Winding down

So I'm fast approaching the 3 month mark of being unemployed and things are winding down here. I've already begun the process of finding new work- have applied to a number of places already. Am targeting Nov. 9th for a start date. Fingers crossed that I can a company that both interests me and wants to hire me. Am never able to escape that Woody Allen joke "I'd never join a club that would allow a person like me to become a member" in terms of work though...

In terms of the things winding down: I'm excited that most my projects/goals/objectives of this hiatus have been met or are very near the finish line. Other than claiming I was going to do TWO quilts rather than just one (because I'm an idiot), I feel I've done an excellent job of scaling my ambitions to my expected available time. The quilt is essentially done, just needs some more superfluous stitching and a wash. The books are going to be finished come hell or high water. I've learned to cook chicken a number of ways (some of them even fast and easy!) and feel rather confident I could prepare a "meal" on the fly now after work without excessive stress or research. I've got 3 branch libraries to hit and then I'll have tackled 'em all. I had an excellent run of 5+ mile a' days there and don't feel guilty or bad that I've slipped back down to a steady 3 miles a day because I want to, you know, DO THINGS during the day and walking takes a hella' lot more time than initially anticipated.

(I dehydrated a hard boiled egg. I DO NOT ADVISE IT)

I guess the main let-down of this whole extended vacation was I failed to advance my drawing skills. I had hoped to tackle landscapes and I've made not a pinch of progress on that these 3 months (or past 10 even- it was one of my few resolutions this year). I also failed to attend any sort of fitness bootcamp nonsense thing, which I never really seriously considered but had always faintly hoped I'd do given sufficient free time. Maybe three months just wasn't "sufficient" enough, 6+ months off and I'm sure I'd get around to it...

In terms of other, just general awesome things:

Saw the whole blood moon eclipse thing. Happiness.

Went to the SF Super Hero Street Fair with company. Had a drink even! Danced with Santa. Was swept off my feet by random silver spandex man and made very happy. Good times.

Finally took another stab at hard crack sugar. It went better this time. I am emboldened.

Suko and I have not yet abandoned archery. This makes me proud of us.

I got a calligraphic letter from Katie in the mail, and it wasn't even a reply to something I'd sent. Just outa' the blue. So nice!

Enjoyed opening weekend at the Petaluma corn maze. Highly recommend it.

The delights of excessive free time

This week marks two months since being unemployed. Utilizing my boundless free time, I went to Golden Gate Park on Monday.

We in SF have had a long stretch of ridiculously good weather. Monday was the first real day that broke. Perhaps not the best day to visit the park. It wasn't really raining, but Karl the Fog was hugging the park really, really tightly.

On the up side, it looks like shooting mid-day mid-week should be entirely doable! The archery range is neeeever that open on the weekend. There was just one individual with a super tricked out bow, shooting by his lonesome. Anyway, after wandering about a bit I decided another day might be better. That day was Thursday.

It can be rather breathtaking, how beautiful the park can be. There's a many a thing to tease SF about or sneer at... but one cannot deny that our park is wonderful and we are all lucky? blessed? to have such easy access to such lovely landscape. Too bad I rarely make it out to that side of the city.

Took a pleasant stroll on my way out through the SF Botanical Garden, which is free to visit if you're a resident! My favorite paths wind through the Australia section, but the entire grounds are delightful. Just be careful- the grounds are so peaceful and calming and restorative that many an individual is inspired to friendliness and chatting... Avoid eye contact!

Was also able to visit two more ocean-ish library branches this week, bringing my total up to 21 of 28. So far Ortega remains the nicest due to it's views but everything gets better the further west in the city you go. Nothing can compete with the catalogue of the main downtown library though.

After all that, I started the binding of my quilt and then went over to a friends house for movie, food, and great company. Life is good. Friends are awesome.

One Month In

So I've had a month to myself now. Have I squandered it? Probably. Lets review:

Visit all the public library branches in SF.

