Life portrait

Feet

Hands

First snow 2008

Seated & Reclining Poses - 30 Minute Drawings

Seated & Reclining Poses - 15 Minute Drawings

Skull Anatomy

Hands and Feet Anatomy

Pelvis anatomy

Balance

Using only black and white forms, create a design utilizing formal balance.

Trunk anatomy

Lower limb anatomy

Upper limb anatomy

Proportion

Portrait

Still life

Lily

Mad Cow

Devise either a new corporate image, or a new flavor of ice cream for "Jolly Humor Ice Cream" to bring client into the 21st century.

Simplicity

Draw a "simple sketch" of a logo or concept for a ficticious ice cream company.



Photoshop & Wacom tablet

Perspective

Changing plane perspective with reflections

Mackin' Ta A New Hizzouse

I came home today to discover our landlady is raising our rent.

By ten percent.

Almost more irritating than the monetary increase was the letter that she sent informing us of the increase:

--------------------------

VIA CERTIFIED MAIL

(editor's note: it was delivered regular mail)

Kathy (last name completely botched) and John (last name)
(address)

RE: Notice of Rent Increase

Dear Lisa and John,

(editor's note: WTF? ADD much?)

This letter is to inform you that rent will increase (blank dollars), effective September 1, 2008. I understand that this increase is significant; however, due to current prevailing market conditions I found this to be necessary.

Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions.

Regards,

Denise

--------------------------

In the grand scheme of things, the total difference in rent isn't the end of the world; we can easily afford to continue living here. So we listed the pros and cons of staying and sucking up the increase:

--------------------------

Pros

1. We don't have to move (which is inclusive of all of costs and hassle associated with moving

2. ...?

Cons

1. We are currently bookended by apartments. Obnoxious tenants. They make me mad.

2. No fenced yard. In fact, the back yard is practically useless. No deck, no landscaping, not really good for anything other than grilling food and bringing it upstairs and inside to eat. I had the most incredible back yard / deck at my last house. I miss that.

3. I've never been entirely crazy about the layout of this house. It's not enough on its own to compel me to move, but I've just never been in love with it. For what we're paying, I should be.

4. We live across the street from a batshit crazy couple. Naked guy that suns himself on their deck facing the street during the Summer. Last Summer, they broke up and while I don't have irrefutable evidence, I'm ninety-nine percent positive she took out a restraining order on him, he violated it by showing up at her house completely wasted one day, and had a crazy-ass sit-in protest with the SPD until they finally forcibly took his car keys away from him and strongly encouraged him to leave the premises. We had a peaceful five months until she took him back. I could write volumes on these loons.

4. We live a mere 2 blocks from the Seattle Center and during events, our neighborhood gets a little crazy. I'm ready for a nice, quiet street.

5. People inexplicably love to park in, or block, our driveway. This makes me murderous.

6. In the two+ years that we've lived here, the landlady has not once come by or called to see if anything needed to be done to the house. The gutters haven't been cleaned since before we moved in, she's never checked on the condition of the roof (of which I've noticed clumps of moss starting to grow), the paint is cracked and starting to peel, etc. This one, I just don't get. The house is valued at well over half a million...why would you not take care of your investment? Stupid.

7. The occasional mouse. We actually borrowed a friend's cat back in February, a sort of "rent-a-cop" scenario. Haven't seen hide nor hair of the mouse since. But, still.

--------------------------

While none of these issues are dealbreakers in and of themselves, combined, it seems silly to pay what she's asking us to pay. We can do better.

So, the house hunt begins. In some ways it's exciting; we have been on a month-to-month lease basis after we had lived here for a year, so we can abandon ship at pretty much any time we decide. We can take our time and look for the perfect place. In other ways, it totally sucks: I had already begun circulating my resume and the whole interview process fiasco a few weeks ago, and I don't handle more than one major source of stress at a time very well.

But mostly, it's kind of sad: we've built a history here. We got engaged and married while we lived in this house.

We became a family in this house.

There are memories that live here.

Between Us

My good friend Mary, whom I've known for 15 years, got married last month, on my husband's and my first anniversary. The wedding was amazing, and even more amazing (even though I wasn't invited, although I'm sure that was just a miscommunication) was their three week honeymoon in Greece and Italy.

So.

Jealous.

