New York City in January

This is the cover of my sketchbook I use when we travel. It's the 4x6" size and Susan helped me cut up one of my old art papers to make the cover. 

And why, you ask, have I waited so long to post the rest of the  information and pictures from my January trip to New York City? I have an excuse and it's a very good one.  Susan is my Blog Wrangler and it's HER fault. She has been doing things like wrangling with the new (now 6 months old) computer and has now figured out that for every snag the old one had, the new one has a different snag, just a bad. It took just about 2 weeks to get rid of the crummy security program that came preinstalled so she could use her familiar one. She has no idea why she can't play Yahoo games anymore. She has no idea why Yahoo Mail randomly ignores paragraph spacing. She is beginning to hate Yahoo.

This week she hates Picasa Web where she normally puts pictures so that this Blog can get at them. For no reason it keeps telling her "Upload failed: Server rejected". But if she keeps trying a LOT of times it will finally take them, one at a time, very slowly.

Anyway....

Now you know what we do with our days. This is how we travel through the city:

I finished reading Dog Stars by Peter Heller. Wow! Martha tells it better than I can. I'm now starting Before I Go To Sleep by S. J. Watson and the first chapter has already hooked me in.  Susan is reading Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking and gave me the Introvert Test in the book:  Scoring 19 out of 20 makes me a gold-plated Introvert. She thinks the book is great reading if you are, as she is, a "pseudo-extrovert". 

Looking back on the notes above I see that we watched the movie Hanna. A fascinating creepy movie, 5 Stars.  Last night we tried to watch Cosmopolis. I don't care what the reviewers said about how great it was, we stopped it after the scene with the doctor in the taxi. Dumb. No Stars.

Adorn Me

I went to AdornMe in Houston a few weeks ago. When I first heard about it I thought it was called "Adore Me" and couldn't figure out how that went with jewelry making but thought I could probably get a lot of attention there since it's mostly women attending.

Unfortunately, most of the attention I get is because
1) I need a lot of help and
2) I bring a lot of tools to share.

I've taken great classes from people like Richard Salley and Thomas Mann and for the first time, from Mary Hettmansperger.  The piece above is from one of Mary's classes, a small copper pendant made with a technique using black gesso and silver embossing powder.

 

 

 

I'm not sure what will happen to all these class samples but I'm thinking they will get incorporated into larger pieces that will become small wall sculptures. Or become jewelry for the Little Dudes.
Or become Give-Aways, hung with invisible fishing line from a tree or bush. Or, given my tendency to schedule too much for myself, will just get tossed in a drawer.  Susan tells me that when I die she's going to pay for my funeral by advertising a big "Stuff Sale" where people will pay a fee to pick through all the drawers of my stuff. She figures she'll make enough to put me in the ground and then do her grieving in Tahiti. Cold woman!

Still mapping.

Maps and Robert Scholle's Art

What are we reading now:? I just finished The Night Circus. When I got three-fourths of the way through the book I didn't think I could recommend it but then I got to the ending and ...wow... changed my mind.

 Our latest Netflix have been 5-star movies: The Last Rites of Joe May (great acting from Dennis Farina), Young Adult (great acting from everyone in this and a stunning twist at the end), and Jeff, Who Lives at Home (great acting from Jason Segel). We like it when we see "small" movies with great acting.

Who is Robert Scholle? Susan was in a class with him at ArtUnraveled and although he is very young he is very talented. She was impressed with his work and loved that he really got great energy in this piece.

Deming and Stuff and a Map

We owed these very interesting people a blog entry over a month ago.  I've told you before that Susan will talk to anyone, dead or alive. We were coming back from ArtUnraveled in Phoenix and stopped in Deming, New Mexico, to get gas and look for art stuff. At the gas station she started talking to these people and here is part of their story (as best as I can remember):

If you look closely you'll see that his motorcycle has an Alaska plate. He works on the North Slope for 6 months and then gets 6 months off. He does lots of road travel with his wife sitting right behind him. Road travel as in back and forth from Alaska to Florida and to California and back to Florida, driving right through the hotter-than-hell Southwest in August. On their helmets it says "If You're Not Living on the Edge You're Taking Up Too Much Room." They also live part of the time on a sailboat in the Caribbean.

Oh well. Just driving for 4 hours makes me tired and I'm doing it in an air-conditioned car!

When we were young, very young, and I was almost out of the Air Force (and had my Viet Nam tour over with) we had A Plan.  The day I became a cilivian we would fly to England, buy BMW motorcycles, and tour all over England and Scotland and Europe for 3 months. Then we would ship the motorcycles home and when we got back to Austin we could sell them to cover the costs of our travel. For some reason back then you couldn't get a certain type of motorcycle in the US so it was a big deal to bring them back. 