Am at 10 of 28 now. I've picked off all the easy ones, they're just getting further and further away from here on out. Mostly the western half of the city left, with a few far north and south to check out. I still believe it's a good idea, gets me out of the house. I've discovered that the Teen section of the library is much larger than I thought/remembered it was. There's apparently a non-trivial section/genre called 'Urban Teen' that I've never encountered before. Also, the graphic novel section is pretty neat. And there's a *lot* of romance novels there, more than I even expected.

Today I flipped through Emily Post's enormous Etiquette book. It was fun and enlightening.

Try to walk more than 5 miles a day.

Working out reasonably well... Travel had an impact, but I'm not beating myself up over it. One thing that I find particularly interesting is that it's not so much that the distances increased that much (I used to walk to and from work, and then frequently out to dinner or activities), but that the "active time" is what most noticeably jumped up. Even sitting at home crafting or cooking, I'm moving around around so much more than when I sit and code.

Finish piecing/appliqué of quilt so I can start actually quilting it (and taking it with me when I travel).

Quilt progress continues, slower than I'd like. But it is progressing. There's just so much work to do. I still have about 7 station dots to sew down. And two track bends to correct. And some more border to piece together. And then the whole thing to assemble. And then the back to assemble. And then the quilting can begin. And then, yeah, there's that whole second quilt I'd like to kick off real soon here. Hmmm. Quilt progress, as it comes along, can best be tracked via the #quilt tag over on my Tumblr.

Wrap head around food/cooking.

Eh, going reasonably well. I cooked chicken for the first time ever in the oven. Pathetic, but at least I'm trying to correct the situation. I made some super awesome sourdough bread using just starter recently. Sour and chewy and delightful. Am going to take another stab at it soon.

Draw more.

Fucking failure. A huge gaping hole in my pretty picture of intentions. I don't know what's wrong with me. I've sat down several times, both at the Cintiq and with my pencils. Aside form Dr. Sketchy's, I've not been able to produce anything. It's getting to be a little disturbing... Not tracked in inital post, but worth mentioning:

• Code for fun : going quite well. Have been really enjoying my Google Doc-to-LaTeX document converter project. Will make a stand alone post for that soon. Just got set up today (Tuesday) to run sutro.fm locally so I can start working on that again. Gah, I've forgotten how much I for (no good reason, really) dislike Backbone. Also, after bumping into a swarm of ex-Rdio co-workers, one after another, I feel an urge to clean up my animation patch for Thor. There's also some inventory management system project mentioned in passing by Logan and the joke-but-maybe-not-a-joke idea of contracting for a friend. And finally I'm starting to bump into enough minor nits that I don't like about Stalk like Stecker that I might need to re-write it.
• Be more social : Seems to be going reasonably well. I have friends. They're pretty fucking awesome. They'll even hang out with me some times. There are things on the calendar. A number of them. I'm excited. Will post separately about it so as to not forget. Remember, future Rebecca. Life and friend can be good.

(written Tuesday night)

Scrap

"Keep your shit together," I tell myself as I gaze at the limbless bust of a male mannequin. "I'm past all this. I have all the miscellaneous art crap I need." And then I wander down the next aisle. And I lose my shit.

It's a meltdown with screaming and sobbing in delight. All in my head. Externally I calmly ask the lady next to me where the bags are because I stand before a wall packed tight with fabric scrap rolls and there's a sign that says 15 for $1. I feel tears of joy prick my eyes.

She points me in the right direction. Her glasses rest cartoonishly low on her nose. Because it's the way things are, we start talking. She repeatedly invites me to join the SFQG. I smile and express interest and will never do more than glance dismissively a the website. We ask about each other's projects. She makes scarves out of beautiful fabric bits. I find it hard to express the quilt idea but she helpfully and insightfully suggests that it sounds like a collage project. Old people, they're so smart!

We both discuss how the real value and emotion is in the process, not the final project. She leaves. I spend the next REDACTED minutes picking up fabric, stroking it, sometimes putting it in my bag, some times putting it back on the shelf only to do it all again several more times. I leave with only 30 small roles. I will be back.

I return less than a week later. I leave with fewer rolls but more fabric. There is no more purple fabric left.

