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04.03.08
Photos, Please Bear with Me, Uncategorized (7)
bathroom, Laurel’s Cuban restaurant, SF, originally uploaded by young@art.
My next bathroom visit of the evening wouldn’t be so pretty. Damon would have the camera and my jacket and my soul outside the warfield ladie’s room while I rejected grilled sole, habanero salsa and mojitos.
The rest of the photos are up on Flickr, even those tights and shoes I promised
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03.14.08faces
Daily, Sketchbook, Uncategorized (4)
more faces, originally uploaded by young@art.
so, actually, this is part of that Moleskine sketchbook that’s going to the London Book Fair in a few weeks (thank you, Moleskine!). I’m extremely motivated to do a lot of sketching, consequently. And I could always use help with faces. I was discovering that I tend to draw the same features, more or less the same face, as I sketch along. Now that I’m studying faces, I’m hooked on discovering all those wonderful details that make people’s faces unique. It’s really addictive! So that’s why I’m up past midnight on a Friday, drawing at my desk (besides that fact that I’m a dork).
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03.10.08+++spring in my step+++
Daily, ListLove, Uncategorized (2)
pause in play, originally uploaded by young@art.Springtime means more low tides during the daytime.
Moleskine asked to borrow one of my sketchbooks for the London Book Fair.
I’m starting up a Moleskine exchange for nature artists. (Might you be interested???)
Squeezing fresh lime juice onto a tablespoonful of lavender honey is divine. I recommend this over chocolate, unless it’s that time of the month. After all, it’s nonfat.
The treehouse adventure is so much fun! Chas is asking to do everything up there: read, draw, play games, throw things, sleep, throw things, and throw more things. Which reminds me, I have more photos to upload.
My new camera is BACK from the shop.
Chas says his quiet time is that hour every morning during our jog, when he (you won’t believe this) sits quiet and still in the jogger. No lie. Knock on wood. Plus, if I decline my workout, he throws a screaming fit. So it’s easy to stay in shape around here.
My brother and his wife are expecting baby Logan any day now.
Sleeping with the windows open.Screech owls at midnight.Hummingbirds fighting all during the daylight hours.
It’s now warm enough to surf without a hood and gloves. AND you can see almost to the bottom of the water (No red tide).
The alluring, heady purple hyacinths keep me on the stoop, sipping coffee at sunrise.The amaryllis, narcissus and snowbells are fading, but RED tulips are on their way up in the garden.
Go to the surf shop to buy an emergency beach towel, store owner (I love you Barbara!) sends me to thrift shop two doors down: A fifty year-old scrap quilt for $12.50, during storewide clearance.
Ford is reading and writing! Although he’s more fluent in heiroglyphics (that actually translate) than in English.Favorite new dresses, which I can now wear with sneakers and maybe/maybe not a hoodie.
3 more days at the beach planned this week. The car remains packed, with detritus collecting on the floors: energy bar wrappers, lost wasabi peanuts, tiny toys, mussel shells, sand.Laying out on a weekend morning with the guys, after a run, blues music piping outside from the living room. Warm sunshine on my back. Coconut suntan lotion. Bohemia with salt and lime, scrambled egg whites, avocado chunks and a gimongous dollop of srirachi with chili seeds.
Then another coupla tablespoons of lavender honey and lime juice.
And back to the beach again.We should just live there.
What’s putting Spring in your step?
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03.07.08
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02.14.08double trouble
Uncategorized (11)I’m trying to materialize an illustration style that’s in my brain, trying to find a way to capture the look and feel of a little story I’ve written this year. It had been tumbling around in my skull for several months and it’s time to get it down in print. Photos with illustrations on top, or interwoven? This is a very rough sketch, but I also have a goal of ultimately staying loose. Right now I’m teaching myself about creating layers; I haven’t started experimenting with the blending.
I can’t imagine having twin Chassies. Craziness.
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01.11.08
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11.09.07The Hook
Ford, Santa Cruz, The Pacific, Uncategorized (5)I made it past the breakers, beyond the brute slap of the Pacific’s arm and the ramming plunges of whitewater, onto the mammoth back of the ocean. It swells and heaves beneath me. I feel so small.
