San Francisco

I'll try to sum up a few of this week's experiences...

 

The Palace of Fine Arts: Overwhelming.  It's under renovations and I want to come back to see it when it's complete.  

The beach:  It's been very windy al the time we've been here.  We wanted to do some tidal pool exploring but the waves are so big! (and why do they always show those Tsunami shows on Discovery when we're on holidays on the west coast?)

China Town: ...great deals, interesting food, colourful characters, strange aromas and sore feet.

Cable cars: Vintage  San Francisco, where riding public transportation is an event.

The Aquarium: Experiencing the undersea world without getting wet.

Taking a ferry around Alcatraz and under the Golden Gate Bridge: windy, wild and exciting!

Makers who made my head spin

Art Car(Truck) with 3D flames and a garden growing in the box. Ooooh...Aaahhhh.

Silk screen guy at Swaparamarama. We got a guitar done on a cool shirt for Levi.

This girl had it good...she had this cool chair to cruise around Maker Faire in style. Yup. It is remote control and speeds right along. No sore tootsies for her!

Recognize the guy who has Levi by the neck? Yup, it's Adam Savage of Myth Busters. He's an amazing maker who builds models and all kinds of cool stuff. He started out building models out of paper when he was a kid, and was an artist who made sculptures before he got into movie sets and special effects. He's a really nice guy!! He makes altered books! (and he's actually signing Levi's T, not choking him).



These sculptures are made of metal cable over a pipe armature. The girl in the background is TALL, and her hair is made of chains that hang loosly down over her shoulder. They are beautiful.



This Art Car was so beyond belief! It is covered in antiqued ceiling tiles, metal embellishments of all sorts and even musical instruments.

Made by a guy known as "The Pen Guy", it's a "Mercedes Pens", covered in crayola markers that are attached with silicon. Fun, and all the kids loved it!

Survival and Arrival

We did it. We drove the last leg of our trip south today, leaving Reno and our $24 hotel room...



Yes, it cost $24.
I booked it through Hotwire.com. It's a cool way to get great deals if you have a sense of adventure. The Hotel name is a secret until after you pay, and there are no refunds. You pick your general location (city), view a synopsis of the hotel amenities, read reviews by other users, and pay. THEN you are told the hotel name.

Our first night we stayed at the Best Western in Idaho Falls Idaho. It was nice, with a great breakfast. They served my Dad's favorite American breakfast, something I'd never had before, biscuits and gravy. Tasty, but sort of weird. It made me think of him and wish I could tell him about it.
The falls were right across from the hotel.

There was a freak snowstorm and when we woke up Thursday morning everything was white. Aaargghhh!

Our second day of travel took us past Twin Falls Idaho, and when we stopped at a tourist info for a rest, it turned out it was the spot on the Snake River where Evil Knievel attempted to jump over the canyon. WooHooo! Remember him? Yes, he lived to jump again.



We ended our drive at our new home (for the next 9 days) in South San Francisco. This room was also booked on Hotwire.com (honest, I don't get a commision!!). It is at the Hilton Homewood Suites fir $66 a night. We were happy with this reservation. It's great, and it's right on the Bay.






Tomorrow morning...Maker Faire.

I may be too tired to blog about it.

Global warming???

We drove 13 hours straight south yesterday, at lot of that at 75 MILES an hour at least...we arrived at Idaho Falls Idaho last night.

It was sunny when we arrived, thought there was some snow on the drive. We woke this morning to a blizzard.

We're driving to Reno tonight. Expecting better weather.

Time Off

There are a lot of people I have missed seeing, talking to, arting with. There are a lot of books I have not been reading. There is a lot of life I have not been blogging about. I have been living, loving, hurting and laughing, missing and sharing and planning.

So please excuse me for a little while. I'm off to have an adventure now. I'll write when I can.

In the meantime, this is pretty much how I feel about a lot of things:

the important novel and I

Poem by George Bilgere

Once Again I Fail to Read an Important Novel

Instead, we sit together beside the fountain,
the important novel and I.

We are having coffee together
in that quiet first hour of the morning,
respecting each other's silences
in the shadow of an important old building
in this small but significant European city.

All the characters can relax.
I'm giving them the day off.
For once they can forget about their problems—
desire, betrayal, the fatal denouement—
and just sit peacefully beside me.