Now that they're back (looking tan and gorgeous) we got together with them and another couple (Mary's sister Jennifer, whom I've known for a bit longer than Mary, and her husband) for dinner at a gem of a restaurant that we stumbled onto called Entre Nous. French tapas? I didn't even know that was a thing.

Oh, but is it ever. Course after course after course of amazing French tapas - I think we ordered 80% of what was on the menu. Our waitress was delightful and they brought out only two items at a time so the table was never overwhelmed with food. Duck, lamb, beef, parma wrapped asparagus, "Barely Stuffed Tomatoes" (which was the source of a heated debate at our table: half of us were convinced it was a typo and should have read "Barley Stuffed Tomatoes", the other half taking it literally but then that devolved into another argument: how can you barely stuff something? Isn't that a contradiction in terms?), sausage stuffed onion, scallops, mushrooms (PASS!), zucchini fritters, pomme frite with aioli, blue cheese stuffed endive...I wasn't kidding when I said we ordered most of what was on the menu.

And the wine. Good god, the wine. I stopped counting after five bottles.

The restaurant itself is tiny, but so quaint and darling. The chef's wife is the hostess, and she had their 3 month old son strapped to her chest in a baby sling while she seated diners. The baby was darling and didn't make a peep all night. And towards the end of our meal, the chef came to our table to introduce himself, and naturally, he too, was darling. Such a character. The walls are all covered in beautiful black & white photographs of their family, and black and white French films are projected onto the ceiling (no audio). They even turned on subtitles for us so we could stare up at the ceiling between courses and sips of wine. Oh, the wine.

I'm not sure what I was expecting out of this restaurant when we first sat down, but whatever it was, this place far exceeded it. We decided that we are going to try to follow through on a new tradition of getting the same group together every six weeks for a repeat performance of last night's dinner, each time a different person gets to select a new restaurant. I'm really hoping we follow through with our plan and that it wasn't a product of all that damn wine.

And maybe I'm PMSing, hence the sap that is about to spew forth from my fingertips, but it was such a great night, I wanted to write it down to remember. I truly value my friends. I really am very thankful for them.

And Jennifer...if you happen to read this...

...we won't mention The Incident after we left the restaurant, and I hope your finger heals quickly.

But that's between us.

Heh.

The Standoff

As much as I would love to report that our household is 100% rodent free, Remy the elusive mouse made an appearance tonight. Naturally, I was home alone.

I had just come downstairs to cozy up on the couch next to the fire to read when I saw...movement...out of the corner of my eye. The mouse was running along the length of the far wall in our living room and then disappeared behind our TV. I let out what can only be described as the girliest of girlie squeals and then there he was again, from behind the TV trying to made a run for it. He ran half way across the bottom of the fireplace and then must have freaked out either by the heat or me squealing, did a 180 and bolted back behind the TV again.

I sat there for a moment, absolutely oblivious as to what to do, so I picked up my cell phone and dialed my husband.

"Uh, hi." There was no way I was going to come off sounding like anything other than the world's biggest twit. "So...I was wondering how soon you might be home? Because, you see..."

Ah, the hell with it.

"The mouse is behind the TV and I was hoping you could come home right away to deal with it. Please?"

(pause)

"You could try to cover it with a bowl or something until I get there."

A bowl? Really?

"Just come home soon, OK?"

The moment I hung up the phone I saw two beady little eyes poking out the side of the TV table, so without even thinking, I blurted out "NO!" and back behind the TV he went. A few minutes went by until once again, I spied a little mousey face peeking around the table at me to see if I was still there.

"NO! Go away little mouse!" I ordered...and back behind the TV he went. If nothing else, he was obedient.

After several rounds of this, I had the brilliant idea to set one of the mousetraps in front of the gap between the table and the wall that he kept appearing in. I crept up to the TV, plopped the trap down, bolted for the couch and pulled my feet up underneath me.

We stayed that way, the mouse and me, for half an hour. Him looking to see if the loud human had finally given up and disappeared, and me barking orders at a tiny mouse like some deranged Drill Sergeant. Finally I spied him except this time, the mouse wasn't going to let me bully him back behind the TV again. He darted out, completely bypassed the clever trap I had set for him and ran his little heart out: past the fireplace and the crazed human yelling and stomping her feet, and through the dining room. The last glimpse I had was that of two tiny mouse ears and a tail, silhouetted in the light of the mouse safe-haven that is our kitchen.

