Munching on the Month

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Time Drawn: April 2012 (Today!)

This is my 31st post.

This means I’ve been at this for a solid month. And so far, it seems to be working.

I really wasn’t sure if I’d be able to keep updating daily when I first started. I have never done well with routine, always running behind or just dropping it after a week or two. And even here, it shows some. I’ve frequently run a little late on my posts, since I’m writing them about an hour before I plan to post them (which is midnight Eastern time, by the way).

Mind you, I’m probably the only one to notice the lateness. Unless you’re checking it exactly at midnight, it doesn’t exactly matter. And my readership isn’t exactly large right now. I know my parents read it, and my sister reads it (I’ve only gotten comments from them). And I’ve spread it to friends and family some, though given how asocial I am (and my family and friends are), I don’t know if it has spread past there.

Admittedly, I’m not necessarily doing it for the readership (I didn’t tell anyone, not even my parents, that I had started this for two full weeks, since I wanted to see if I could keep it up with absolutely no outside pressure). And I’m a near-professional level lurker, reading blogs and forums and leaving not a trace behind. So if you don’t want to comment, feel free to stay quiet. I do like comments, though…

One surprising thing: I hadn’t expected to create as much art for this as I have. I was expecting to talk more about things I could screenshot on Mondays, or just not have art. But it felt so wrong to post without art. This is a daily art blog, after all. I just like chatting about my art, since I know I see it at levels others don’t.

And my art skills are already seeming to improve with this weekly quick drawing. I’m getting a lot more comfortable using my tablet, and I’m doing more with shading. I’ve got a strong tendency to over-complicate my art, so fast drawings help me work on the simpler sides.

Plus, I got to draw a rat eating a calendar. Which is awesome. *nomnomnom*

As for the future, I’m starting to look into monetization options, so stuff like ads (non-evil ones, I promise!) and a shop might pop up in the next few months. And I’m planning to keep on posting, every day.

Now I just need to get more of a buffer, so I can take vacations properly…

  

Avocados Don’t Make Me Cry, but Oil Painting Does.

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Time Painted: April 2007

Ah oil painting, how I hate thee.

I took a painting class in 2007, which focused on that classic medium of painting: oil. I had been (hesitantly) looking forward to it, since I thought I might be good at it.

And I am. I get the flow of working with oil quite naturally, and have created some beautiful oil paintings. Unfortunately, I can’t stand it.

I’m not sure exactly what it is. Some of it might be working with toxic materials. Turpentine, used to thin the paint, is not exactly a nice material. Some of it just might be my natural aversion to oil-based media, which keeps leaving an odd feeling of greasiness on my skin when I work with it (I can’t stand oil pastels either). Some of it may have been the teacher, who, while a fairly decent teacher, was one of the rare people who trigger my social phobia very easily through no fault of their own.

I left a few oil painting classes suppressing tears. I even had a breakdown near the end of this class, after the teacher tried getting me to mix together two colors that really weren’t looking good mixed together, at least not to me. I had to leave that class early, and was actually crying then.

I’ve got an odd relationship with tears. You see, one of my social phobia’s primary defense mechanisms is to trigger tears when it gets going. So there I am, trying to suppress my social phobia when it starts rearing its head, and tears start pouring out. It’s very awkward, and I’m usually grinning like the madwoman I am trying to stop them while explaining to whomever I’m speaking with that no, they didn’t make me cry, it’s my social phobia, they don’t have to feel bad, really, it’s fine.

Somehow in all this, I managed to stop my tendencies to cry for other situations. I tend not to cry when sad, or angry, or anything but frustrated. I recently successfully completed a “No Cry” Challenge, with some rather heart-rending videos. Give it a try, if you dare. Apparently, I don’t have a soul or something, though the Homeward Bound clip in there got my eyes a little wet, so maybe I just have a tiny soul. :3

I’ve got fairly weak emotions overall, though my positive emotions are stronger than my negative. I very rarely get angry. As in, once or twice in my life. Most of the time, I’m too good at seeing both sides of the issue to get defensive about my position, and the rest of the time, my natural instinct is to withdraw rather than enter a rage. At least this does mean I’m one of those who has a clear head when things start happening too fast, and I can take charge in situations like that if needed. Not that I’ve really been in too many situations like that.

But enough about emotions. More avocados!

