Him: When in San Diego, when you take the top down and insist it won’t rain, you’ll probably be right.

At 11:30 as I was about to go to bed, I saw a giant column of sparks a couple of streets over and ventured out to investigate.

The big house on the corner of First and Clement was burning. Radford’s a party school, and this is the fratty area of town, so many of the spectators had beer and seemed to be enjoying the drama. Others were simply amazed. You could feel the heat from a block away.

From the construction fabric ringing the property and the fact that nobody in the talkative crowd seemed to know who lived there, I got the impression the house was vacant. The reek of gasoline hinted at arson, which is a shame. I love old houses and I hate to see them go.

My instincts, honed through photography class beat-downs, kicked in and I took about 150 pictures. Here are a few of my favorites on flickr. You have to click through to the original size to really see the colors.

A. paint them
B. apply to hair in streaks
C. squeeze into pasta
D. make lemonade
E. hurl them in a rage

It was the fourth of July, and a red, white, and blue cake seemed essential.

 

 

Julia had already challenged us with her rainbow cake, and after a brainstorming session we came up with our own strategy for creating multicolored cakes. It is simple and fun!!

Multicolored cake recipe:

1. Select a white cake recipe. I prefer an easy one, because I am lazy.
2. Mix together the ingredients.
3. Separate the cake batter into different bowls for each color. Add food color to each bowl.
4. Pour different colors of batter into bundt cake pan.
5. Swirl together with rubber spatula. Do not swirl too much, or the colors will mix together and become muddy.
6. Bake normally and frost as desired.

Today me and Cathy (CATHY AND I- GRAMMAR GASP!) went to the art building for old times’ sake. Aided by the mysterious fact that someone installed the deadbolt backwards so you could turn the lock from outside, we ventured in and discovered this déclassé and unacceptable furniture arrangement.

Look at the grainy cell phone shot of this and despair:

So we added up our collective MFA abilities and made the lobby the “peak of chic”.

There’s a lot going on here, all of it good.

I love when people paint their 4X4 with Cammo, and I love when they stencil on their cars.

I did the same thing with my tiger car back in the day:

Compare the beauty:

And just a cherry on top, the Jeep driver left the keys in the ignition (at the liquor store-ha!) A ballsy move if ever I saw one. I do not have the level of trust to do this, even in small town America where I live.

I am writing this post because I have never read an article or blog that says you should go to grad school. Most say you should save your time and money. I went to grad school and I stand by my decision. Why I chose to get a MFA:

Not to teach

You have to be realistic about college teaching as a career move. College teaching has bad pay, intense competition, and extremely strict experience requirements. For teaching K-12, a master’s in education is cheaper and more practical.

(I actually love teaching, but it is not my current career goal. I am considering it as a second career in 10 to 20 years.)

To get beyond employment plateau

I worked design jobs and was at a competitive disadvantage because my degree was in another field. The diploma itself didn’t matter as much as the fact that I didn’t have the institutional knowledge and depth of experience I needed. Everyone else got that in art school, so I decided to do that too.

Also, I work at a university. Almost all the people with big jobs at my place of employment have an advanced degree.

True interest in the subject matter

I truly love the subject and wanted to increase my knowledge of it.

Affordability

A cheap state school with a competitive MFA program was 15 miles from my house in a rural area of Virginia. This made school convenient and attainable. A big-name school in a city was completely out of the question since I would have had to pay back $150K in student loans.

(My MFA is in 2D visual art. My concentration is in painting and drawing. I took electives in commercial art, graphic design, and photography. I had a great experience and I am extremely happy with my decision to attend this program.)

I can’t even describe how tired I am of these. Sim City has always had them all the way back to 1995. This is not a new idea and it just gets more and more annoying.

Example: Picnik, the Flickr online image editor. Status message as it is s…l…o…w…l…y loading the interface over my terabyte connection here at work:

Applying sunscreen…

I think there’s another one along the lines of:

Unwrapping sandwiches…

I get it. The application is called Picnik, so all the status messages have to be picnic themed in order to have an integrated design based on this stupid application name. Right? WRONG!

This is not a clever design. It is annoying, and it sucks.

What is wrong with

Loading…

?

NOTHING! Loading is perfect! It gives you information and doesn’t make you feel like all these highly paid professionals think of you as a 3rd grader who is entertained by this crap.

I’m such a hater, but whatever.