Category
SillyValley
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04.09.08
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04.05.08our backyard friend’s silhouettes
Daily, Nature, SillyValley, Sketchbook (3)
our backyard friend’s silhouettes, originally uploaded by young@art.
A warmup set, and part of my new silhouette obsession: Winsor & Newton Black Indian Ink atop delta ceramcoat atop gesso atop the pages of a Moleskine (heavy stock) sketchbook.
We have no more critters in our backyard than anyone else, but I wage that ours are the cutest, because of the quail. There’s a family, about 20 of them, that run the perimeter at dusk. The California Thrasher couple have a nest somewhere in the hedge; when we lay in the sun by the bird bath, one of them will watch us from the grapefruit tree, sometimes with a red worm in his mouth, for a half-hour or more. Hummingbirds are always fighting, and the woodpeckers have assaulted the old olive tree on their continual hunt for boring insects.
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01.29.08more fronts & fungi
Chas, Daily, Exploring, Ford, Home, SillyValley, Young @ Art (5)Sillyvalley was scoured clean again by another front and today, awestruck, we were witness to some kind of crazy glorious spectacle of snow-capped mountains atop the massive bowl of San Jose, all purple and crytallized behind the field outside the kitchen window, which is, for its part, cloaked in a riot of yellow mustard. I just didn’t know what to do with myself, standing there in the playground after school, staring at the immaculate horizon.
Then, as with all cold fronts, the sky started weeping. Under a rainbow we walked home and decided to hunt for mushrooms in the backyard under the oak canopy, savoring the last bit of afternoon light, regardless of the rain.
And what do you know? The rain stopped just long enough.
We gathered a handful of mushrooms, no idea what kind yet, just for something to draw or paint while I started a pot roast. I set a pan of opaque watercolors out on the table and gave a quick basidio-lesson and painting tutorial. They did all the rest.
Ford picked up a paintbrush:
And Chas got sleepy.
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11.02.07what to do?
Daily, SillyValley, Thinking (5)You know you
live in Californiaare a slacker when you have to decide,-
Should I spend tomorrow morning with the kids, stockpiling water and other necessities, reviewing emergency procedure, in the face of a 30% big aftershock possibility (which, incidentally, lasts until Tuesday?) or…
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Should we skip school and drive to the beach for the 7 foot swells at Manresa?
I mean, after all, Ford has a cold. And what kind of parent am I to send a sick child to school? Oh, the stress! A tent, a sleeping bag, thermos of tea and a tote full of books–Tsunami risk aside, the cool, salty mist sounds very therapeutic.
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11.01.07Whoa!
Daily, SillyValley (1)When I was about 6, I remember walking into my friend’s house, next door, and feeling woozy. My friend was Chinese, and her house always smelled like wontons and moth balls. They had an off-white pile carpet and ample north light glowing into the back of the house that, despite the heavy air, gave the space a dreamy, vacuous look. I could read, but I was unable to make anything of the vertical characters on the Chinese newspaper that her father left on the coffee table. I remember the room swaying after I entered, cloaked in heavy scent and unfamiliarity, and feeling as if I might fall over. It was a brief sensation, but I can’t forget it.
I had this same sensation several times when I was younger, always following me into an unfamiliar place: mostly into heavy roomfuls for chotchkes, homes of the elderly, still and too-quiet. But oddly, as I’ve aged, I can’t report having had feelings like that in a long time.
Then last night, when I was in the shower, I felt my husband and his brother running through the hallway outside the bathroom. When they felt like they were about to pound through the door, I felt my knees brace and the walls move closer in. In one movement, I swung open the curtain and lept into the doorjamb, and there I clung like a web as I watched the medicine cabinet door swing back and forth for something like twenty seconds. The room swayed, the invisible train rumbled away, and there I was, dripping onto the tile floor and wondering, wooo, that’s something I haven’t felt in a while.
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10.08.07Moffett Field
Daily, Exploring, Ford, SillyValley, Uncategorized (45)
Ford and his friend, Revan, study the model with anxious eyes, and eager fingers tap the glass and track the belts. Revan’s father is about to take us for a ride on the VFS, Vertical Flight Simulator, and five astronauts were in the sim only hours before.
The building smells like a well-oiled metal shop and the hi-gloss waxed terrazzo recalls the set of 2001; the interior hasn’t changed in thirty years. But it feels oddly comfortable to me; like the industrial white and ochre interiors of Texas A&M, where I hung out afterschool with dad, about that many years ago.
We’re in the shuttle cockpit. The boys land it at night onto an airstrip. During our visit, the mechanics work downstairs on one of the elevator motors, so we have to imagine the horrific vertigo; the boys crash five times before landing correctly. Still, I find myself covering Chas’ eyes as the tarmac lights swallow the shuttle, and all is then black.
The kids laugh and touch every archaic steel switch on the console, poring over the data screen, trying to make sense of the complex code of numbers and letters, and I, scanning the code with them, get a sense of what they’ve been going through this year, as they have slowly begun to string letters together to form words, and understand the translation of larger numbers, how to scan linear strings of data. Folds upon growing folds of intelligence, carried by wild chariots of grubby abandon, tell us everything without words; wonder behind the flood of simian awe.
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