I like avocados. They’re delicious, and I thought (correctly) that they would make a lovely still life painting. I did have to paint half of this from memory and referencing what I’d already painted, since I couldn’t afford to buy new avocados each painting day. These days, I eat avocados nearly every day (which is awesome).

This painting is hanging in one of our bathrooms, which is painted a lovely harvest orange color. The painting goes so well with the colors of that room that you’d think it was made for it. It’s the best thing that came out of that oil painting class, by far.

  

Blue Heron, Tell Me How to Walk on Water

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Location Taken: Columbia, MD
Time Taken: August 2010

I went for a walk around Lake Elkhorn one day in August with my mother. And a Great Blue Heron decided to take a walk the very same day, across the surface of the lake.

The heron’s not walking on the water, mind, nor even on any shallow water hidden underneath the algae that was covering the top half of this lake. There’s a tube floating just below the water, hidden by the algae that the heron’s using as a bridge.

They were doing some dredging that year in this man-made lake, you see. And the algae is a side effect of the reason they were dredging – the sediment was building up and slowly filling in the lake, creating a perfect environment for this algae to grow. Here’s an article from the very same month I took this photo, talking about the dredging and the algae problem.

Dredging is necessary any time you build a lake. Since man-made lakes are, well, man-made, they don’t naturally fit in to the watershed patterns of the area. This means that the outflow of sediment will not match the inflow. If there hadn’t been a dam built, this would just be a stream, but streams move faster than lakes, and wash the sediment away faster. So every so often, for proper lake maintenance, it’s necessary to hire someone to come and dig the excess sediment out of the bottom of your lake. Even if it is loud, ugly, and involves tubes criss-crossing the lake. The dredging wasn’t active the day we went for a walk, at least. We got to see the rather lovely lake with no more noise than that inherent in a busy park. We got passed by lots of walkers and bikers that day.

It was getting dark by the time we got to the end of the path looping around the park, so I couldn’t get a decent photo of the dam at that end of the lake. It is actually a pretty dam. It has a strong slope, with tiers, and has a waterfall running down the center of it. Here’s a photo of it, since I don’t have one to share.

And here’s a video of the lake, if a rather wet one. That was taken during the flooding last fall, so while you can see the dam in it, it’s a wee bit covered in water. You can compare the pictures of the dam in the video with those in that photo in the last paragraph to see just how wet it had gotten last September.

It was a combination of storms that lead to the flooding, really. First, Hurricane Irene hit the last weekend of August, thoroughly saturating the soil. Then, a little over a week later, the remains of Tropical Storm Lee hit the area, dumping even more rain on top of the already wet soil. The water couldn’t soak into the soil, so it started flowing downhill and accumulating in low spots, causing flooding across the area.

Last fall was quite rainy, really. It wasn’t the best for business (the rain tended to hit on weekends, and I was working outside on the weekends that fall), but I loved it. I wilt whenever it’s sunny and bloom in the rain. I actually miss the rain last fall, since the following winter and spring have been irritatingly low-precipitation, so I’ve been in a general wilting pattern. I need to move to someplace with more rain. And don’t say Seattle, they don’t get strong enough rain for me. I’m thinking more Vancouver, in the Temperate Rainforest there, or say Newfoundland, which gets lots of rain and even more snow.  I like snow, too.

…Apparently, I’m a closet Canadian. Not too surprising given how many of the photos I’ve posted have been from Canada, but still…

  

Sleeping Mall

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Location Taken: Arundel Mills Mall, Hanover, MD
Time Taken: July 2010

We go to see movies at the movie theater in Arundel Mills Mall. It’s not the closest movie theater, but it is the best that’s at all nearby. They have comfortable seating, with a steep slope on the gallery seating so you can always see over the person in front of you. They don’t seem to use cleaning materials that I’m allergic to, unlike some of them. And, most important, they are more likely to show the movies we actually want to see.

You see, I’m not really that in to movies. I see only a handful a year at most. Largely, it’s because I only care for rather good science fiction or fantasy movies, which are more rare. We do catch every single Pixar and Studio Ghibli film in the theaters, though. And this theater’s been showing the Studio Ghibli films pretty much since it opened in 2000. Now, the first one they showed, Spirited Away (still one of my top movies), only showed on one of their smallest screens for a few weeks, but still, before that we had to go down into DC to an art theater to catch them, and I’ve already ranted about driving in DC.

