making whale shapes out of sticks

the whale

i have dreams of a whale in an ocean,
in water so dark that it's tar.

below there's an eye full of mourn, full of woe,
looking through me for clues to the future.

what do we share, breathing air?

giving life?

we can't be too far from the reasons we fight to continue.

my top five favourite animals

hooters

last week we went to an owl educational workshop at a local arboretum. we learned about owl habitat and owl vocalizations and what kinds of things owls eat if they’re peckish. after the learning we went out in the woods to track some owls and watched a long-eared swoop swiftly, silently off her cedar perch. at the end jeremy asked the interpreter if owls were rare or common, kept mysterious by their nocturnal habits and amazing camouflage and the guy said the latter and i’ve been walking around in wonderment ever since thinking that they’re everywhere like in one of those pictures where you circle all the hidden surprises.

then the other night i heard a screech owl through the crack in the kitchen window where i stood, making toast with peanut butter, before bed. i heard it once, then twice, then three times and yelled for jeremy to join me on the floor where we slunk with our ears to the outside and the quick, descending trill of the eastern screech.



an owl! right outside our window! has he lived there all this time? keeping quiet until now? maybe he said things before but we didn’t know the language. maybe he said things before but i thought it was the wind.

i hear you now, my little feathered friend! come in through the open window and warm yourself by the faux fire. jeremy will read the hobbit aloud while i rub your tiny neck, safely hidden beneath a cowl of red-grey feathers.

a saturday squid

my hair is deciduous.

happy birthday jeremy!

to my absolute favourite everything! my molecules wish your molecules a happy 32 years and a happy 33rd en route.

my heart wishes yours the world. you've given mine just that.

x

foraging

i LOVE gathering stuff. give me a piece of land with some of some nature's collectible cast offs and i'm good for like an hour, maybe even two.

yesterday we found a bounty of chestnuts on a cemetery stroll and i filled both sweater pockets and my purse. and it isn't just me. my husband shoved his hoodie full and juggled three more on the walk back.

chestnuts are neat! they're such a rich brown mahogany colour and they come in all these pleasing and varying shapes and you can play conkers with them which is a real game with chestnuts on strings and there's a whole rulebook and if you're good you can go to the world conker championships.

come on over for a conker match! for appetizers, we'll gather nuts from the backyard.

x

this is ronald

he's a turtle with a comb over. and a penchant for grilled cheese sandwiches.

but only if they're made with processed slices and accompanied by a pickle and a perfect pile of ketchup.

just a thought

wouldn't it be cool if you could mentally suck up books through your hands like evil willow does in buffy, (but without the evil part), and you could go to a party and be all 'the pacific walrus is the third biggest pinniped next to two kinds of elephant seals' because you just sucked up volume w-z in your animal encyclopedia set?

when drawing the moon, drink iced tea with mint.

jeremy thought we should make art for the bedroom instead of buying it and for a second i resisted before the greatness of the idea soaked through as greatness does when given half a chance.


so we made these moon prints and i like both and i also like how easily you can guess whose is whose.

darn tree swings! give me away every time.

i drew all this stuff! myself! with the writing pad and software thinger that jeremy bought me for christmas!

the pad and pen are called bamboo and the program is corel and i highly recommend you get them both and take the tutorial and begin your career as a part time artiste. that's en francais for artist when you add the e on the end.

there's normal paint brushes and chalk and any other writing utensil you can think of transformed electronically but also there's patterns, like the cherry blossoms and ferns above.

there's exposures to play with and all sort of paper types to select and still the freedom to make blue dogs with wings, if that so be your desire.

here i started with a photo of a spider and changed it to a woodcut and played with the contrast and smudged in peaches and now it looks like people in a city who are pink.

i think modern art might be a happy mistake you make on the way to realism.

sally sells sea shells on the sea shore. the fish come to buy but the prices are too high and anyways, sally doesn't deal in soggy dollar bills.

i drew this snake with the vine pattern tool and the grass pattern tool then zoomed in to give him eyeballs and a tongue. now he lives in the computer waiting for me to draw him a mate.

after that he'll get a house and a car and a garden he can work in.

i'll pay him in pixels.

sunday school

did you know that stars are actually suns or that our sun is a star or however you want to look at it but basically stars aren't twinkling little things with people fishing off the side of them they are massive and so far away and could quite possibly have little earths and other planets revolving around them as we do our star/sun.

betelgeuse is one of the biggest stars we know of and if earth is a raisin and our sun is a grape than this thing is the giant apple tourist attraction at that pie place off the highway - it's MASSIVE.

it's actually shrunk in size 15% since the early nineties which is probably because it's millions of years old and didn't drink enough milk in its youth.

betelgeuse can be seen in the night sky on the right shoulder of the constellation orion, one of the most easily recognizable star systems from almost anywhere in the world. especially easy to recognize in the planetarium at the science centre when the guy uses his red laser pointer.

why is space so amazing? clearly i am someone who is awed by items big and small but space has always been the kicker for me. i love to think about the sheer size of it and my small size in comparison and how important i am despite my almost inconsequential measurements.

betelgeuse could die in our lifetime causing an explosion visible even in daylight. i hope i'm alerted in advance so there's time to throw a goodbye party.

shine on you crazy star! shine on until you explode and i can have people over to celebrate it.

x

i spy with my little i

yesterday morning we saw a giant hawk sitting on top of a cable antenna and i thought to myself, see, this is why it's good to look up and down and all around when you're walking places. you catch all the good stuff!

sometimes eye level just doesn't cut the mustard.

i like to draw pictures from samurai jack

it's a new hobby as of last night.

a thousand words paints a picture

that bread song was my favourite when i was 5. the song that says if a picture paints a thousand words then why can't i paint you? yeah i loved that one.

my mom sang it to me and i used to imagine scenes for all the dramatic lyrics like the part in the end when they talk about the stars going out in the sky one by one i'd imagine the world ending and floating out in space really peacefully holding hands.

i made this picture using 1000 words and then erasered out space to look like my aforementioned imaginings.

just in time for the christmas shopping season, it goes on sale to the public next week.

art

i made this at our picnic two weekends ago. it was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, jeremy was reading and i was drawing pictures of mercats.

typical.

sometimes we draw pictures of each other

here's one i did last night of jeremy/ernie/grover.

does grover have ears? i don't think so. well he does i'm sure because he isn't deaf but i think they are those internal ears like frogs have.