Doodle earns a time-out; Miles earns a chair at the table in hell with Hitler, Pol Pot, and Dick Cheney.

When I went in to his room to rescue him after the minute or so on his own, he was clutching his sleep sheep to his chest and trembling in tears. I may as well have hammered a shoebox full of kittens to death. I still feel terrible two days later.

Christmas is coming early this year.

J's mom is in town for Thanksgiving and brought T a bunch of Thomas the train engine stuff for Christmas. I don't know what it is but kids are hardwired to love Thomas. Most can't understand why we'd name our guy after a train, but they shrug it off as adult silliness. They figure it's like naming your kid after Jeff Gordon or some saint.

The reason he's getting this stuff now is because a week or so ago I took him to a toy store he'd never been to. And even though he'd never set foot in this place his eyes went blank and he went straight for the Thomas table like Lindsey Lohan to a baggie of coke. I had to pry Harold the helicopter from his sticky little mitts to much protest (he loves flying machines. I think helicopter noises were his first word). So tonight he got Harold and a little wooden scooter to ride around on, which he did, with Harold clenched in his little fist. We've set up the track with a couple trains on it for a morning surprise, should be super fun.

Also, I have pix of him. I just haven't had time to post anything. It's been a busy few weeks and I haven't really had time to shoot. Hopefully over the holiday so check back.

Art Crawl

The Silver Lake Art Crawl is this weekend. I'll be at Grace Ellay hawking my wares, so if you're in the area stop on by.

ATT makes me cry

It's like banging your head against a wall, without the benefit of results.
This morning I was happily surfing away, not a care in the world. When I stopped for lunch, so did my dsl service. It never came back though. Apparently an automated computer cancelled the order for my dsl (which was working) because it was never "fulfilled". Bottom line, whoever hooked us up didn't finish their paperwork. I won't even go into the fix they came up with because it's a convoluted Rube Goldberg scheme involving a new phone jack, some kind of phone line independent dsl account and several hours of my time setting up the computer (twice!!) just to switch the line back to the original phone line next week. It's all to allow the system to pass the "glitch" like so much day old sauer kraut. Or I can wait until next week, get a new phone number, hook the dsl up to that and switch back. It took 3 hours on hold and the rest of my cell phone minutes for the month to figure this out. I COULD HAVE BUILT MY OWN FUCKING PHONE SYSTEM IN THE AMOUNT OF TIME IT TOOK THEM TO SORT OUT WHAT AMOUNTS TO A CLERICAL ERROR!!! I'm trembling with rage.

butterscotch pudding

There is a place on the westside, in the building where I used to live, called Clementine. The food there is pretty good if a little overpriced and it's been a big hit in that neighborhood since its doors opened several years ago. It's too far for me to frequent now and it's too crowded with westside "ladies who lunch" and CAA agents to be really enjoyable anymore. But, whenever I'm in that area I always try to stop by to see if they have any of their butterscotch pudding because it's the only thing I've ever found worth that kind of trouble. They don't always have it and it's hard to tell when they will, it doesn't seem to be a seasonal item but who knows. It will blow your mind. When God sat down on the 2nd day to create the pudding family, this is the stuff he came up with. It's molasses-y and sweet and a really strange shade of almost gray,,juuuuuuguuguggghhhhhhhh.

Anyway, here's the point. I went over there today to drop some stationery I had shot off at Sugar Paper (I shot most of their website, if you want to see what I've been doing) and popped my head in for a bite with the kiddo and to pick up some pudding (and apple turnovers, almost as good as the pudding and still the best turnovers we've found). Brought it home for J and had some after dinner. Of course, the best thing about having a kid is feeding him stuff and seeing the reaction so it was time to have his first taste of butterscotch pudding. He's sitting on the floor chewing on something and I give him a tiny taste. He stares at the floor for a second while he contemplates the brown sugary goodness melting on his tongue. Looks up at J with the biggest smile and spins around on the floor like he's on a sit-and-spin. It was the best reaction I've seen to a food product yet. Then of course he wanted more and it only took a second to realize I'd made a huge mistake, and right before bed time.

rejoice

we're back amongst the living. So to speak. After much trouble and complaint we've finally been re-wired. So we can sit back and get fat while watching youtube and eating potato chips.

