. I mean, really? If you're looking at a photograph of a naked woman and then look at an extremely close-up view of a flower, is you mind really not going to go there? Of course your mind is going to go there.

I'm not saying that's wrong. And I'm not saying that the opinion that her work was a bold, if veiled, statement on female sexuality is wrong. I'm just saying, I choose to see her work in a different way. Based on her whole body of work I really just believe that Georgia O'Keefe was a woman who made a point to see and call out the every day beauty of the world around her. I've always thought that those gigantic pictures of a single flower? To me those are a way of taking something that is small, insignificant and frequently overlooked and making it huge and significant and very difficult to ignore.  It is literally saying "Hey! Look at how incredibly beautiful a single flower can be if you just take the time to look at it. Look at how cool a building can look at night if you just look up. How cool does this pile of rocks look?"

Maybe I just saw The Crow at too impressionable an age but I believe heavily in taking pleasure in the little things. And as such I just can't help but want to find the beauty in the little things, in the details that can easily get overlooked. In the words of Eric Draven, "believe me, nothing is trivial."

I don't know, maybe it's just that I like the idea of it. That it fits pretty well with my own personal view on life. Or maybe it's just that I have a hard time looking at her work and thinking "it looks like a giant vagina" without sounding like a grunting idiot in my own mind. But the way I see it, Georgia O'Keefe's work was and is a message to literally stop and smell the roses.

I know that got a little art history major-y there. I've just been musing on this for a while now. Got myself good and worked up.

The building where I work has some ice problems. By that I mean we manage to get a lot of ice buildup on the sidewalk where pretty much every one has to walk to get to their cars at night. They mark the really bad patches with those bright orange traffic cones. They don't actually help much, but they at least remind you that they tried to tell you there was ice there before you slip for the twentieth time. This is a photograph of a reflection of one of those cones, through this patch of ice that's melted off of the roof and refrozen on the branches of a little bush below. Just something that I've noticed a few times as I've walked past and thought "that's really cool." You know, the little things.

Blankie

Steve and I went to see little baby Jackson over the weekend.  He was two weeks and two days old when we saw him and, sweet Jesus, is he cute.  He doesn't really do a lot.  He squirms quite a bit.  Makes funny faces.  Sleeps.  That's about it.  He pooped every time I held him.  He's a little, tiny baby and about one third of everything he does is poop so I tried not to take it personally.  He's also exceptionally cute so I'm pretty sure I forgive him.

Which brings me to:

Baby feet!  Holy crap is that not the cutest freaking thing you've ever seen.  Little itty, bitty, tiny baby toes.  Damn, that's just adorable.

We got the chance to give him (well, his parents) his baby blanket.  My teddy bear, Sleepy Tired, has been kind of enough to model for me:

The blanket itself is about 4 feet by 5 feet (give or take, depending on pull and such) and made out of organic cotton yarn.  Specifically it's from the Lion Brand Nature's Choice collection in Almond and Blueberry.  (Sounds like a tasty cereal combination.)  Note:  I have not been paid to promote Lion Brand Yarn, it's products, or knitting in any way.  Their yarn is readily available in most craft stores which makes it easy to gauge the weight, texture and color of the yarn and therefore decide if you want to use it.  I've used a number of their yarns over the years, some of them are great, some of them are terrible, some of them are so-so.  The yarn I used for this project is VERY soft, very easy to work with, and while it's pretty light overall it makes for a very cuddly blanket.  I would absolutely recommend this yarn if you're looking for a warm, cuddly project for fall/winter.  

Okay so that was me geeking out about yarn.  Yeah... I'm not without my... well let's just settle on I'm an odd duck okay?  Odd duck it is.

I used a five to two ratio for the stripes and an over-all diamond pattern to give the blanket just a little more texture and interest.  Here is a close-up:

And here's a wider shot that really shows the diamond pattern nicely.  

Jon and Kelly seemed to like it a lot, which is awesome.  (It may have been suggested at one point that it will end up being Kelly's blanket, that's cool too.)  Jackson kind of looked at it a little bit, which is really all you ask for from an infant.  I know the comfort a good blankie myself so I hope it'll be a good one form him.  And it was really a fun blanket to make.

