Month: April 2006

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      This is my newest painting. It's a luna moth chased by an Eastern small-footed myotis, North America's smallest bat. Since they are nearly the same size, I titled it "Ambition", since the bat may have over-reached himself. A small work, 14 x 11 inches, acrylic on canvas panel. I really liked the idea of dark brown & green on a purple background.


        I completed it in time to enter EBSQ's online Insect show, which runs the month of April. There's no chance of anyone even seeing it, as there are more than 100 entries. The most popular subject being dragonflies. There's a number of spiders in the show, which is zoologically incorrect, since technically, spiders aren't insects, but arachnids. Quibble, quibble.


        This particular painting isn't going to be popular, but there's more to the animal kingdom than cute & furry. Besides these creatures are fascinating in their own way & perhaps I might open someone's eyes to that by painting such unusual subjects.

  • This and That

      Finished a painting yesterday, of a bat chasing a luna moth. That's why I've not been around much. Already photographed it with my new camera and I'll show it to you as soon as I figure out how to get it from the camera to the computer. First I must install the software & then learn how to tranfer the images. I need to do this soon, since the painting is for an online art show that ends next Sunday.


       When I was outside taking pictures of my pictures on the front porch, a robin flew down to the grass in front of the building. I was excited, as this gave me a chance to use the zoom feature. It wasn't a super close-up, but it's not a dot waaay in the distance.



    Last weekend Rufus was quite mopey, sleeping a lot & acting as if the sunlight was hurting his eyes. I put a sheer curtain over the middle part of the window to reduce the glare & checked him to see if I could find anything obviously wrong. There was nothing I could see & he was eating & drinking. By mid-week he was back to his usual silly self, thank heavens. He's munching on hay, even as I speak.



       HBO is running a miniseries "Elizabeth I", which was made by the BBC. Part 2 is on Monday night. Helen Mirren plays the queen & Jeremy Irons was Dudley. His stepson looks like Orlando Bloom's younger brother. This version of the queen's life isn't as good as the Cate Blanchett movie from a few years ago, but it has an interesting viewpoint & nifty scenery.


       But I do wonder why this particular ruler gets all the attention. There's dozens of other kings & queens which have equally interesting lives. Even if the wanted to focus on female rulers, there's still plenty to choose from: Catherine the Great, Eleanor of Aquatine, etc. Even Queen Victoria has only gotten 1 film, the wonderful "Mrs. Brown" being the single exception.

        Spring is firmly ahold of Cleveland, blossoming trees & flowers everywhere. Trees with bright, unfurling leaves.Birds all about. Warmer temperatures & puffy clouds in the sky. After several dry weeks, this weekend has been making up for it, raining intermittantly since Friday evening, when there was billowing fog. Late Saturday night, there was dramatic lightening, but hardly any thunder. It was terrific to watch; the bold, white streaks against the dark nighttime clouds. Nature puts on a splendid show!

  • Happy Earth Day!

      


     


     

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  •     I've had a strange week involving the mentally ill neighbors. The apartment directly above me is a halfway house for schizophrenics who have been hospitalized, but are trying to get back into the world. Most of them are no trouble & some are even friendly.

       There are 3 young guys up there now, one is a big guy who recently returned to alcoholism & is causing a lot of problems. He has the bedroom over Rufus's & lately has been blasting heavy metal music at all hours of the day. On Sunday he had it going from after 4:30 pm until 12:30 am, when I called the cops. The cops warned him that yet another complaint & his stereo etc. would be confiscated. 

       On Tuesday evening , when I turned on the TV, it didn't work. The cable company sent a repairman out. He replaced the converter box & it still wouldn't work. When he traced the wires into the closet, he found they had been cut. It turned out that the same problem had happened upstairs. Neither apartment had a TV signal because of the snipped wires. On Wednesday, 2 cable guys spent more than 2 hours rewiring both apartments from the outside.  

       Later, the two friendly guys from upstairs came down & explained to me that the big guy had gone through their apartment cutting any wires he could get ahold of: cable, telephone, etc.  When they discovered the damage, he threatened them & waved his fists around.

       Before the TV repairs in the afternoon, I saw the big guy outside, walking around in his bare feet, muttering, waving & pointing to someone invisible. He tried to pull a metal "No Parking" sign off the chain link fence in the parking lot, then threw a stone at his own bedroom window & walked back through the garages. Somewhere along the way he'd found a can of paint thinner & was carrying it around looking at the foundations of the building(have I mentioned he smokes?). Later, I found it on the front steps when I took the recycling out & quickly placed it in a bag & hid it in the garbage. He had ripped junk mail up & threw it all over the porch and front yard.

        That night, about 10 pm, 3 policemen & a caseworker/shrink spent about 45 minutes up there before taking him away between 2 cops in a patrol car. He was clutcing a large envelope, probably containing the medicines he hadn't been taking. I heaved a sigh of relief.Normally I don't mind the fact that there are schizophrenics in the building, but that guy was out of control & scary. Even if he's not gone permanantly, hopefully by the time he returned in a few weeks or months he will be stabilized.  

     

  • National Library Week

          

      This week honors one of the institutions I hold most dear--libraries. Some people think they are boring, others are intimidated, but I've always felt like they were giant treasure chests full of stars and rainbows. Recently I came across a passage written by Eric Jerome Dickey that sums it up nicely:


      "God bless the libraries. And the librarians who dare us to dream.You have no idea how many people the libraries have inspired. You have no idea.A library is more than a building made of bricks."

  • National Ferret Day

     


    It's the day to celebrate our native species, the black-footed ferret.This is a different kind of animal than the ferrets that are  pets, which originated in Europe.Ours once lived throughout the Western plains from Canada to Mexico. The black-footed ferret is seriously endangered, mainly because of it's symbiotic relationship with prairie dogs. Not only do the chubby rodents make up most of it's diet, but also where the ferret lives, which is in abandoned burrows in the midst of prairie dog towns. Over the last century, with humans taking over the habitat for factory ranching & housing developments, prairie dogs have been considerably eradicated with poison & bombs tossed into their burrows, wiping out entire colonies, along with the other animals that depend on them, such as burrowing owls, ferrets & certain types of toads. There are very few prairie dog colonies left & even fewer ferrets.


        Most of the remaining ones were taken into a captive breeding program, which then led to some of them being reintroduced back into the wilds. Their sucessful reproduction depends on whether humans can restrain themselves from covering every inch of Western North America with concrete.