Month: July 2005

Pets, Photography

Elliott (March 1994-July 29, 2005)

Shelly

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Late Thursday night, I lost my heart dog. I got Elliott as a puppy, eleven years ago. Eleven is a nice, respectable age for a dog, but it’s not enough

From the start, he was my constant shadow, always underfoot and alert to my every movement. He was a dream puppy–reliably housebroken from day one and thoroughly trustworthy. With one exception, he never touched anything that wasn’t his. (In his defense, the chair he ate was later eaten by two other dogs. Obviously, it deserved it.)

Elliott had a wicked sense of humor, something that won’t surprise anyone who has lived with Chowy dogs. They’re deeply, but quietly, funny. Elliott’s Pit Bull half meant that he was also silly, gregarious, and big-hearted. He was glad to do anything I asked of him, and more. Bomb-proof, nothing fazed him.

If I could design the perfect dog right this minute, it would be Elliott. I wouldn’t have changed a thing about him.

When Elliott was five, I decided it was time to add a second dog to our home. When I got Harriet, Elliott was ecstatic. He wanted desperately to play with her, but she was Not Interested. It took her about 24 hours to warm up to him, but when she did, they became good friends.

As playmates, they were well matched. Elliott taught Harriet how to play chase games and she taught him how to box. Hardly a day went by without riotous games of bitey-face. He let her boss him around (that’s what girldogs do best and Elliott was happy to let her exercise her bitchy prerogative). She let him take care of alerting to strange noises and intruders (watch dog duty is not her Thing). Despite occasional disagreements and the odd fight, they were deeply bonded to each other.

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I don’t know how dogs perceive death, but I know that Harriet’s at loose ends. She was terribly bossy toward Elliott, but she always took her cues from him. If he decided that a noise outside wasn’t worth worrying about, she believed him. It’ll be interesting to see how she adapts to not having Elliott to hold her paw.

Another area for concern is how well I’ll be able to deal with her activity level. Walks and play time aren’t an issue, but there are games that dogs play with each other that humans just can’t participate in. I went outside with Harriet this afternoon, at their regular “dog play” time. She stood on the deck and looked at me like “Now what?” Even when she was just mooching around, eating grass, she was always accompanied by Elliott. She doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with herself without him.

At some point, I’m sure I’ll get another dog–a male Boxer, if all goes according to plan. It’ll be a while, though. For now, I’m just trying to get used to having a one-dog household. It’s a little surreal. Elliott took up a huge amount of psychological space. He was always glued to my side, so that, even when he was resting quietly, I was always aware of his presence.

Goodbye to the bestest dog ever. I miss you like crazy.

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Journals, Photography

Sunset and Journaling

Shelly

Last night’s sunset was spectacularly vivid. The sky was an intense cerulean and the clouds were neon pink. I managed to get some pictures before it had faded too much.

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The weather did, indeed, turn lovely, just as our trusty weatherdude promised. With lows in the crispy upper 50sF, it was perfect for sleeping. I was so comfortable when my alarm went off this morning that I didn’t want to get out of bed. Sleeping all day was, alas, not on my To Do list, though.

Now, on to journaling. I belong to a few art journaling mail lists. I enjoy discussing materials, motivation, inspiration, etc., and these lists are a good place to do that. Probably the most frequent topic of discussion is “journaler’s block.” Folks post, asking for help with visual how-to guides and idea prompts, because they’re drawing a blank or, worse, they are intimidated by their journals. I think everyone who expresses themselves creatively has experienced the former. In my experience, there is an ebb and flow to creativity. Some days the muse dogs your every move, bullying you until you pay attention to her and other days she can’t be coaxed into coming to the party. As an artist, you learn to deal with her fickleness in your own way.

The latter problem is a whole ‘nother kettle of fishes. I really feel for people who are intimidated by their own journals. I don’t know how you help someone in that position. To me a journal is just an extension of my own mental space; a sort of back-up drive for my brain, where I can dump the stuff that swirls around in my head. Otherwise, it will drive me to distraction. And, we don’t want that, do we?

