36 years (oink!)

My birthday came in the midst of chaos. We're surrounded by boxes, and certainly not settled, whatever that means, but we took the time to go out to lunch at our favorite Indian buffet. (And then came home and took a nap!)

I was born in the Year of the Pig, which has rolled around again. Next time the Year of the Pig comes, I'll be 48. And the time after that I'll be 60. In addition to the twelve animals, the Chinese zodiac also cycles through the five elements (the year I was born was the metal pig--this year is the fire pig), so it takes 60 years to get through the whole cycle.



Here's the "Year of the Pig" kit that I finished up in time for the Lunar New Year. (That's what my cute little papercut piggy was for.) It's been fun to see what people do with it. I wanted to share a couple of links:

Marci's "Only in Vegas" (I really like the way she cut the flowers out of the paper and layered the other stuff on them.)

Kat's "One Month (Very cool strong graphic design!)

My birthday sale!

Prolonging the agony

This was going to be the weekend we moved. It didn't happen. Kate is still sick, I've been sick, and now Doug's got it. We all stayed home from church today, convalescing. Rebecca brought us over some yummy lemon chicken soup (thanks Rebecca!)

We've been dreading this move for a while, and the delay is not helping. Unfortunately it's not one of those things that'll go away if you stop thinking about it. We have started boxing up our books, but it's a small dent in everything we have to do. (We have six bookshelves. With books on them.) Kate has been having fun getting into things that we're trying to pack. I've seen her a few times pick something up, and she gets this look on her face like, "Wow, we have this? I didn't know we had this!"

Kate has started asking to have her nose wiped. Wow.

The answer is 42

The question: How old is Doug today?



Kate has been sick. She was feverish on Sunday, threw up twice on Monday, and has in general been needing a lot of comfort and care. We haven't been getting much else done. This morning I looked at the date on the computer and thought, "Oh yeah, it's Doug's birthday!"

Kate was much better today--not completely well, but much better, and going stir-crazy from being cooped up inside--so we all went out to I Love Bento for a birthday lunch. Kate got her own bowl of miso soup with extra tofu, which she was just gobbling down. That was good to see. It's so hard when she's sick.

It's also my sister Barb's birthday, so we called tonight and sang to her and then she sang to Doug. It's a tradition in my family that we always call and sing Happy Birthday to each other over the phone (often as badly as possible, holding out the "toooo yooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuuu!" at the end, like the stork on Dumbo). As the family has scattered it just means we get more phone calls and more songs. It's fun.

Happy Birthday Doug!

Footprints

(I can't help it, this makes me laugh.)

One night a man had a dream. He dreamed he was walking along the beach with the Lord. Across the sky flashed scenes from his life. For each scene he noticed two sets of footprints in the sand, one belonging to him and the other to the Lord.

When the last scene flashed before him, he looked back at the footprints in the sand. He noticed that for many times in his life there was only one set of footprints. He also noticed that it happened to be at the very lowest and saddest times in his life. At still other times in his life he could see only a single footprint, with a circle-print where the other foot should be, and a straight line between them. This really bothered him and he questioned the Lord about it.

"Lord, you said that once I decided to follow You, You'd walk with me all the way. But I have noticed that during the most troublesome times in my life, there is only ONE set of footprints. I don't understand why when I needed You the most You would leave me."

The Lord replied: "My son, my precious child, I love you and I would never leave you. During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, It was then that I carried you." The man felt much better, but was still perplexed.

He asked: "But what of the footprints with the line and the circles? Where did they come from?"

"My son," said the Lord, with compassion in His voice, "that was when we were joined by a one-legged pirate with a wheelbarrow."


(I am compelled to add that if you google footprints pirate wheelbarrow you get Princess Bride references.)

This Little Piggy

I've been trying to come up with a Chinese-papercut style pig. I like this little guy.

Say Uncle

I found a cafepress shop recently where somebody has some adoption-themed shirts with words like mother, grandmother, etc, in different languages. Including Korean. Some of it is right, but some isn't. The word they have for uncle is actually the word that you'd use to address a bus driver or some guy on the street. The problem is that family words in Korean are pretty complicated. The word for uncle is different depending on whether you're talking about your father's older brother, your father's younger unmarried brother, your father's younger married brother, your mother's brother, your father's sister's husband, or your mother's sister's husband. "Aunt" is similarly complicated. That would be a lot of different T-shirts to offer!

On the Move

It's that time of year again--the time when colleges start posting their job openings. Doug's been after that elusive full-time job for years, but the market is very seasonal. It's kind of ironic that we're getting ready to move now, and if all goes well we'd be moving again. Though one of the schools with an opening is a school that Doug already teaches at, so that would be ideal. And we wouldn't have to move again till we want to. (So we could use all the good hiring vibes you can send our way!)

