Photo Phednesday

The Flying Spaghetti Monster Heels made. I should get a little pirate. He can't be more than 3/4th of an inch tall, though. We want to make sure that The Flying Spaghetti Monster continues to keep all His grandeur.

Photo Phuesday

The so-called art in the lobby of the building I work in:

From the entrance.

Near the elevator. (Sorry about the skylight. Who knew it was going to be so sunny that morning?)

From the third floor.

I think it's supposed to represent birds.

Photo Phonday

Answering the question no one has asked: Where do you keep your comics?

These are the long boxes. The stack is mostly Strangers in Paradise, I think. And the brown box is all Cerebus, but not the whole series.

Comics I've read since I moved here. Some have been bought and others lost their places in the boxes.

These are the comics I've read most recently. I'm not sure how long it's been growing. At least two months

Photo Phunday

This is a painting on a bench in the Courthouse Park. It took me nearly a year of walking past it to realize what she was holding to herself.

I'm sure most of you have figured it out already, but you're not the perverts I am.

Photo Phaturday

The fake pond that I often sit by at lunch. The bench I sit on is off to the right. Usually the waterfalls are running, but I took the picture before the city guys got around to turning on the pumps. Also, in a week or so they'll come by and shovel out all the leaves, give the concrete a half-assed scrub, and add ten tons of chlorine, or bromine, to make the little park stink for a week. I guess someone on the city council doesn't like green ponds.

Photo Phriday

The building I work in. (Oh, yeah. I ended that sentence with a preposition.) Trust me, it's as ugly, or uglier, on the inside as it is on the outside.

The house that's for sale near my apartment. I've written about it before and even drew it.

Only $439,000 for two bedrooms! What a bargain!

Twitting

I don't use twitter. I don't hate it like I hate Facebook and MySpace and Friendster, I just don't use it. Sure, I'll check to see what Heels and Johnny Logic have to say (when they're not on vacation) a couple of times a day, but, other than that, it doesn't do anything for me. It seems useless.

Thank you Lore Sjöberg for explaining, in a funny way, why it's so useless.

EDIT: I should have included this Penny Arcade strip when I first posted, but I forgot about it until I read Jazz's comment.

Photo Phursday

Jesus blessing the cars.

This part of the church was build in 1900. It was closed to the public in the mid seventies because it's not earthquake safe. Regular people still aren't allowed inside.

I am my brother's biggest fan.

This was a project for his English class in 12th grade. Guess what they were reading...

I swiped this from my parents the last time I moved away from their house.

Photo Phednesday

I pass this house on my way from work. I really dig the tower thing. If only it had some crazy flag on top.

This one used to be a house, now it's apartments, or something. I mean I've seen at least fifteen different people go in and out of this place in the three years I've walked by it, twice a day.

Photo Phuesday

This house is right next to...

...this house.

I like to imagine that there used to be one house and then a child, probably a daughter, got married and was given a house... next door! What a wonderful gift!

Nice houses, though. Big, too.

Photo Phonday

Click if you want to read it.

Magnetic Poetry worked on from Jan 1, '07 to December 31, '07.

Photo Phriday

For practice, the teacher had us make a little skull. (It's only been bisqued. I don't know why I didn't put it in the high fire kiln.)

Then we got to make a big one to work toward the final project.

[Final Project Photo Unavailable]

The final project was to do the head of a person we knew. I choose to do my cousin for two reasons: 1. She's pretty symmetrical, I thought that'd make it easier. 2. I have trouble sculpting and drawing faces that look feminine, I thought this would be good practice.

In the end, it didn't look much like her, but it had her mischievous smile and it looked female. My goals were met and I was happy with my work. The instructor disagreed and ripped out the eyes and nose and mouth and cheeks and chin then rebuilt them to look more like the pictures of my cousin. It didn't have her smile, though. The only things left that I really made were the ears and the hair. I hated looking at it.

I packed it away and haven't seen it in years. I don't think I'll like it anymore now than I did then, though.

Photo Phursday

Once upon a time, I took a real sculpture class:

A hand was one of the first projects.

We only had a real model, once. He said he wasn't getting paid enough to take off his Speedo.(Although it didn't stop one woman from giving him what, in real life, would have been, at least, a foot long penis.)

