Snow Day!

Yesterday was pretty fun. We took a short drive out to Snoqualmie Falls to meet up with Dan and Erica. They had stayed the night out at Salish Lodge and were recovering from a massage that Dan described as "a midget korean lady beating the shit out of me." We hiked down to the falls and then packed into Dan's car and headed out to find some snow at Rachel's request. We went up to the ski areas at Snoqualmie Pass and pulled into a parking lot with huge drifts on the side. Of course we did the whole snowball fight thing and once I was absolutely soaked and Rachel's ear was packed with snow we made a snowman. Dan finished it off nicely with a delicately constructed snow tophat.

Rach, Erica, Dan and Joe at Snoqualmie Falls:

Rachel's cat-like reflexes save her from a face full of snow:

Dan decides cat-like reflexes are no match for outright brawn:
Dan puts the finishing touches on our snowman:

I hope everyone got to watch the Huskers defeat Michigan in the Alamo Bowl. What a game!! I still think the MVP should be Bowman for his game-saving heads up play in the final seconds. With the rest of the team already on the field celebrating, he realized the ball was not dead yet and saved the Huskers from what would have been a VERY embarassing defeat.

The 5 Weirdest of My Habits

I've been tagged by AMG for my five weirdest habits, here they are in no particular order:

1. If I left my shoes by the door at night I have to turn them upside down and give them a shake before I put them on to make sure nothing crawled inside them........like my apartment is infested with scorpions or something.

2. When I'm using scissors I open and close my mouth whenever the scissors open and close....probably some kind of a shorted ciruit.

3. I ALWAYS give clothes the sniff test before putting them on, even if they are hanging in my closet or fresh out of the dryer.

4. I don't like to be confined to one choice of where to sleep. My one bedroom apartment has three places I sleep, my bed, my couch and a weird little nest of blankets on top of a beanbag chair.

5. I like to drive with my driver side window down year-round. Rain or shine, doesn't matter.

And that's all I have time for, we're headed to the mountains for some sledding today!!!

What I Want for Christmas

It;s not every day you run across a car that bears your last name........unless your last name is Ford............or Dodge.............or Hyundai. I have to get my hands on one of these cars!!

The Henney Motor Company

1931 Henney Limousine-style Hearse

1934 Henney Arrowline Three-Way Hearse (Pierce-Arrow)

The Moisture Festival

I hope everyone had a GREAT weekend.... I joined my friend Sue for her company christmas party on Saturday night. I was her back-up date so I introduced myself as her lover, pool-boy, bodyguard, sidekick, personal trainer and bullriding instructor. It was funny because I could really tell which guys had a little crush on Sue by how much they were crushing my hand in a handshake....easy fellas. Most of her co-workers are pretty fun people which came in handy later when Sue decided to skip the show and hang out by the bar coaxing her boys into buying her wine. The event was held at the Moisture Festival down here in Fremont. We all agreed that "moisture festival" is a horrible name. There is no water involved at all and the word moisture is kind of icky. So, this place was a warehouse behind Hale's Ales and was similar in theme to Teatro Zinzani which I also visited recently. There were jugglers, aerialists, drag queens, acrobats, singers, etc. It was kind of the cheapo version of Teatro Zinzani but they put on a great show. You could tell they were working with a limited amount of funding and probably were not in the business for the great pay. The "bathrooms" were porta-potties with christmas lights and decorations inside. No matter how much you decorate, it's still a porta-potty.... One part of the show was a forty minute presentation by a local philipino high school marching drill team, something you might see in any local parade. I had a lot of fun though, I mean, dinner was served buffet style! What fat kid wouldn't be happy??
The can-canner on the right has the voice of an angel! You all know how I feel about a woman who can sing. I totally fell in love with her that night, at one point the entire cast came out to dance with the crowd to the music of the Fremont Philharmonic, she was nowhere to be seen, damn.

Five days left until the Seahawks STOMP the now not-so-undefeated Indianapolis Colts.......

Pipe Problem Tied to Naked Man in Basement

Somehow I knew just by reading the headline that this would be in Washington......

SPOKANE, Wash. - A plumbing problem at a Spokane home turned out to be a naked man. Police say a woman who thought she was having a problem with water pipes beneath the floor called the Water Department. Employees found the basement barricaded, and when they determined there was someone behind the door, they called police.

Police broke through the door, found the naked man and took him into custody. They searched the basement but found no clothing for the man. They also found that a pipe had been broken and repaired.

The 36-year-old was booked into jail for investigation of burglary.

What a Day!!

This was one hell of a day. I got up early, seven o'clock is WAAYyyyy early for me now, and headed to school for my eight o' clock english final. I had two hours to write a six page essay on a piece called "I Just Wanna Be Average" and tie it in to the effectiveness of our public schools. My pen touched the paper and did not stop moving until I was finished.......like buttah. While I was writing my phone started buzzing. When I left the classroom I found that Lockheed Martin had called to offer me a job in Moorestown, NJ. I've been on the job search for more than two weeks now with no success. Do you ever have a moment of clarity where everything just makes sense all of the sudden? This job offer ties in events stretching back maybe ten years for me. They want me to be an instructor at one of their training facilities. I am MIGHTY intrigued. I came home between tests and made some modifications to my resume and sent it off right away. So hopefully they'll be giving me a ring for an interview soon. Then I had my Visual Thinking final which was cake because he gave us the questions before hand and it was open note.....hmmmm. After that, drove all the way to Tacoma to talk to a shrink. The Navy is trying to figure out if they gave me an anxiety problem and if so, how much money do they owe me for it? The doc was a total quack, I walked in feeling fine and left there tense and all worked up. I don't like psychiatrists, well, not that froot loop anyway. HE should go see a shrink.

