Ayse: May 2005 Archives

We were going to get another dog this summer, from the same breeder we got Rosie from. But tragically, that dog died suddenly. She offered us a younger dog who basically just needs a good home with patience and love to help her through some issues, but with the house under construction we didn't think that was a good idea (the younger dog doesn't have a good recall yet, and we don't have fences right now). So instead we'll be getting a dog in October.

The artichoke is starting to open out into a thistle. What on earth made anybody ever decide these should be eaten?

I've been noticing lately that I get creative spurts that come on all at once. Lately I've been working on my final project for design, but I've also been planning a sweater (I've given up on patterns; they drive me nuts and are often wrong; if I have to do all the work anyway, I'll design exactly what I want), working on a garden design for the far-off future when we have a yard again, and designing three web pages.

Maybe I need to work on spacing this out a bit better.

Google has this new "Stuff Finder" tool. Using their satellite indexing tool, they've spidered just about everything in the continental US (Hawaii and Alaska should be online later this year, and Canada is due in January -- I gather they have less stuff there). You just enter your question, and it will tell you where the thing has gone. So simple questions like "Where are my socks?" no longer eat up half your morning.

I've started working on a web page for Casa Decrepit, showing my garden plan, linked with images of all the plants named there (eventually to be replaced by actual images of the garden itself). It's a lot of work, and I'm nowhere near done, but if you want to see the plan drawing (just a sketch on trace, but I think I did a nice job on the trees), I give you:

Holy Cow That's a Big Picture

And yes, I do know I have a giant pile of dirt in my back yard right now. This is a coping mechanism while I wait for the legal issues around the foundation to be hashed out.

Well, not a rose exactly. But a grocery item you rarely see like this:

We bought Rosie a new pool today: a watering trough for cows or horses, made of a nice heavy plastic that can stand up to being in direct sunlight for extended periods. Also, with a punchout for a little bunghole to drain it. We brought it back to the place in SLO to test it out.

Um, so. We've been doing a lot of stuff in studio and professional practice. This leads to me just not posting much because there's enough going on that it seems like there's too much to post every day, but then again, at the end of the week there's an even huger pile of stuff to talk about. So I'm going to skip some stuff and you will have to trust me that it was not all that interesting, anyway.

Rosie came down with me this week, to have a bit of a vacation by the beach and keep me company, chiefly because I have been very homesick lately. When Rosie is down in SLO, I usually let her sleep on the bed with me (she's SPOILED ROTTEN, I tell you). She's learned how to lie next to me all nice and comfy, with her head on my shoulder, which we both like quite a bit.

The only thing I haven't been able to teach her to do is wake me up in some manner other than smacking me in the face with her paws while yawning and stretching and making her happy morning noises. So I was up at 5:30 this morning, thanks to the canine.

She's also on a slightly reduced food diet, because with no yard she's not been getting as much exercise and has put on a bit of weight. So the last couple of days she has really known when it is dinner time, and been quite clear about the fact that she's STARVING TO DEATH. Poor thing. Tonight I told her that if she stopped smacking me in the face first thing in the morning, I'd consider giving her an extra half scoop of food. She burped dog-food burps at me, which is I think a way of saying, "I'll agree to anything for food."

I don't know where my obsession with anthropomorphic buildings has come from, lately, but as I said, I've been designing this ritual space for architecture for the last few weeks. On Wednesday we had our crit (we have six more to get through today).

We had to do a series of drawings, a slice model, and a detailed model called a fragment.

I made this penguin from Knitty a couple of weeks ago and forgot to post pictures. Part of that was because I made the damned thing twice, the body and belly at least, because I followed the directions for sewing it together blindly, and they are slightly off (they don't tell you to sew the neck). Then, when cutting it apart, I cut several stitches and unravelled a bunch and it was a big mess, so I threw the first penguin away and started over. I'm not usually so destructive when rebuilding something.

I broke the comments on here a couple months ago while fiddling with the commenting script, and I'm not going to have time to fix them until after the quarter is over, I think, because it's Perl and every time I work with Perl have to spend like four days remembering what the heck was going on in the first place. This is because a) Perl is an inscrutable language, and b) Perl programmers seem to be unable to organize their code logically.

So while I feel for all four of my readers who desperately want to comment, for the mo you'll have to send me e-mail (ayse at this domain name works just fine) if you want to tell me I'm insane.

Some friends invited us over to make sushi on Saturday. I still had the digital camera after a long day in the botanical gardens, so I took some photos of the fun. Homemade sushi is never as elegant as what you can get in a sushi bar in San Francisco (read, Ebisu), but it is tasty and easy to make.

On Saturday afternoon, Elaine and I had a little expedition to the Regional Parks Botanic Garden, which is one of the largest collections of California native plants in the state. We were both looking for ideas for our gardens, and we happened upon a real treasure: on Saturday afternoons, there's a docent-led tour, and we were able to snag a docent all to ourselves, who showed us lots of plants that met our specific garden needs, and talked a bit about what sort of environment they like. It was the best two hours I've spent in a botanical garden since I left Smith.