We found an apartment at a complex right across the street. Initially we got a second-floor unit, and were going to have to move in January, but then we found out that they had a ground-floor unit opening up in February, so we switched. We feel much better about it now. A little more time to prepare, and no stairs to deal with. We haven't really done anything to get ready yet, though we did get a bunch of boxes. I called a friend whose husband can get boxes from work, and asked if he could bring us some. He brought us all the boxes in the world. We now have stacks of them (flat ones) leaning against the wall in various places around the house. Kate likes to lean them up against the wall and make tunnels, or slides for her stuffed animals. If we had the space we could make one killer box fort.

Our little reader

Kate has loved books for a long time. She's always coming up to me with a book and saying "Read this! Read this!" (It was a great day when we got her to stop dropping them on our faces in bed.) She's interested in the words. When we read Hop on Pop she always wants to read the lists of rhyming words on the end papers. Several times, even. A few weeks ago she started pointing to the words herself and saying "fast past last, it bit, upside down." Sometimes she even gets fairly close to the right words that she's "reading." (We've done it so many times she's memorized where they are.)



We've had Mo Willems' stirring The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog out of the library before. It is currently visiting our home again, along with the adorable Knuffle Bunny. Kate loves both of these books. The last time we had the pigeon book, she was intrigued by the page where the pigeon loses it and yells "THAT'S IT!" Perhaps it's the big letters. Or the pigeon's crazed expression. Or the way that Mom yells "That's it!" when she's reading it. Kate would point to the letters when we got to that page. This time she's reading it with us.



We made an audio file yesterday. Kate's squalling a bit at the beginning, because she wanted to play with the microphone, but she still says "That's it!" right on cue.

Click here to hear Kate

And just for fun, we'll throw in some animal sounds too.

The cold wind doth blow, and we shall have snow

I used that phrase in a kit recently, and I wasn't sure if it was "cold wind" or "North wind." I did some googling and found lots of hits for both, as well as "the March wind doth blow," which was definitely not what I wanted. I decided to go with "cold" for maximum flexibility.

We had a snowy week. Doug missed a whole week of school, since his morning class kept getting canceled. Now he has to rearrange his syllabus.

The first snow was lovely and fluffy and sticky. We went out right before lunch time and made a snowman. It was the kind of snow where you roll the snowball and all the snow comes up off the ground, leaving a swath of bare grass behind you. I used up most of the snow in the yard making that snowman. We didn't have anything to put on it for a face, though. I think the reason Kate likes snowman is because of their cute faces. She didn't seem much impressed by this one.



The snowman slumped a little in an afternoon thaw, and then fell over that night as the wind picked up and temperatures dropped. The roads were bad. Schools closed. Sunday morning Doug tried for an hour to get the icy locks on his car open, and ended up walking to church for his early meetings.

It's been warming up and drizzling the past couple of days and the snow is mostly gone. Kate seems relieved to get out of the house again. And of course, we are happy that she's happy.

Vrooom!

Coming to you via my new graphics card. We are speedy! We got some more RAM for the computer a little while ago (bumped it up to a gig), but I wasn't really noticing a difference. Then Doug, poking around in the machine's innards, discovered that it didn't have a graphics card at all but was just running off the motherboard. So we ordered a card. He got it installed last night (after minor difficulty which did not quite devolve into cursing) and now everything is so much faster. Wheee! Not just the big graphics programs like Photoshop and Painter, but even things like opening up windows in the file browser. This should be a major boost to my productivity. When working on graphic stuff I tend to do a lot of zooming in and out, and it would often get hung up just re-drawing the screen.

Now I can start saving my money for other things. Next on the list: Adobe Illustrator, and a professional membership at sharedink.com.

Happy Birthday TWO you!

Yes, it's true--we have a two-year-old. We knew this was both inevitable and imminent, but it's still a bit hard to believe.
For Kate's birthday we took her to the zoo. It's been cold but it was a nice day for it. She got to ride the carousel twice, once with Dad and once with Mom, and we spent a lot of time in the Kids' Zone, as has become customary.

They have this long double slide (the otter slide) that Kate can go down all by herself. It's never a very fast slide, and people often get stuck halfway down, but the cold seemed to slow it down even more. Kate had to pull herself along with her feet the whole way. She sure enjoyed it, though--I think she went down maybe four times.


