Author: Shelly

Crankypantsing, Meta

Please Stand By…

Shelly

Malaprop o’ the day: “Heresy Kisses.” Have y’all tried the peanut butter ones, yet?

Okaythen!

My apologies for doing unspeakable things to my various templates, but I’m just not happy with them. I switched the gallery template back the clunky grey whatsit over the weekend, and today I tweaked the blog template so that it is at least somewhere in the same color realm. In the process, I managed to delete my header php file, which made all sorts of ugly happen.  Eeep!  Now that I’ve got it back to where it is, at the very least, unb0rken, I’m thinking I may swap out the grey frame with plain ol’ white.  The grey, while better than the stock color that came with the template, is not really very elegant.  I also tweaked the sidebar, because the stock one lumped all the blogroll links into one stream.  I like being able to have them divided out into categories, so I did a little Frankensteining to massage everything into a format I can live with.

But hey, I now know more than I ever wanted to about both style sheets and php (including how to tweak Coppermine so that the image captions are left justified, instead of centered). Aren’t I a lucky duck?

Art, Photography

Easy-peasy Monoprints

Shelly

100_1308

I sometimes use this method to create backgrounds. It can also be used to create full-blown works of art.

Start by laying down a sheet of freezer paper, shiny side up. Secure it with tape. Then, apply acrylic paint to the freezer paper “plate.” You can move it around with a brush, fingers, etc. This time, I used a credit card to smooth the paint and mix it slightly. When you have the paint where you want it, lay your paper face down onto it and burnish gently with your hands. Be careful not to move the paper, or the design will smudge and smear. Gently pull the paper away and lay it flat to dry. You’ll need to re-“ink” the “plate” with additional paint between pulls. If you want to change palettes, you can scrape and wash the remaining paint off the “plate” or you can just toss it and start over with a fresh sheet of freezer paper.

Uncategorized

Flambé is NOT the Answer!

Shelly

Squick Alert!

I watched Cabin Fever last night. Which was probably not a good idea. Not that the movie isn’t good. It is! It’s Friday the 13th meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with David Lynch-style surreality and Troma-style absurdity. It’s funny, smart, and creepy as hell. It’s one of the very best horror movies I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot of horror movies.

Anyway, I suspect that’s what lead to a night of strange dreams.

I had some weird-assed dreams last night. In one of them, I was hanging out with a group of friends near the loading dock of one of the buildings on campus. There was another group of students across the parking lot from us, with two Husky puppies, which were playing. One of my friends dropped a piece of sausage from his sandwich. I could tell that the puppy saw the food fall, but he was too interested in playing to come get it just yet. Eventually, he trotted across the parking lot to get the sausage, but a guy suddenly appeared from behind a delivery truck, reaching out and grabbing the dog. He swung the dog around in circles on the end of a leash. Where the leash (or the guy!) came from, I haven’t a clue. C’est la logic of dreams. When the dog hit maximum velocity, the guy let go of the leash, catapulting the dog out of scene. My friends and I were both seriously creeped out and royally pissed off. Realizing that the guy was a dangerous psychopath, we decided to leave. On the way, one of my friends doused the guy with lighter fluid (again, where on earth did it come from?) and set him on fire. My response was, “Dude, flambé is NOT the answer!”

And then, of course, I woke up.

Art

The Raising of an Old Hope

Shelly

Vessels: The Raising of an Old Hope
Vessels: The Raising of an Old Hope
oil pastel on 90lb Stonehenge paper with bones, hair, brass brads, and copper wire
11 1/4 x 9 1/2 inches

I meant to play around with making a pinhole lens for my 35mm camera, but I didn’t end up getting to it. The weather turned kind of gross–cold and grey and snowy–so I stayed inside and made art. Not that it was terrible out or anything, not like what the east coast is experiencing (25 inches of snow?!), but I just didn’t feel like doing much of anything. Instead, I spent the day drawing while watching some awful movie about a 16th century Venetian courtesan on WB (ah, apparently it was called Dangerous Beauty) and a biography of Anne Boleyn on PBS. That was an odd juxtaposition!

And, now, the weekend is over. Hrmph. They always speed by too quickly, and there is never enough to show for the time spent.

