Oh, my stars and garters!

Do you like art? And artichoke dip?

Then you should probably come to this on Saturday!

7 p.m. at End of an Ear record store, 2209 South First Street in Austin.

Free beer, too; did I mention that?

Hope to see you!

Uneventful summer punctuation

One story is that I got an honorable mention in the Austin Art Boards competition.

It's a cool project--Reagan Advertising agreed to work with the Austin Visual Arts Association to display art on its billboards when they aren't being leased to paying customers. So instead of some stupid "DO BILLBOARDS WORK???? JUST DID!!!!!!" filler ad, motorists get to drive past giant works by local artists.

Oh, man, I wanted to get this up on a billboard SO BAD. If I got to drive past this on I-35 on my way home from work for a week I would be the happiest woman alive. But there were lots of entires, so even being in the top 30-odd is still pretty good, right?

I will just have to keep entering some improved variation of this until I: (a) win; (b) read with sadness about the discontinuation of the Austin Art Boards contest; or (c) die.

Anyway, check out the winners because they are pretty great (or, if you live in Austin, just wait until you see them in the wild). Dan entered a photo too and is going to enter every year until the above conditions are met as well.

The other story is that I bought a kayak. We were driving back from Windy Point last month behind someone with a shitty little boat in the back of her pickup, and I realized I had always kind of wanted a shitty little boat too.

After some research, a quick trip around Lady Bird Lake* on a rented kayak, and some advice from a friend whose boyfriend makes great use of his inflatable boat, I settled on a not-so-shitty but fairly little inflatable kayak.

It was delivered last night, so I took today off to test it out. We took it to Lake Walter E. Long** and had a fine time paddling from one shore to the other. It's a little hard to control because it's higher and lighter than a regular kayak, but by the time we turned back Eric and I had figured out a rowing rhythm to keep us from yawing too much.

Sea Eagle! Caw! Caw!

I had so much fun today. I want to launch it everywhere.

*Town Lake

**Decker Lake. And really, do we have to rename every damn thing in Austin? It's not like it was all named after some Joe Paterno-like figure before.

Can you guess which one is mine?

Hey, I've got four prints in a group show that's opening this weekend, and Dan's got some photos up in there too. 

The opening reception is tomorrow (Friday, June 22) at Gallery Black Lagoon (4301A Guadalupe Street) from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Check it out if you like art and free beer and vodka.

(Actually, I'm not sure why you're reading this right now if you don't like art and free beer and vodka.) 

Ok, then! Hope to see you. 

Switcheroo

How to spend your day off:

Yoyogi Park

Yoyogi Park near Harajuku is probably the best park I've ever seen.

Tokyo is a crowded city, and it seems like people mostly cope with that by being quiet and exceptionally courteous to each other. Yoyogi Park is where everyone goes on Sunday to stretch out and make a little noise.

We saw a flag corps, frisbee players, cosplayers, jump ropers, and soccer players.

We saw people busking and practicing all kinds of instruments.

We saw Tokyo greasers, a group of rockabilly dudes who dress up and dance all afternoon at the entrance of the park.

We saw four nearly naked men paint each other gold and then do a fierce and funny dance. I don't know why.

The best thing, though, was the drum circle. No snark; it was joyful, it was loud, it was good, it made everyone happy.

Then, as we were dawdling near the entrance, we saw at a group of people streaming into the park in a line with their 10 Siberian huskies. Each dog was dressed like a maid, a cheerleader, or a sailor. It happened so fast I didn't have time to get my camera, so I drew you a picture:

Then it was time to go, because after that there was no way Yoyogi Park could get any better.

In case you ever need to express the concept of "cat money" in Japanese...

I have created this handy guide for you.

I'm not sure how much practical help this Japanese class is going to be, but it's amusing me, for sure.

I am classy.

When I was in New York City in January I was amazed by the mosaic signs and artwork in the subway stations. When I got home I searched online for mosaic classes, thinking it would be nice to have a piece of all that for myself.

I was secretly planning to plan to take a mosaic class someday but never actually, you know, take one, but my plot was foiled by the fact that I found one right away, five three-hour sessions for beginners, and it started less than a week later. So I pretty much had to sign up for it.

The class ended today, and I was just able to finish and grout my project before I ran out of time. It's a little messy in places, and I wish I'd done some things differently, but I really liked working on this thing. I want to take the advanced class later this year. I want to make a million more.

I have taken a few classes at Laguna Gloria. They seem to have a good level of instruction there; the classes are serious enough but still accessible and fun. Plus it's hilarious to try to work when evil squalling peacocks are stubbornly perched on the windowsill of your classroom. I recommend it.

I am also taking a Japanese class through ACC Continuing Ed this month and next. Eric and I are going back to Japan soon (more, probably much more, on that later) and we signed up for the class together, thinking it would be nice to know how to say more than "thank you," "excuse me," "I am so sorry," and "uhhh, toilet?"