In the afternoon,
at lunch near the cathedral,
and in the evening, after my lonely,
historical walk along the promenade,

the men and women, the children
and even the dogs
in the important, complicated novel
have nothing to fear from me.

We will sit quietly at the table
with a glass of cool red wine
and listen to the pigeons
questioning each other in the ancient corridors.

For my Dad

These last few weeks that I've been away I've been doing the most difficult, love filled and amazing thing I could ever imagine.

I've been helping my Dad die well.

He passed on...(what a perfect term)...on April 11. His seventy second birthday was on April 10th.

He had been diagnosed with lung cancer early last year, had been given a prognosis of just a few months to live, had decided to try chemo anyway. And he had a wonderful year full of love, and life and happiness and productivity. Untill about three weeks before he died he was working on his newest project almost every day...his Model T Hot Rod that he designed and build from scratch. When he got to weak to continue the work, he was admitted to the hospital and his friends finished it, doing the final body work and the paint job and promising my sisters and I that "the T would win it's first race". The doctors said Dad had just days to live, as his lungs were no longer functioning, and these friends worked around the clock to get the T ready. Then they loaded it onto a flatbed, hauled it to the hospital and we brought my Dad from his room in a wheelchair to see the finished work.
He stood up and walked around the car, had them put his oxygen tank in the back and he got into the truck and drove it away! He even squealed the tires leaving the ambulance bay! He got to fulfill his dream. A dear friend had called the local news paper, and his picture appeared on the front page of the next weekly addition, along with a little story. It was a miracle, and it meant more to me, and to my family, than I can say.

I was able to stay with my Dad as he returned home for a week after that. He had company flood in to see him, and grown men cried as they told him they loved him, and that it was an honour being counted as his friend.
I took night shifts and sat with him through the difficult dark hours as he struggled to draw each breath, never once complaining or expressing fear. I held his hand, rubbed his back, wiped away my tears and talked to him about the special times we had shared as a family. He said, as more and more people drove for many hours, or flew accross the country to see him once more, "This is what it means to be rich".

Yes Dad, you were a rich man. Blessed in ways few men of money could comprehend. You lived life on your own terms. You lived fearlessly, sometimes recklessly, but always authentically. You never stopped to ask yourself who you wanted to be. You lived who you were and gave tirelessly of yourself to everyone who came to be a part of the ever widening circle you called family and friend. You were a creative genius, and a master craftsman. You will be missed more than I can ever say.

I love you Daddy

Exceptions to Home Education

Sometimes, the conveyor belt is just a better idea all around......

“I just want to say that I'm against home schooling in the following areas: med school, dental school, firefighting certification, pilot training, and military stuff like artillery and tank qualification. Call me old fashioned, but I just think that official, regimented, certified programs with the proper teaching facilities are the way to go in those cases. Also, I'm NEVER going back to that homeschooled dentist again. He was horrible.”

From Fark.com.

Amazing and Wonderful

Beautiful objects and brilliant design...what could be better?

Remember how Buckminster Fuller designed geodesic domes with a dream that all mankind could have affordable, easily constructed homes? (He's one of my favorite all time heros).

These designs are like that...only different. They are for shoes, bags, chairs...things we all use everyday and don't give a second thought.
Well, this company asked how they could design things with zero waste(at least I think that's what they asked..most of their site is in French).
The results are mind blowing. And beautiful. And textural (come on! water cut felt shoes that come flat and you fold them up yourself???!)

IKEA was one of the first companies to do this in this part of the world, with their flat packing ideas. And Kindersurprise. (I always marvel at the cleverness of their tiny toy designs).

It gives me hope for the future of our planet to think that artists and designers are collaborating on ideas like this.