Thank god.

Further dispatches: cross your fingers, we may be in business

So after a long week and a half we may actually get our dsl turned on. I won't go into details again but after another two days of lies, half-truths, transfers, promised calls never received, and not one single explanation or answer, we finally got a number to call where I got in touch with someone who could help. It was a corporate number that took us through another endless tree but ended with a woman who had answers, called back when she said (actually before she said she would if you can believe it) and got results. She says we'll be online by tonight at 8 and if not she gave us her direct line to call back. So there it is, cross your fingers we finally found the one person who works at ATT who can follow through on her promises.

Dispatches from the Library or: ATT has the worst service EVER!

The move went fine. Everything is in and so far nothing has broken. The neighborhood is nice and we've met some neighbors. The problem is ATT can't for the life of them seem to figure out what's going on with our DSL. I've never had worse service from a company which, presumably, wants me to send them a check each month in my life. I've been sent from one department to another and back again. I've been told I'd be called back and never was. I've been given different stories as to why we're not hooked up yet (despite all of their assurances that last Monday would not be a problem). I've spent hours on hold. All to find out there is a box somewhere without room for the plug they need. So I have to wait until Friday (they say, and nothing they've said so far has even resembled the truth) before I have my DSL. Will they reimburse me for my tuition if I fail a class? Probably not. Are they apologetic? Only as apologetic as a high school kid with a crappy job in a call center can be. What can you do? You can't get mad at them, they're just there to field calls and hope that the department they send you to can answer your questions. Change providers? I don't think anyone else can get me hooked up by Friday and if they could changing our emails and updating everything else sounds more tedious than what it's worth. It's not like my monthly bill going missing is going to put a dent in the buckets of money they rake in each month. Nobody will be fired over our leaving. They've got you over a barrel and they know it. It's so frustrating.
One woman tried to sell me cellular service after keeping me on hold for an hour to tell me the "escalation team" would call me back in 8 hours (which they didn't). Right, because you're doing such a bang up job helping me out now, I'll take on the additional headache of getting cell service that sucks. And what's an "escalation team"? It sounds like something NATO peacekeepers do when the blue helmets aren't having the proper effect on the local warlords.

Signing off.

Tomorrow is the big day. I'm going to check in with my classes one more time tonight and pack up my computer. It always makes me nervous to move, you never know what won't make it.

We are looking forward to the new place though. Will update in a few days.

Last Chance

This is the last weekend of my show at Grace Ellay. It may stay up a little longer, due to extenuating circumstances. But I wouldn't count on it. Check it out if you get the chance.

Dulles

The danger of learning something new...

Especially in the middle of the night is that you think of all of the things you'd like to have done with it. By the way, I think the fact I didn't know I could do this until just now means I'm OLD. Though I did figure it out on my own, so I think I get a point for that.
A super cool Bjork video. All is Full of Love.


Animator Laith Bahrani did a great series of shorts called Low Morale. The website I had seems to have been taken down though you can find them on youtube. This is an animation for the song Creep, just to keep up the Radiohead theme.

Radiohead, an experiment.

I just figured out how to embed video here, so I'm giving it a try. This first video I just saw on another blog and it's really cool.



This might be my favorite song on my favorite album I've bought in a long time.

Last but not least...

Thought I'd throw up a few new pix of T. Gotta get all the blogulating out of the way at once.

Just thought I'd throw another shot from the show up. This one from LAX last winter. I like the texture and monochromatic color scheme.

Kodachrome

Before our trip to Albuquerque a few months ago I bought some Kodachrome on a whim. It's been forever since I've shot it and I was thinking it might be nice to shoot a few rolls before they stop processing it altogether. These are a few of my faves from the first roll, the second is still to come. I love the color rendition of this film. It's such a welcome change from today's super saturated, super contrasty films. The look almost vintage. And it kills me how different T looks just a few months later. Just a note, I don't have a film scanner so the way I digitize my negs is to put them on a lightbox and shoot them with my camera. It introduces a sort of almost low tech look that I like with the lens distortion and terrible color rendition. BW is easy (see last post) and these slides were pretty simple as well. Color negs on the other hand, ain't no trip to Cleveland.