Hemp Bound Journal: Spine
Hemp Bound Journal: Spine

I think this is why it’s difficult for me to understand or offer advice to someone who is intimidated by their journal. To me, that means that what they really fear is the stuff that swirls around in their heads. Or, perhaps they just don’t have the skills to access the swirly stuff? I’m not sure it matters either way, as all the encouragement and journaling tips in the world are unlikely to help the person because the real problem isn’t just your garden variety Mental Block.

Maybe what the intimidated person needs to do is offer a formal invitation to her muse. Ask her over for a cocktail or a cup of coffee and have a little chat with her. Maybe the two of you can come to a mutually beneficial agreement?

Now, if I can just stay connected long enough to upload this. I swear, if the digital divide were any larger, I’d be back in the Stone Age. Apparently, us rural folks don’t merit either a stable dial-up connection, much less any kind of broadband option. I’d be happy with a 14.4kbs transfer rate. I just want to be able to get on-line.

Crankypantsing, Meta, News & Politics, Pets, Photography

Nitpickings and Ramblings

Shelly

Have I mentioned that if it’s not one thing, it’s ten others? Yes! Yes, I believe I have.

I keep finding pesky little issues with the website. Most of them stem from having used my host’s silly web FTP to upload files. Life would’ve been grand if I could’ve used a proper FTP client to do the uploading, but, obviously, that would’ve been far, far too easy. I think there are approximately eleventy-hundred separate files, so when loading them five (yes, *5*) at a time, it’s not surprising that a few went AWOL. I keep a close eye on my error reports and fix problems as I find them, but if y’all run across files that seem to be missing, just let me know and I’ll fix them ASAP. So far, it’s mostly been large images that have gone walkabout, but I also ran across a couple of links that were, um, pointing with their middle fingers. I dunno how that happened, as I used relative URLs for internal links. Another issue has been file names changing case when uploaded. What’s weird is that they changed from lower to upper case. Hmmm. Usually, it’s the other way around.

Anyway, that’s a rambly way of saying that I’m continuing to tidy things up around the edges. Which, you may have guessed, is the story of my life.

No art today. I’ve been driving myself to tears with this Color Erratica round robin. Someone dropped out, causing a log jam of books, so a bunch of us are scrambling to get caught up and get the group back on track. I took a break from it last night, though, and sat on my ass and did N-O-T-H-I-N-G. Well, not exactly nothing. I watched some–you guessed it!–really bad TeeVee. I’ll spare you the details, as there really aren’t any.

The unholy hot weather continues. “They” say we’ll get a break from it tomorrow. I’ll believe it when I see it. In the meantime, because Freshman orientation is over and the wee kiddies and their parents have left the building, and because the heat index has been in the triple digits, and because we supposedly need to conserve energy, The Powers That Be have declared that our building will be having periodic chilled water outages. Yep. When it gets super hot, they turn off our AC. Of course, this is an eleven story building with no windows above the third floor, so it’s not like we need AC or anything. M’kay. All that means that here are about a zillion fans going full-blast, so A) it’s impossible to hear yourself think and B) I really have to question whether there is, in fact, any sort of energy savings at all.

Le sigh. If I ran the world, things would be very, very different. Not better, mind you, just, well, different. For example, we might have year-round snow:

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And, finally, for those of you who care, the House of Representatives re-upped the Patriot Act. (A pdf of the full text of the Patriot Act can be found here.)

Art, Artist Books, Collage

Color Erratica: White

Shelly

I Turn Myself Inside Out I
I Turn Myself Inside Out I

I Keep My Spine in My Pocket
I Keep My Spine in My Pocket

By Hand
By Hand

I Turn Myself Inside Out II
I Turn Myself Inside Out II

These are the pages I did in Patti’s book, for the Color Erratica round robin. Obviously, her chosen color was white. She requested that people choose vintage themes–black and white movies and things that made people feel calm and soothed. I don’t know how well I followed her directions–calm and soothing is not really in my art vocabulary. However, out of my work to date in this round robin, I’m happiest–on a personal level, at least–with what I’ve done in Patti’s book. Hopefully, she’ll like it, too.