He was, however, happy to show us his crack.

Fiction Friday #31

"Okay, Sonya," I said, not feeling comfortable with her name in my mouth. She'd been Mrs. Mayreux for as long as I could remember. Other kids may have been introduced to her as Sonya by their parents, but not mine. They believed that children had to show great respect to adults, especially coworkers and their spouses.

"Thank you," she said, picking up the menu in front of her.

I hadn't looked at mine since the waitress had dropped them on the table. I knew what I was getting. The Killer Burger. It was a one pound hunk of ground beef, twelve strips of bacon, and four different cheeses: cheddar, mozzarella, provolone, and swiss. "Western" style came piled with onion rings and was slathered in an "authentic" Kansas City sauce. "Veggie" style had avocado and sprouts. Me, I liked mine "classic," but with the onions caramelized and piled high. The Killer was so large, that it couldn't be held whole; it collapsed under its own weight. That didn't bother me, though.

The only question that went through my head was whether I was going to save half of it, or eat the whole thing. And that was a problem. I knew that saving some was the smart thing to do; I'd have a meal that I wouldn't have to worry about, but burgers are never as sublime as they are in the minutes after they came from the kitchen. Never again would the bun be absorbing the juices from the patty, mingling the meaty flavor with the slight wheaty sweetness. The bacon would never be as crisp. And the onions were never quite as slimy.

My stomach growled.

Sonya looked up and smiled, "Hungry?"

"I didn't eat this morning," I said.

"Why?"

"Preparing for lunch."

Her smile crinkled up and her brow furrowed.

"Just wait," I said. "You'll understand."

She looked down at her menu.

I dusted the sugar, that I had played with earlier, off the table and on to the bench beside me. I wondered how I'd get out of the booth without getting my butt all sugary.

After a bit, the waitress came back, pulling purple off her lips with her tongue and carrying a glass of water. She put the water down and asked, after her lips were pink again, "Can I get you anything to drink?"

"Iced tea," said Sonya, without looking up, "three lemons, on the side, and some of that raw sugar you have back there for the people who order espresso."

"'Kay," said the waitress, looking at me. "And you?"

"A Coke," I said.

She frowned, "We have Pepsi."

"Didn't you used to have Coke?" I asked. "I could have sworn I got a Coke in here before."

She looked like she wanted to shove her gum in my ears and push it in as far as she could. She knew I was being an ass. At the beginning of the school year, the university went and signed a deal with the Pepsi people to only serve Pepsi products on campus and at campus events. People were upset. Not because they like Coke's stuff so much or hated Pepsi's, but because they lost that choice. It was stupid, but that’s what we did there, make big deals over little things that we couldn't change but thought that maybe we could. It was easier than trying to change big things and being ignored when we knew we couldn't do a thing.

I took a deep breath and sighed. "I suppose Pepsi will do," I said, "but I'd rather have a Coke."

"Yeah," she said rolling her eyes and turning away, "wouldn't we all."

She left and Sonya was still looking at her menu, so I looked out the window and wondered, again, what was going through the head of the people who choose the design of the history department's building. It was a giant cube of concrete flanked on either side by two smaller cubes of concrete, connected by breezeways. Horribly, hideous buildings. Sometimes, though, when I pulled an all-nighter and was exhausted I imagined a giant robot made up of buildings around campus. The main history building was the body and the little ones, shoulders, with two of the silos making up arm; the tall, thin, silvery physics building made up the head, while the rec center and the main dining hall, turned on their ends, were the legs and feet.

Ah, the things that exhaustion and too much coffee caused one to see.

Only Because I Was Tagged

1. Link back to the person who tagged you.

2. Post these rules on your blog.

3. Share six unimportant things about yourself.

4. Tag six random people at the end of your entry.

---

1. Okay.

2. Okay.

3. I have a Flying Spaghetti Monster sitting in front of my monitor at work.
I throw my fingernail and toenail clippings into the driveway by shaking off the blanket they were clipped into.
I don't like bananas or shellfish or cephalopods or beets.
I only unbutton the top two buttons on my shirts so I can put them on or take them off; the rest stay buttoned.
I own three pairs of shoes that I rotate through, but none of them are "classy."
I think pesto is overrated.

4. Fuck no.