If you want to live dangerously, I highly recommend checking out Scrap in SF. It's not just a fabric store. It's an everything-I've-always-wanted-to-hoard-for-potential-art-project store.

Onto New Things

So July 10th was my last day of work at Rdio. I learned a lot during my 2.5 years there and chose to leave for a number of reasons. There's a large number of really awesome people still working there and I wish the best of luck to them. I still plan to use the service and do some side projects with the JS and Android SDKs.

As a tech worker in the Bay Area I understand I'm extremely privileged and lucky when it comes to employment. Because I have the freedom and security to do so, I've decided to take a couple months off before looking for my next thing. And so today was the end of week two of that horrible phrase which I'll use once and avoid using from here on out: "funemployment"

I've lots of projects, both in progress and still in the idea stage, that I want to work on. I have years of learning-to-cook to catch up on. I've a basement that still needs to be cleaned/sorted/half thrown out/organized. I've travel and friends and beautiful weather luring me outside. There's so many things to do and I already feel like there's not enough time in the day. At least my previous stint between jobs helped prepare me for that one. I'm not surprised when the end of the day rolls around so soon, but I still grit my teeth and wince.

A couple key things I'm trying to focus on:

Visit all the public library branches in SF. I'm at 6 of 28 right now.

Try to walk more than 5 miles a day.

Finish piecing/appliqué of quilt so I can start actually quilting it (and taking it with me when I travel).

Wrap head around food/cooking.

Draw more.

Doing so-so on everything other than the drawing and quilting. Purchased a dehydrator at the start of week one and have been experimenting with that. Dehydrated mango- insane success. Dehydrated avocado- not so much. Dehydrated rhubarb- iiiiinteresting. Anyway, also hope to blog more in coming weeks. We'll see how it goes.

Public Transportation Hike : Pacifica

This post is not about coding or crafting. But an important part of coding is NOT coding. And one of the best best ways to not code is to hike.

Enjoyed another wonderful Public Transportation hike this weekend. We caught a BART down to the Daily City station and then caught the SamTrans 110 bus down to Pacifica. The connections went well there and back, but be aware the 110 runs once every 1.5 hours. But don't let that spook you. This hike was refreshing, interesting, and totally worth the time.

We started off by heading up the Sweeny Ridge Trail. Finding it from the bus stop was easy enough. The first 1.2 miles was some steady incline, but since we were in Pacifica we were blanketed in fog the entire time and never once got too warm. It's questionable if we ever were really warm at any point during the trip. There was definitely apprehension as we watched the fog out the bus windows during the approach. We've had some disastrous hikes in the past... thankfully Adam convinced me to wear not just a thermal top for the hike but also my thermal leggings under my skirt. It would have not hurt to have brought another layer... and a hat... and my own gloves (I wound up stealing Adam's)

Have you seen the movie Stalker? It's a terrible film, don't bother if you haven't, but there is some striking imagery in it of foggy landscapes. That's what this hike looked like. We were quickly swallowed up by fog and the world stopped existing beyond the small spot we occupied. The trail was a constant surprise because it twisted into trees or behind shrubs and then out of existence. Sounds were muted, everything was covered in dew, and Adam's hair and beard quickly got soaked. (My braid was too dense we think to hold the dew). At one point we were wearing sunglasses to keep the fog from our eyes and had to repeatedly take them off to wipe clean.

We eventually stumbled across a Nike missile site that had been abandoned.

The site was at the peak of the hill we think- there was wind there at least. But still fog. After that we started to decent and eventually could see the coast. A little. Here the trail gets a little iffy. In theory there's a much more leg-friendly trail down to the church by the freeway... but we got turned around and took the mountain biker path. Insanely steep trails, loose rock, poor footing. Luckily it didn't last too long.

Popping out onto Highway 1 again, next to the church, we were DELIGHTED to see Lovey's Tea Shoppe right there, across the road! That's not a typo-- while it is related to (and shares the exact same menu with) SF's Lovejoy's, its name is Lovey's. Adam and I were able to slip into the communal table no problem and had us a pair High Teas.

