metal shop

It was a short day at the office today, so with the time I had to myself I went and bought an architecture book I'd been thinking about a lot, then I came back and went to the metal shop next door to practice my stick welding. "Daang those are some nice beads!" someone remarked at my practice welds as he passed by, but I need to work on getting them consistent when I'm actually welding one thing to another. I may have been welding for three hours or so. When I came home tonight my hair was stiff with metal dust and running my fingers through it got them dark and grimy, but today was the happiest and the most whole I've felt in what feels like months...

the mystery family

I found these photographs at a flea market back in July. It's a little creepy to be holding on to family photos of people I've never met and are possibly long gone, but they are so intriguing. Look at how gorgeous everyone looked, so put together and beautiful in their simple, crisp outfits. This obsession led further into investigating more of my own family's photos, and I came back from New Jersey last month with an armful of images that still have yet to be scanned and shared.

i feel you, fall

Mornings have suddenly become sharp and cold, and snap at you to get out of bed as you force yourself into a tight warm ball and cling desperately to the remaining vestiges of sleep before the alarm warns you one last time to get up. Chilly mornings are the worst, depending on the context. Horrible for when you need to get up early when the earth feels frozen and go to work, but nice if you have the day off and are sharing a warm breakfast with mother and poopies/a friend. I know it sounds crazy to be complaining of the cold in Southern California, but we have our moments here every now and again, and I'm biased because I love/need warmth and sunshine (it doesn't help that my eyes snap open at 6 am every morning these days either). It feels more like Thursday than Tuesday because of the massive amount of deadlines we suddenly faced at the office today, but we pulled through. I went to see Lykke Li at the Fox Theatre in Pomona on Monday and it was mind-blowing to the point of being life-changing, but maybe I was just in a goood mood. No, Lykke Li was amazing and her energy and complete command of the audience was like watching some kind of ethereal high priestess working her magic on a spellbound audience.

entomology

Some shots of BUGS that I got all summer (some are blurry, some are repeats). I thought I had more, but I think I'm confusing those bug sightings with the times I did not carry a camera. I had fun drawing some of these bugs from my pictures because they move too quickly in real life, er, except for the dead ones. The green one is a funny one because every time I see one around a Hispanic friend, they'll exclaim and say that as kids they used to tie strings around these buggers and fly them around outside. And every time I ask them what they're called they'll shrug and go "Dunno!" The name of that green beetle has eluded me for years...! The crimson dragonfly is a summertime favorite, I always used to see them zipping around our backyard when we still had a papyrus plant growing. Also my Westies are either smart for eating bugs as an additional source of protein or just silly and don't know any better - Maxie snaps at bees and has eaten a couple without stinging himself, and he snaps at flies too. BB is a bit more subtle but I know she has downed a bug or two after hunting them down..

mail moves the country!

Things as little and seemingly insignificant as postage books seemed so much more fun back then, no? I'm a sucker for objects like this, obviously! I've amassed a large amount of super old postage stamps and funny envelopes and am waiting for my pen pal to write me so I can write him back! Or heck I think I'll just start mailing people NOW. Anything to keep the feeling going.

the end of summer

Warm, dusty brown and cool dusky blue are two colors I've been gravitating towards lately. I've been helping one of my neighbors on my block with re-building his house so I've been sore and tired but immensely happy to experience the building process firsthand. I learned to wire a switch yesterday and successfully did it on my own in half of a crawl space that we nearly finished sealing today! Knowledge is power, and when it is practical it is extremely rewarding. I haven't felt this positive about learning in years, but that can very much be attributed to an attitude adjustment on my part. We had a flash thunderstorm this evening which worried me along the lines of messing up the construction, but otherwise it was fantastic. An enormous, guttural rumble of thunder that sounded like the end of the world, followed by a downpour that gushed down for all of three minutes interspersed with brilliant flashes of lightning. It felt like a sign. Now I am enjoying the chilly breeze that is flowing through my window and listening to the crickets that have been chirping for the past few hours. Time for sleep, they say.

unintentional collections

I heard once that it's not a collection until you have three of a certain item, so the fact that these photos display four feathers total I believe then entails a collection. Two owl feathers and two parrot feathers. I haven't really done the research but they might be from a barn owl and the red-crowned parrot (not two from the same bird because they were all found on different days). The funny thing about finding feathers for me is that I never find them when actively searching for them, but encounter many when I'm barely paying attention. That's like a lot of things in life I think. There's a heat wave in L.A., kind of the last farewell to summer and it's really hot and dry and stifling in the valley. But at least there is no hurricane to face... I was worried for my friends on the east coast but they're tough cookies/badasses and they don't seem too worried. The last few days for me have been very hedonistic - full of shopping and lazing about and swimming in the pool. The coyotes are out in the neighborhood, need to keep a watchful eye on the poopies and kitties.


Edit: I forgot all about this scrub jay feather I picked up after perilously scrambling along the side of a steep mountain slope covered in crumbly, unstable soil a week ago. I remember I kind of threw myself down, grabbed hold of a tree root and started talking out loud to myself while trying to get some solid footing. Getting totally dramatic here I felt like Atreyu in the Neverending Story, out on a quest and getting my ass kicked by the natural elements. I didn't make it out to the crest like my cohort did due to his discovery of a homeless camp up there, but I was happy to turn back and find the feather, like a little badge for my hilariously city mouse in the mountains moment.

Hammond's Nature Atlas of America, 1952

Self-explanatory, I love old picture books, and a hundredfold more when there is information alongside the pictures. The painstakingly rendered, 50's cheesy but beautiful images, along with the matter-of-fact writing are educational AND entertaining. And for three bucks, what a steal...

thingummies

I finally found an old 70's-style woven camera strap after puttering around and searching for the perfect one for almost a decade! (I had some weird criteria for getting one, let me tell you). Initially I put it on my XT which looked and felt really stupid so I moved it to my Nikon FE, much better. This photo doesn't really show the strap at all so I'll probably show it to you in its full glory later on.

