Category: art

Monkey Mind Needs To Dance

Having a hard time concentrating today. Lots of reasons, but it seems that writing coherent sentences is impossible.

So you know what that means. Imagination Prompt madness!

You need other people because…

I can’t be expected to make my own perfect Manhattan straight up with a maraschino cherry all by myself, now can I?

Could you stay in bed all day and think?

%^$@damn right I can! Oh, wait, you said think, not drink.

I could stay in bed all day and think, too. It’s just less of a party.

Describe a typical day in elementary school.

Crayons, recess, paste, lunch, recess, paste, crayons, and something with numbers on a mimeographed worksheet.

What keeps me going?

force x mass

What if you were never born?

You wouldn’t be reading this completely awesome blog. You’d be reading a different and less awesome blog and wonder what was missing in your life.

Why should I be honest?

Because my short term memory sucks and I can never remember which yarn I spun where. The truth is just easier to remember.

List five things you need.

A nap.

A cookie from the conference room down the hall.

The group admin to look the other way so I can steal a chocolate chip cookie from the conference room down the hall.

Tweezers (you don’t want to know why)

Another nap.

My heart sings when…

I eat a huge plate of green chile chicken enchiladas. Later, my esophagus sings too, but it’s an entirely different song.

Write a haiku about today.

Here I sit writing
One day before vacation
No more today, boss




Who Needs a Brush? Not Me!

Back in the kindergarten days I always thought the best activities involved using my hands. Sitting and listening to a book being read was ok, but could get boring (reading it myself was far better). Working on worksheets? Bleaack. But clay, markers, crayons. Now we’re talking!

My absolute favorite activity happened when the gelatinous finger paints came out of the supply closet and we all strapped on smocks and got down to business.

I have learned over the course of my life that I have two of my five senses that are especially heightened. First is my sense of touch. I like to touch stuff. I like to feel surfaces. It’s all endlessly fascinating to me. So that luxurious gooey paint was just the ticket!

And the other sense is sight. Now, I don’t mean vision, my eyesight is terrible. I mean the way I respond to visual cues. I learn better visually. And colors! Oh how I love to see a raucous display of color.

So those pots of paint held endless fun for me. I’d dig a finger in there for a blob of red, then a finger full of blue and….holy crap! Purple!

I think all of this is why later on in life I took up crafting. I’m a total sucker for the water based acrylic paints that I use to make my stuff. I wonder sometimes if I’m a complete weirdo, because one of my absolute favorite parts of any project is the early prep work.

I *love* laying down that first layer of white base paint. I LOVE when I can just slap it on there and mush it into the corners and get paint up and down my arms and YES!

And when there is a sale on my brand of paint at the craft store? Step back people, I’m gonna drop some cash.

When I’m working on a craft project, I find I’ll fall in love with a certain color. I’ve had torrid affairs with Tomte Red, Pumpkin Orange, and Bright Blue. And then there’s Evergreen. This is but a few of my flings, I could go on at length.

I even love the blackest black paint and lament that I can’t get it to be darker. It’s all beautiful to me!

I’ve always admired Van Gogh paintings for the fact the man used a LOT of paint on the canvas. He’d mash it and squish it and make magic. I’m no Van Gogh, but I too love to use a lot of paint. I squeeze it on there with reckless abandon and find a place to use it all.

And then when I’m done, I take bristle brushes, sponge brushes, paint palettes, and fingers to the sink and scrub, scrub, scrub. I’m always a bit sad to see the last of the pigment wash away down the drain.

But when I set all the gear to dry, I smile to myself. All those clean brushes are there waiting for me, singing out, “c’mooon, let’s paint!”





This week’s Theme Thursday is paint.

Photo by Flavio Takemoto and used royalty free from stock.xchng.


Whadderyoo Looking At?

There is so much I have yet to learn about making good photographs. Each step along the way seems like I’ll never sort it out, but I keep at it. I snap photo after photo until I finally understand what makes a particular aspect work. It’s usually one photograph that turns out just right, and I say “hey, maybe I’m starting to get the hang of this.”

My current studies are about macro photography. I’ve owned a macro lens for a quite a while now, but have used it only rarely as I’ve never happy with the results. It’s the photographer’s fault, not the lens. It’s a fine lens, but a macro in the hands of an inexperienced photographer can yield some funky stuff (and not in a good way).

