letter writing is awesome!

I have totally gotten back into letter writing. Seriously. I write 5-10 a week. Letter writing is fun. I get to send paper "hugs" to friends & family I haven't seen in a while. AND the best part is that often they write back!!! While I was working long hours yesterday, no one gathered the mail at our house. I found the pile this morning. Underneath the scads of election mail I had not one, but three letters waiting for me. My friends are AWESOME! Thank you for making this Tuesday a much better day. :^)

what baseball has done for me lately

It has been quite some time since someone offered me money for services in a bar.
While at a conference earlier this week, I wandered into the Mucky Duck with a colleague to watch game seven of the Giants/Cardinals series. I'm not a baseball fan, really, so I was doing what I always do in these situations. I pulled out my sketch book to draw. I was trying (and mostly failing) to draw the batter in his batter's helmet while he shifted, adjusted and the cameras kept switching to other angles. My sketches were a little pathetic, but I suppose when one is confident enough to draw in a bar, some skill is assumed by observers.
One of the waitresses came up on my blind side and said, "oh my god, you draw? Do you want to draw my daughter? I'll pay you."
Within moments of my half-mumbled, "sure" she was back with a stack of really nice photos of an adorable blonde ~2yo. I sifted through them as my companion alternated between yelling encouragement to the Giant at bat and gushing about the child's extreme cuteness.
I selected the photo that showed the child's happy personality and set the others off to the side. I started in pencil to be certain that I had proportions correct. Errors in drawing people are noticeable in a way that an error in drawing a spiny lobster is not. We as people look at other people all of the time. Whether we realize it or not, simply by interacting with other humans we have internalized the basic measurements between facial features and have an inatate sense of "rightness". We judge a portrait by how well the artist placed the nose, mouth, eyes in relation to each other.
Once I got the basics down, I came back in with ink, shading, tweaking. The light in the bar was not ideal, but I was able to shift along the bar toward the kitchen and borrow some illumination. 
Additional challenges: happy baseball fans pounding the bar. The waitress bringing people over to look at the drawing in progress.
I took several bad photos with my Blackberry before signing the bottom. I carefully ripped the portrait out of my sketch book and handed  it & my card over. The waitress was thrilled.
At the end of the night, Giants world series bound, we fled the odd live music. Our tab for 4 drinks and food came to less than $20. All for a sketch. Works for me.

greetings from Monterey!

On day two of my recent conference, I played hooky and spent the morning walking to and from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The public biking/walking path runs along the water front. I saw many harbor seals on the rocks, sea lions, sea otters, brown pelicans, canada geese, hermeen gulls, CA gulls, western grebes, pied-bill grebes...and other shore birds I couldn't readily identify. I had a relaxing morning collecting fish faces and talking to kids about drawing as I painted the horn shark. Have sketchbook, will travel!

what i'll be doing next week..

summer in a jar

One success from this week: taking the tomatoes & yellow zucchini from our garden, adding the onions, garlic & green peppers dropped off by a neighbor, plus a few store bought carrots and turning it into a case of salsa. I make it without heavy spice. At first this was because my kids were anti-spicy-anything, but now it continues because I found it to be more versatile After all, you can always add spice later, but you can't take it out. As is it can be added to the rice cooker, used as spaghetti or pizza sauce and as traditional salsa. Hooray for gardens!

divergent thoughts

I should be preparing for my conference talk on Monday. There are "slides" to be assembled, digital files to be uploaded. There are finer points of a study that I need to memorize, an outfit to be picked out and obsessed over, carpool details to finalize.... Instead I find myself thinking about mouse lemurs.  

These smallest of primates are nocturnal, and like all lemurs, natives of Madagascar. Mouse lemurs range in length from 23-29cm - that's 9-11in nose tip to tail. Madame Berthe's Mouse Lemur has a combined head-body length of 3 inches. How cute is that? 

Today is also a day to celebrate the woman who inspired Alan Turing in his creation of the first "modern" computer system. Not through her feminine whiles (Turing was gay), but through her grasp of math. Lady Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, 'Enchantress of Numbers" published the first computer program around 1843. 

What do either of these interesting subjects have to do with my talk on Monday next? Nothing, except for the inner workings of my brain!

Homework Helper

Years ago I helped write a rubric for science education on the use of the sketchbook as a science tool. Well, last night I used my sketchbook as a tool of mathematical instruction. Making bar graphs (now called histograms in today's sixth grade) is like coloring with math. Maybe that's why I like them so much. All those different levels and hazards in boxy formation made me think of V's favorite video game of the moment, and the drawing continued. :^)

urban sketch II

A quick sketch I made while waiting for E. to finish piano and V. to finish her ballet class on Saturday morning. Turned out to be one of the only moments I had to myself all day. :^)

(yes, there are vegetables in the background - it is a seriously weird journal. I have to try new journals occasionally - if only to remind myself of all the reasons I like my ol' standby brand.)