Kate is growing, learning, adding to her vocabulary, and stringing more words together. It's sometimes a struggle to communicate, but we are often impressed by her resourcefulness in getting her point across. She's rather opinionated and strong-willed, and we are doing our best to try to teach her and enjoy her at the same time. She loves all animal toys and is firmly convinced that any animal toy she sees, anywhere, is there for her to play with. She had a brief meltdown at the zoo when we prevented her from swiping a stuffed monkey off someone else's stroller.

Kate dances. There are a couple of movies that she watches that have songs that she always has to dance to--usually with one of us, but she'll dance on her own if necessary. In Bambi, it's the part where the bucks are racing around the meadow, to very exciting music. She knows when that scene is coming, and she'll run over to me, hold up her arms, and say, "Dance! Dance!" Then I pick her up and we whirl around the living room, bouncing up and down. When it's over she points at the TV and says, "More dance! More dance!" and we rewind and do it again. (I have a feeling she would be content to rewind and repeat all day, if she could find a dance partner with that much energy).

Kate makes us laugh. Sometimes at inappropriate moments. Last week in church, she was sitting on the floor near my feet and bonked her head (not hard) against the leg of the pew. She clapped her hand to her head and said, "Oh! That hurts!" And then she did it again. Bonk. "Oh! That hurts!" (Actually it was more like, "Das Huws!") I could almost see her thought process--"If I do this again, will it still hurt? Hmmm, yep, still hurts. Let's try it again. Ow!" She did it about six or seven times in a row, clutching her head dramatically each time and exclaiming loudly. I was laughing so hard I was wiping tears from my eyes.

Happy Birthday, Squidgit! We are blessed to have you in our family.

Merry Christmas!

Here's Kate on the horse that Scott got her for Christmas. She loves it. It's bigger than she is. We have named the horse Bucky. (Doug says his full name is Buckminster Fuller.)

We had a nice Christmas at home. Kate got some more Schleich animals to add to the herd. (She is loving the deer family, especially.) Doug got me another 1 gig memory card for my camera (yay!) and I got him Creature Comforts on DVD. We also got the game Apples to Apples from my parents. We'll have to round up some friends to play.



Kate seemed like she kind of got the idea of opening presents, but she did need help. She's been enjoying the Christmas tree and always wants it plugged in right away when we get back from being out of the house. She hasn't been too bad about pulling things off the tree. If she wants to play with a non-breakable ornament, then we'll get it down for her for a while.



That's our tree! Some of the ornaments are ones that I had growing up. Others we got this year. I had a fun time tying ribbon on them. (Kate had fun with the ribbon too--she kept walking off with it and unwinding the spool.)

We hope you all had a great Christmas!

Computers can DO that?

All the learning, doodling, and playing around finally coalesced into me, the graphics tablet, and Painter getting together to create a finished product. The moment at which this happened was not entirely convenient, as it was right in the middle of Christmas. I haven't been at this designing thing for too long, but two particular things that I have learned are: A) Stuff always takes longer than I think it's going to, and B) Trying to get something done by a specific deadline leads to a lot of stress and to other things getting neglected. I've spent too many Saturday nights frantically trying to finish something up and get it in the store before Sunday. So I'd told myself that I wasn't going to do that anymore. But, well, when the inspiration struck, it was Christmas inspiration, and I wanted to get it up in the store at least before the end of Boxing Day. So maybe there were a few things that didn't get done--like some additional planning for Kate's birthday--but I guess it all worked out okay.

I was thinking back to the first computer my parents got, when I was maybe eleven--the old Mac with 512K of RAM. It had a graphics program called MacPaint that I spent hours playing with, awkwardly drawing things with the mouse in big pixelly patterns. All black and white, of course. I was fascinated by it. I remember there was a horse head that I spent a lot of time on, looking at a picture in a magazine and then trying to reproduce it as best I could with the program's limited capabilities. There was also a program called MacDraw that we could never figure out. Years later, after I learned to use Corel Draw, I realized that it was a vector graphics program. If my eleven-year-old self could see the stuff I get to play with today, she would be completely freaked out, enthralled, astounded.... Doug recently found a sound clip of Homer Simpson saying "Computers can DO that?" which he added to his machine (to play on a certain action). I feel that way a lot. Holy cow, computers can do that? Amazing. (I think I need to get some more RAM, though. Painter stumbles a bit. It should be happier with more RAM.)

I call this one "All Aglow." It was all done with the tapered chalk in Corel Painter IX.5. I love this program. I love my tablet. Sigh.



(Here's a link to the product in the store.)

So sumi

Yes, I've gone off the deep end--I'm in love with a brush stroke. I got Corel Painter IX.5 a few days ago. So far I've just been watching the training videos and playing with it just a little, but I'm impressed by how much is there. This is a sumi brush--done with a mouse, even, not the tablet. That's one well-programed brush. It's really amazing that they can figure out how the brushes and media interact, convert it all to numbers, and recreate it with the computer. I am going to have such fun with this program.

