A Loaf of Bread, A Bottle of Wine, and Thou.

"Read 'em and Weep" or "Weed 'em and Reap", which one?

Friday, w00t!

Johnny Boy is 23 today. Happy B-day, Johnnay!

We ate a nice dinner to celebrate, plans slightly modified from their original form, since we couldn't get close to our intended eatery. It was right next to the MiraMesa cinema. The huge parking lot was swarming like an anthill with people trying to park to go see Star Trek. Very few things more frustrating to me than dealing with a bunch of rampaging lunatics behind the wheel, jockeying for parking places...

I'm batching it tonight - wifey took Daughter #2 with her to spend the night at her running partner's house. They're going to rise early so they can go run 24 miles. O_O The marathon is less than a month away (I believe), so they are in the home stretch, as far as training is concerned. More power to 'em, I suppose.

So I get to sleep in my own bed tonight instead of the couch! YAY! Don't ask, it's a long story...

Plus, I'll likely finish reading the first Black Company trilogy tonight as well... read myself to sleep again. Ah, life is good.

Except last night, I had a legitimate nightmare - haven't had one of those in forever. The kind that wake you up bolt upright, panting, looking around with bugged-out eyes in the pitch black... Don't remember all of it, but there was a big, open compound involved, and I was being hunted by some mean beasties, and my cell-phone calls for help were blown off as "crying wolf". I was prey. And I knew my self defense knowledge wouldn't help me against beasties, so I was sunk.

Sounds lame, I know, but at the time, it shook me up. Funny how dreams seem to carry so much weight as they are happening, and right after waking, but they half-life very quickly, until you shrug your shoulders and laugh it off, if you even remember it at all...

Worked from the rug shop today, which is outside the normal schedule. But the push to get website-related stuff moving is in high gear, so that's that. It will be nice to get it operational, so I can move on to other areas of the site that need serious tweaking.

Took Eldest and Youngest Daughters in with me to work. On the way in, we stopped at the nearby deli to grab some grub, and they had a baseball game on their bigscreen TV. Wild pitch almost took some dude's head off, but he ducked in time. It also almost hit his bat. Eldest asked me what happened if it hit the bat as he ducked, so I explained the whole "foul tip" rule.

Made me remember something that happened in my own little league career, which I will now relay here. I'll keep it brief.

It was the quintessential cinematic set-up. I was a youngster at the time, one of my team's best hitters. Late season, battling for first place, important game, the whole deal. Still further - last inning, bases full, 2 outs, we are down by one. I kid you not, this really happened to me... Count goes full, the crowds are into it, on both sides. The next pitch comes for my head. I duck, fail to pull the bat down, the ball nicks my bat and goes foul. Foul ball, count still full. Pitcher is obviously losing his nerve, right? Pressure's too much for him, which is why he almost hit me, right? Next pitch will also suck, right?

I watch it go right down the middle, steeeeerike three! Yer out, game over, time for Dave to go have himself a good half-hour cry.

For years, I would re-live that moment in my mind, wishing I would have at least swung the bat... But then I went many more years having successfully pushed that memory away, and happily forgot about it. Until today. Funny the way things work out...

I was always quite mediocre when it came to sports. Played baseball for years, always pretty much sucked. My brother Bryan would get more hits in a game than I would all season. I was a decent outfielder, but that was it.

Played golf for years as well. Had a decent putting stroke, but everything else sucked. Brother John was telling me today about all the times he's holed out from the fairway and gotten eagles, etc. All my years, I occasionally chipped in from just off the green, but never from anywhere further than, say 20 yards or so. John apparently holes out from the fairway regularly. An eagle? Bah, if I got a birdie, it was like Christmas morning for me. And I mean, I played from the time I was 8 yrs old to junior year in high school.

Same with skateboarding, really. Took me years just to learn the basics. I could eventually ollie pretty high, but other than that, mediocre. Jason could skate circles around me.

We all have our strengths, I guess. That segues nicely, I suppose. Thought I'd post some more of my art, since yesterday's sketches were well received.

That one is oil paints on a big ol' canvas. If memory serves, I had separate source art for the jungle and the snake. The pic isn't a very good one, sorry. Set the canvas up and took a pic with a digital camera. Best I could do.

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That one is guache paints on a big canvas board. I lucked out in a way - my instructor didn't tell me until well along in the piece that you weren't supposed to use guache paints on big spaces, but they were best for small boards/canvas'. He said it would get all muddy and splotchy, which it did. However, I risked ruining it by spraying it heavily with "spray fix" - which is normally used on finished pencil sketches to prevent them from smearing in the future (also preventing you from working on them anymore, so you must be happy with the results before applying.) Anyway, the spray fix eliminated all of the splotchiness, and the results (as you can see) were acceptable.

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This was fun - it's a type of reverse oil painting. You pick a color, and brush it liberally over a blank canvas. Oil paint takes forever to dry. Anyway, you grab a T-shirt and you start wiping away the paint. The more you wipe away, the whiter the area becomes. So that dude's face is basically varying levels of missing oil paint. Once I was happy with his face, I added the black and teal color for the shirt and the head gasket. Then the eye color and the Powell logo went on last. Anyway, it was fun.

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That one is also oil paints. I liked the perspective. I ran out of time to finish it, so I told the teacher a little fib - that the painting was for a clothing ad (JIMMY Z) and so the focus should be the clothing, not the person. That's why I didn't paint the person in there. It was pure BS, but it worked. It's hard to get much detail with oil paints...

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This last one is pastels on a sheet of bristol board about 18" x 30" or so. I added the text in photoshop after I scanned it, I don't know why. The text detracts from the piece, really. Bad font choice, bad placement. Guess I should fix it, eh!

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I have others, but I won't subject you to them now - you've endured enough self-indulgence for one day, I'm sure...

Here's a dog sleep-running into a wall...

Todayve In History: May 9

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- May 9, 1945: VE Day! The end of World War 2, w00t! (There was so much celebration, they almost renamed it VD Day...)

- May 9, 1974: Impeachment hearings open against Pres. Richard Nixon around the Watergate scandal. (You could tell it was Day One by all of the impeach fuzz everyone had...)

- May 9, 1980: The first meeting of Pope John Paul II and the Archbishop of Canterbury. (I thought that "Archbishop" was what they call a McDonald's Chaplain...)

Well, I guess I'm gonna pack it in for the day. Until tomorrow, remember: never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.