Just then, the front door opened and in walked my husband and daughter.

"So, did you trap him under a bowl?"

I looked long and hard at the man that stood before me, disguised as the man I fell in love with, before answering.

"No...no I didn't."

"You mean you let him get away?"

I smiled sweetly and gently covered my daughter's ears so that I could properly address my husband and his suggested mouse trapping technique.

Fashion Sense

For Christmas this year, my mom bought my husband this sweatshirt:

Out of the many endearing qualities that drew me to fall in love with the man I married, his sense of fashion is not one of them. Life is a series of trade-offs, so this is something I have come to expect, and in the greater scheme of things, I can live with. The fact that he is hopelessly color blind doesn't make things any easier on the poor guy (although I did discover early on in our relationship that it can be the source of a limitless wealth of entertainment, as he is totally reliant on his friends and loved ones to be truthful when occasionally asked the color of certain items: it's much more fun to tell him that "No dear, that woman's dress isn't red at all - it's actually cobalt blue...wow...you really are screwed up, aren't you? Poor bastard.")

Generally speaking, he does OK, as his wardrobe consists almost entirely of t-shirts and jeans. Every once in a while, say, on a day when the laundry is piled up and his collection of t-shirts has been depleted, he will try to improvise and the results are never pretty.

One previous incident that comes to mind involved a woman's sized medium t-shirt with the ubiquitous "" emblazoned on the front (it was given to me, shut up). Totally impervious to the atrocity I was about to discover, I came upon him in the kitchen, making coffee. Speechless, I stared at him in abject horror.

He tried to play it off as the hem of the shirt was making its way up and over his mid-section. "What?"

Words escaped me. "No."

He recognized the tone in that single word, hung his head, and disappeared to find a different shirt.

This morning he decided to wear his new half-zip pullover. As Natalie made her way down to the kitchen where he was again, making coffee, she approached him cautiously.

"Dad?" She asked sweetly. "Is that what you're going to wear to work?"

"Yep." he grunted back. To say that he is not a morning person is something of an understatement.

"Don't you think you might want to wear a t-shirt under that?" she offered.

"I'm fine kid, just worry about yourself. OK?" Clearly he was losing patience.

Conscious that she was treading on thin ice, she paused to choose her words carefully.

And then blurted out "But you look stupid."

Recognizing that he had once again suffered a bitter defeat at the hands of the females in his life, he retreated back upstairs to find a shirt to go under his pullover.

I'm so proud of that girl.

Mixed Messages

Cashier at QFC, after having realized I had six Weight Watchers® Smart Ones® frozen meals in my basket: "You know, if you buy six more of these, you get 2 free gallons of Dreyer's Ice Cream!"

Me, puzzled: ...Um...I'm good...

Mizzouse in the Hizzouse

We have a mouse.

Until very, very recently, I would have qualified the previous statement with allegedly.

The mouse chronicles began a few months ago. I was upstairs on the computer; the child and husband were in the kitchen. He was manufacturing our family dinner for the evening, and she was sitting at the kitchen table in full-on Natalie extreme motor-mouth mode, consisting of a seemingly endless barrage of non-sequitur questions and incomprehensible ramblings seasoned with occasional, spontaneous bursts of song from High School Musical 2 or humming the Indiana Jones score. It was a typical night in our household.

Then I heard the scream.

I ran downstairs to find the child standing on a chair, flailing about wildly like some crazed circa 1950's cartoon housewife, gesturing toward one of the far corners of the kitchen floor and sobbing hysterically, and my husband trying, unsuccessfully, to calm her down.

"amouseamouseamouseamouseMOMMYAMOUSE!"

I met my husbands eyes.

"I take it you saw a mouse?"

Apparently, a small mouse had appeared from underneath the stove, ran across the kitchen floor four feet and disappeared underneath the dishwasher. It's not entirely surprising; our house was built in 1905, and we have a partially unfinished basement. October in Seattle brings with it a definitive drop in temperature, so yeah, not shocking that a field mouse decided to take his act indoors. We reasoned with the child that the mouse had probably just lost its way, it was much more scared of her, blah blah blah please calm down. She sucked in her lower lip, wiped her tears and sniffled once.

"Can we name him Remy?"

