Finally, an actual assignment to show. My food shots so far this term are all in limbo until my instructor returns them and I get 'em scanned. In the meantime, another digital illustration inspired by a line in Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories:

"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking."

I had to shoot it with that crappy Nikon 990 again, since the rest of my department appears to have discovered the Canon D60 - it seems to be altogether unavailable these days. I actually worked on this a bit with a Wacom tablet at school. I liked it so much, I ordered one. Trying to do retouching and compositing work with a mouse now feels like painting with a bar of soap. I think I won't be going back.

My friend Lou, of aforementioned fire dancing fame, also makes beautiful organic-looking fused glass and silver jewelry. I have a pendant he made, which I wear pretty much every day - I think I get a compliment on it at least once a week.

With further experimentation, it appears that the lowly scanner is the perfect way to capture the look of fused glass jewelry. So Lou came over the other day and we scanned his entire collection. This made me happy, 'cause I didn't have to drag out all my lighting stuff and a macro lens.

Now he has a few of his one of a kind fused glass pieces up on ebay. Check them out! Buy one for somebody you love. They're even more gorgeous in real life.

He also does custom work (which you may have seen around the necks of many Burning Man attendees lucky enough to have run into him), so send him an email. He rocks.

I'm so tired. Last night Michael and I polished off a bottle of cheap merlot and abused my scanner. My new desktop picture is red wine in plastic wrap.

I think I'm experiencing school re-entry stress. I woke up every 10 minutes last night remembering some piece of email I need to send, some meeting I need to go to (remind me to check my head before volunteering for student government again), some piece of an assignment I need to finish.. I finally fell asleep at half past four and now I'm up again, feeling really, really crusty.

Which is too bad, because I have three meetings and a class to attend.

Cringe.

What I did on my winter vacation:

Slept.

Ate Mom's food.

Slept more.

Ate Grandma's food.

Watched TV movies.

Passed out on couch.

Ate leftovers.

Slept.

I didn't get to go anywhere more exotic than a 48 hour kamikaze trip to San Francisco to see Ms. Rebecca Leckman and her furry menagerie (no, not you Tad). However, I think I accomplished what it was I was trying to do over break, which was a lot of nothing.

I think I'm ready to do something now. Maybe.