I AM a Lion. I AM!

Here is an illustration I did a while ago. I tried to use it for my avatar on a writing forum. But every time I thought about posting a serious comment, I felt ridiculous.

Like, um...Hi guys, can I play too? Heh-heh.

Oh, well. I’m still fond of my scrappy little kitty.

Paper Jam

Between my tissue paper paintings and some summer activities going on at home, I thought of another story of crumpled paper:

In preparation for entering high school next year, my daughter is abandoning the hunt and peck method and learning to type properly - you know, hands on home base and all that. My husband came home with a typing instruction program, and the rest of the family planned to brush up, too. He also dug up an old Gregg Shorthand book and decided to take a crack at that.

I’ve declined to jump in on this. I developed both skills in high school, before going to work as a secretary to pay for college. I learned to type on a manual typewriter, when pinky fingers got a workout and an awkward rhythm caused an unfortunate pileup of keys jammed up in the middle. Luckily, I never had to put my questionable shorthand skills to the test. The dictaphone had become popular for typing up drafts.

I was also lucky enough to have an electric typewriter available at work, complete with correction tape and an automatic correction key. Unfortunately, this didn’t correct the sandwich of carbon copies as thick as baklava that went behind your original document. If you made a typo, you’d have to erase your mistake from all eight or ten copies, with an eraser that worked more like a black grease pencil. If you made more than two mistakes, your document was pretty much toast. Accuracy was very, very important.

A friend in the next office was, like me, fresh out of high school and eager to make a good impression. Every day at lunchtime we’d compare notes on how many people we’d accidently hung up on or what urgent message we’d forgotten to deliver. One day, about a week into our new jobs, she sheepishly dug into her handbag and produced a giant, twisted wad of stationery. I burst out laughing, and reached into my purse to produce an identical roll of twisted paper. Both of us, afraid an overflowing wastebasket would reveal our incompetence, thought it best to smuggle evidence of our shortcomings out of the building in our bags.

Until now, I hadn’t given any thought to the convenience of paperless typing. Of course, printer problems are another matter.

Two More Ducks in a Row

Roughed Up Ducks

For an illustration contest I painted characters based on some handmade toys. I wanted them to have a friendly, fuzzy texture, so I painted them on crumpled tissue paper. I liked the effect enough to try some other paintings using the same technique. Here is a painting inspired by a pair of velveteen ducks I've had since I was little. The actual ducks are not quite so fuzzy anymore.

Our Summer Project

This is our five-month old rescue puppy, Luna, and the reason I am not getting a lot of work done on my portfolio. According to the kids, her full name is Luna "Shmelly" Spalko. The last name refers to the evil villainess Irina Spalko of the recent Indiana Jones movie, and the middle name is self-explanatory. Here’s what we’ve learned so far:

1. When a puppy spends its first four months of life in a kennel, it is very difficult to housebreak.
2. It is impossible to keep an all white dog white.

Luna’s a lab mix, and we’ve been entertaining ourselves with guessing what she might be mixed with. We only know that the mom is a lab. She looks a little like Wishbone, and a little like the RCA dog. But she’s got the pointy nose and big hare paws of a greyhound. All we can figure is that her dad was very smitten by the lab next door, and must have been a very good fence jumper. Now that I think of it, Luna does look a little like a kangaroo.

This is the least blurry picture I could find. Notice the two tails. Imagine two little horns to go with them. Every evening at about 7:45 she becomes a demon from hell and rips through the house like a rabid wolf. We just let her go ‘til she burns herself out, which thankfully is usually around 7:48.

Our motto for the summer: Luna did it.
The question: When will she behave?