This last one is downtown LA.

A shot I made of my mom while she was here in January I think. We drove up to Mt. Wilson and made a couple of stops along the way to see the view. I think it's the longest stretch of time T has ever slept. It's nice to come across something like this while trolling around for something else. Like finding a dollar in your pocket.

Now what?

So last night was the opening of my show and it went pretty well. Thanks to everyone who came by, the turnout was great. One of the owner's said it was the best turnout of family and friends he'd seen at one of their shows. So thanks for all the support. If you couldn't make it by last night it's running until September 28th so you still have some time to check it out. For hours and directions check out her website (she's only open on weekends).

One more day...

Tomorrow is the opening of my show. I'm getting kind of excited and a little nervous. Sari and Thom and I are going to go check it out later this afternoon to see what it looks like. Ramey, the owner, said she needs to re-hang one wall so I'll have to use my imagination but that's ok. I want to see it before I show up.

We're so screwed...

T just figured out how to unlatch all of our "baby-proof" cabinet latches. I think we're going to have to go through the whole house with boards and nails a la 28 Days Later.

1st life, 2nd life, whatever it takes.

I've officially begun classes toward my MLIS as of yesterday. Well, not quite officially yet but almost. I've signed into the Blackboard section and looked over the schedule. I'm excited and a little nervous to get started as it's been forever since I've done anything academic and the whole online format is a little intimidating. That's another thing, online. People raise eyebrows a little and I have to admit I'm a little apprehensive. I've asked around though, and it's got a pretty good reputation within the community and it looks like they're using a lot of really cool technology to bring people together to offer them something they wouldn't be able to get otherwise. So, we'll see.

I have been taking a class aimed at familiarizing us with that technology and it's been pretty interesting. It's a lot of content delivery type things in addition to online teleconferencing and mail lists etc. They have an online social network kind of like Facebook but not quite as flashy. That was sort of easy since I just signed up for Facebook recently so I was kind of used to it. The newest thing I've done for this so far is 2nd life. I don't really know how to explain it except as an online community where you can run around video game style and interact with other people from all over the world in a virtual environment. So you build an avatar and can go visit islands and own property and build things to sell or buy. There is an entire economy there based on Linden dollars, which you can exchange real dollars for. SJSU has a virtual campus there complete with cheery t-shirts and class rooms. Companies have places there and have meetings with people from all over. It's the new frontier I guess, though all I've seen of it is orientation island (could be a fox show, there's so much subtext in the title alone) and SJSU island, where the campus is. I thought it was creepy. People in various states of undress wonder around while they "edit" their appearance. And the one action I can perform at this point is undress. Though there was a blurb written on etiquette when you enroll that says you need to keep that sort of activity to specific places set up for that and rated appropriately. The default rating is PG. I guess it's like a smoking section of sorts for people who want to see naked video game people. Anyway right now I prefer 1st life but who knows, maybe I'll get used to it and get sucked in like Tron.

Siggraph

I went downtown yesterday to meet my brother for lunch and then checked out Siggraph 2008. This year was the "35th International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques", whatever that means. It was a huge convention center filled with booths dedicated to video games and (this year anyway) Iron Man. You'd think that movie employed the entire industry the way that suit of armor kept popping up. There were models dancing around in motion capture suits and video games with no controllers (just a camera that watched your hands go through the motions of using a controller. A slightly disconcerting effect if taken out of context). There were video games everywhere. I even learned that online gaming has become such a spectator sport that they hire professional tv camera men from Fox Sports (or whatever) to control cameras in the gaming world. They even sell special devices set up like a camera that links into the game environment so they have all of their familiar controls. It's an enormous industry to say the least.

I had fun though. And got to hang out with my brother for a bit, which was nice.

The things I find myself saying these days...

"but there's poop on his hands and his hands are in his mouth!"

Wallace at One

Just a tiny taste to keep the grandmothers at bay. Some pix from T's birthday.

Sunday before we had a cake, he was pretty into it. He looks like Oliver Hardy here.



Went to the park a couple days later with his cousin. Here he is playing squishnose with mom.