Art

Vessels: Six Secrets

Shelly

Vessels: Six Secrets
Vessels: Six Secrets
Prismacolor and Caran d’Ache Neocolors II on 90lb black Stonehenge paper with vertebrae and copper wire
11 1/4 x 9 1/2 inches

Someone in one of my art groups asked about drawing with Prismacolors on black paper, and I remembered a stash of black Stonehenge paper I’d gotten a while back. My intention was to use it for oil pastels, and I will, but there’s plenty of it to play around with. It’s been years since I’ve played around with Prismacolors. They’re fussier and more time consuming than oil pastels, which is probably why I don’t use them much. And, while they’re somewhat finger blendable (I just cannot seem to keep my fingers out of whatever I’m working with), once you’ve built up enough layers, they aren’t as easy and fun to move around on the paper as oil pastels.

While I was working, I watched the last DVD of Freaks and Geeks. Good grief! I laughed, I cried, it was way better than Cats. Truly. It reminded me so much of the preppy high school I went to in 9th grade.

Pets

Why I Love Boxers Reason #487

Shelly

So, Miss Brown spent some quality time outside this afternoon, digging and generally making a mess of both the (alleged) “yard” and herself. She was spectacularly, grossly, disgustingly dirty. Ugh. So I gave her a bath. After Elliott, who A) loathed being bathed and B) had a long, dense, Chowy coat, the short, single coat of the sporty Boxer model is a finely crafted thing of beauty. Eight minutes it took me, to bathe and towel her off. Now she’s resting happily on the couch, giving herself a “cat bath” to remove the remaining moisture.

The best part is that, while she hates getting wet, she’s a total peach about being bathed. She doesn’t exactly like it, but she doesn’t object to it.

Oh, and have I mentioned how much I appreciate our local license branch? I had to renew my driver’s license and the registration on my car. I was in and out in 15 minutes.

Crankypantsing

Change of Address

Shelly

When I moved last fall, I filled out all the various change of address forms with the USPS and with the folks I regularly pay money to. You know, like my car insurance people. I’m still getting mail from them bearing my old address. Late mail, of course, because it appears to have taken the scenic overland route to my house. Now, first class mail should be forwarded for one year, so this isn’t necessarily a big deal. It should be relabeled by the post office before it is delivered. So why, oh why, is my mail making multiple stops on its way home, and why, oh why, is someone ever so helpfully rewriting my name–which was originally spelled correctly, I might add!–multiple times and with multiple misspellings? Shouldn’t the little yellow label, which has my current, correct information on it, have been applied before anyone ever attempted to deliver the envelope?

Crankypantsing, Pets, Photography

Harriet Brown is a Sleepy Goose

Shelly

100_1269

I love it when Harriet tucks her nose under her “wing.” She makes such a compact bundle. I would’ve wrapped her up in her binkey, because she was obviously a little chilled, but she was lying on it and I didn’t want to disturb her.

So, I stopped on the way home to get gas (only US$2.25/gallon!), and had an odd encounter. First, I nearly got creamed by some asstrumpet in a Camaro who cut through the Bigfoot lot to avoid the traffic waiting in line to turn onto the main road. Can we say rude and illegal? Yep, I thought we could.

Then, when I tried to use my card at the pump, I got a message that blinked “Panic Code 013.” WTF?! I went inside to inform the young man at the counter that his, um, equipment was taking A Tone with me. His response? “I wonder just how panicked we should be?” Smartass! I ended up pulling around to another pump, which worked fine. As I was leaving, I saw that another car had pulled up to the Cranky Pump and that there was an enormous pool of gas all over the pavement. Yikes! I didn’t hear any explosions as I drove off, so I assume all’s well that ends well.

Photography

It’s a good, good day

Shelly

I don’t usually get to see the morning Belt of Venus, because I live in a valley and the view to the west is obstructed by a ridge. I happened to look out the window at work, though, and saw a beautiful pink blush in the western sky. Mmmm. It was delightful.

And, more crepuscular rays. Sorry to keep going on and on and on about them, but the clouds we’ve had recently have created some gorgeous ray action. This photo was taken at the intersection of Starnes Rd and Reeves Rd, near Ellettsville.

100_1292

In other photographic news, I found some pretty straightforward instructions for making a pinhole camera, using a 35mm camera body. w00t! That means that the film can be commercially developed, which is important, as I don’t have easy access to a darkroom or a way to dispose of chemicals. I’m going to play around with it this weekend, weather permitting.