Rockin’ it Old School – or should that be “Blowin’ it up”

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Time Drawn: Freshman Year of High School? (early 2000’s)

I was doing some cleaning the other day with my family and we ran across a stack of old sketchbooks.

If you’ve ever filled a sketchbook with your drawings, you know how tough it is to throw it out later, even if the art inside is rather poor.

I mean, this one was about 90% Slayers fanart, the one and only series I’ve fangirled about. (It’s an awesome anime, so it was a decent one for that standard teenage girl obsessive stage, but still…) At least all that fanart (and fanfiction) I made helped push me past some of the barriers of art.

This was near the end of the sketchbook. It has nothing to do with Slayers (though those explosions are definitely in the style of Slayers), though at this point, I certainly don’t recall what my thought process was for the piece. It’s been over a decade, after all!

Still, it holds up on its own, even if you just have to take one look at the hands and feet and know it was drawn by a novice.

And it is fun to look back and see how far you’ve come every so often. It helps put things in perspective. It’s very easy to get disappointed with your art when you look at the top tier artworks then stare at the piece you’re working on that just isn’t coming out like you hoped. It’s tough being in the middle, far better than the average person who can’t draw stick figures, far worse than the people whose art inspired you to go into the field.

Ah well, only one way to get better, make more art.

  

As the Water Trickles Through the Rocks, My Mind is Happy

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Location Taken: Rainbow Falls Provincial Park, Ontario
Time Taken: July 2010

I do so love the waterfalls. A significant amount of my earliest memories are of them, visiting and exploring and enjoying them.

It’s one of those magnificent things that you can sit in a meditative mood watching them, and there’s enough action to keep your brain entertain while not enough to trigger any flight or fight reactions that would mess up your peaceful mood.

I love the interplay between rock and water, and watching the way the water finds the smallest cracks to funnel through. And I so enjoy the sound of them, but then, I love the sound of natural water movement in general, from waves on the beach to the sound of rain on the window.

I wonder if it’s possible to buy a place with a waterfall on it, so I could enjoy it all the time…

  

Two Fluffbutts, in Too Small a Space for their Fluffy Butts.

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Location Taken: The Car (somewhere in Michigan)
Time Taken: June 2012

Nothing special today, just a blurry photo of my dogs being the silly fluffbutts they are.

In case you can’t tell, that’s both of them crammed onto one seat. There’s space for them to sit elsewhere, but no, they both want that seat. So Revel (the black one) gets shoved into a corner while Kerowyn (the not-black one) claims the front of the seat.

They both do quite well in cars, which is a good thing. We’ve had a dog in the past who hated them, and needed constant petting to keep calm. And another who got carsick on rural roads. She threw up on a specific blanket of my sister’s on at least two separate occasions…

Revel loves cars. Riding in them, watching them go by, chasing them, you name it. At least we’ve trained him out of chasing every car that goes by, though if a big enough vehicle goes by, all bets are off. He’s cornered a snow plow and gotten onto a UPS truck in the past. But put him in a car and he’s the happiest dog ever.

Kerowyn’s not as fond of cars, and tends to just settle herself down in a corner and go to sleep. In our old van, her favorite spot was under the bench seat in the middle. She’d tuck herself right under there and all you’d see was the tip of her tail. In this car, she can’t do that. Modern car design calls for foldable seats rather than removable ones, which means they’re connected to the car itself and don’t have any space for puppies below them.

Which leads to odd cases like this. There’s space for Kerowyn in the footspace, and she usually takes that, but every so often she goes “Seat, mine.” and gets right up on it, not caring one bit that it’s already claimed.

I love my silly pups. They make me laugh.

  

A Distant Bridge in the Fog of Rain

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Location Taken: Rest area in Michigan
Time Taken: June 2012

It was a rainy day, driving back from a family reunion in Wisconsin to my Grandparent’s place in Michigan. If we could grow wings and fly back, it would only be about 125 miles, about two hours or so travel. But, alas, there is a lake in the way. A rather large lake. If you go south, it’s 500 miles (and have to go through the mess that is Chicago), but north is only about 440 miles. That’s still more than three times as long as the straight shot (which would have been possible when there was a ferry line across Lake Michigan out of Frankfort, which isn’t too far from my Grandparent’s house. But for the current time, heading north into the Upper Peninsula is the best option.

It’s a pleasant drive, especially since there’s not much traffic. The Upper Peninsula (or UP, as the natives call it), is sparsely populated. There’s one 40-mile stretch with barely anything on it at all (it’s long and straight too, so it’s noticeable), so it can be tough to find food and lodging if you start looking at the wrong time. And that’s even with the normal buildup of services along the main roads through the area!

In order to get from the Lower Peninsula to the Upper, there’s only one option: the Mackinac Bridge. Well, theoretically there’s a few ferries, but still… It is an eight kilometer long bridge (combination suspension and causeway, for those bridge fanatics out there (I’m looking at you, Mom)) crossing the thin Straits of Mackinac between tips of the Lower and Upper Peninsulas. Mind you, that’s pronounced “Mack-i-naw”. The C turns into a W sound. Don’t ask why, it’s a confusing mess of a native word filtered through French immigrants trying to spell it in the days before spelling standardization became a thing picked up by the English-speaking people who eventually became dominant in the area.

It’s a marvelous bridge, and I always love seeing it. The view from the south side isn’t too impressive. You come in to it head-on, so it’s all scrunched-looking. But from the north, the road goes along the lakeshore for a while, so you get some really nice views of it.

Even when it’s rainy and the clouds are low, it’s an impressive sight. We’d stopped at a rest area just barely within sight of the bridge to swap drivers, and I had to take a few photos. I had to use a strong zoom, which adds in blur and a high chance of other issues (especially horizon tilt), but getting a photo of this beautiful and important bridge was an opportunity I wasn’t going to miss.

Random trivia time! Did you know that in Michigan (or at least the more northern parts of it), people from the UP are known as Yoopers (say UP again if you don’t get it), people in the Lower Peninsula are Trolls (they live under the bridge, you know), and tourists are Fudgies (there are a lot of great fudge shops in Northern Michigan, and the tourists flock to them)?

  

At least if you prick your finger, there’s ice right there to numb it…

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Location Taken: Niagara Falls, New York
Time Taken: December 2010

Continuing from yesterday’s post, this is what was behind me when I took yesterday’s photo.

I’m not sure what type of plants these are, aside from one that makes a hedge I certainly wouldn’t try to walk through. Just look at all those prickles on the stems! It’s probably quite attractive when it has leaves, but right now, it’s a pile of sticks with pointy bits all over them.

Admittedly, they may have chosen it for durability. Anything they plant here has to withstand the ice. That’s some pretty serious ice on the top of those branches, which means some pretty serious weight where the plant normally wouldn’t have any. If it didn’t have such thick stems, these bushes would lose six inches of height each winter, and in an uneven pattern at that, since not all of the branches get the same amount of ice. That would be a landscapers nightmare, especially for a tourist spot like this.

You can definitely tell which way the falls are from this photo, though. That’s a serious case of directional freezing going on.