A tiny moment of joy.



Best for last. Come on!!


I'll put the rest on flickr when I get the chance. Been busy with school lately. That's right, class is in session.

cocktail hour...

In an attempt to become more social we've begun what I hope will become a semi-regular thing with some friends of ours. We'll plan a simple, cheap dinner, take-out or we'll cook if we decide to go the extra mile, and head to there house in the early evening. The key to the evening, the reason for the evening really, is the cocktail. We'll decide on something seasonal, maybe with a theme for dinner or whatever, and splurge on that. We've only done it twice so we'll see how long it lasts but it's been pretty successful so far. The trick is to do it early so the kids can play in the yard before dinner and to pick something not too alcoholic because let's face it, J is kind of a lightweight.

So a couple of weeks ago we went with a vermouth spritzer. It's not something I'd usually drink (I like my booze with booze in it. And nothing else) but it's summer here which means it's hot and dry and it's nice to sit in the yard while the earth cools and enjoy something cold and fizzy and just strong enough to take the edge off. I'll admit we got the recipe from Martha Stewart (where else?) but it's pretty good. First off you freeze some orange juice in ice cube trays. Throw some of those into a glass and add 1 part vermouth and 2 parts soda water (I think, I'm writing this from memory so adjust it to taste. That's my philosophy for pretty much anything) and a couple splashes of bitters. It was pretty good. I've never had vermouth as anything but a mixer but it made a light, not too sweet drink. As the "ice" melted it cut the bitterness of the vermouth well and was very refreshing in the heat.

Last week we did a cocktail with Pimm's #1, Britain's premier drink of summer. You start with a tall glass layered with ice and cucumber slices, an ounce of Pimm's, 1.5 oz of vodka and top it off with lemonade. Garnish with a slice of lemon. It's a little citrusy, a little cucumber-y and a lot good. A little sweeter (though I not cloying) and more potent than the vermouth drink. You can't go wrong with either.

So there it is. I don't know what's coming up next but I'm sure it will be fun.

Shake it...

Everyone (everyone locally anyway) is talking about the earthquake today. I was at a taco stand at a carwash (for anyone outside the Los Angeles area it sounds grosser than it is) and all the people working started whooping when the earth started to undulate. Undulate. Not a word I use in daily conversation but really the only one I can think of now that describes the sensation. It's like sitting on a bed that someone else is bouncing up and down on. J heard the cracking sound that often accompanies these things (and in my opinion, is one of the most disconcerting things about an earthquake) but where I was it was silent. Everyone (except the car washers) stopped talking and stared wide eyed at one another silently asking whether they should take cover or not. It's like playing chicken. Who's going to break for cover first during the longest 30 seconds you may ever experience. The quake measured 5.4 (at first they said 5.8 but they downgraded it) and where I was it was pretty uneventful. A little nerve-wracking, but nothing came apart. No fire or cracks in the earth a la Superman. In fact our pictures at home were still straight and nothing fell. So all is well that ends well.

USGS knows more about it than I do. Check it out.

Raise a glass...

One year ago last night (this morning?) at 2am J came to me as I was watching the end of Silent Hill (oy) and said "my water broke". Get out! was my reply but to know J is to know nothing short of the very sheets she's sleeping under catching fire could drive her from her bed at that hour, so I knew that that moment we'd been waiting for so long was finally here. So off we went with bags in hand and, to make a long (long) story short, 20 hours and one c-section later little T came bellowing into our world. Nothing has been the same since. So happy birthday Thomas, we're glad you're here and decided to stay. And every time you smile or laugh or give me the stink eye for suggesting the possibility that the power outlet is not the best place to put your keys, we love you a little more.

this is Chinatown...

They just restored a bunch of the neon in Chinatown and have been lighting it up at night. It's really neat to go down and see it as it was in the 30's I guess. Most of my pix came out blurry but this one I like.

Some new pix of the boy...

My first photo show...

I'm opening my first show at Grace Ellay in Silverlake on August 23rd. Drop on by if you happen to be in the neighborhood.

Listmania!

This may be silly, but it seemed like fun. I noticed another blogger I follow made one of these Amazon lists so I decided to do one to. See what you think.

