???Sculpture of a Tape Hare??? by Alduct D??rer
March 12, 2010
In situations like this, I will not be reinventing the wheel. Today’s assignment was to do something unconventional with Duct tape. I didn’t think twice about how I would use this manmade wonder. I spent more time standing in Target trying to decide which of the five non-grey colors of “Duck” tape I would choose.
I was presented with flourescent purple, blue, pink, orange, and green. Given the subject matter, my first instinct was to choose orange. But as you may recall from a previous post or two, I do like my bright green. But what I learned from game after game of Trivial Pursuit is to trust your first instinct. I finally picked up the orange roll.
My orange hare is entirely duct tape. I wadded up a bunch to make a core ball for the body, then artfully wrapped strips smoothly around the outside. It was kind of interesting working in foil and tape, and fun trying to coax the desired shapes into existence, such as the haunches and the ears. They’re both pretty malleable media; tape was quite a bit easier to control than the aluminum foil as it had the advantage of being adhesive.
Okay, so I’ve created two masterpieces. Now what do I do with them? Enter Mom.
My mom is a complete and utter pushover for both rabbits and bears. She really only needed one look at Foil Hare and Duct Tape Hare perched atop my television to start gushing. Although I have piles of stuff all over my house, at times I am able to have an unnatural detachment about the possession of things (and people, for that matter). I asked my mom if she wanted them and it was a done deal. I sort of wanted to keep them because I feel sentimentally about the reason for and process by which they were created.
As my mom was preparing to leave and stashing them in her things, she was dismayed when one of Foil Hare’s ears fell off. I said that I had only required it to hold together long enough to be photographed. I had a brief moment of clarity as I separated the sentimental from the practical. On a number of levels, I am a lot better at being unemotional than my mother. But that’s a whole different subject.
My drink of choice (second runner-up)
March 11, 2010
I suppose the time of day would determine what I would say to this. In a shootout at the OK Corral, water would probably win because it’s the most versatile and the best for me. For fun, well, you all know I love beer. But beer isn’t always practical, and I also covered it in a previous post. So for this entry, the winner is coffee.
I do coffee backwards. I drink decaffeinated in the morning and regular in the afternoon. It’s like this. I get addicted to the caffeine very quickly, so I have to be careful. If I have a couple of cups two or three days in a row, I fall victim to that awful caffeine headache if I don’t start getting my fix soon enough on subsequent days. That is why I started drinking decaf years and years ago. So that I wouldn’t get hooked on caffeine.
In the last year or two, however, regular coffee on a regular basis has crept back into my life, after lunch. It’s sort of like when I started smoking again the last time. I thought, oh, I’ll just have this one and it’ll be just fine. Next thing you know, you’re smoking close to a pack a day. Same with coffee. One afternoon when I was bored, a little sleepy, and there was already some made, I drank a cup of regular coffee. And guess what—I perked up. Maybe once a week I’d do that. Well, now I’m drinking two or two and a half mugs an afternoon. On Saturday at home when I don’t make coffee for myself, I am visited by the splitting headache. I usually just take a few aspirin (not Excedrin, my prefered pain-reliever, because that’s got caffeine in it) and tough it out, only to start over on Monday. I still drink decaf in the morning. My reasoning these days is that presumably I’ve just been sleeping all night and should be rested and not need artificial stimulants. I also believe that morning caffeine reels me in a day or two faster than afternoon coffee. My name is Kelly and I am in denial.
Just to recap on my beers of choice, we have (L–R): Summit Extra Pale Ale, Surly Coffee Bender, Bell’s Oberon, Lagunitas India Pale Ale, Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale.
I have two mottos
March 8, 2010
I don’t hold myself to very strict standards in most areas of my life, but I do seem to embrace two credos. From my parents, I get “it doesn’t hurt to ask.” From bowling, I get “it’s only fun if you make it fun.”
It doesn’t hurt to ask
This is a philosophy that was instilled in me by my parents from an early age. In my young life, I was made to practice this by having to make my own requests about things. When I was eight or nine, I had come across a science activity to make my own bouncy ball by mixing certain chemicals together. I don’t remember what the substances were, but I do remember that it was very convenient that one of my best friends’ dad was, in fact, a chemist. As much as I wanted my mom to make the phone call for me, I had to do it. He was more than willing to bring me a little of what I needed. What still stands out in my memory though, is that, having never really directly addressed the dad before, I just went ahead and called him by his first name. Nowadays it’s common for kids to call adults by their first names, but back then, there was a brief hesitation from Mrs. H on the other end of the line as well as the suggestion from my mom to call him Mr. H in the future. I also remember that the ball did not turn out very round.
