The weekend... Friday & Saturday.

Friday was a busy day. After spending the morning looking for work and the afternoon hacking on Omaha's website (and not getting anywhere; Rails is not my favorite framework), I ran up to town to get my hair done, and then back down to the house, only to head out again to hang out and spend the evening with a lovely friend. She fed me a picnic on the beach. The evening was grand.

Except that I seem to have misplaced my iPod. Omaha and I listened to it Thursday on the drive home from our date, but I can't remember anything that may have happened to it since. I know I didn't take it with me Friday evening, and I don't think I had it when I went to get my hair cut. So where did it go?

Saturday, we spent the morning getting more gardening done, and Kouryou-chan had her weekly dance class, and the weekly accounting phase. Toward the afternoon, we headed up to Tolt park to do Oloteas, which was lovely. The weather was gorgeous, we played bocce and roasted corn on the grill, and the ceremony was a little silly and discombobulated but otherwise came off fine. The weather stayed gorgeous, I got quite a bit of sun, and we all went home and slept like logs.

Sunday: D&D

Sunday was also a magnificent day. I made waffles for breakfast, mowed the lawn, and tended the garden in the morning. One of the stupice tomatoes is already showing a tomato bud, and the strawberry plant has sent up a second shoot. The basil isn't doing too good, however; kinda sad and wilted, even though I've put out a slug trap. The mint's kinda iffy, but it looks like it'll pull through.

Sunday evening we had our bimonthly D&D game. That was fun, although it was mostly combat and the DM had to ignore a few rolls to make sure we weren't all dead by the end of it. Kouryou-chan is trying to pay attention to the game, but she's still a little girl with a lot of energon and got bored when it wasn't her turn or she wasn't being called upon.

Dinner was finger food-- chicken bites, cheese, crackers, fruit-- whatever we had lying around. That was actually pretty good, all things considered. This was the third day in a row I've eaten a meal outdoors.

This billboard annoys me. Photoshop Fail

The billboard

This billboard is near my house. Now, it some respects it entertains me, because it's some sort of weird winner in the bad design category. At least the Nescafe' billboards taunting Starbucks for trying to horn in on the "instant coffee" market use one typeface consistently.

Starbucks is also trying to emphasize the "nativeness" of their coffee with that canvas bag background, but it deserves a closer look.

The cup: painted on, brush over stencil.

A close-up look at the cup logo in the lower right corner shows some interesting detail. It looks as if the cup was painted on with a thick acrylic or oil, as it seems that there's fiber seepage right along the margin of the cup. I could be wrong, that might be a graphic art artifact. Or it might be deliberate. Whatever it is, it's closer to what the original artist might have wanted. It comes close to communicating "illustration screened onto aged canvas bag."

But look at the lettering:

The letters

The letters are utterly crisp. The cup and the letters show two different levels of skill with the illustrative arts. I could do this ad in ten minutes with the GIMP, the alpha channel, and some playful dodge & burn effects. This does not communicate "illustration screened onto aged canvas bag." This communicates bad photoshop job.

If the ad campaign wants to communicate something by associating the canvas coffee bag with their advertising campaign, then they had damn well better get a better class of artist, one who can make a request for stencils and screens look like stencils and screens.

This campaign fails to impress me.

PSA: Pull up your pants!

Seen at Folklife.

Remember folks: Just Say No To Crack:

( May not be safe for work )

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness!

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is the name of a traveling art exhibit appearing in major museums around the country, a collection of Yale University's Americana exhibit of great paintings and artworks from the colonial era through to the late 19th century. One of the centerpieces of the museum is a collection of John Trumbull's work. Trumbull was the artist who painted all the great color illustrations of the American Revolutionary war; it's his "The Signing of the Declaration of Independence" that appears on the back of the two-dollar bill.

Most of the paintings at the Wikipedia sight above I saw in person today, including "The Capture of the Hessians," a painting which must make the pro-torture crowd grit their teeth. That's the scene where Washington is depicted showing the Hessians mercy and declaring that doing so when "he is wounded and in your power" would be a sign of a nation's greatness.

We also saw some original Thomas Nast illustrations, an original picture of Cotton Mathur, an original Whistler (and no, not his mom), and a who bunch of chests, chairs, sofas, chifferobes, cabinets, and table settings. In fact, the one thing that came through clearly to me is that colonial America's design sensibilities were wholly in its furnishings, rather than on its walls, and translating that design sensibility into an illustration that clearly communicates "Colonial America" is a hard business.

Kouryou-chan hung on almost to the end, but she was bored before we reached the exit. Still, it was good to see, especially on Memorial Day, all of these rememberences.

And it's Folklife!

Kouryou-chan at Folklife

We arrived at Folklife a little after 1:00pm. I had dropped Omaha and Kouryou-chan off at the curb to go park, and I found them at the wading pool, whereupon we all set off to get something to eat. Kouryou-chan was showing signs of crankiness (the museum trip hadn't helped) and getting food into her seemed like a good idea. We got her a corn dog and some yogurt, then Omaha and I got pulled-pork sandwiches, which I'm afraid also underwhelmed me.

The crowd seemed a little thin this year. Omaha says that that was probably due to it being Monday. Folklife was blessed this year with four days of perfect weather, so I would have expected it to be packed, but not so. There may still be some lingering fear after last year's shooting, too. The drum corner was much quieter than in years past, the police presence much more pronounced, the smell of sweet rope burning missing.

We tried to get to a piano recital, but got there too late. We stopped to listen to some bagpipers instead, a group called Nae Regrets, passed by some great saxaphonists, and then went into a side theater for a show on Japanese culture. In years past I would have been gung-ho for this sort of thing, but today I wanted to do the bluegrass and jazz shows.

Daiko!

Still, the show was amazing. The Kabuki was interesting, as was the Okinawa dance style. The Daiko was really good, and got Kouryou-chan going again; the cranky kid had returned during the kabuki shows.

The crowd at Folklife!

We left and went up to Fisher Plaza to look down on the seething crowd, and to be huckstered by a local farm selling its jellies and jams. I ended up buying a chipotle raspberry mustard, which was way overpriced but damn if I'm not going to have the best roast beef sandwich on the planet tomorrow.

After a while, Kouryou-chan said she wanted to go home. She was cranky and upset, and it only got worse as we headed back to the car. When it was time to get into the car, she decided she didn't want to go after all. But we were ready to go, I'd already pulled out from the paid lot, and I'd already called Yamaraashi-chan's friend's parents to let them know when we'd be home so they could bring the other kid home. Things were set in motion.

Kouryou-chan cried all the way home. She was upset that we had never gotten cotton candy. Omaha pointed out that she'd had funnel cake and an evilly delicious dark chocolate truffle, more than enough sugar for one little girl.

When we got home we calmed her down and got both kids ready for bed. It was on okay day, but after Oloteas, D&D, the museum and finally folklife, this three-day weekend had been full from beginning to end with Stuff To Do, and I think Kouryou-chan (and maybe all of us) were a little burned out.

Photos from this year's Folklife, including breakdancers, bagpipers, and another panorama can be found In the Folklife 2009 Set.