Given that the bus comes once every 1.5 hours we had "just" missed one by 15 minutes, and the Colma BART bound 112 wasn't any more convenient. That's fine, there was still the final portion of the hike-- Mori Point. It winds right along the coast cliff and was absolutely bursting with wildflowers. An excellent way to wind down a hike and aid in a little digestion.

After strolling along between the beach and a golf course, we reached the bus stop with a comfortable 10 minutes to spare. Our BART connection was another 8 minutes. And then we were home.

All in all, an excellent hike and an excellent lunch. GMap-Pedometer puts it at an easy 7.1 miles. Check out the link for the exact route taken. Google Maps doesn't quite let us capture it (it refuses to acknowledge the path down to the highway) so here's the first portion & the second portion.

Looking forward to trying it again (perhaps following Sweeny Ridge trail a bit further)

Bay Area Public Transportation Hike

I've never owned a car. Adam got rid of his car shortly after we moved to our current home. Luckily SF is an excellent city to be carless these days.

Just about the one and only major draw back to lacking a car is hiking. The Bay Area is wonderful for so may reasons, and one of the top o' the list reasons is the fabulous nature surrounding the cities here. Sure, there's Zipcar- and we've definitely used it for hiking- but driving 2 hours round trip for a 4 hour hike just seems... not great. Especially given that I almost always fall asleep right after a hike and leave poor Adam alone and bored behind the wheel. That's why it's always such a treat to find quality hikes entirely reachable via public transportation.

This week's find was a lovely hike up in the Oakland hills. Took the BART to Rockridge and then the 49B bus to Derby St & Claremont Blvd. There's an excellent collection of trails there.

The area is Claremont Canyon Regional Preserve is where we started and Strawberry Creek Canyon is where we ended. In particular we hiked the Stonewall Panoramic Trail & several fire trails.

As we were approaching the peak, we kept hearing these train noises. "Can we actually hear Amtrak from here?" we wondered. No, you can't. What you CAN hear is the super awesome Redwood Valley Railway which just so happened to be open for us on this weekday. For $3 a piece we hopped the train for a delightful ~12 min ride in the FREEZING COLD. We also forgot to stop Strava so when you check out the Strava results the flat ~2m portion in the middle is us hiking off the path, going around the train, and coming back.

Taking out the 2 miles and 30 minutes for the train trip, the hike was ~7.6 miles ~2hr 20min. Felt like a lot longer... because it was FREEZING COLD for most the hike. Be sure to check the weather and BELIEVE the reports before you head out on a hike, folks! End of the hike dropped us at the Berkeley BART.

My Beautiful Bird

BOOM! LOOK AT THAT! Amazing, isn't it? I just got back from my first taxidermy class today and I'm still giddy. SO HAPPY. I'm not saying I reconstructed the best bird ever-- in fact, I think the girl next to me did the best hen ever. I'm just over the moon at how well run and awesome the class was. I learned a lot and feel like if I ever did want to taxidermy another chicken on my own (which I don't believe I will do) I totally could. I love that my bird is tailor posed for the space designated for it. I love my bird more than any number of cooler taxidermy pieces because I constructed it. Me. My hands.

Of course, the smell of chicken haunts me. Am so happy I didn't have a poopy-butt chicken like some of the other girls did... and girls it was. The instructor was a dude but he said that of all the classes he's been teaching through Paxton's Gate, he's only had 5 dudes. Class size is limited to 6 I believe, but we only had 5. The instructor was Geoff Vassallo and the class was run by Paxton's Gate. Pricey, and LONG (6+ hrs) but I would highly recommend it if you've any interest. I don't know if I'd do another bird class (maybe if I could request something smaller?) but there's a squirrel class that I'm rather on the fence about... if anyone else wanted to do it, I believe I'd be interested.

For someone who hasn't handled raw meat much/at all, I think I did remarkably well. I think I was pretty good at, and enjoyed, the basic skinning stuff. Cutting through the muscle & mean wasn't that bad either. The head though... ugh, I was defeated. The instructor did all things involving the head interior for me, which was very nice of him. I'd say that was the best thing about the class-- he'd help as much or as little as you wanted and had a really great attitude the entire time.