More recently, just asking is how I got Lagunitas Brewing to sponsor one of my bowling teams, even though they’re in California and I’m in Minnesota. I had the opportunity to meet the owner and brewer toward the end of last summer, and the idea hit me like a lightning bolt. So when it was my turn for a few minutes of conversation with him and I had finished gushing about how I absolutely love his beer, especially the India Pale Ale, I said, “Hey, I’ve got a promotional opportunity for you!” And his answer was, “Sure, we love doing things like that.”
It doesn’t hurt to ask.
It’s only fun if you make it fun
This one has developed in the last few years as a result of bowling with better bowlers in better leagues. Everybody wants to be good, including me, and there are some really intense people in these leagues. I always try to do my best and even when I’m having a game like the one pictured above, I try not to give up or get crabby. Being upset doesn’t benefit me or my game. But a lot of people don’t see it that way. They throw their towels or smack the scoring console or swear loudly at the foul line. I don’t believe that those things make them feel any better or help them figure out how they could adjust to improve their shot. It probably only raises their blood pressure a little. If we were that good, we’d be out on the PBA tour with a sponsor. We are good, but it’s still just a game and not a matter of life and death. We should enjoy ourselves while we’re out recreating.
It’s only fun if you make it fun.
And now I will refill my glass, even though it’s still half full.
Something borrowed, kept ???til tomorrow
March 7, 2010
’Fess up. Somebody, out of the kindness of their heart, loaned you something “for a few days.” Or you cat-sat for someone and took something home with you, fully intending to return it before they returned.
I fall into the latter catter-gory. Rob M, I confess. I have your Pantone swatch book. Let me refer back to old files on my computer. Nope, it’s been so long* that those files aren’t even on my current computer. No, I “borrowed” your swatch book when you entrusted the care of your feline companion to me for a longish Christmas trip to Green Bay, when I was still doing the quarterly catalog for cooking classes at Lund’s for my former freelance client. It was a one-color job and I got to pick the color. I used your swatch book to make the choice. Now you know. Obviously, you haven’t missed it much. Or else you’ve been just too nice to bring it up. You are a nice guy, but I suspect it’s more that you just haven’t needed it and so either didn’t even notice, or if you did, decided that it wasn’t important enough to mention. That’s because you went and became a fancy web designer guy at Yahoo!. The internet doesn’t care about the Pantone Matching System. If you ever need to use Pantone colors again, I’d be happy to return it to you. But may I note that it only goes up to PMS 587, with a few flourescents and metallics thrown in for good measure. The latest edition apparently features 2,058 colors. Your book is old news. The green featured in the call-out is 363, the color of the Pantone coffee mug that was part of the Christmas 2008 office gift to me. That color was carefully selected for me by our office manager who thought it reminded her of the color of the spinach soup that I sometimes make. She likes baby-shit-colored split pea soup, but for some reason, my green-greener spinach soup grosses her out. There’s no accounting for taste.
*Omg, it was SO long ago that I was still working in QuarkXPress. What?
Three items for your last meal
March 6, 2010
How many ways can you answer this question? I will share my favorites.
Meal: three things you’d like to eat in association with each other:
Three things I really like to eat together as a meal are grilled salmon with lemon juice, asparagus steamed al dente, and white rice with just a little butter. All with a little salt.
Three things I often eat together and which would be acceptably pleasing:
One of my favorite lunch places is Asian Max (pictured). There are two three-item combos that I usually ask for: sesame chicken, spicy green beans, and cucumber salad; or sesame chicken, shrimp spring roll with sweet brown sauce, and either spicy green beans or cucumber salad, depending on my mood.
My comfort lunch is D’Amico caprese panini, Tuscan chicken soup, and small bag of potato chips. It’s a fancy grilled cheese and tomato soup. They have a punch card for buy five and get one free. That’s not very many.
Three things you like to eat that wouldn’t necessarily comprise a menued “meal”:
Grilled steak (rare) with onion salt, grilled salmon, giant salad.
Grilled steak (rare) with onion salt, giant salad, zinfandel (doesn’t have to be fancy).
Steak, sauteed mushrooms, Bell’s Oberon Ale. The first time I ever tried Oberon was at a wine tasting. Bell’s had a table off in the side room, and I went there after I had tried some steak bites with butter sauteed mushrooms from Murray’s Grill. Oberon was the first beer I sampled. It was divine.
Pizza. Well, there are at least three ingredients there, aren’t there?
Salad. The same would apply to a giant salad. I am quite happy with one of those.
Everyone knows that smoking stinks (addendum)
March 5, 2010
I had a really stressful few days at work. I handed off the project at 1:00 this afternoon, at least for the next twenty-four hours. On my way home, I stopped to get some comfort provisions—sushi and beer. Posted next to the door of the sushi place was this placard. Now that’s what I’m talking about!
Everyone knows that smoking stinks
March 5, 2010
I should know, because I used to smoke. I managed to stop cold turkey in the spring of 2004 after I had been so sick with the flu that I didn’t go to work—or do anything, let alone smoke—for three and a half days. I had been wanting to stop, and with that head start, my brain finally got behind the effort.
