Periodic Table Printmaking Project:

Ninety-six printmakers of all experience levels, have joined together to produce 118 prints in any medium; woodcut, linocut, monotype, etching, lithograph, silkscreen, or any combination. The end result is a periodic table of elements intended to promote both science and the arts.

Still here, still alive, very busy.
Work - busy.  Next month will be worse, possibly.  I have learned that summer = WOW HECTIC here.  It's all good, though, and still fun.  These are good people. Also, wow, this week I have come closer than ever before to actually doing a header into my keyboard at the office.  So tired.  Must learn to sleep.
Home - reading, busy, tired.  The Dresden Files keep me up all night. 
Exercise - heavy weights = sore, but man, I can lift weights! 
Cheese - located Houston vendor for Wensleydale with Cranberries; all is right with the world.
Also acquired: Mexican Chocolate ice cream, and Santander dark chocolate.  Oooh, baby.  Seriously, Santander = wonderful delicious. 

Con Report with photos is coming, really.  Hopefully my Masquerade photos will be salvageable.  I just haven't had a chance to edit them, it's been nonstop with Meetups, work, exercise, the whole "I'm reading books again" thing, and being tired. 

Also, from the random files of web graphics, each issue's DVD from imagineFX comes with ten quzillion fonts.  Woot, fonts.  Too bad they don't have a quick-upload thingie, though. Doesn't Adobe have some kind of font manager tool to keep the font bag from overloading? 

Yesterday I called Donna from my car and she said, "Why does it sound like you're listening to Martin Luther King, Jr or something?" And I said, "Because I am listening to the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr on CD." And she said, "Oh, I'll have to borrow that for next year. I just did a unit on Martin Luther King."

When I pulled into the garage for the Houston CSS Meetup, another white car pulled into the space next door and the driver rolled down the window and called, "Keri? Are you Keri? Can you give me a hand with this?"
Apparently she has a gift for recognizing people based on fuzzy avatars and internet "auras". It was a great Meetup, though, and hopefully I can do more with her and that group. As she said to me, "When I saw your Prius, I thought to myself, "Oh, yeah, she's a geek. And we love geeks."

From this morning:
me: this just in - scientist conclusively determines vampires cannot exist
Lisa: hah!! I love what people spend their grant money on.... grin
me: well, i don't know if there was a grant.  I found it to be a fundamentally flawed proof, myself.
Lisa: hehe
me: his assumption that vampires convert every person they bite into another vampire ignores much of modern mythology. he seems stuck on Stoker.
Lisa: oh, piff!
(And then I went to the actual link and saw the comment thread, which pretty much covers that. Also, this math dictates that there can never be more than 512 vampires in the Buffy universe. Mmm, math. Tasty.)

It's been raining for days. The sky is gray, the wind is cold, and the ground is overflowing. Yuck. This also means drivers are way more obnoxious. I spent a lot of time in traffic with idiots. Of course, I usually do that - especially idiots who don't seem to understand the width of the car in relation to the width of their lane. Get inside the white lines and stop horning in on my space, please!

Yesterday at lunch I took the wrong bus and ended up off-campus at the Graduate Student Apartments, so today I walked both ways to get my food. It's probably better for me anyhow but my hands are cold now.

Last night I went to a Meetup - my first in Houston. The Houston Tarot Meetup was near my office, but even so I still got lost (in the rain) trying to find the streets that actually went all the way through. Silly dead-end neighborhoods.
It was a fun evening, although I did feel a bit like the new kid in school for a while. Then I got over it, because the discussion was so interesting. I think I was hoping for something a bit more academic-historical-spiritual from the Major Arcana discussion, but I have high expectations that are often so dashed. There was plenty of meat nonetheless, and the people seemed great.

I look forward to going to more meetings. And there's not a much better endorsement than that.
I did do a reading (I think I may have been the only person reading at the end of the evening?) for a total stranger, which was enlightening in many ways. I found, though, that my task as reader was parallel to my task as minister - after a while, I stopped talking and listened. We did get to some meaty bits over the course of the reading, which ended up lasting almost an hour. It was very good to feel the cards in my hands again. It's been a long time.
One great side benefit of the group are the deck reviews, with live decks. Folks will bring in the ones they've bought and loved, and pass them around or place them on display. Some of these are brilliant and gorgeous and I look forward to adding them to my (now diminished) collection. When I get said collection out of its bin. I think they're all even in the same bin, but I don't remember which bin that is. Someday I will finish unpacking.