The Plan became more realistic, we loaded up backpacks, bought a Eurail pass, and flew Icelandic Air to Europe and backpacked through Europe for 30 days. Icelandic Air was nicknamed Hip-Hop Airlines because all the hippies (this was the early 70's) flew it, at that time; the rates were dirt-cheap because you had a stopover in Iceland and you landed in Luxembourg - a sort of odd route.  We slept in hostels and on trains, ate food from vending machines and street vendors and washed our socks in the sink every night. We had saved our money for a year, had no jobs, and no mortgage. And we were young enough to think that was the best time of our life.

Art stuff in Deming? Yes! We always stop at the Tinaja Alta Trading Company, a fancy name for an antique/collectibles store loaded with lots of odd, interesting, cool stuff.  Cindy and Miguel will cut a good deal for you as you pile up your stuff - old silverware, ledgers, buttons, etc. Everything you want and don't need but get anyway because you can never have enough art "stuff".

Tooling Around My Maps

More maps. I like making maps.  I'm using my Michael's coupon to buy more sketchpads so I can make more maps. Stand back, I'm on my way.

And I like tools.  These were a direct result of being in Thomas Mann's Fastenation class.

Skull Maps and a Nap

Is this not the greatest skull ever? I have no idea what animal it came from but I'm crazy about the markings on it.

I'd like to think it is sort of like the maps I make.

We are still in the process of moving in. Actually, we are moved in but boxes are still stacked everywhere and Susan is sticking to her plan of being unpacked by Christmas. I sneak around behind her back and unpack when she isn't looking. Then all she can say is "Where in the h*** did all this cr** come from?" I can't help it -- I used to have the use of a 2-car garage for my studio and now I have half of a 10x12 foot room.  But at least I have that!

Part of our contract here at Woodchuck Manor guarantees us one meal a day. Today's entree choices included Sweet & Sour Pork or Grilled Chicken Satay with Peanut Sauce or Crab cakes with Lime-Lemon Chutney.  Don't even ask me about the desserts.  It's actually a bad deal because the food is so good I stuff myself at lunch and then come back and have to take a nap. And I'm not being productive when I am horizontal. 

We don't really have a couch (yet) but we do have some deck chairs to sit in. Even so, Susan made a tag for me that she hangs on the door in the afternoon so no one will disturb me:

Losing My Way

More maps. The idea of maps is sort of out of left field for me because I couldn't read a map if my life depended on it.  Susan's father was a pilot during WW II and she still has some of his silk maps. The maps were what pilots flying in the Pacific carried in case they were shot down. They were made out of silk so they'd be useful even if the pilot had ditched in the ocean. Hopefully they would be able to figure out where they were. In my case I'd probably have looked at the map and headed toward Greenland.

About this time you are wondering how bad my navigation skills can be. OK, I'll tell you. When we take our long road trips Susan is the navigator. She can read an upside down real giant-size paper map in the dark and doesn't even need the Google maps with the blue I-Am-Here button on them.

She plots our trips and tells me the highways and the routes we'll need for the next hour (we switch off the driving task every hour or so).  Then she tries to take a nap or read something. You know how some people swear and curse and people say "they cursed a blue streak"? If you want Susan's curses to turn the air Navy Blue all you have to do is say "Was that our exit I just drove past?"

The real fun comes when it's her turn to drive and I have to try to figure something out on the map because there's a detour or something unplanned, even though she highlights the route on the map. First of all, it's really big and hard to unfold the map without flapping it in her face. Second of all, I can't seem to get Google maps on my phone until we are really in the wrong direction. And I keep forgetting the I-Am-Here button. It gets really interesting when she grabs the map and tries to figure it out herself. While she's driving 70 miles an hour. And turning the air Navy Blue.

More Maps

I make maps while I listen to my audio books. Right now I'm getting ready to start The Night Circus. But in the meantime we've been catching up on our Netflix.  Here are some 5-star recommendations:

Margin Call

Ides of March (very eerie at this point in our election cycle)

More recommendations:

At Close Range (if you are a photographer you'll love this one)

and

The Tunnel

(we thought this would be too long but it totally held our attention)

Map of Don's World

Susan has a blog named MapOfMyWorld that she rarely updates anymore. So I stole her title and now it's mine! After all, Texas IS a community property state. If you've been following me since the beginning, you know that I used to make metal art and I now make jewelry art and ceramic sculptures. Add another item on to my Bucket List: I make maps.

We both love to read books and look at art books but I'm a pokey reader due to dyslexia. AudibleBooks to the rescue! The problem is that when I'm listening to a really good book I can't be doing something that requires a lot of thought and attention or I will lose track of the story. But I don't like to just be sitting there idle. Susan taught me a little bit of Zentangle so I started doing that while I listened to the books. Eventually we figured out a way to help me branch out into my own style of map-making.

A good book on making maps:  Jill Berry's Personal Geographies.

A good book to listen to:  Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.