To me, a macro lens is amazing because you can get such detail, but that detail can come at the cost of clarity if you don’t have it focused just right.

Well, the practice continues, and since my pets must suffer their fate as the subject of my ongoing photography education, today I present to you another photo of my beloved male betta named Benito.

Last evening I pointed the macro lens his way when it was his turn to cool his fins in a holding cup. Freshly treated water in his tank was warming up to a comfy level while he waited.

Snapping him in the holding cup helps because he doesn’t have as much room to move and spin and twirl and turn his body into a perfect u-shaped form, thus creating ever more blurry photos of half a fin or an out of focus gill.

He’s very responsive when I speak to him and comes right up and looks at me. Sure, he wants me to feed him, but I like to think it’s because he knows I’m his human and here to take care of him.

I like looking into his little eyes, and wanted very much to capture a photo where you could see the clear domes over his little fishy eyeballs.

I think I succeeded. He was very patient while I fiddled with the focus and turned the knobs on my camera and cursed and snapped away.

For this photo, I used a very shallow depth of field and I like how his head is very clear and the rest of his body blurs to soft focus.

Benito is not really a fan of having a camera aimed at him, so I only took about eight photos, but I’m pretty pleased with the results.

I’m learning!



click image for larger size




This week’s Theme Thursday assignment is turn.

Photo by Karen Fayeth and subject to the Creative Commons license, as posted in the right hand column.

Worst Quote Ever for Serious Musicians

“Touring is no longer an ordinary thing where you play an instrument in jeans and a T-shirt. It has some pizzazz these days, and I’m definitely bringing the pizzazz with a lot of bells and whistles.”

So says Katy Perry while discussing the addition of smells to her upcoming tour.

See the thing is, if you are an honestly good musician, some people will actually pay to see you standing there playing an instrument in jeans and a tshirt.


With The Passage of Time

While toiling away at my desk job every day, I like to keep the day going by listening to the radio in the background.

Generally, I like to stream the oldies country station out of Albuquerque, channel 104.7. It is very comforting to hear familiar music mixed in with ads for local ABQ businesses. It’s also very perplexing for my coworkers, which is an added benefit.

This afternoon while crunching spreadsheets and lobbing emails over the wall, the circa 1969 song “Okie from Muskogee” came on the radio.

Now, as you know, I do love a Merle Haggard song.

For some reason today, instead of just mindlessly singing along, I listened in on the words.

It’s a pretty outdated song by many accounts, yet in some ways still feels relevant.

Take this, for example:

“We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy/
Like the hippies out in San Francisco do.”

Well, for one thing, long and shaggy hair is commonplace now. It’s actually mainstream.

For another, there’s not any hippies in SF these days. I don’t think the free-love folks from the sixties would even recognize the place anymore. Funny how scads of money tends to move the needle toward conservative, no matter where you are.

That said, that’s still my favorite line in the song. I sang it at the top of my lungs when I saw Merle in concert this summer. The absurdity of singing a line deriding San Francisco while being near San Francisco was just too delicious.

Then there’s this part that has always cracked me up:

“We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse/
And white lightnin’s still the biggest thrill of all.”

So he’s singing about how being a square is a good thing. About having good clean fun. About waving the flag and being upright and just.

Oh and he’s also singing about drinking an illegal alcohol substance.

Marijuana? No. Moonshine? Just fine.

Am I the only one who finds that just a little…oh I don’t know…ironic?

Plus, I can guarangoddamntee you that Mr. Haggard has sampled of the green stuff. More than once. More than once today.

Merle has said he wrote “Okie from Muskogee” as a protest to the Vietnam protestors. He found them a little hard to take after he’d been released from San Quentin.

Oh wait. So the flag waving good clean fun guy was in prison?

Five different times, actually. Doesn’t that seem…uh…also ironic?

Which makes me remember that the whole song, while conservative and flag waving and a bit chiding in tone is really, actually, all done tongue in cheek.

It’s a bit of a ruse, and a well-done ruse. A Grammy winning poke at society.

And that’s where the title of this post comes into play. With the passage of time, The Hag starts to look a little less like a musical outlaw and a lot more like a musical genius.

Plus he helped me get through a really rough day. Thanks Hag.