I was definitely the most n00b there-- one of the girls had already skinned 2 ducks before (but failed to mount them), one of them had worked for Paxton's Gate before and had a number of dead animals in her freezer, one worked with mounting bones a lot (but never skins), and one was ridiculously gothy and absolutely cool with all the blood & guts & dead-ness. I think the above mounting by the girl who had already skinned 2 animals (and had 3 more in her freezer at home to work with after this class) did a stunning job-- and this after she had come in late and gotten the last bird that no one wanted. This cute little peeking through the wing feathers, head tilt, wide eyes, a lowered tail. So good!

Anyway, my bird is pinned in place with feathers taped up for some quality posing. Will probably take some better pictures later once the rigging can come down. I'm quite fond of my extra touches-- miss-matched eye colors and a number of feathers tucked under her toes, as if she were standing in a barnyard.

I've a number of in-progress posts that are a bit too gorey to post willy-nilly on the Net. Let me know in person if you're interested and I can flip through them/tell you more!

Pumpkins!

I greatly enjoy Halloween. I miss the massive box of decoration supplies we had at my parent's house and the time spent by my sisters and I going through it every year. To embrace the season, several friends packed into our tiny kitchen and participated in ritualistic seasonal gourd mutilation.

Turns out there's a really cute pumpkin patch spot in the city over on the other side of Twin Peaks that Adam found. A bit pricey, but they have a lovely selection and seeing all the kids running around was fun. Clancy's if anyone's interested. Next year I'm getting a novelty pumpkin (the sort of corpse blue/pink splotched ones)

My pumpkins is the Aperture Science logo one. Adam did the traditional pumpkin face, Katie did the creepy eye, Vince did the triforce, and Suko carved a bird & tree on the surface of a little one (though sadly it's not quite thin enough to see at night). (not pictured is the fantastic Owl Gripping Mouse one done by the Adam & Clair team, which was taken home)

Turns out good prep work makes things a lot easier. I should put sheets of paper down more often! I am saddened by the fact that the little dinky pumpkin knives you get in the kits actually cut better then my collection of steak knives.

p.s.- apparently there are such things as grease ants

Season of Dreams...

Not sure why, but every night this week I've had vivid, odd dreams. This, after several months of nothing particularly striking.... I blame the changing temperature.

The second dream:

My co-workers and I were super heroes, themed after different sandwiches. Someone was a ham sandwich hero, I think I was egg salad or peanut butter & jelly. I wake up. I tell one of my coworkers about this dream. I wake up.

After telling the same worker about the dream and the dream within the dream, I did not (sadly?) find out I was still dreaming. I'm happy that this dream did not leave me sad/scared/worried.

The first dream:

I'm somewhere near a river, in which I find a goat being slowly washed down stream. I retrieve the goat and decide to keep it as a pet. Time passes and I go somewhere else. I realize I forgot my goat and call my aunt Laurie to see if I left it at her place. Sadly, she doesn't know where it is. I am sad to have lost my pet goat, but on the other hand kind of relieved... Apparently adopting a goat would cost $250 and it occured to me that the backyard at our house doesn't really have any grass and I start to imagine the damage the goat would cause in the basement if we kept it indoors. None the less, I spend the rest of the dream frantically searching for my goat. I do not find it.

Despite the above sketch, the goat in my dream was very clearly a Anglo-Nubian goat. This dream left me very sad/worried.

I have not yet sketched the third dream.

In totally unrelated news I went to the San Francisco Superhero Street Fair and had a great time. It's not an epic event, but one I would casually recommend. Fun dancing time. I wore a sparkly mask, glow sticks, and a skimpy outfit. Someone asked if wearing a mask made dancing easier. It didn't make dancing easier (that went just fine) but it made going out in public in one's underwear a lot easier.

