On the board ~
I love mice. This is how I think of them. So its really hard when my cats catch them and bring them in the house. I rescued one from under the lingerie chest the other day, which had been brought in sometime during the night (the mouse, not the lingerie chest ). I managed to corner him and get him in a box, then kept the cats in while I released him back into the shrubberies. I like to think he made it home to his little nest, where he recovered himself with some tea and snacks.
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Speaking of bad kitties . . .
Here are the Catley Twins, Master Edmund and Miss Edwina ~
They couldn't resist goofing it up for their pictures. And they both got in trouble for it. Sent to bed without supper, the both of them.
Both have a bad habit of dropping mice and other small creatures off the roof onto the heads of unsuspecting people down below, so be careful if you ever visit Mewton Manor, and are walking around outside - be sure to look up once in a while.
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I had the itch to do some dim sum and sushi drawings. These are all ACEO size - 2.5" x 3.5".
(ACEO stands for Art Card Editions and Originals. Its a "thing". People collect these, as well as ATCs (Artist Trading Cards). The deal is, ATCs are traded, while ACEOs are sold. They are a nice way for artists to offer original art, and prints, at a more affordable price to people who might be interested in their work.)
And so ~
First up we have a Chinese Potsticker.
Then some Salmon Sushi,
And some Tuna Sushi.
I'm working on a Shrimp one too.
I could eat this stuff every day, that's how much I love it! But I know its not for everyone. So we'll see if anyone has any interest in these. I've put the originals in the
shop, matted; and also have prints available, matted or unmatted.
I'm also adding some ACEO size prints for some of the other art I already have in the shop - the herb drawings, some other food, and some kids book art. Basically, if the art lends itself to be cropped into that size well enough, I'm doing an ACEO of it. It'll take me a little time to do them all, but bit by bit I'll get there.
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Its been very hot here. Over 100! I managed to get my two 'show pieces' of art delivered to their respective places the other day, in the 104 heat. One went to the State Fair Fine Art Bldg, and the other went to FedEx to be shipped. Its always hard to say good bye to your art, even if its just for a show. I hope both drawings will enjoy their adventures and have a good time being ogled by the public. I will be glad to have them home again in a couple of months!
We spent our Sunday in Montreal enjoying three of my favorite things...food, the performing arts, and a great book.
First, we went for dim sum at La Maison Kam Fung (yes, that's the right name...stop laughing. That's what happens when you have a Chinatown in the middle of a French city). Our table was littered with empty bamboo steamers after we consumed huge amounts of shaomai (steamed pork dumplings) and har gow (steamed shrimp dumplings).
After brunch, it was off to Place des Arts to see...
...Swan Lake on Ice, performed by the Imperial Ice Stars. We bought the tickets as a Christmas gift for the kids and weren't quite sure what to expect. We were absolutely floored. This show was an incredible marriage of theater, ballet, and figure skating. It was truly stunning, from start to finish. I checked the tour schedule, and it looks like there's just one more stop in North America -- in Toronto. If you live anywhere near there, it's definitely worth checking out.
On the ride home, we finished a read-aloud of Andrew Clements' No Talking, a lively, funny book that can be enjoyed equally by a six-year-old, an eleven-year-old, and a couple parents. We spent the rest of the evening trying to talk only in three-word sentences (if you've read the book, you understand). Thanks, Andrew - your characters were fabulous company in the car, and the game they inspired ended our weekend perfectly -- with terrific fits of laughter.
I'm experimenting with a new version of the blogroll in the sidebar. The hack to create it comes from Google Operating System and utilizes Google Reader. (Yes, we've pretty much become All Google All The Time here at Mumpsimus Central.) I do wish there were a way to ignore the first articles "A" and "The" when alphabetizing, but I haven't figured it out yet; also, people are alphabetized by their first names.
When I was writing in every link separately myself, I alphabetized the blogroll by ignoring initial articles and sorting by people's last names, but I also stopped updating the blogroll because it was absurdly time-consuming to keep doing this in Blogger's template editor, which has some nice features, but which, when it comes to revising long lists of links, is awful. So the compromise I've made is to have an easy-to-update blogroll that is not alphabetized perfectly. (See what sacrifices I make for you?!)
I thought about creating subcategories for the blogroll to better identify blogs that are associated with particular things -- books, movies, ducks -- but decided against it, partly out of laziness (well, mostly out of laziness) and partly because to do so would in some ways violate the basic philosophy of this site -- that categories and labels should be viewed with great skepticism. (I did consider randomly assigning categories to blogs -- categories like sulfur, mercury, and salt, for example -- but though the thought still amuses me, I thought it would be more perverse than helpful.)
There's also an option to view the blogroll as a webpage, or you can read all the blogs there as one big RSS feed. I doubt these are particularly useful options, but they're kind of fun nonetheless.
I've put blogs on the blogroll that I regularly read. This means some are not there that used to be there, because, for whatever reason, I don't read them all that often anymore. I expect now that I can easily add and subtract blogs from the list, it will be far more dynamic than it has been in the past. I'll still use the "fresh links" section to point to individual items I've found of particular interest (this, too, is from Google Reader, so it can be viewed as its own page, and it also has an RSS feed), and these will continue to come from a wide variety of sources.
The other sections of the sidebar remain at best dusty, and shall remain so for a little while yet, because really I'd rather be writing about books and movies and people and stuff. Especially stuff.
In other site changes, some of you might have noticed that I've started moderating comments. This is not out of a desire to become a dictator of the comments section of posts, but out of a desire to cut down on spam. Tons was getting through the word verification, and so now I'm moderating. I will try to only reject comments that seem like spam to me, or comments that seem utterly and completely obnoxious and offensive. I realize this is a subjective judgment.
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As I recall, this year's Ig Nobel Prize for literature went to a paper on the difficulties that the word "the" provides for indexing. Maybe it will have some useful suggestions...