Drizzly Days

The Dachshund Channel

There are only so many ways I can entertain myself on cloudy/cold, rainy/drizzly days, and we had a bunch of them last week.  In fact, last Friday it SNOWED.  I ask you!  The temps have struggled mightily to climb above 40-45 degrees.  Did the great Pacific Northwest miss the Spring memo?

So I watch a lot of The Dachshund Channel, a private entertainment source.   Truman and Pippin have different energy levels but once or twice a day they are on the same page and want to romp around.

As you can see from the short video below, Pip is big enough now to hold his own and even dominate his older pal.  Tru is not too sure what to make of it all.

Dachshunds, however, sleep a lot, too, and then they are not quite so entertaining.  One needs more than dogs to fill 16 drizzly hours a day.

Non-Drizzly Birds and Where To Find Them

Luckily, we did get a few brief breaks here and there, during which I dashed out to run errands, or race around the block with the Hounds in an effort to beat the next shower.  One day we even managed to get to Magnuson Park, where we found the Last of the Winter Birds lolling about the ponds.

Look at that sky--blue holes! (But it was chilly, of course.)

Ring-necked Ducks are one of the Winter visitors and we found several who had not gotten the Spring memo yet.  With snow and 40 degrees, who can blame them for delaying the northward flight?

The Green-winged Teal also found Seattle more to their liking then the frozen tundra. 

Pippin is fascinated by birds of all sorts.  Truman, who has been on many, many birdwatching outings, has learned that birds are BORING.

The U.S. Reading Project

My current reading project (I have others, trust me) is to read one nonfiction book about each of the fifty U.S. states.  Subject can be anything--history, travel, memoir, nature--as long it is about each specific state.  Researching and choosing each title provided hours of fun (well, I thought it was fun, other people mostly scratch their heads when I explain it). 

I started a month ago and have now finished the "A" states.  I read:

Alabama: One Big Front Porch (Kathryn Windham)
Quaint, enjoyable tales of local history and culture

Coming Into the Country (John McPhee) [Alaska]
Outdated and overlong; best part was a wilderness canoe trip

Going Back to Bisbee  (Richard Shelton)
Part memoir, part history as the author takes a meandering southwestern Arizona road trip

Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol' Boys Defined a State (Brooks Blevins)
Fascinating study of how the image of Arkansas developed over the centuries

I'm now reading California's Frontier Naturalists (Richard Beidleman).  I just finished a section that gave me pause.  Why, do you ask?  Well, I will tell you!

In a description of an early 1800s exploration voyage, the author tells us about one of the ship's naturalists, a fellow named Adelbert von Chamisso.  The brief bio includes the information that Chamisso served as page to the Prussian queen Louise, fought with the Prussian army, studied philosophy and literature, moved to France to hang with Madame de Stael's famous social circle where he somehow fell in love with botany and got good enough to go on a Russian expedition to the American west coast.  Afterwards he became a famous author of stories and poems while superintending the Royal Botanic Gardens in Berlin and in his spare time became an authority of Australasian languages, penned the first poems in German on American Indians, and compiled a book on Hawaiian grammar.

The reason this gave me pause is because it's not uncommon--I often encounter similar biographies of 17th-19th century people with inquisitive natures who manage to become experts in multiple fields, fluent in three or more languages, and authors of impressive tomes while whiling away their spare hours performing concert-level tunes on obscure instruments previously mastered only by Tibetan yak herders.

This sort of information tends to make me feel a tad indolent.  Of course, those people didn't have the Home & Gardening TV Network or YouTube.  Which I imagine is the point.  While I don't have cable TV, I obviously have the Internet, and some days I feel I ought to be doing something more useful with my oodles'o'free time than watching cute dachshund vids and playing trivia games and flicking through Facebook wondering when something interesting will show up there. 

So I am in search of Projects.  Rainy day/Drizzly day, Cloudy/Cold day, Wintry Can't Go Outside day Projects that don't involve sitting on my duff in front of a screen.  Please help!  Send ideas!  Is there an App for that??

When In Doubt, Shut Up and Paint

Because it was Not Nice Enough to go outside this past week for more than short dog walks, I came up with a new Indoor Sketching subject:  Lighthouses! 

I don't like drawing from photos (especially other people's photos).  But after the Drawing People exercise a while back, I realized what I needed was subject matter I actually cared about.  DUH.

And I adore lighthouses!  I have drawn and painted lots of them from my own photos.  So this week I went looking for new ones, and found a terrific site:  lighthousefriends.com, for all your lighthouse sketching needs.

The site has state-by-state lists of all the lighthouses you could ever want to draw, with multiple photos for each one, some of them historical.  It's fab.

I did these all directly with pen, because it was more challenging that way, and I figured it was good practice for when I'm out and about in the real world trying to draw buildings without wriggly off-kilter lines.  Drawing in pencil first just wastes time, and the only time I do it is if I'm not going to use pen at all, but only watercolor.

Look at all those non-wriggly lines!  Whoo hoo!  (Though if you look closely, you can find off-kilter lines...I just covered them up with paint.)

The forecast for this entire coming week is DRIZZLY RAINY CLOUDY COOL IT'S NOT REALLY SPRING YET HA HA FOOLED YOU.  So there will be lots more lighthouses.  Possibly from the next states or provinces (the site includes Canada) in alphabetical order.

