Currently: September 23, 2005

I started my Advance Painting class this week. The college recently built a new Center for the Arts which means bigger classrooms and sinks that don't plug! We are also using REAL oil paints this time around, which I am REALLY excited about. They still will not let us use solvents so we are using M. Graham solvent free paints which I am seriously digging. The difference in pigments from the water miscible is amazing. The paints use walnut oil, and I just read that "Brushes may be cleaned during and after painting with Walnut Oil with a final washing in mild detergent if painting will not be resumed for several days." Oops. I have been washing the hell out of my brushes and have used them the next day. Crap. Oh well... everything seems fine so far. I really like the idea of not using a turpentine type solvent.

I am finding the most difficult concept for me to grasp is the idea in painting in layers. I find myself wanting to paint the detail right away, and not build up a painting. Something else I am struggling with is what to paint. I just really don't know what kind of "message" or whatever I want to convey. What is my ultimate goal? Do I want a gallery show? Do I want my paintings to be hung on walls? Or do I want to do commercial illustration? The answer I keep coming back to is for me to paint what I love and something will eventually come of it. Right now I am just painting from references so I can get a handle on this medium.

Yesterday I unchained myself from the computer and dug in the garden a bit:



As you can see, I made a TON of progress. This part of the yard is full of dandelions and thick, dead-ish grass. At first I thought that I would solarize this area. Then I got to reading and I think that sheet composting is a better idea. When my mom comes out I am going to have her help me plan the future garden beds and perhaps we can mark the area. Part of me feels like I am biting off more that I can chew because this area is HUGE and I have never had even a teeny weeny garden before. Another thing that worries me is that this area is totally uneven and slopes towards the house. Oh well, aim high, I guess.

September 16, 2005

Last week it was toilet talk, and this week it's going to be rodents. These are our upstairs bedrooms, the pictures taken before we moved in. (the treadmill and weight bench are not ours unfortunately)



More orange as you can see. We also have mice! Yay! Our home inspector noticed evidence of rodents and we had the previous owners bring in an exterminator. I called this guy yesterday because I keep hearing the scuttling of little feet when I am in these rooms and can see droppings (yuck) when I open the storage/crawl spaces.

E: "Yes, I know they are there because I can hear them."
Pest Guy: "WOW! They must have eaten a TON of bait! We can put you on a pest control program that will cost you a million dollars."
E: "Let me talk it over with Jeffery."
Pest Guy: "Certainly."

I don't know if you can tell by the pictures, but we also have that LOVELY popcorn ceiling stuff in almost every room. Not only that, but it has GOLD GLITTER in it! How lucky are we!!?? I did a search on the internet the other day on how to remove that stuff and I found out that there could be a good chance it contains asbestos. YAY!!

Now I have to rant about something not home related. My iPod mini. I am VERY upset with Apple right now. The iPod I got for Xmas has been plagued with the battery problem and it finally bit the dust a few weeks ago. It's still under warranty so I sent it in and got a replacement iPod last week. The replacement iPod's volume control didn't work and it was stuck on THE LOUDEST VOLUME POSSIBLE and would not turn down. I sent THAT iPod back last week and got it's replacement yesterday. THIS iPod is has the static issue. I was on the phone for an hour yesterday with Apple and I am so pissed off. I just want a product that works! I guess I have bad iPod Karma. The sad thing is that I miss it so much! I didn't realize how addictive it was.

It's not all doom and gloom however. I will have three book proposals begin shopped at a book show in Frankfurt next month and I am currently working on illustrations for another knitting book with Amy and Jillian. My advanced painting class starts next week and I am going to a composting class next Saturday to learn the fine art of composting and then Mom is coming to visit the week after.


September 9, 3005

This is my new office/studio space:



Notice the lovely orange carpets, and the lovely orange curtains, and if you can see it from the picture, the lovely light orange walls.

I am seriously digging the wall shelves. They are a little too shallow for some things. I had to lay my magazines on their sides instead of upright in groovy magazine holders, but as you can tell, I still have a bunch of empty space I can fill up, so that's not something I am going to complain too much about. Someday soon there will be a makeover on this room. New carpet, new paint color and new curtains.