I paddle farthest out, and behind me, everyone bobs atop their boards, all in black, all watching the outside. Suddenly, floating above the emerald heft, I relax in between sets. I circle to face shore, sitting upright. My feet tangle in the slick fingers of kelp that sways in a world beneath me, a mystifying, pulsing abyss. Sea otters hump three feet from my board, unashamed, and I smile and wipe snot off my face while they cavort and roll in a large circle around me.
I swing outside again and see nothing under the white curtain of fog. But back on the shore, I watch the boys and Dwight take turns sliding on the sand, learning to skim, climbing the cliff rocks. Chas is wearing a red baseball cap. That was a good idea.
Damon, yards behind me on his big banana longboard, puts both fingers to his eyes, then one finger points outside. I turn my back. A tremendous hussy of a wave shows me her hand, and my face falls. I am sucked offshore in her slow inhale, and in the green-gray glassy shadow, where I watch the kelp reach skywards, I draw a pillowfull of air and slink off my board. That’s when the beginner follows her stomach, covers her head, and plunges round and round to the place where leashes become necklaces, surfboards rocket, and the ocean smacks a big fat bubbly sign on my forehead that reads “DUMBASS.”
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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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09.24.07summer’s end for fall
Uncategorized (2)
Now that I’m back, I notice that Leslie has tagged me for a meme. I kind of need to be forced to make a list. This fall is off to a chaotic but downright joyful start, so it’s right to sit down and prioritize.
Gotta start with a fun project. The boys and I are going to hack our way through this book and write about it
Now that the canoe is christened for the season, I want to slip it in here and camp out later here.
And make costumes for them and me. I also want to take the funk up a notch around here, and variations on these would look fantabulous around our house.
The motherf#$ing gophers have me planning my defense, graced with these, finally,
among some of these.Time to grab a board and suit , finally, and learn. Or die. I’m tired of being curious.
Inevitably, I’ll envision what I’d like to stock a few acres with when we move back to Texas in a few years.
The rest is business as usual. Yadayadayada.
What about you? What’s on your autumnal agenda? And have you been tagged yet (not having been online much lately, I wouldn’t know)? If you haven’t, then here! Now you’ve got the baton.
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09.11.07tales of a duffel bag, part 1
Daily, Exploring, Uncategorized (6)I’m sitting in the rocking chair in the corner of our bedroom, and the soft yellow lamplight bathes the tousled bed and the the daisies on the bedside table, both closets stand ajar, with light spilling out the doors. Ford’s drawings, tacked upon the wall here and there, rise gracefully off the wall under the occasioanl breeze. It’s quiet, nothing but the drone of the window unit, but I can still hear my ears ring. And that, my friends, is the peace my ears deserve at the end of an afternoon with my own children.
I finished unpacking our bags from the past month’s travelling, all piled upon the floor and covered, by now, in a smattering of white dog hair. The clothes from one bag drained coarse sand in its wake as I walked to the laundry room; those were from our paddling trip up Mendocino. They smell of campfire and redwoods and ocean. I already want to drive back.
Mendocino is like Provincetown, Mass, minus the saltwater taffy stands; everything about the town digs up vacuous memories of freshman orientation in Cape Cod: the ageing middle class, tie dyed tee shirts, burgeoning blocksful of B&Bs, cottage gardens, picket fences, and storesful of kitch.
But we only spent an hour or so downtown; we camped at Russian Gulch state park.
We practiced knot-tying and sm’ores-eating and echo-making
boat-ramming and sea-dogging
It’s the kind of place where, if you have a plank to paddle upon, you can skim your way mellow up Big River; listen to eagles and the drift of seawind weaving through swaying flats of saltmarsh; look down past your oar into cleargreen depths of bull kelp and eelgrass,and let your eyes guide you up beyond mammoth timber moorings (once used by Russian pelt hunters).
And when the tide returns, you can drift seaward, out of the gentle, giant embrace of coastal redwoods and into the wild expanse of the Pacific. It is a place to feel very small and, among all ages, full of wonder.
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