Get ready to Listmania!!

T visits the Big Boy and gets a balloon.

What else can you say, he LOVED the balloon.

From a recent trip to the west side.

Kul(er) new stuff...

Adobe has a site called kuler that is just color swatches you can download and use in photoshop or illustrator or whatever. I've used it a bit to get color palates for different things (a valentines card and our holiday card for example) and it's super cool on it's own, BUT, they have a new feature where you can create swatches from pictures. Which is what I've been doing this evening. It allows you to find your pix (or anyone's really) on flickr and it picks 5 colors from each to create the swatch. Then you have several choices regarding how it selects them (bright, colorful, muted, you get the point). It's been really fun distilling my images down to 5 colors and interesting to see the results. If you are interested you can go to the site and search for milesdscott. That will bring up my collection. You can even download them and use them in photoshop if you want.

Roy's

An old picture with a new texture layer. Charlie sent me a box of stuff the other day and in it was a really great old camera he got from my grandmothers things after she passed away. So now I've got it to add to the collection of my grandfathers other cameras. The shutter doesn't work but the ground glass is nice and big and has some hand drawn crop marks on it for either cut film sheets or roll film. There was also an attachment with a mirror, I guess to use as a waist level finder. Both made good photoshop layer textures. You can check out the rest of the set and download them if you want from here.

No name...

Just the other day I set up bootcamp on my iMac to run Windows. I need it to run a database program for a class I'm going to take, and they have all the good games. Now, I don't want to be one of those "Oh, macs are so good for this reason and that, blah, blah blah" because let's face it, such truths typically don't need to be harped on. It's a simple fact of life. I'm having a really hard time using it though. It's counter intuitive, difficult to navigate and worst of all plain ugly. It's an assault on everything I hold dear. The best part is the partition I had to make to run it shows up on my mac desktop as a separate disk simply called NO NAME. I thought about changing it but it seems sort of appropriate.

Philip-Lorca deCorcia

T and I ran over to LACMA today to see the Philip-Lorca deCorcia exhibition. The blurb on the website will say more about him than I can but I will say it was a really good show. HIs work has become a template of sorts for a lot of the current hip fashion / editorial work you see now. I guess it's the lighting and the staged non-stagey-ness about it that makes it perfect for depicting vacuous movie star / models shilling the latest fashions or bottled water. My favorite part of the show was the installation of part of his "Thousand Polaroids". They were a wonderful sketchbook-y look into his aesthetic. Even Thom dug deep and found the patience to sit through it.

Pencil Sharpener

I have a pencil sharpener. A really nice stainless one with two sharpening cones (?) that I've been carrying with me since college. And I seem to have misplaced it. It's driving me nuts, it has to be around here somewhere, I even remember the last time I used it. I hate, hate HATE when I lose things.

A few new things.

I've been messing around with PS, just honing my skills I guess. Playing with layers and brushes here to get sort of an ages, victorian feel. That's why I chose these pix from the field museum in Chicago. I'm out now though so I may have to go to the natural history museum here to get some more.

Foodie.

I like to cook. My favorite thing to do is braise meat. It takes all day and fills the whole apartment with the smell of cooking food. Best done during the winter of course because it also heats up the apartment. I think the rarity of the occasion to braise adds to the appeal, it's an event.

I couldn't do it without this though:


It may be the best investment in cookware we've ever made. It's heavy and easy to clean and it goes from stovetop to oven without blinking. And it's bright orange. How can you not love it? This is a picture making pulled pork a few weeks ago. J is kind of particular when it comes to BBQ, having been raised in KS and all. It just comes with the territory. And believe it or not we've yet to find a BBQ place in LA that passes muster. So we do it here, sort of. No actual grill but we can do the pulled pork, more of a South Carolina thing I guess. Here's a pic of it done:



The salad was a cucumber and onions concoction. Pretty decent. And all from a Martha Stewart magazine. Not bad.

a few more from Montrose.

These are a couple shots I took on the trip to Montrose. Just some interesting details.

New from T.

A few new pix of T.

A nice bw in his room.


These are from a trip to Montrose.


Doing some gardening.


Eating some rocks.


Hanging with mom.