I ran out of clever.

I haven't been taking a whole lot of photos as of recently which is largely why I haven't been posting. But I'm finally taking some time to post what has been happening since Halloween.

On the eighth of this month Joel and I celebrated our one year anniversary of being married! We've certainly done a lot and had a lot of changes happen (moved across the country, started and quit a couple jobs, started school, got a cat and chickens, moved in with lots of friends, etc.) and its been a really wonderful time. So on the eighth Joel and I went on a drive in Northwestern Oregon. Originally we had intended to go on a hike but it was really rainy and cold (big surprise, Oregon) so we just drove and had a picnic overlooking a duck-speckled lake and enjoyed each others' company and talked the afternoon away in the car.






On our way back down from Vernonia (where the lake was, it might have even been called Vernonia Lake) I spotted an apple tree along the side of the road so we stopped and I walked around on the slippery sloping side of the road and picked two apples that looked not too bad. I ate one a couple days later and it was very delicious -- crisp, tart and sweet.




Then after we came home we went out to have Mexican food and that was pretty much the day. It was a good quiet anniversary.

A couple days after that I felt the impulse to autumn-ize our garden. I actually should have pulled everything and treated the soil much earlier but, thats the way it goes sometimes. I pulled the tomatoes out.







Weeded the radish and beet patches





And let the chickens run wild and pick up after me for a bit.








Yesterday we hosted a pre-thanksgiving dinner because a lot of our friends were going to be gone for the actual day and we still wanted to celebrate together. So Kelley made us a beautiful bird, Clara and I did the veggie dishes and I made a pumpkin pie from a Sweet Meat Winter Squash from the farmers market -- tasted just like sweet potatoes, yum!



Clara made a delicious butternut squash bake.




I got some satsuma tangerines and a pomegranate at the store, tempted by their alluring colors and salivation-inducing tastes. I may go buy a crate of satsumas tomorrow...




As I said, Kelley made this beautiful turkey for us.



And we all enjoyed our decadent feast immensely, I'm sorry Clara but this is the way it is (she's dancing in the doorway).



Joel and I enjoyed some momentary snuggle time after much feasting.



And no blog post of mine would be complete without a mushroom. No idea what this one is either, I'm making the spore print as we speak. This mushroom popped up in the tree lawn in front of our house with a couple other mushrooms. The mature mushrooms are about 3-4" wide.

Sleep Pod #2 and others

Today I had my second critique in my sculpture class. It didn't go very well because it was structurally unstable so it wasn't useable. I wanted people to be able to get inside (or at least me) but that wasn't the case. At any rate, the idea was that it was a nest/womb-like structure that you could hide out in whether that be reading, sleeping, knitting, etc. It was also nomadic though this was more of a problem than the good idea I thought it was. But I learned a lot and that's what school is for I suppose.




The diagram to this piece led me to consider what I would like to do for my thesis. This is the most basic idea of the thesis but essentially I want to try to bring my Sleep Pod sculptures together with my dream paintings and create an atmosphere based on both of those.






My thesis is still in its most infantile form but those are the basic elements that I intend to build my thesis out of.

Recently I've been photographing and identifying lots of mushrooms because it is more or less "mushroom season." Rain and decaying fall materials (i.e., leaves) are the perfect recipe for mushrooms. I found this one on my ride home the other day and then made my first spore print. In order to do this you just need to cut off the stipe (stem) and then place the cap gill side down on a piece of white or black paper (or both if you don't know what the spore print color is going to be. I'm getting ahead of myself. For those of you who don't know, a spore print is the spore deposit that a mushroom leaves when it is expiring. It is a mushroom's way of reproducing itself (like seeds).




The little white spots are collections of microscopic spores on the brown mushroom.



Since the mushroom was so brown I figured the spore print would be similarly colored. But to my surprise (and proving again that I am just a novice) the spore print was white and waxy. Neither of these characteristics did I anticipate.



I also found Field Mushrooms a couple days ago and identified them accordingly. I made a spore print of these and the colour was indeed a deep chocolate brown. After correctly identifying them I made soup with all of them I collected almost a whole pound from just one lawn. Luckily it was an abandoned lawn so I didn't have to ask permission. And its been over 24 hours since we all ate the soup and none of us suffered even a little so I think it is safe to say that I identified them correctly.



The larger mushroom was about four inches wide. The smaller was perhaps two inches wide, they were really big mushrooms! Field Mushrooms are the closest relative to the button mushroom you most regularly in grocery stores.




And now for Halloween photos!

Joel was a Monty Python Lumberjack
(for those of you not familiar with sketch, you can watch here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUkqqkbtSeY&feature=related)



I was a foxy teacher (Hot for Teacher?) from the fifties




Clara was "Sleepytime Genghis"



Kevin was an Idaho Potato Barron



Gina was a super bright super hero




Brady was a Zombarista



And Kelley was (maybe) Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas.



Here are all the mustachioed folk.



Kelley touching up on my busty husband.



The day after Halloween Joel and I test rode bikes so that he could take measurements of the bike bags that he wants me to make for him (industrial espionage). So I came along and while he measured I took photos of the mushrooms at Ladd's Addition.







And here are a handful of my paintings as of now. They're all finished (I think) save for the last one.






For those of you who didn't read the blog post that I made this summer, I'm making paintings of dreams that I've had. I started to narrow it down to just post-apocalyptic dreams, and dreams where the major theme is water. This is an outside-of-class project that I'm working on with one of my professors from last semester.

I'm hoping to put up more photos of my work and sketches. In addition to the aforementioned thesis idea I've been considering making "artifacts" from a post-apocalyptic pacifist hunter-gatherer community which would allow me to wed my desire to work with fibers (tents, clothing, etc.) and my obsession with hunter-gatherer methods.