The night the lights went out

The big windstorm swept through on Thursday. It was not entirely unexpected. "Big storm coming!" people said. "Be prepared!" We were at the library that evening, and then went to I Love Bento for dinner. The storm was fitful, with gusts of wind and pounding rain that started and stopped suddenly. It didn't seem too bad at first. The power went out around 1:00 in the morning. Kate was a little distressed to be without her night light. We stayed in bed till it was light outside. I had a banana for breakfast.

Scott's power was still on (across town) so we spent a few hours over there. He had a nice warm shower, and a stove to warm up the keema matar leftovers from our fridge. When Kate got cranky we tried to take her for a walk outside, but it was just too cold and windy. She really wanted to leave--she went up to our car and patted it, and cried when we told her we couldn't go home right then. We thought maybe we'd go over to Borders (bookstore) and let her play there for a while, if they were open. While on the road, Doug said we should call Cousin Lonnie in Puyallup. First we had to call Doug's dad to get Lonnie's number. Then I called Lonnie (Doug was driving). "Do you have power?" I asked. "Yes!" he said. "Want to come over here tonight? Come over! We'll make dinner. How does Vietnamese noodle soup sound?" Wonderful. The first time we had pho was at Lonnie's house, when we first came out here. Cousin Robbie served a mission in California speaking Laotian, and introduced his family to many interesting foods on his return.

We didn't make it to Borders. We stopped by our place to pack up clothes and things--extra diapers, sleepers, a few stuffed animal friends for Kate. We didn't know how long we might be gone, so we packed for two days. It was getting dark outside again, so the packing was done with the aid of a single small maglight. We do have candles--there was one Christmas a few years ago where it seemed like we got nothing but candles--but, unfortunately, we do not seem to have any matches. Kate seemed simultaneously glad to be home and upset by the dark.

Lonnie and Martha's house was warm and welcoming, and Kate was just a happy little girl the whole time we were there. She ate lots of noodles from her bowl of pho, went to play for a few minutes, and then came back for some more. The meat was buffalo, pressure-cooked to perfection. We got a bed in the spare room. Getting Kate to sleep was the hard part--I kept laying her down and she kept popping back up again. We were tired; she was having too much fun.

In the morning we called our home phone and the answering maching picked up, so we figured the power was back on. We had a nice breakfast and took our time getting ready to go. Kate didn't want to leave.

Our power was out for a day. Probably less than twenty-four hours. Other people went several days without power. It was eerie, driving through town and seeing all the dark houses and streets. A couple of large sections of wooden fence by our apartment complex blew down. They're saying it was the Northwest's worst windstorm in recorded history. It made me realize how unprepared we are. We were glad to have somewhere to go, and friends and family that could help us out.

Merry Christmas. Now get out.

We just got notice that our apartments are going to be sold as condos, and we have 90 days to vacate. We are not happy. We've just barely been here a year! Ah well. I suppose this will lead to... something. At this point we sure can't say what. Maybe we can find another nice place with a little yard area like we have here.

The timing stinks. We hate moving.

Giraffe, take 2

AmyB said she wanted a copy of my giraffe doodle for her son, so I said I'd make her a better one.



I used a reference photo for this one, one of Scott Coulter's from pbase. I always work better from reference materials. The original has a particular quirk that I didn't replicate here, though. Check it out for some giraffe humor.

More!

I'm on a roll tonight! I just discovered the "tapered gouache" brush. What a gorgeous line!

Practicing

Theresa said I should draw something with my tablet and post it, so here are a couple of doodles. I've been playing around with Corel Painter Essentials. I haven't gotten very far into it yet, but I'm already thinking I'm going to have to spring for the full Painter program. So here's a giraffe for my sisters (Barb, who collects them, and Kirsten, who has been wanting giraffe stuff lately), and an apple. Yum.



The tablet is marvelous. I've heard people say it takes a while to get used to using the pen. I haven't found it that difficult, at least as far as pointing and clicking and drawing strokes. There is a lot to learn, just with the different things that it can do in Photoshop and other programs. There's a whole level of pressure-sensitive controls in the PS brushes that you can't utilize with a mouse. Certainly enough to keep me busy for a good long while.

Kate thinks it's pretty cool too--I've let her scribble with the stylus a few times. I shall have to keep it away from her so she doesn't decide to color on it with something else.

I would prefer to title this "practising," because I think it looks better spelled the British way. Those two c's are just weird.