[Edit: The last image was taken with my camera while the other three were scanned. The scanned images are fairly close in color to the originals. The one taken by my camera came out almost glacial white, which is incorrect. Can’t do anything about it now, because the book is long gone.]

Bookarts, Crankypantsing, Ladybusiness

Wonderfalls, New Journal Part Deux, and another Big Brother Rant

Shelly

Hemp Bound Journal: Cover

I spent time last night watching the first half of the last disc of Wonderfalls. The first disc sat here for nearly a month before I got around to watching it. I couldn’t remember what it was or why I’d put it in my Netflix queue, so I waited until I was good and bored before I watched it.

It was well worth the wait. The writing is brilliant–funny and smart. It’s quirky, but not annoyingly so. And, as there was, alas, only one season of the show, it’s not a huge, on-going time committment.

While I was watching TeeVee, I put some finishing touches on the hemp-bound journal I made the other night. I used torn masking tape to attach a photo of a stormy, sullen winter sky. It’s been ungodly hot lately, so I thought a reminder of cooler weather would be motivatory. We’ll see. Because there are only 24 pages, I decided to mete them out as two-page spreads. With one spread for a calendar/table of contents, that leaves 22 plus one to grow on. My intention is to do a spread a day.

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And now some more ranting about Big Brother. This one has been germinating for a while. In a previous episode, Eric got his knickers in a twist because Mike was kissing and hitting on the women in the house. M’kay. The women in question either enjoyed it (one, in particular, claimed to enjoy it a lot) or told him to fuck the hell off in no uncertain terms. It seems to me that that ought to’ve been the end of the Situation, but because Eric is afflicted with a surplus of testosterone, it wasn’t.

Eric, as head of household, decided that it was his place to give Mike a talking to. Apparently, those poor, helpless girls weren’t capable of speaking their minds and it was up to Eric to come to their rescue. Poor little girls. After calling Mike on being a flirtatious pain in the arse, Eric spent the rest of his tenure as HoH telling everyone that Mike had sexually harassed the women and that he needed to be voted out of the house. It fit nicely into Eric’s strategy. He wanted Mike gone and branding him as a pervy bastard was an effective way to achieve his goal.

Mike was a jerk, there’s no doubt about that, but using the umbrella of sexual harassment as part of your strategy for winning a game is, I think, pretty craptacular. I also thought Eric’s ubermanly “I’m going to protect these poor, defenseless girls from the big, bad, kissy monster” schtick was far more degrading to the women in the house than Mike could ever have dreamt of being.

What an ass! And a bully, too. Eric was this close to doing physical violence to Mike because he thought he’d been talking smack about Eric’s family. Who the hell cares? You don’t go around beating up people because they’ve got big mouths. It doesn’t solve anything and only makes you look like a total and complete fuckwit.

Oh, and I’m liking Kaysar more and more with every episode. The guy is smart and, I think, appropriately devious.

Bookarts, Photography

Demolition Derby and the Sunset that Wasn’t

Shelly

I finally got around to cropping and uploading photos I took at last weekend’s demolition derby. Yes, I said demolition derby. If you haven’t been to one, you have no idea what you’re missing. Not only is it the ultimate in recycling, it’s a ginormous amount of fun. I especially recommend watching the Bumble Bees (AKA the minis). A little four-door Geo Metro won the mini division this year. Alas, I got no pictures of the minis, but I got quite a few of the large and mid-sized cars, including a firemen’s confab. Also, alas, there were no explodiations or infernos this year.

It’d been overcast and oppressively hot that day, but before the derby proper started, there was a lovely break in the clouds and a tiny peek at what would have been a spectacular sunset.

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No arting today, but I made a nifty little book last night out of the end of an old stash of paper. When I worked at the art museum, I was given a stack of museum board. It’s half-way between rough watercolor paper and Davey board. It’s interesting stuff–nice for oil pastels or any number of media that work well on toned paper. The texture has a definite grain, but it’s not too pronounced once you’ve worked on it.