Even when I was a smoker, I was a hypocrite. If I was not puffing away myself at the moment, I was not in favor of smelling other people’s pollution. It seems a lot of smokers feel that way. I was, um, lucky enough that none of the city, county or, eventually, statewide indoor smoking bans had gone into effect while I still smoked, so I didn’t have to deal with enforced outside-going to engage in my nasty habit.
But people who still smoke do have to go outside. And that brings us to the pet peeve that is my topic today. Hey smokers: please move a respectable distance away from the door to engage in your filthy habit!
As has been the case several other times in the course of writing this blog, I learned something new. I thought I had remembered that part of the ordinance detailed that your smoking is not supposed to occur within a certain distance of building entrances. That is not the case, it is not written into the law that you must be ten or twenty or any number of feet away from the door before you light up.
That part is, if you think about, simply common courtesy.
I accept that it is your choice to continue smoking and contribute to your eventual demise. My beer drinking probably isn’t doing me any great favors. But what bugs the living daylights out of me is having to walk through your stink to get in or out of a building. I have no choice where the door is. You do have a choice about where to create your smokescreen. Here’s a simple request: please move a little farther away.
Now you’ll try to convince me that in cold or otherwise nasty weather, you’re more sheltered from the conditions closer to the building. If you’re that concerned about your health and welfare, quit smoking!
I’m not really going to preach here; you’ll do what you want to and, like religion and politics, my little rant doesn’t stand a chance of getting you to change. But it feels good to put the bug in your ear for a minute, anyway. If I can influence just one smoker …
???Sculpture of a Foil Hare??? by Kelly D??rer
March 4, 2010
How often have you wished you could draw? Or write, or sing, or whatever? You don’t have to be good to enjoy doing something. I fully embrace the notion of A for effort.
Take Albrecht Dürer’s Portrait of a Young Hare, for example. My former rabbit Bibi did a much better job of recreating it in the course of her daily life than I did this evening with aluminum foil and intention.
Here’s a question for those of you who live with freerange houserabbits. Have you ever noticed (if you ration their food and feed them at predictable times) that about forty-five minutes before mealtime, they start this whole stretching and yawning routine? Well, they do. At least four of my six rabbits have engaged in such activity.
Bibi was a master (mistress) stretcher-yawner. And one time, I managed fire up the camera quickly enough to capture this portrait. I think she did a far better job with her ownself than I did with foil. I entered her posthumously for the mission of standing in front of a portrait and making the same expression. How could I resist? Who doesn’t think their pet is the cutest ever? (p.s. They are!)
Later that same day, which was a Friday, I eschewed actual work work in order to create my own entry for the mission—a self-portrait in front of the artist’s self-portrait. I swear I could have kept doing it all day. And, it just happened I was wearing brown that day. Dürer’s hair is curlier, though.
It’s weird taking pictures of yourself when there are plenty of other people around who you wouldn’t mind not seeing you doing it. I managed to escaped scrutiny.
Going into the day, my plan was to make my 3D sculpture of the 2D painting with Fun Tak, because I could have worked on it discretely at my desk and nobody would have been any the wiser. But today, unlike that January Friday, work tasks conspired against me and I did not have the opportunity to goof off as much as I sometimes do. The trade-off? I am redesigning the Black & Decker DIY books that you will soon find in your local Menard’s, Home Depot, or Lowe’s. It’s the highest-profile thing I’ve ever worked on. I can live with that.
So I present you with this inadequate foil replica of a masterwork. But as I’ve declared on a few previous occasions, the fun part is that I’m doing something that I wouldn’t have, ordinarily. But I did today.
(For those of you paying attention and remembering my “What’s in a name?” entry, my D does not stand for Dürer. It’s merely a convenient coincidence.)
To-do list (2 March 2010)
March 3, 2010
The to-do list. It seems innocuous enough. Yet at the end of the day, you curse it. If you’re like me, your ambition always outweighs your actual accomplishment. Yet today, I did okay.
√ Items 1 and 2
Things to do to finish the fifth out of six manuscripts for a book series I’m writing about simple science activities. Topic number 5 is water. The little projects were written, but I had to organize the materials list, as well as write the two- to four-sentence long book specific introduction and conclusion.
(√) Item 3
I’m working on a new text design for a grammar-related series. The author is very organized. All of a sudden, about forty-five minutes before quitting time (which turned into an hour and a half and me leaving another forty-five minutes after quitting time, which isn’t any specific time as long as we get our eight hours in and the work done), I found my design muse. Yesterday I remarked that I wish my whole day could be shifted about four hours to the later, because that’s when I shift into being productive.
√ Item 4
These are tiny little pre-final changes. They didn’t take very long. No problem.