chausson pod, Feutre sérigraphié en pièce unique, découpe numérique, assemblage par clés. Chaque chausson constitue une tuile dans un pavage périodique hypothétiquement infini. Les patrons étant contigus, chaque coupe permet de produire deux pièces. Ceci est le principe de la «coupe partagée», que nous exploitons largement dans nos créations. La rotation des cadres sérigra- phiques, ainsi que le «bougé» du chemin de découpe permet de produire des séries non-standard. Pod slippers, felt screen printed, original pieces, water-jet cutting, assembly by keys. Each slipper constitutes a tile of a hypothetically infinite periodic paving. The patterns being contiguous, each cut generates two parts, instead of one. It is the principle of the «share-cut», which we exploit largely in our creations. The rotation of the serigraphic screens, as well as the «bougé» of the cuts, allows the generation of non-standard series. sac opla, feutre naturel sérigraphié, découpe numérique, assemblage par fermeture zip. La hauteur du sac opla représente un tiers de la hauteur d’un rouleau de feutre standard. Sa fermeture éclair est une couture amovible, permettant de le monter, mais aussi d’ajouter d’éventuels «périphériques». hand bag opla, natural felt screen printed, water-jet cutting, assembly by closing zip. The height of the "opla" bag equals the third of a standard felt roller’s width. Its zip is a removable seam, making it possible to assemble it, but also to add "options". Pochette cd alvéole imprimée, 20 feuilles en papier recyclé rainé. Par simple pliage, on obtient une pochette hermétique munie d’une cinématique d’ouverture efficace. Une pastille d’adhésif double-face permet aussi d’animer les murs de range-cds modulaires et ultraplats. Printed paper CD case, 20 sheets in recycled paper. Through simple folds, one obtains a hermetic CD pocket with an effective opening kinematics. A two-sided pastille of adhesive also allows to animate one’s walls through the modular assembling of this ultra flat CD case. pochette cd alvéole imprimable, 20 feuilles papier recyclé rainé, la pochette à plat fait 29,7 cm de long. Elle peut être imprimée à partir d’une banque de modèles ou être personnalisée avec le logiciel alvéoprint téléchargeable en cliquant sur la photographie à gauche. Printable paper CD case, 20 sheets in recycled paper. Flat, the CD pocket is 29,7 cm length. It can be printed starting from a bank of models, or be personalized whith the software alvéoprint, just click on the image at left .

- objets mobilier scénographie projets et idées actualité presse nous

Still Goghing!

Dear Dawn is amazing. I had a whole day yesterday to do something special. I thought I was going to be spending my day with Liam, but it turned out that he had a date with his GrandmaFarm which I had forgoten about.
So....when Dawn called, we plotted, and she decided to torture my kitty.


Poor Zoot. It was the brightest, sunniest day yesterday and he had finally made peace with the fact that his chair was forever changed. He sprawled out on it, soaking up the rays (can kitties make vitamin D through their fur?) and just wallowed in the loveliness of the day.

Then Dawn showed up. In her white coat. (Her paint smock is a reincarnated lab coat).

With her brushes.

He was in a snit. He was chased off the chair and had to resort to sitting on the back of the couch. He spent the day conspicuously facing away from us. ( He is going to develop white coat syndrome, I swear!)






Dawn did her magic, Levi and Zach amused themselves with Shaun the Sheep DVD's, sketching and generally driving me crazy, Josh cheered us on, Zoot ignored us and pouted,
and I, well I made soup of course.

And I did important "research and development" on the top secret new project that Dawn and I are working on together. (It's going to be really exciting!!)

Back to the chair...Dawn is amazing!
You know how most of the Masters, Vincent included, learned and became great by copying other Masters? Dawn is right up there. The chair is a Masterpiece! The colour and light in the painting are beautiful!

It is a one-of-a-kind, and I can't even begin to tell you how happy it makes me to look at it, sitting here in the sun! If you click on this last photo, you can see that there is just one couple sitting there, on the terrace at the cafe. It's Mr Wonderful and me...we have the place to ourselves!

(Don't you think Dawn should also paint herself in here? Leave me a comment if you think she should).

Inner peace...

"The way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what you start. So far today, I have finished 2 bags of M&M's and a chocolate cake. I feel better already." ~ David Barry

Happy Blogiversary to me!

It's been two years since I started this blog. I have had fun writing, sharing, connecting, recording...so much has happened in the 24 months I've been posting.
I've become a Grandma to sweet Liam, I've taken classes, and taught some, I've shared many holidays with my family, I've done a ton of laughing (and crying) with my friends. I've seen seasons change and lives change. I've seen people I love battle illnesses and overcome...or continue to fight, and live with grace and purpose. I've learned SO MUCH!!!

I want to share it all, but I'll settle for a random sampling of photos taken by me, photos that I feel chronicle my life in a surprisingly candid way.
Hope you enjoy!