Morning Sky

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I LOVE THESE COLORS! This is not the greatest picture I’ve ever composed, but I love the color and texture in this sunrise! I had to put it up!

I was on my way to work this morning, and as I turned the corner to head west I caught a view of the sky that I couldn’t see on my block. It was simply amazing! I stopped for a second and thought, “Man, I’m running late. I gotta get going.” I drove down the street a block, stopped at the stop sign, looked in the rearview mirror, and went, “I HAVE to shoot that!”

There was no one behind me, so I put it in park, jumped out, flipped the camera on, and squeezed off two quick shots. One was blurry, as I used slow shutter speed and wiggled it, but this one came out. The clouds were just amazing. Unbelievable! I wish I could have stood there for another 120 seconds, because two minutes later at another light I looked in the mirror, and the whole sky had gone brilliant gold. It was just one of those moments when everything looks beautiful.

Triangle, Triangle(s)…5

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Number five in the series of installments, and look how close we are to being finished! I have just a few minutes left to put in on one of them, and then we’ll be done! Per Melissa, I’m thinking on ideas involving circles for the next one. I didn’t own the color black until we were halfway through these, and tonight Jem decided that she was going to add tons of black around the squiggly things. Personally, I think that was brilliant, really made the colors jump off the page!

Pre-NaNoWriMo Worries

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It’s nearly upon us. The web is abuzz with literary twitter (not that other kind, this is…well, it has no capital “T”) over the month of November and what it means for writers all over the world. It’s NaNoWriMo, folks, and during November hundreds upon thousands of writers sit down at their laptops or desktops or notebooks or typewriters or whatever they have, and they write. A ton. Within 30 days thousands who started will have completed a novel of not less that 50 thousand words, a daily average of just a hair over 1,666 words per day.

Last year was my first year for NaNo, after having laughed it off as either “stupid” (What? Those people think they can write a REAL novel in 30 days?? Please!), or “too hard” (That’s too hard!). I actually ended the month with 76 thousand words (gadzooks!), but wasn’t finished with the novel. I chipped away at it over the next several months, and finally put the triple-pound on it at 92,165 words in June 30th. (See how much faster you work when they only give you a month to do things?)

I had an excellent time last year, met a lot of great people, and realized that *gasp!* I actually COULD write a novel! It’s not a great one, but I did write one. I guess I’m officially a novelist, even if said novel is a rough draft that not even I am very excited about ever looking at again.

So, your fresh, newly-minted amateur novelist is all fired up about NaNo again this year. I’ve been visiting the forum (at the sight handily linked above nothatI’mtryingtoencourageyoutogothereoranything) and posting about our kickoff meeting and the various write-ins around the city that we’ll be having throughout the month, but despite all my enthusiasm, I have one nagging problem. I have no story idea. Nothing, zero, empty.

Oh, sure, I have some ideas, but it seems that, while I’ve been gorging myself on some pretty fantastic short works by a number of authors from the West Coast (Charles Beaumont and everyone connected with him notthatI’mtryingtoencourageyoutoreadhimoranything) it seems to have gotten me into short story mode, and all of my ideas can be wrapped up in about twenty pages or so. Twenty pages is just a *little* bit shy of the 175-page tome that I must turn out by November’s end.

I’ve been reading Writer’s Digest a bit lately, and thinking about what I’m wanting to do. Writing has taken a back seat lately to all the visual arts I’ve been working on, but it’s not like I haven’t been doing absolutely no writing whatsoever. Journaling should count for something, shouldn’t it? No? Um…apparently not, not where this endeavor is concerned, anyway.

I hope by November 1st that something shows up. It was fun last year. I’d like it to be fun this year, but I don’t know how I can do that if I’m sitting there going, “Okay, I have a character, this guy, and he….he needs to do………..something…………..”

Wish me luck, kids, and my hat is off to those of you who join me on the journey this year.

Smoothing Things Over

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And, following on yesterday’s post, here we have pop giving me a hand with the rolling ball sculpture project. I wanted to put a wood base underneath it so that it would be a little easier for the kids to pick up and move and possibly not quite so likely that they’d grab onto the frame itself and bend it. (I hope, anyway.) Plus, it eliminates the possibility of the bare wire scratching any tabletops.

I asked dad if he had any scrap, and my only desire was that it not be plywood, because the sandwiched nature of that wood looks unattractive when viewed from the edge, which this would show. Pop leads me over the the scrap box and says, “Well, here’s what I have – some pine…here’s some mahogany if that’ll work…” and he has real wood! I grabbed this kind of streaky-looking piece and said, “What’s this?”