(-) Item 5
I’ll address that tomorrow evening. I try to write at the office, but I’m easily distracted and there’s usually plenty going on. I’m much more efficient if I bite the bullet and write at home.
(-) Item 6
Well, if Item 3 hadn’t been going so well, I would have gotten to Item 6. I have to arrive t my Curves by 6:00, so I have to leave the office by 5:45 at the latest. Tonight I did not. But I went last night, so it is not yet a big deal that I didn’t make it there today
√ Item 7
I had to pick up a few items for the photoshoot for the simple science book on water. On the list: marbles (displacement), rubber tubing (siphon), cheesecloth (surface tension), clear straws (density), and wooden matches (surface tension). Marbles are hard to find these days. I imagine that’s for two reasons: they are a choking hazard which today’s paranoid parent doesn’t want to deal with, and they are not a video game which today’s youngster does not know how to deal with.
So all in all, today was pretty productive. And I drank some tasty beer and wrote a couple of blog entries, which was personally satisfying. And the temperature reached 40°F for the first time in what seems like years. It’s probably just been since November.
Ask a random person to draw for 10 seconds
March 2, 2010
I believe that quite a lot of people, though they profess otherwise, are secretly hams. I am a case in point. If you asked me whether I was shy, I would unhesitatingly answer with an emphatic YES! But anyone who has spent even the smallest amount of time around me would beg to differ. I inherited an odd combination of my mother’s effervescence and my father’s reserve. The bubbles often win.
But I digress.
The assignment was as stated in the title above. My first victim was our office mailman, Jim. Jim was our mailman when I started my job in March 1995. We are in our second office in the neighborhood and a couple of weeks ago, Jim started his third stint as our bearer of bills and junk mail. I know him pretty well. He is a bowler. I thrust my fluorescent green Post-It™ pad and brick red Sharpie® at him and said, “Draw for ten seconds, please!” Not surprisingly he asked, “Draw what?”
After clarifying that it could be anything, he put pen to paper for a good two and a half seconds. Not surprisingly, he drew a bowling ball. I also would have accepted an envelope or a stamp. I informed him that he still had seven and a half seconds left. “Would you like me to enhance it?” Please do. He added the brand name Hammer.
Back in college when I started bowling “for real” and throwing fingertip, my first urethane ball was a Pink Hammer. It was hard as a rock and is still my sentimental favorite, even though in technology terms, it would be like surfing the internet using a 256 baud modem.
But I digress.
I took my Post-It pad along to my bowling league in the evening, where I figured I could talk one or two other people into drawing for me. My first target was Brett. I know all of his team well, we were on neighboring lanes, and Brett and I were sharing space on the same table. It was inevitable.
At first, he blinked at me like a deer in headlights. Fortunately, I had to go take my next shot, so the performance pressure was lessened. When I came back, there was the upper right nice little drawing. I know Brett likes his tropical vacations so I was able to reassure him that it was was determinable as a palm tree and beach.
The team opposing Brett’s was the one of which the bowler Tom Kasper (of Tiny-bunny fame) is a member. I determined that Tom would be my next artist. That was when all hell broke loose and my ham hypothesis gained some traction.
Though it was to Tom to whom I next offered the Post-It pad and pen, he barely had time to make his nice little sketch of the target arrows on the bowling alley before the next and next and next people were clamoring for their chance to make a ten-second drawing.
Tom’s teammate Craig made a quite accurate caricature of their teammate Gary. From there, sometimes substitute bowler Randy confiscated the pad and pen and gave them to the youngster Jasmine, a five- or six-year-old who I assume was one of the bowlers’ daughter (must have been Craig’s? because I’m pretty familiar with everyone who was on that pair other than him, and nobody else has young children), who drew the second face of the evening. At least I assume it’s a face; otherwise, it’s a bowling ball with facial hair. After Jasmine, Randy made his own drawing, the hypnotizing swirl.
From there, I tapped my own teammate Ken, who was one of the brainstormers for the Tiny-bunny ideas. He produced the second tree of the evening along with what, at the time, made me think of telephone poles but which now I see more as silver dandelions in summer—a hopeful scene from the depths of a Minnesota winter.
Our final contestant was my friend Dick, Brett’s teammate (or vice versa, depending on how you look at it), who plaintively asked, “Can’t I draw, too?” Well, of course you can. His entry was this content-looking face. I see it as someone resting peacefully on a really comfy pillow.
I don’t think any of these people would say they can draw. Would you? I sure wouldn’t. I’m a graphic designer, and I get by because I can use a computer. When my hand is required to manipulate a drawing implement, I am stumped. But in the social situation, the lemmings raced each other to the cliff.
Prologue
Huh. Going in, I was thinking this would be one of my shorter entries but it turned out otherwise. Once again, interesting what happens when you do not choose the topic.
Kelly’s Unnecessary Blog 