Today has been an exercise in CSS frustration so far. There's nothing like nested divs to give one a big fat headache. My attempts to take this table-based layout and convert it to CSS are doubly stymied by the fact that we are using a content management system that divides the page in places that make CSS layout uncomfortable. I am working on it.
At least it keeps me busy.

Mom continues her toil over the quilt square, and today we toiled (well, she toiled, I ate) to Little Miss Sunshine. Holy Effin' God, that was a funny movie!! Absolutely brilliant.
And I have recommended Mom watch Saved!, but we have to watch from the beginning or it won't be as funny. So far we keep missing the first half hour.

Today at work I attempted to explain how CSS would replace the tables the site currently uses for layout, but I think I just managed to confuse folks. I need to work on my delivery of the Gospel of CSS.

Now I should write something. Or illustrate something. As long as one of those gets done each day, it will be a step in the right direction. I have also joined some networking organizations for artists. Maybe someone can point me to local resources. I need a place to do figure drawing from a model without paying an arm and a leg and a lung.

Things have been happening. I've been reading online again, shame on me. Not getting things done as I should. But, I've also been busy...

- buying and studying reference books for javascript and other things I need to know to get a job being a web designer
- going to Election Judge Training and learning just how bizarre our electoral process really is.
- voting myself, yesterday, on the much-celebrated eSlate, which is entirely navigated by a scroll-wheel. Whee.
- introducing the Quilt Committee to Roxanne and my tablet, offering my designs for squares and being asked to do some more.
- going to the NaNoWriMo writing kick-off at Ranosh restaurant in west Houston, with a couple of other folks.
- signing my mother up for NaNoWriMo!
- staying up very late playing Cranium with the kids on the patio. That was way fun.

And now I need to grab some grub before Mom gets home and we head over for our first day at the International Quilt Festival downtown. They have the entire convention center floor for this thing - it's massive. We're taking two days to make sure we see as much as we possibly can.

Since I am quite literally surrounded by hippos at my desk here (I can reach out my hand in several directions and encounter hippos themselves or the display case door.), I figured it was a good time to upgrade my imagery on Painted Hippo Designs.
And as long as I was painting hippos anyhow, why not make an icon? I can't believe I didn't have a hippo icon already.

Where have I been that I missed this for so long? Artist Trading Cards.
There are exchange groups all over the place, plus it just seems like a quick, fun project to vent a bit of your creative energy and have something finished at the end.

Ok, four hours of money-work later, I have a mock-up. I need to find someone to test the layout on a Mac for me. I had to do some fiddling to make it behave the same way in IE as in Firefox. Just my luck if all that fiddling broke it in Safari. Mmm, web design is fun.
Now, it's time to eat some good grub and enjoy some ME time. Yay me!

I love love love Firefox's Web Developer Toolbar!!

My website now reflects an actual painted hippo, drawn by me, even.
Painted Hippo Designs

Painted Hippo Designs has finally launched. About time. Striving for perfection is not a very lucrative way to go about things, so I have decided on just putting myself out there and improving as I go.

Ok, people, this is your audience participation round. I need some help!

Please drop a comment below, with five words/concepts/colors/images that you think of when you think of me. If you want to go over or under five, that's fine, I'd just appreciate the input.
I'm working on design elements here. Please feel free to be totally honest. This is sort of for science!

Comments will be screened.

Love you all!

After installing updates to various drivers and deleting detritus from Roxanne, I’m hoping she’ll run a bit more smoothly. I still have to try adding the rest of the peripherals one by one, but I’ll wait a bit.
For now I’m struggling with Dreamweaver’s interface. I prefer straightforward EditPlus or even Homesite for most things, but I am learning to appreciate Dreamweaver, at least for non-CSS things. I miss Homesite’s convenient color pallette drop-down menu.
Meanwhile, today has been a day of annoying pain. My body is not in the best shape these days even without misbehaving organ systems. Not even ginger did the trick this time. At least it’s easing now.
Off to see if I can fix this html to work correctly across a couple of browsers, at least. Whee.

p.s. for those who are counting, Nanowrimo Words = 0.

There's a lot to plot: how to manage my finances, how to get a new desk, how to move my furniture without injuring myself, how to avoid spending endless hours on the NaNoWriMo forums, how to vote in the elections, how to manage getting my information disseminated throughout the city so people will employ me, how to finish my classwork in a timely manner, how to finish a novel...

For someone with so much to do, I sure spend a lot of time staring into space imagining fun and interesting arrangements of flowers and hippos. One day those imaginings will spawn a website. Until then, my fellow commuters can wonder what that silly smile is about.