Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Art is cool.

I wish that I had known more about art earlier. A lack of talent (really) and a few bad teachers in middle and high school turned me off art pretty early, but the class that I'm teaching this semester focuses on science and art (it deals with both through the lens of human creativity), and I've learned so much about different types of art.

I highly recommend checking these out:

Chris Jordan does art involving environmental issues.
www.chrisjordan.com - specifically check out the "Running the numbers" series. You have to click on the paintings to get the full effect. These images are pretty memory-heavy- slow internet might take a while.

Theo Jansen creates animals that move using wind as a power source. Why aren't we using this technology for cars? This is seriously amazing.
http://www.strandbeest.com/ This is his website.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b694exl_oZo This is his TED talk - it explains how his art works.

Alexis Rockman is a painter who created an exhibit called A Fable for Tomorrow that's on exhibit at the American Art Museum. Here's some more info:
http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2010/rockman/
This exhibit is SO powerful.

Maya Lin is an architect and artist who created the Vietnam War Memorial in DC. She also created this amazing website:
http://www.whatismissing.net/#/home
It shows sounds, images, and information about endangered species.

Andy Goldsworthy is an artist who creates pieces from items found in nature. The documentary Rivers and Tides talks about his work and is TOTALLY worth watching but you can also see some pieces here:
http://www.rwc.uc.edu/artcomm/web/w2005_2006/maria_Goldsworthy/TEST/index.html

Right now at this very moment, Andy Goldsworthy is my favorite. Theo Jansen and Chris Jordan alternate with him, though. All of their work is SO COOL.

All of these people, and the class in general, has totally inspired me. Maybe a painting class is in my future...

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Turtles!

Because highly developed areas (like Fairfax) have lots of impervious surfaces (such as parking lots, roads, and driveways), and lots of trash, trash ends up being washed downstream into various bodies of water after rainstorms (since the water runs straight down the impervious surfaces at high speed). There are both advantages and disadvantages of this. Clearly the trash shouldn't be there in the first place, but frequently these bodies of water allow the garbage to be collected before it flows further into the watershed (the Chesapeake Bay) or into the sea. These animals are taking advantage of the structure that the garbage provides as a habitat source.

This is a painted turtle on a log. Nearby are plastic water bottles (honestly, with all the extremely attractive reusable water bottles, why are we still buying these? plus, tap water in the United States is usually perfectly fine), flipflops, tennis balls, and a crazy amount of styrofoam.
Another painted turtle. They're pretty resilient.

Apparently tennis balls make good seed starters.

Isn't he cute? This snapper was in a much cleaner stream close to the lake above.


Sunday, March 20, 2011

Home improvement adventures

Even though we've decided not to stay another year in this house, and even though we're now actively looking at other neighborhoods, doesn't mean we're keeping our own decorating decisions on hold.

First off. This is disgusting. The previous tenants who lived in our house used the property as a dump. This is actually only a fraction of the garbage that's currently in Jim's truck waiting to go to the dump. It'll take multiple trips. Who leave car batteries, tires, an oil drum (a burn barrel?) yards and yards of pipe, at least two dog beds, rugs, bongs, oil filters, a compact fluorescent bulb (thankfully unbroken), garden oils, lots and lots of gallons of Wild Turkey, pork styrofoam packages, burned car parts, the blade from a woodsaw, etc. in the yard? Especially considering we're right on the lake. Good grief. The lawnmower they abandoned in the woods is working fine, now...
you can see Jim's shadow... ooohh

Repeated canning and sewing projects (with ironable mesh) means that our table was badly damaged (cheap-o laminate table).
Also, our stool had some water damage. (I have since learned to use coasters, thank-you-very-much).
And our bookshelf was just fugly.

This clearly needed remedying, on this most beautiful of weekends. (Jim didn't know I took this picture. I got paint on the camera, too. I am messy.)

Aren't they beautiful, now? You can see them from the other side of the lake. Bright colors are fun, though! Clearly everyone needs a bright green table, a bright yellow stool, and a bright orange bookshelf.
(see? just look at those coasters)


Now, that's just awesome.

Next up: the screened in porch. This is o of the best features of this house, which we weren't using, because a) bugs b) it was winter, so give us a break, c) um, it was a convenient place to store unwanted crap. Which was ugly.

We cleaned up the stuff we didn't want, brought it to goodwill or sold it, and then looked at some overly expensive furniture at Lowes and Target and other places before realizing thrift stores were plentiful. We found an awesome set of chairs (that fold! I am a big fan of collapsible furniture) and a 70's retro table that's growing on me (not literally).

We also found a rug. And then got some pretty candleholders and lanterns at Pier 1 (thanks SK & and JK!)

What's that gorgeous screen, you ask? It's hiding Miss Kitty's powder room. Normally $300, we screwed some hinges onto some shutters from Home Depot for a fraction of the cost, and now it's quite nice, if I do say so myself.

Lastly, the rug:
I am clearly an idiot. After grading for 6 hours on Saturday, I wanted to do something out of the house, so we went to the carwash and washed the rug in the carwash, because what ELSE would you do on a weekend evening? Foolishly we didn't bring enough money to rinse it there, so we had to bring it home (it's a very big rug, and very heavy wet) and then I got to finish rinsing it, in the dark and cold with water that is piped in from Antarctica. For hours. We rock at taking breaks. Anyway, while I was doing that, Jim built a tennis ball slingshot. Which works impressively well.

Then we went out to dinner.

We're so productive, we make my teeth itch.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Signs of spring

Robins, spring peepers, flowering daffodils, warm weather, etc. - spring has well and truly arrived. We spent the whole afternoon in a t-shirt painting our furniture orange, yellow and green.

Really. It's awesome.

Last weekend, I started seeds for our garden:


Look at all those little baby plants!
Oh wait, now you can see them.
Here's another closeup.

I also repotted my plants. This would be boring if it weren't for this philodendron- which is taking over the world.
There was no dirt in this pot. This is all it. Only roots. It's like a crazy X-files plant that will eat our brains in our sleep.

Natural History Museum trip

Last weekend we went to the National Museum of Natural History - such a cool museum. One of the exhibits is the hyperbolic crochet coral website (http://crochetcoralreef.org/). This is SO cool. It's basically a giant coral reef, complete with the coral itself and animals like anemones, all crocheted out of different colors. Here are some pics:

This is so neat - look at the fan coral, and brain coral.. those look super realistic!


A more colorful section of the reef....

This part looks like animals on the reef...

We also went to the annual orchid show, which the NMNH puts on with the US Botanic Garden. Pictures don't do this exhibit justice.



Catsphere

It's hard to be a cow-eating, dog-toy stealing, dog-bed hogging kitty. Sometimes you just need a nap.

Seriously?!

As if the bazillions of bugs in our house (we literally remove between 20 and 200 a day - STILL) weren't enough, we now have BLACK WIDOW SPIDERS preying on them. In our house. I don't have a problem with spiders, or with poisonous spiders, but NOT in my house!


Here she is- currently eating a stinkbug. I'm glad she's occupied at least! She's now taken up residence in a spice jar, with a nice secure lid out on our porch.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Holy Robins, Batman

I saw 20 robins in the neighbor's yard today! Hooray for Spring!