So, school's over for now and I'm going to spend some time.....ummmm.....waiting by the phone for Lockheed to call me.

Finals Week!

The quarter is almost over, I have three finals this week, one tomorrow and two on Thursday. Here is a portrait I did for my final visual thinking portfolio, the guy looks pretty stern. I copied this one from a self-portrait of Edward Hopper from the National Portrait Gallery.

Bzzzzzz.....That's Not My Phone Buzzing!

I started off my morning right with my new weekly pilgrimage to the coffee house near my apartment. It is a true Seattle experience in my eyes. Free Wi-fi, cute college chicks studying over obnoxiously gigantic mugs of coffee, and local art all over the walls. It used to be a house and still feels like somebody's home only with a large espresso bar added to the living room.
I walked in at about 8 AM this morning and sauntered up to the bar and asked the barista(my new coffee vocabulary), for a large vanilla latte....mmmm. (By the way, I'm still very impressed by the way these northwesterners can rattle off their extremely complex coffee orders with the skill of a practiced auctioneer, "I'd like a harmless double tall non-fat vanilla cap, and make it wet please.") She pulled out a mug that would hold a well-developed cantaloupe and said "are you sure?" I said to her, "hmmm....do you have anything more....say, bucket sized?" I always claim that I don't drink much coffee and then people say, "but what about this morning, you had two cups??" I guess it always seems like I don't drink it often because I have not built up the caffeine tolerance of these coffee-fiends up here. I dragged my mondo mug of coffee over to my regular corner next to the window and got right to work. About an hour later I had downed three-quarters of the cup and started to notice that my writing looked like I had been using one of those squiggle pens. I was shaking so bad you could actually hear a high-frequency hum coming from where my butt met the chair! I managed to get through writing the notes for my finals but then had to begin one of two portraits I have to do this weekend. Not a chance! After going through four hand-spasm riddled pieces of sketch paper I decided to abandon the task and walk back home for some food. I never even finished my trough of coffee.

This is Interesting, I Think.

I found this quiz while surfing the net today.....a nice homework alternative for those of you in school. It's kind of interesting if you have the time to do it. Take the quiz and leave a comment, let me know YOUR world view:

This is mine:

You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational. Cultural Creative 88% Romanticist 75% Existentialist 69% Idealist 69% Materialist 63% Postmodernist 63% Modernist 38% Fundamentalist 31% What is Your World View? (updated) created with QuizFarm.com

Remember......

The Sixth Annual Drawing Jam

Papo and I spent almost nine hours at the Drawing Jam, an annual event held by the Seattle Academy of Fine Art. The Jam featured 12 hours of live music, belly dancers, free food and art supplies, and about ten studios open for anything from still-life drawing to clay-modeling to nude figure models. I was picking on Papo because even he called it "artsy-fartsy," he spent several years as an art student in San Francisco. If he calls something artsy-fartsy then it REALLY must be. At Seven o'clock they ushered out the kiddos and we broke out the beer that the Red Hook Brewery had so kindly donated for the event......didn't I just have a post about drinking and drawing recently? I spent most of my night in the long-pose room where the models hold their pose for an hour. I met so many great people and it was cool to have so many REAL artists in one room. They really gave me some great pointers, I think I'm going to start sudying how to draw hair. It is a really elusive technique for me, I always end up with "rambo" hair like the woman in the drawing on the right has. I wish they had an event like this every week, I really need the practice. That was my first time ever drawing the human figure. I was really surprised to discover that there are a lot of parts that I generally overlook when I see a naked person. I must have spent twenty minutes studying one woman's shoulder! It was very eye-opening for me. I realized that people, including myself, generally have a very poor idea of what is beautiful in other human beings. Studying the body as I did that night teaches one to see beauty in everybody.

For the Gadget Lover

Holy Crap!! Is this thing real? My friend Rachel was on the hunt for gadgets as gift items for Christmas and turned up this super technoriffic set of pens that transform into a computer. There is no way these things actually exist, is there?

My New Roomie....Sort Of.

My friend's dad had a heart attack yesterday and went in for a quadruple bypass operation. I'm happy to say that the surgery went off without a flaw and tough old Greg is doing quite well. Sue flew out to Idaho as soon as she heard what had happened and asked me to take care of the dog for her. Sophie is a dimwitted but sweet 115 pound St. Bernard. Mind you, I lived with her for almost three years up in Marysville. Things were different then though, that was a HOUSE with a YARD. She is Waayyyy too much dog for my little one man pad I'm living in now. We got back to the house at around eleven last night and within two minutes, she had torn down three of the blinds from the sliding glass door, she's too big for her own good. Then she kept me up all night, at two in the morning I woke up to the unmistakable sound of a dog vomiting. I was too tired and figure I'd just clean it up in the morning. Funny though, when she woke me up at four A.M. to go for a walk, there was no sign of the Sophie surprise anywhere......I'll probably find it in one of my shoes or something. I took her to go pee and then hopped back into bed. She continued to do obnoxious things like breathing on my face, jumping on the bed and belching, yes, this dog belches, LOUDLY. She'll only be here for a couple days though, and she IS a total sweetie, she thinks she's a lap dog.
OH! Also, it's SNOWING out here today!!!! I'm so excited, I haven't seen snow in a loooong time. I usually migrate south in the winters.