Live at the Gaslight*

One of the cool things about living in St. Paul is the history of the place.  It's a very old city and there are historic buildings and neighborhoods aplenty.  I've been reminded of this lately since I've change my route on my way home from work.  The technically shortest (least amount of miles) way for me to get home is to simply stay on the freeway until I get to my street.  A few months ago, tired of sitting at a complete stop for twenty minutes everyday, I tried an alternate route that turned out to be much faster.  Rather than staying on the freeway and dealing with everyone pouring out of downtown St. Paul, I'm getting off at Grand Avenue and sort of veering around downtown on surface streets.  I get off of Grand almost immediately but the area is very old, and gorgeous.  Every day for the past several months I've been driving past the intersection of Dale St. and Summit Ave. and looking at the buildings on all four of the corners thinking "man, I'd like to take a picture of that."

I've found taking pictures while waiting for a light to change is not an easy thing to do.  Especially at that intersection.  I once got honked at for not moving for the green light quickly enough at that intersection.  I thought it was reasonable to wait for the person who ran the yellow light waaaaaaaaaaay too late to finish turning left in front of me, rather than voluntarily getting into an accident.  The luxury sedan that was behind me (and had been forcibly inserting that BMW logo into my exhaust pipe for several blocks) apparently felt differently about the situation.  All I can really say about that is unless that guy really, really had to poop, he's pretty much a d-bag.  Anyhow, the overall point here is that I haven't attempted to take pictures of that intersection from the car.

Yesterday I finally headed down there with the specific intent of walking around and taking some pictures.  Let me tell you, it was a good idea.  I've been feeling kind of burned out lately.  Between getting sick (and convincing myself in a fever state that the mosquito bites on my legs was actually the Chicken Pox - that's a story for another time), work sucking, a killer three-day migraine, work sucking some more, and some old emotional shit that's been reared up again I just haven't really been feeling good about myself or anything I do.  Which of course makes it harder to put up something here and be like "Hey, look at this, isn't it neat?  Except I don't really think so and, Jesus, I'm a fraud, why even bother.  Etc. Etc. Etc."  ... Kay, that just got a lot heavier than originally intended.  The point, anyway, was that I was feeling very inspired yesterday while I was out taking pictures of pretty houses.  I felt calm and happy and even a little creative.  I really only covered about a mile and a half of Summit Avenue, but I took more than a hundred photos on my regular camera and also hauled out my analog 35mm camera and shot up a roll of real live film.

And I discovered I have no fewer than two new obsessions.  Wrought iron and lamps.  Perhaps they're unusual obsessions, maybe not.  Either way, I'm very excited about them and I'm pretty excited to go out again and find more.  And I'm excited by what I came away with yesterday.  I'm most excited by this pair of door lamps (I don't know - are they still sconces if they're outside?  They're those lights that you see on either side of a door on a house, building, etc.) that were actually on the outside of an otherwise not very remarkable (comparatively, anyway) apartment building.

I don't know these are copper or iron that has naturally acquired that patina or if they've just been painted that way, but I'm absolutely in love with that color.  It's just absolutely amazing.  Furthermore I've always loved any kind of swirling pattern/scroll work.  So I just adore the shape and the flow of these.  I'm not normally a fan of yellow (and especially yellow glass) but it fits with the greenish color of the metal so well that I'm kind of in love with that too.

Lets take a closer look, shall we?

(We shall because I say we shall and I'm the one putting up the pictures.  But I like to be polite about it.)

I should mention that I found these right after I totally got nailed by a condo owner.  The building right before this one - I was taking a picture of the door and this lady walked up and said "thinking about buying that unit?"  "Oh no, just taking pictures of architecture."  Yeah, she kept watching me for a good three or four minutes.  I'm pretty sure she was calling the cops by the time I finally got out of sight.  Downside of taking pictures of houses people are living in I guess.  But isn't that scrolling on top of the glass just kind of... peaceful.  For being a seriously busy piece here it's just so elegant.  Guh, just love it.  I think I would marry these lamps if that were possible.  And if I weren't already engaged to a real, live person and such.  

A closer look at the scrolling closer to the wall.  Man I hope that's natural patina because that's just so much cooler.

Finally what I feel is a real cool angle shot.

This one just does it for me.  I can't say for absolutely certain but I'm pretty sure this is a photo that's going to be on my wall very soon.  (That means I like it a lot.  And I'm proud of it.  Not something that actually happens very often.)

I have loads of other pictures to share.  A whole collection of other lamps.  Tons of wrought iron that totally knock my socks off (but I hate socks, so it's definitely a good thing) and just bunches and bunches or really cool architectural details.  I'm pretty excited about a lot of them, I even have a whole bunch of pictures from two different churches (risking lighting strikes and brimstone just for a cool photo) and, of course, a couple flowers and animals from my walk.  Stay tuned! 

I might even stop mentioning Bob Dylan all the time.  I kind of doubt it though.