“Oh, that’s some spalted maple a fella gave me. Most of it was too water damaged and I had to throw it out.”
It was awesome looking, but an extremely rough cut.
“Sure. I can plane it or maybe sand it.”

So here’s dad doing some sanding on the piece after we got it cut down to size. Turns out it’s going to need some planing, as it’s just too rough for the sander to do an adequate job, but it’s going to be awesome. Spalted maple has all these black lines in the grain where water got in and discolored it. It’s a very unique look. Can’t wait to show it to you guys when it’s finished!

Roll ’em

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Did I say I was finished with this? I think I did…the other day. Maybe? Silly me. I can never stop improving something. In this photo there’s one improvement that’s readily viewable, and that’s the little leg there at the lower right corner. You can even see I haven’t soldered it in place yet. I removed the simple spiraled curl that had previously been the terminus of the whole shebang, and I added a ramp to that last spiral and had it curve around to the lower right there. Nice, eh? Makes it a lot easier for little kids to get at the marbles and put them back up top for another trip.

Next up is to have dad help me make a nice wood base for it.

Honk or Hiss?

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On Saturday morning I awoke, slightly unrefreshed from five hours of sleep, and went to meet up with my dad and go to an estate sale. One of the fellas in his Model T Ford club had passed away, and prior to doing a public auction, the family had been kind enough to do a separate sale where they invited the Ford club members to come and go through all of it. Pops was interested, of course, and while I don’t have a T of my own at this time, it’s really hard to deny the allure of a trip through hundreds of must boxes and crates and shelves in search of buried treasure of some sort or another.

Dad got a speedometer he’s been wanting for ages, but my little visual gold (or brass, as the case may be), was coming across this doodad. What is it, you ask? You mean you don’t know??? Why, it’s very obviously a horn! What else could it be?

This is the business end of one of those old, circular brass horns you would have seen on a car in the teens. It had a big rubber bulb on it, and you just squeezed it to let the buggies ahead of you know that your flivver was hot on their heels at a blistering sixteen miles per hour. This one had a bulb, and I tried it, but it was out of shape, and I just got a gaspy sort of wheeze from it.

The had a lathe there too, folks. A lathe. Haven’t I addressed my desire for a lathe here just recently? If not, well, I want one. They wanted a grand for the one they had, which I thought was on the high side. That, and I’m broke anyway. No lathe for me.

And, though I try to limit my One Pic A Day posts to one picture, Melissa will doubtless be all OMG(!) over the old Fords and ask to see one, so here’s a lovely Ford truck that just needs a little scrubbing and maybe some new tires to get it back on the road.

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I’ll take a moment to say that I’m very happy with today’s image. It’s a lot more interesting than my drives to work, eh? Really the sort of thing I hope to bring you a little more often. I hope that I’m able to get out and do some more interesting subjects as the year goes on. My desire is to stretch out a little bit and do more than simply give you a visual diary of my daily life. I’m glad that for once I have something a little out of the ordinary for you.

Hit it!

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There was just enough light to do this. I had to go with a slower shutter speed, but I like how the drumstick is obviously moving, yet I managed to get the drummer’s face sharp. At my last photo club meeting we were encouraged to do some work with longer shutter speeds even when shooting action stuff. This one turned out kind of nicely as an experiment.

Dead Art

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At the art center where my photo club meets they do a big thing on the celebration of the Day of the Dead, which is the Latino remembrance of friends and family members who have passed. The idea is that November 1st and 2nd are days when it is easier for the souls of the departed to visit the living, and so altars of sorts are constructed to encourage this connection. They do a bunch of pretty involved altars and decorations at the art center, and they even teach classes on making stuff like sugar skulls. This is just one small portion of a very large altar that someone had constructed. Everyone loves those little skeletons. Admit it, you do too.

Triangle 1,2,3…4

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Fourth installment by my count on this particular project. Jem came over tonight, and we worked on adding more color to our drawings. They’re coming along a lot faster than we’d thought they would. She wasn’t mad that I’d worked on the one a little bit. I still feel I’m a little behind, but I asked, and she said it was okay if I worked on it just a little more before we get together again. They’re looking pretty good now, but it’s still hard to tell what they’ll look like when they’re completely finished. We’re already starting to try and think of new ideas for the next project, though!