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I tore it down to size (I really prefer torn paper to cut paper, especially for journals). I was too lazy to dig out my book board, so I used two folded sheets of the paper for the front and back covers. I doubled them over and punched holes in them along the open side, then used eyelets to reinforce the holes and close the open edge. Because I wanted to keep the book looking rustic, I used hemp twine to bind it. It’s just a basic, single-needle Coptic stitch.

Art, Artist Books, Collage, News & Politics

Artings and Musings

Shelly

First, the artings.

These are from the latest installment of the Color Erratica round robin. The color theme this time was “dusk,” so I focused mostly on purpley, winey colors.

The Pea Hens
The Pea Hens

I’ve had that peacock feather floating around in my stash for at least ten years. It was time to use it. The little cotton knickers came from a bunch of antique baby and doll clothes my mom snagged for me at a yard sale. The background is another piece of wrapping paper from Mr. and Mrs. B.’s wedding. This particular book has already travelled overseas, so I figured it was safe to include the poplar leaf and the peacock feather.

The Party Girls
The Party Girls

This was a silly little page. I kept the label from a bottle of Christmas sangria. It was too lovely to throw away. The purple wrappers came from a bag of chocolate truffle candies. The yearbook girls–glued to 35mm film negatives–are from the 1920s (Prohibition era in the USA), which makes me laugh, because the sangri was non-alcoholic.

Baubo and the Girls 1
Baubo and the Girls 1

Baubo and the Girls 2
Baubo and the Girls 2

The last two pages started out covered with dark purple tissue paper. It was a little too garish, though, so I covered it with unbleached waxed paper to tone it down. I love the way it looks–the scans do not do the subtle color justice. I used a couple more Polaroids from my Baubo’s Safari series. I separated the photos from the backing, then sanded through the photo layer, to make them lay flatter and give them some transparency and texture. The top Polaroid was also sanded on the front and rubbed with brown India ink.

The bottom page presented an interesting challenge, in that it had a window cut out of it by the person who worked in the book before me. I decided to emphasize the window by framing it with a scrap of intaglio print I’ve been carrying around with me since college. A cast-off from another student’s printmaking project, I picked it out of the trash and have been carting it around ever since.

Now, the musings.

Thanks to Cynthia for pointing out this article.

I think one of the ironies of the whole Rove debacle is that it shows just how dishonest and lacking in integrity this administration is. It seems to me that, when your platform is based on “moral values,” you might be expected to hold yourself and your staff to a certain, well, moral standard. Countering claims of wrong doing with “it’s partisan politics,” or “he didn’t actually do anything illegal,” seems to me to indicate an ethical disconnect. Since when were moral values a legal matter? Rove clearly discussed information that he had no business discussing with people he had no business discussing it with. Whether or not he’s legally in the wrong ought to be irrelevant to this administration, as it’s quite clearly morally wrong. Condoning such behavior speaks volumes about what’s important to Rove’s superiors and it’s not “moral values.

Oh, and speaking of ironies, dare I say that Mr. Bush’s rephrasing of his intention, from “the leaker will be fired” to “if the leaker did anything illegal he’ll be fired,” might–just might–be considered flip-flopping?

News & Politics

And This Just in from the Us vs. Them Newsdesk

Shelly

It looks to me like Rove is going to walk. I’m angered, but not surprised. What struck me, though, was this bit:

On Thursday, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada pressed for legislation to strip Rove of his clearance for classified information, which he said President Bush should have done already. Instead, Reid said, the Bush administration has attacked its critics: “This is what is known as a cover-up. This is an abuse of power.”

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tennessee, said Democrats were resorting to “partisan war chants.

By reducing criticism of Rove to “partisan war chants,” Frist deflects the main focus from Rove’s actions and sets the stage for an Us vs. Them debate. A debate which, conveniently, no one can win, for we have always been at war with Eurasia Oceania Them Us… You see the problem this presents.