Have been playing with the NVD3 graph library at work (which sits atop D3) and been having a good time of that. I can't really chew on numbers with any sort of statistical skill, but I can make a mean graph. Sadly our hackday that was planned for tomorrow has been moved.... to some time in the future. Alas.

Related to work, I've really been enjoying this song for some reason:

Adam has been playing GTA V and I've really enjoyed watching him do so. I <3 Trevor (just like everyone else, I'm sure)

Rolling along...

Just got back from visiting family in the Midwest. Both sides of the family, actually. I took a pile of photos and will at some point soon be sifting through them... In the mean time, here's today's Dr. Sketchy's doodles.

Have been very busy lately, sadly. Was in Seattle not too long ago and now this trip. Played my first outdoor soccer game on the Rdio team (8v8 coed) and look forward to future games. I didn't do that great, but I had fun.

I pulled out my Arduino stuff recently and poked at it some more but had to give up-- the weather is just turning nice again and San Francisco Second Summer is starting... who can stay inside and code on weekends like these?!? I look forward to the rainy season so that I can code contently in my home or at a coffee shop... but till then! Outside time!

Adam and I enjoyed the ever-wonderful pancake breakfast on Mt Tam this month in the company of a co-worker. Yay for socializing and exercise. Remember, the last pancake breakfast of the year is Sunday, October 13th. Other fun outdoor things- this Saturday is both the Tour de Fat event in Golden Gate Park but also the Greek Food Festival.

Things thing things... I've been flying my kite a lot lately. Actually, I drag my kite around and then Adam flies it marvelously. Makes me want to try designing some novel kites... My knees hurt a lot these days, which is sad.

An looking forward to upcoming new D&D game with friends. Reminiscing lately about old MUD playing days. Not looking forward to turning 30 soon. Time goes on. I'll write a better blog post next time...

Doing Good

Dr. Sketchy's tonight! Woot! Disclaimer: images scattered through post have nothing to do with following topic other then the Sisters falling under the banner of "doing good"--

I really enjoyed attending W3Conf last month. It was an ideal first conference since there was only one track and the subjects were very focused. One of the talks that really struck me, and those I was with, was Léonie Watson's "Design like you give a damn: Practical accessibility for web pros" (which is available on YouTube, 40 min long). The talk itself was rather simple but the Q&A afterwards was informative and the subject itself sort of startling. My coworker, Matt, and I both found the title of the talk appropriately... harsh? Why of course we should make our site not shitty for those who might need to navigate it differently.

This last Friday was my first Hack Day at Rdio (got a sweet t-shirt out of it!) and I happily poked at the issue of accessibility. Turns out doing it "right" is hard... and rather stupid because the ARIA spec uses IDs for a lot of stuff, which isn't great for reusable components. Yes, yes, obviously something can be figured out. But for a one-day-at-work project, wrestling with that was more then I wanted to do. Some take-away thoughts:

• OMG use alt="" if your image is just decorative! If it's not, put some damn text in the attribute.
• VoiceOver on Mac might not be the hottest screen reader around, but it's so easy to run you have no excuse not to at least try
• Using buttons or divs with with just a background image for a button is lovely and totally not accessible to screen readers. The aria-label="Button Name" and role="button" attributes are so easy and make a big difference!
• Handling focus with popup divs is not instantly obvious (I flailed for most of the end Friday with it, got it working for < 2 minutes on Monday, and cannot figure out how I did so nor return to that state since)

Because it was just a one-day hack, no code is really fit to be rolled out... but it's something that will probably be coming soon.

Jumping topics- Dr. Sketchy's was a joy tonight. Our models were several of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, which is my second time drawing them and the fourth time they've modeled for Dr. Sketchy's. I'm thrilled that I got first place in the contest tonight, whose theme was "Draw the new pope". My entry was the following image:

I used construction paper today because I knew the Sisters would have lots of black & white... totally wasn't prepared for the amount of pink though. Luckily a kind lady next to me let me borrow hers. The gentlemen to my right (a former art teacher?) also helped me out with drawing some sparkles. Another lady lent me her light blue pencil, which I sadly failed to return before she left. What I'm trying to say is that everyone at Dr. Sketchy's is awesome. Also, I must give a shout-out for one of the sponsors Utrecht- the paper (toned gray) and pencils (graphite aquarelle) I won tonight are exciting and I'm looking forward to using them soon. I also won a lovely lei which looks perfect wrapped around my bun.