*This is also not a Bob Dylan lyric.  But it is the name of a Bob Dylan album.

Big Coup in the Zoo, Part Two: Electric Boogaloo

Our adventure at the zoo continued as we went to visit the fishies.

Or... more specifically, the sharks.

There were actual fish too:

After The Storm

We had a right proper thunderstorm last night.  Actually, it was a bit more than that really.  Watching it on radar was like watching a giant purple blob scream toward the Twin Cities.  There were thunderstorms, tornado watches, flash flood warnings, etc., etc., etc.  But here's the thing - I loves me some thunderstorms.  I have ever since I was a little kid.  I remember sitting at the patio door with my brother as a small child watching the lightening illuminate the yard.

My brother likes to say there's nothing better than watching a good thunderstorm; it's better than fireworks.  I must say I disagree.  Fireworks are the shit.  Ain't nothing better than fireworks.  Thunderstorms are close though.

I'm also a big fan of clouds.  I feel like clouds don't really get all the attention they deserve.  They can do so much to change the mood of a scene.  They can convey danger, softness, lightness, or peace with nothing more than slightly different formations.  That's pretty cool.

Anyhow the moral of the story is after the good lightening passed through I was lying in bed watching some TV when I noticed our dark green curtains were turning the strangest color orange I've ever seen.  A quick peak outside revealed some of the most surreal, eerie light I've seen; especially without an actual tornado about to touch down.  Unfortunately I took entirely too long to locate my camera (located, rather logically, in my purse) and what follows does not particularly capture that eerie surrealism.  But much of the cloud cover that remained was still pretty cool.  It just doesn't nearly stand up to what it was about ten minutes beforehand.

This one is probably the closest.  I should point out - it was not sunset.  At all.  There was still a good hour and a half to actual sunset, though it quickly became just plain dark.

Orchids in Afternoon Light

I didn't really get too close a look at these orchids.  They were many, many feet above my head.  Both because they were very high up to begin with AND because I'm a wee little person.  

Okay - no.  I'm not an actual little person.  Not a little person in the "Little People, Big World" kind of way.  I'm just a short person.  I do not enjoy the classification of "vertically challenged" because it makes me feel deficient.  I greatly prefer "space efficient."  That makes me sound way more like a super handy kitchen appliance or something that's easy to travel with.  Much better than "challenged." 

It suddenly occurs to me that I may have put a little too much thought into that.

So I'm 5'4" which I'm pretty sure qualifies as short in the books of most people (not my college roommate but she was a half inch over being the official kind of "little person" which was awesome for me because she always made me feel tall.)  When I was a wee little child (I think I just like saying/typing the words "wee little") I always wanted to be 5'6."  I have absolutely no idea why and, as far as I know, it was a completely arbitrary number I pulled out of my wee little ass.  Alas I really only ever had one growth spurt (around the 5th grade or so) and, though I kept hoping until I was about 24 that I'd keep growing, I have been 5'4" since I was about 10 years old.  Which sadly accounts for the majority of my life at this point.  

So that was a nice trip into my psychoses, don't you think?  Don't worry it gets way darker and weirder in there the further you go.

... ... And all of that was a really long (and ultimately awkward) way of simply saying I'm short and the flowers were way up high.  Back to the flowers.

So I didn't get a particularly great look at the flowers themselves, but the light was hitting them in this really pretty awesome way that I'm really happy I managed to capture at least a little bit.  So yeah - the way the light is creating easily a dozen different shades of purple here is pretty sweet right?  I think so.

Iris!

Man oh man isn't that color amazing? The yellow is so vibrant and the purple is so muted and lovely. And they work so well together. What a great flower.

Fall-looking Leaves in Spring

This bush just outside my door is very weird. It looks like this should be a left-over photo from Fall. It's not. It's Spring, it's the middle of april and this plant has yellow, red and orange leaves all over it. Like I said, weird.

Red Dye # 2

See how much better the blues and greens are? That barely constitutes pink, let alone red. These were meant to be the "Bright, vibrant hues" too, according to the box anyway.

I dig the purple one though.

Fun With Dying

It's really too bad that they can't make a red dye that actually turns eggs red... I think I'd like red eggs. I wouldn't know because I've never seen one.

... Something About Mr. McGregor's Garden...

And thusly, something about Peter Rabbit. Which would get to an Easter joke but quick.

Lady Bug

My grandpa would probably be upset with me for this. He HATES these bugs and I not only took this picture in his garden, I also didn't kill the bug when I was done. I agree with him, they're obnoxious as hell, but it's so cute! Lookit him! He's adorable.