Anyway, back to the picture. I took this at 10 at night, on the way out of the theater after seeing what had to be Inception (It’s the only movie that was in the theaters at the time I’ve actually seen). At that time of night, the only place open is the movie theater. All the other shops are shuttered and the lights have been dimmed to nighttime levels. This is still rather bright, since half the places don’t bother turning off their neon signs. The mall is empty at this time, and the whole feel of the place is different. It’s actually peaceful, this giant building (it’s, what, half a mile long?) resting for the night, looking forward to the next day.

It’s actually a very different feel from a mall that is empty because it is dying. I’ve been in a few of those. There’s one to the south of us that’s closed off half the building because they don’t have enough shops to fill the slots. The most empty one I’ve been in was in Benton Harbor, Michigan. That town is in some ways dying too, losing more people than it gains. I’m sure that they’re trying to stop it, but a lot of Michigan’s having that problem these days. This mall had maybe one in ten of its shops open, and we may have been the only customers in the building. It had a feeling of boredom and desperation, rather than the peaceful resting feeling I get from a building that is merely closed for the day. Dying malls are somewhat creepy, the whole sense of something that had been great, that had been a community center in its heyday, now fading away, unvisited by those who spent so much time and money here in the past.

I doubt those dying malls leave as many lights on at night as Arundel Mills does. Arundel Mills can afford it, after all.

  

Pumpkin Punching! Okay, so it’s not a pumpkin, and I’m not punching it…

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Location Taken: Washington DC
Time Taken: October 2008

It’s a squash!

Well, at least I think it is. The skin doesn’t look quite right for a melon, but this squash does look surprisingly similar to a watermelon at first glance, doesn’t it?

However, the leaf shape is solidly that of a squash, so squash it is!

Actually, there was another, easier way to figure this out. I took this photo in the Native Garden right outside the National Museum of the American Indian. If you’ve never encountered a Native Garden before, they are gardens set up to only contain plants native to the area (or at least the continent; some are less picky than others). They also often use crop plants as well as flowers, and plant them in the techniques used by the native. I have no idea if such things even exist in other countries, and they’re pretty rare even in the US, but I’ve bumped into a few. It helps if you like visiting historical places that focus on Native life a bit more.

Anyway, the thing is, squash is native to the Americas, while melons are not (they evolved in Africa and southwest Asia, according to Wikipedia). I think this squash is a Cucurbita maxima, but I wasn’t able to find an exact match of color and leaf, so I can’t be certain. It does look a lot like the Kabocha squash I like, though, with is one of the Cucurbita maxima varieties.

Admittedly, that does bring up the other issue of deciding what “Native” means. Kabocha is considered a Japanese squash variety. In other words, all kabocha trace their heritage to ancestors grown and bred in Japan. Now, unless you failed your Elementary Geography lessons, you’re wondering what American squashes are doing being considered Japanese. The answer, of course, is that all those kabocha ancestors trace their heritage back to squashes brought over by the Portuguese in 1541, via either Cambodia or China. This does mean that Kabocha squashes have been Japanese for nearly 500 years. That’s quite long enough to have created a separate cultivar and bred it some. And since breeding is just applied evolution, you can say those kabocha have evolved in Japan, as well. (PS: to anyone who doubts evolution exists, we humans have been using it for millenia to breed plants and animals. Evolution has tons of proof, unlike, say, gravity. But that’s for another post.)

Speaking of Kabocha squashes, I have a bit of an odd tale related to them. I first encountered them in a video game. Well, sort of. One of my favorite game series is Rune Factory. It’s a combination Role Playing Game and Farming Simulation Game, made in Japan. In other words, you spend your time hitting enemies with swords, farming crops, and making friends with the townsfolk. It’s not your standard game, so it’s not the most popular, but I love it. Anyway, back on topic. I noticed that when I grew pumpkins in Rune Factory, the pumpkins turned out green, not orange. This was a bit peculiar, so I did some research, and found out about Kabocha, also known as Japanese Pumpkin. My character was actually growing Kabocha, but, since Kabocha isn’t really known here in the US, the translators switched it to Pumpkin when they brought the game over. They changed the pumpkins over to orange in later versions of the game, but still, when I finally saw a Kabocha in a store, I bought it. And tried it. It’s quite tasty. I really like it roasted with Brussels sprouts. Yes, I like Brussels sprouts. I’m weird, and prefer vegetables over any other food group. I’ll have to share my Brussels sprouts recipe here someday, it’s really good.