First up on the home maintenance list is the toilet. It's breeding flies now. Yes, it's as gross as it sounds. We don't use the toilet, let me get that across first off; we run upstairs to the upstairs bathroom. While fabulous for the cardiovascular system, it's starting to get a little annoying. I noticed yesterday when I was taking a bath in the downstairs bathroom that there were a TON of flies. I think I counted fifteen in and around the window/tub/toilet area. It started off like "Oh, there's a fly in here. Oh, there's another one. Wait. And another...three, four, five...SIX, SEVEN, OH MY GOD!!" It was like something out of a horror movie. I lifted up the lid to the toilet, and saw another dozen flies drowning in the water. Their little legs wriggling like mad. EWW!!

I had to call Jeffery and yell at him for not alerting me to the fly problem. He had no idea what I was talking about because apparently thirty-plus flies magically appeared between his shower and my bath just a few hours later. I don't think he believed me at first, you know, if I say there are thirty flies that means really there are only about five, right? I had to leave them as evidence of my sanity, unfortunately. I am not the only one who is going to experience the horror, thank you very much.

If there are flies somewhere, that means- Holy Mother of God- that there are also maggots *gag*. Where in the hell are they coming from?!!? I don't even want to know, and THANK GOD a plumber is coming today. To top it all off, the toilet is a wall mounted toilet, which until recently I didn't even know existed. They don't carry wall mounted toilets at the home improvement store, I looked. When I was on the phone with the plumbing company I said:

Erica: "Oh, by the way, the toilet is mounted to the wall, not the floor."
Receptionist: "Oh Lord."

Yes. "Oh Lord" indeed.

September 2, 2005

I love my house. We had a FABULOUS group of chicas to help us move, and they kicked serious butt. It was weird at first being in this space, after only seeing it a few times. We started to find some things that are going to have to be fixed: the insulation in the office closet is damp and rotted and horribly stinky. The downstairs toilet doesn't work. The heat indicator knobs on the stove are so old that all they do is spin. It was a little bit of a guessing game at first trying to figure out how far you turn the knob to get high or medium-high heat. We burned some pork chops in the process, but I think we've got it down.

I think one of the top issues that needs to be deal with (aside from the toilet) is the carpeting. This house was built in 1970 and some of the rooms are sporting their original orange carpet. Actually, I think 40% of this house is orange. Curtains, floors, walls. Those are easy fixes though, and purely cosmetic. Behold the glory of orange:



Yes, that's THREEE different versions of orange carpet. The drapes up there aren't orange, but they are hideous enough. The picture doesn't do the puke-green color justice. It's not all bad, however, there is some really cool vintage bark cloth in the garage:



There's yards and yards of this stuff. It's quite dirty being in a garage and all, but I think a gentle washing will do wonders. I just hope it doesn't disintegrate!

We are on a dead end with the property next to us being 5 acres of brambles and blackberry bushes owned by a company up in Seattle. The property next to THAT however, is - check this out - A PARK! We met the previous owner of the house the other day and it turns out his mother lives across the street. She told us that the city turned the land around us into a Park with walking trails that surround a wetland. We kept seeing people walk by our house with strollers and dogs, and they would just ...disappear. It's a dead end, you have to turn around right? Well it turns out that behind a bush is the entrance to the park. I don't know how long it would have take us to figure that out if we hadn't been told. It looks like it's on private property:



I haven't explored the whole thing yet, there are several different trails that lead off to who-knows-where. It's so peaceful.

The latest issue of Cottage Living has a couple of great garden articles. One of them showcases a garden by Dean Riddle. It's a great article and it's given me a fabulous idea for the garden fence. He built a picket fence from saplings and some posts and rails he got at a salvage yard. When I was walking through the park the other night, I kept seeing branches lying around that would work perfectly for such a fence. The city recently went through and blazed a larger walking trail, leaving stacks of branches and trees littering the sides of the walkway. Olympia also happens to have a salvage yard, so I think next spring is going to be garden time. Sometime soon (hopefully) I am going to mark out the plot for the garden and lay down some plastic to kill the grass and weeds. The plan is to spend the fall/winter starting a compost pile, planning the garden, getting rain barrels, and preparing the new soil for spring planting.

We'll see how far I get.



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