The rest of the time I will be thinking thinky thoughts about learning a foreign language or three, taking harpsichord lessons, and studying the linguistic intricacies of hieroglyphics.  And then I will go bake some chocolate chip cookies instead. 

Have a full and formative week!

Almost Spring

We had a lot of sunny Spring-like weather over the past week, and got out as often as possible.  I'll just do the roundup in chronological order this time.

First, a visit to Magnuson Park, one of many we made, since it's a very large place with lots of different stuff, and it's just a 10-minute drive away.

After a two-mile walk, Truman introduced Pippin to the concept of cooling off in the lake.

I also got a short video of the frog chorus at the wetland ponds--turn up the volume!

On another sunny day we went to Golden Gardens park on the Sound for some sandy beach fun.  First we stopped at the marsh:

Then we went to the beach, where Pippin had a fun time exploring.

Dueling profiles 

There are still Brant geese around--they are Winter visitors who will no doubt be heading north soon.

On Wednesday I went to visit a friend at the UW, and ran into the tail-end of a student rally on gun control.  I decided to try drawing people again.  Mistakes were made, but that's how it goes when they insist on moving around.

The cherry trees on campus were blooming, so the Hounds and I stopped there as well for a bit.

The next day I took Tru and Pip to the groomers for their nail trims.  There's a mosque not far from the groomers that I've been wanting to sketch for ages, and it was sunny again, so we stopped there afterwards.

The next day I took the Hounds to Meadowbrook Pond park, another favorite spot which is quite small (9 acres).  A very pleasant spot.

On Saturday we went to the Montlake Fill on yet another lovely day.

On Sunday it was a bit cooler and cloudier in the morning.  Tina and I went to the Burke Museum for some comfortable indoor drawing.

All in all, it was a full week.  I also got quite a bit of gardening in, and most of my 3,000sf garden is weeded!  Of course, two weeks from now, all of the weeds will be back, bigger and stronger than ever.  I just hope some of the flowers manage to grow as well. 

Not Exactly 100 People

Last week there was an annual worldwide sketching "challenge" to draw 100 people in five days.  I hate drawing people but thought I ought to try, and since sketchers were allowed to draw from photos as well as real life, I figured I could handle it. 

At first I tried photos of people walking or standing, just as I might draw people if I were out and about in Seattle.  I did not enjoy it one little bit, and I gave up.  I told my friend Tina that people were boring.

She suggested I try people in motion instead.  She was doing the challenge, and was having a ton'o'fun drawing from photos of surfers.  She also suggested starting off with just a silhouette or simple outline to keep it easy.

So I gave it another try, and found some photos of dancers that appealed, and after starting off with simple silhouettes and outlines, I got more and more into it, and actually enjoyed drawing people!

I even tried different pens and color combinations, and did one with only watercolor. 

Next, I moved on to gymnasts.

And then I found the ice dancers -- quite complex!

I tried not to fret over faces or details--I just wanted to quickly capture form and movement.

After three days of this, I got tired of athletes, and decided to try a couple of faces with more detail.

I'm not sharing everything I drew -- by day four I had done 56 people.  Then I took my car in for service, and in the waiting room was a guy just sitting there working away on his laptop, not paying me any attention.  So I thought, "Aha!  I can sketch people now, and here is a person in real life!"  

So I sketched him.  And I did not enjoy it one bit.  He wasn't dancing or bouncing around a pommel horse or lifting an ice dancer into the air -- he was staring at a laptop.  BORING.  

I think for urban sketching, I will just stick to what I like.  Which is Scenes Without People In Them.

Like this: 

This is the steam plant in south Seattle that was built in 1907.  It's now a museum, open once a month to the public for free.  The Seattle Urban Sketcher group met there on Saturday.  Tina and I joined them.

Despite plenty of sunshine, it was COLD both inside and out at 10am when we started.  I lasted half an hour inside (for the above drawing) and then bolted outdoors.  It SLOWLY warmed up to maybe 50 degrees by the time we finished at 12:30. 

The plant is next to Boeing Field, where I had a partial view of an airplane and a full view of Mt. Rainier.

From the most sheltered, sunniest spot I could find (there was a breeze, too!), I could see more of the steam plant buildings.

Brrrrrr.  I was not a happy camper.

I was much happier on Sunday, when Tina and I went to the Magnuson Park wetlands in early afternoon, when it was not only sunny but WARM.  And there I had lovely views of ponds without any people around. 

I wish I had an audio recording, because the frogs were going nuts!  Hundreds and hundreds of frogs in every pond were croaking away in a glorious Spring chorus. 

It's supposed to be sunny today as well, and in the mid-60s.  I hope to get out again, slathered with sunscreen lotion.

I also took Truman and Pippin out in the glorious sunshine, on various walks hither and yon.  One day we went to Meadowbrook Pond park, where you can always see waterfowl.

Pippin was fascinated by the Canada Geese.

He ignored this lovely little Pied-billed Grebe.

Truman ignored all of the birds. 

This is a Ring-necked Duck:

Pippin discovered there were birds on the other side of the bridge, too.

Such as this female Wood Duck:

I'm not sure, but is Truman laughing at Pippin here?  We'll never know.

Happy almost Spring!