And just so everyone's aware of it, the Sisters do a big Easter even in Dolores Park every year. They have posted the event calendar and it should be noted that the Hunky Jesus Contest starts at 3:45. I'm not sure if it's my kinda' event, but I've heard good things.

In closing, I just wanted to add that I've finally found a use for my pile o' Dr. Sketchy's doodles (aside from scanning them). The Month of Letters may be over (I bombed the last week) but I am still writing letters (at a far, far slower paces). For several letters now I've been using sketch pages as stationary and winding my words around model's form, scribbled across the page. It hurts less then tossing the scraps and yet gets them off the desk & outa' the house, which Adam approves of.

Sketches from the Ball

While I would never claim to be that good at it, I do very much love to sketch at events where people are dressed up. It combines the delight of people watching with some artistic exercise, isn't as lazy as poorly-done photography (the only type of photography I'm currently trained in), and removes any awkwardness of attending an event alone. I used to be better at it, as demonstrated by some scans from the 2008 Ball [1] [2] [3]. My rusty skills in no way deter me from continuing to attempt it however. I had a lovely tiny black square book to work with this year, which I believe is an improvement... though I've a spot in my heart for the old now-filled-up sketch book which was tall and narrow with an ornate cover and magnetic clasp...

Some highlights & photos taken by a talented collection of random photographers:

• Diver Helmet Man w/ Bowler was fantastic! He had a drink in his hand, a dapper hat atop his helmet, and what looked like a good attitude from my vantage point across the dance floor. Interestingly enough there was another diving helmet, though I think dapper hat man wore it better.
• This year's Dark Garden fashion show was one of the best yet. The fashion line of corsets + dresses/skirts made me seriously re-consider my no-corset stance. Sadly I can never sketch these shows because I'm absolutely frozen in place with awe. There were in particular a lot of buckles and straps across corsets and skirts and lovely silhouettes that were snug on top and flared around the knees. [1] [2]
• I am always delighted by the acrobatics at the Ball. This year had a talented silk straps act, an impressive rope/cord act done by a woman (I believe I've only seen men perform with it so far), and a far more amazing then initially expected bike act. There were other acts as well, but I've not found good photos of them yet...
• I saw Holy Motors a couple days before the Ball... let me just say, it made watching her act a bit uncomfortable. That movie is really, really, really strange... that doesn't mean it's good, am not sure if it's bad. It's just odd to the point of being nearly nonsensical...
• Did not like the music as much as last year, sadly. I saw Shovelman in passing but didn't get to listen to him play as much as I would have liked. Delachaux is an awesome DJ & I can barely stand to listen to Miz Margo string together more then 3 tracks.
• The belly dancer was to die for. I believe her name is NagaSita. Her movements are magic. (I wish she had more appropriate music to dance to... like some killer techno)
• New crazy costumes every year. Less Edward Gorey themed ones this year (no one in a giant iceberg, alas) but some very original ones stood out: gentleman frog & tentacle woman (sketched below and not be be confused with this other lady adorned with squid)

Alas, my black marker was lost rather early on the second night and let me tell you, you can not sketch at the Edwardian Ball without copious amounts of black ink. This wound up putting quite a cloud over Sunday night and sent me home before the end of the evening (that, and Miz Margo's DJing) Though none of them made it into scanned sketches, mad props given to the crew who posed upstairs in their stark black & white costumes without moving (or with minimal but continous movement). Enjoyable to watch, useful to sketch, good idea all around. Hope they carry it over to next year. Luckily my friend Suko attended with me on Friday night and took a lovely shot of both the model modeling and myself hard at work trying (but failing) to sketch him. In closing, here is something rarely seen- an photo of me in full get-up. The outfit was more silly then usual, as is my pose. I compensated by wearing all black on Sunday.