I am dismayed to find that my brain is much less agile and porous than the last time I took a language class more than 10 years ago. Now my brain feels more like some bitter old crank standing around with its brainy little arms crossed, snarling "English only!"

I have noticed it's gotten a little easier over the weeks, though, so maybe it's something you can gain back with practice.

Anyway, it's fun. There is also a writing component, which I didn't think I would care about, but I like it. I love practicing new letters in big, clumsy rows. I love being able to write whole words with my misshapen letters--each character is a syllable.

You guys! I can write "sushi" and "sake" and "nephew" and "up" in another alphabet. Also "enclosure." If you need anyone to write "enclosure" in Japanese, by all means hit me up.

Edit, 2/24, 12:48 a.m.: Eric points out that the Fonz's A's should really be E's since the Japanese E sounds more like a long A in English. So two thumbs up and an

 

to you!

 

From Stars and Garters with love

(No, really, I like you guys a lot. Thanks to everyone who's still reading after eight years!)

Pollen ballin'

Dorks in New York!

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, My Stars and Garters! presents: Winter beauty tips, timing edition

Pristine machine

I got a new (refurbished, but close enough) laptop today. I had been ignoring the decline of my old one for months. Then one night last week I realized I was working, or trying to, on a machine with a dead battery, a power cord that only connected when it was draped just so over the left side of the screen, broken right shift, right arrow, and enter keys, a cursor that about once a week jumped randomly around the page, the inability to run iTunes, and a tendency to just hang there and think and think and think before it had an epiphany and did everything all at once so 20 windows opened, pop pop pop, and what the hell was I doing in the first place, and is there really a purpose to this life?

I spent most of tonight loading software, setting preferences, and playing around in Windows 7, which I'm happy to finally use. For one thing, I now have the ability to write in longhand with my penpad. I was even going to write a whole post that way, but while it read and predicted a lot of my scrawl admirably, it also kept barfing up words like "bed" for "yeah" and "sargasso" for I don't even know what.

Then, if you can believe it, it wouldn't let me write "fuck"; it was all "buck," "tuck," "luck," and I was all "NO I SAID FUCK!" and it was like "NOT SAD FORT;".

After about five minutes and lots of block printing, I finally got it to say "fuck." So it wasn't that the program refused to do it. It was as though it had wanted to think better of me.

I was going to post it because it was hilarious, but I unknowingly had the cursor in the URL field all that time, and that apparently is not an error you can recover from. All my laborious cussing disappeared forever. Luckily, I did grab a screenshot early in the process so you can see I am not making this up.

So Windows 7 is really nice! Although I was sad to see they made MS Paint fancier. Not fancy, but fancier.

Somehow that seems wrong to me, to have more brush choices in Paint, but what can you do in these modern times but hang on for the ride and try to keep up, right?

If you think you can do better, be my guest.

McKinney Falls State Park is inside Austin city limits and offers hiking, swimming, camping, fishing, and mountain biking. It features an interpretive nature trail and has a number of old buildings and some ruins. To get there take US 183 just south of the airport, then take McKinney Falls Parkway a few miles to the entrance. Christ.

It's been nice, but...

It just goes on so damn long, you know?

All the ladies say

If you read this, you will know much of what has been going on in my life this week.

Eric and I were in Lake Tahoe over the weekend to watch my sister get married.

The lake is pretty like a postcard.

And my sister was beautiful like a girl in a magazine.

(Sadly, this picture of my family in the bare-bones dressing area is the best picture I have on my camera from that evening. But I was in the wedding party and had other things to do besides take pictures, like clutch a bouquet of white hydrangeas and drink a lot of wine.)

It was a fine trip. As I may have mentioned, I got to watch my sister get married, and a lot of other people I love did too.

When we weren't doing wedding things, Eric and I swam in the cold, clear blue lake--colder than Barton Springs, though barely--and watched as a mother duck and her six peeping babies bobbed right past us.

I also lost $30 at video poker in the casino we stayed at and won it all back in the Las Vegas airport on the way home. Last time I stayed at a casino I lost $250 and won it all back five minutes before we got a cab out of there. I can't lose! Nor can I win!

Now we're back, and Austin and all of Texas is still hot and dry. I don't mind the heat much, but the drought is terrible. I try not to let it upset me because there's nothing we can do about it. Still, it's painful to watch the big trees turn sparse-leaved and dusty all over town, knowing that we may not realize the extent of the damage for another year or two.

In much more fun news, I got a cool drawing app recently and have been trying to do a new doodle every day or so. I haven't produced anything spectacular yet; I'm just out of practice and trying to get some momentum going. I hope you won't mind if I post them here occasionally. Today's:

Prickly pear

This week I cleaned my office and cleared off the desk. Now I can use it for something other than piling up empty boxes and and insurance statements.

Dorks

(But: Dorks who know how to stay cool when it is 105 degrees outside.)