Apparently this is a bag sold at the German grocery store chain Kaisers and the sentiment printed below the kissing frog and turtle translates to "Protect our environment". New market bag/tote bag/everything bag.

A $5 bass lure - inspiration for my pop to get better so he can go on his epic fishing trips again and so I can go fly fishing with him on the Owens River!

Clutter and junk. I know people like my mom and sister who are perpetual neat freaks shudder at the sight of my room but it holds an inherent logic to me (obviously). More on my messy abode later!

A weird cloud I saw while I was out in the backyard. Sometimes I think someone's up there saying things to whoever looks up in the sky and pays attention!

There is a restless buzz in the air. My sister's moving back to school this week, I'm starting to work on architecture-y stuff sort of, and ending this summer-long snoozefest that I've kept up for so long. Even though for the past couple of years I've played the pessimist, weird confirmations of my inherent optimism (handwriting analysis!) persuades me to look upward even as I grumble and whine about current conditions. The grumbling helps no one - it doesn't make me feel any better and puts my family and peers at unease so I need to stop. As always time to move onward and upward.

forgotten tidbits - july

1. A handful of Rainier cherries. A fleeting crop but well worth the wait!
2. Stage two or three (I've lost count) of a still life I started painting in oil. It's pretty pathetic because I'm so used to painting with acrylic and thus have not successfully learned the art of "fat over lean" and how to build up layers to create that amazing luminous quality of an oil painting.
3. Mystery flower that grows in the front yard... it gives off a subtly spicy fragrance and it is right by the gate so every time I enter or exit the house I get a whiff of it. It's tantalizing, and even more so because I have no idea what this plant is called.

summer obsessions

Making woven friendship bracelets combats any instances of nervous energy that I can't get rid of. So many bracelets and no one to give them to :(. KIDDING. I want to make like a hundred of these and carry them in a bag and give them to my friends as I meet up with them - I swear, aside from my sister most of the people I want to give these to don't even currently live in the same city/state/country as me. This is my excuse to go visit them rather than to say HEY COME BACK HOME.

Kombucha, a tea-like drink with a live culture in it that ferments the whole thing and it's fizzy and magical and delicious. The first time I bought this was from a tiny Wild Oats/Whole Foods in Kansas City and then I drank it in a weedy lot in the middle of an artsy/dangerous (couldn't figure out if it was either/or or both) neighborhood and it defined the hippiest, weirdest picnic I had ever been on. Since Trader Joe's doesn't carry Kombucha I've been traitorously slinking off to Whole Foods or Sprouts to get my fix. Whole Foods had a fourth of July sale on Kombucha and its Synergy line and I was going to buy a whole case of them until I realized I would have nowhere to store them. Curses! I love the flavors Gingerade, Cosmic Cranberry and the Trilogy one. I mean I like pretty much all of them except for the green one. Too much like seaweed even though I love seaweed.

Buying cut flowers. For all of June I bought peonies for my mom (not cheap!) and lately it has been sunflowers, lavender, and for a weird reason TJ's is selling a dozen roses for $4.99 so I might get in on that and get some roses tomorrow. Not red ones. Maybe pink for my mom or maybe those funny pale green ones. We have tons of flowers growing in the yard but cut flowers indoors work wonders for the ambience of a room. Weird. I am genuinely happy when I am surrounded by flowers.

Band of Brothers. I grew up not having cable (still don't actually...) and I remember like way back in 2001 Band of Brothers was a huge deal on HBO. I had friends who obsessed over it but for some reason I had never gotten around to watching it. I mentioned this to my pop recently and his reaction was "WHAT!" so he immediately ordered the blu-ray set online and handed it to me and basically every evening last week was spent watching one whole disc (two episodes) until we finished. Addicting, amazing, and so powerful. I mean I haven't been this moved by television since Doctor Who. I love every character, and the fact that the characters were based on actual people made it so much more poignant and meaningful. I'm going to watch these again, because I have to make my sister watch them before she goes back to school in the fall, and then I am going to force my best friend in Australia to watch them with me so we can cry and squeal over men and battles and war. I can't believe I got into this a decade after the fact but I'm so glad I did. (p.s. started watching The Pacific, too. It's good but hasn't hit me in the same way BoB has...yet.)

BG-175

I found this at the PCC Flea earlier this month and was told it was either from WWII or the Vietnam War. It was ten bucks and reeked of corroded metal, and upon doing some light googling I read that it held the GN-58 Hand Generator, which I guess powered the radio stations they used back then. It's perfect. It's olive drab (erm, obviously), fits a camera (or four!), or a ton of notebooks, and holy smokes it's solid. I had to wrestle the little trout and California flag pins in. It has some sturdy round snaps too. I have an open baggie of baking soda in there to absorb some of the smell, it's kind of working. Anywho that's that. I like utility bags that kind of make my mom cry as she wonders why I refuse to carry a decent purse. I have too much stuff to lug around at all times and it seems that military-grade canvas is the only thing that'll do it.

peaches + love letters

A white peach nicely chilled from the fridge is a wonderful treat to eat while situated in a warm sunny room penning a letter.

hiking with y

These are all from a hike we went on last month. Amidst towering stands of yucca and magnificent clumps of sage we found areas of shade to cool off in, befriended lizards on rocks and still managed to look badass (my sister at least) in the rising heat. She liked the walk back the most, with the shadier paths and babbling brook along the way. Duly noted!