Two nights later, my husband and I were in the kitchen together, co-manufacturing the family dinner and engaged in our typical mating ritual of sarcastic banter. At some point, he approached me from behind, wrapped his arms around me, spun me around, and began hugging and kissing me sweetly. A very romantic moment...until I noticed his eyes wide open and looking down to the right. Then directly into mine. I asked him what was up.

"Oh, you know. Not much. Except that while we were hugging the mouse ran across my foot and back under the range".

We began discussing our de-mousification alternatives.

After a little help from Google, we discovered that we really only had four viable options for decreasing the number of living creatures under our roof:

a) poison
b) traditional "snap-traps" or "sticky" traps
c) humane (read: catch and release) traps
d) denial

As option d wasn't actually a viable option, and I didn't see the point in murdering the little guy, we elected to go with option c. Again with the help of Google, two days later, we were the proud owners of the Abundant Earth Humane Live "No Kill" Smart Mouse Trap. Two of them!

The concept is pretty simple: the mouse (or Remy, as it were) goes in, but can't get out. You then drive (a recommended minimum of) five or so miles away and release the mouse into the wild (which may ultimately lead to the untimely death of said mouse to any potential lurking opportunist predators, but I digress). Problem solved!

Or not.

For the next six weeks, the traps sat empty. No Remy. I had deluded myself into thinking our mouse troubles would be over a mere minutes after setting the traps.

From the Abundant Earth website:

Actual customer testimonials

"The trap worked!! Yippee!! We caught two mice in three hours last night..."

Lena - Colorado

-----------

"...We've just caught our third mouse with your traps - and we've only had them a week..."

Shelly - Virginia

-----------

...Imagine our surprise when we ended up with not one but TWO mice in the trap at once. In all, we caught and released about five mice..."

Sharon - Washington

-----------

After six weeks of precisely zero mouse appearances, I concluded that the mouse was either the figment of my husband and daughter's joint imaginations, or some silly ruse that they had concocted just to irritate me. If there ever had been a mouse, I was firmly convinced that he had moved on to greener pastures (or newer dishwashers). Remy began to fade from our thoughts.

Until last night.

After dinner, we decided to spend some time with the child watching a movie. As is our custom, we lit a fire, turned out all the lights and settled in for the night. An hour or so into the movie, my husband jumped up suddenly from his position on the couch, brushing frantically at his arms and legs. My husband is something of a man's man, so to see him flailing about like a little girl caused me to collapse into a fit of giggles. The child, looking alarmed, bolted up the stairs.

"That's it" he declared and moved toward the couch with a rarely seen look of determination in his eyes.

"What's up?" I snorted, still finding myself highly entertained by his spastic behavior. "What's your deal?"

He suddenly yanked the couch out from the wall.

"What are you doing!? Would you please get a grasp on reality and settle down? This is ridiculous." His shenanigans were rapidly losing their entertainment value.

"Not ridiculous. Something brushed my arm and I'm pretty sure it was the mouse".

"Oh, right. Honey, I hate to break it to you. It wasn't the damn mouse. In fact, there isn't a mouse. It was a spider, or... a moth. Something. Not a mouse. Mice don't do that. This is stupid."

"Mmmhmmm" he dismissed me as he rolled the couch onto its back to examine its underside.

"See? No holes, no shredding, nothing. No mouse."

"Yep". He was now pounding the bottom of the couch with the heel of his hand. He picked up a shoe and started hammering with it. As if that weren't enough, he was now hoisting the couch up onto one end, shaking and pounding on it furiously.

I had reached my limit of silliness for the night.

"ENOUGH! Can we please put the furniture back on the floor, knock off the ridiculous antics and get back to the..."

Something shot out from the bottom of the couch.

My mouth dropped open in disbelief.

It was the mouse.

We both stared as it scurried through the living room into the dining room, behind a large potted plant, then raced from the dining room into the kitchen where it vanished.

I stood there for what seemed like an eternity in utter disbelief, terrified to meet my husbands eyes, regardless of the inevitability. I slowly turned to him to find him grinning and nodding.

"That? Was a mouse." Smug bastard.

Within our marriage, we share a right-to-wrong-ratio of approximately 90% in my favor. This was a devastating blow.

"I...I don't know what to say. You were right. I'm sorry." Damn it.

So there you have it: we have a mouse. I felt that I owed it to my husband to get up early this morning to cook him his favorite breakfast.

And shop online for a new couch.