Getting strangled. >:/

Bleh. I got stung by a bee today, I think. That hasn't happened in many many years. Last time Is stepped on a bee, my foot swelled way up.
I'm glad that hasn't happened this time, considering I got stung in the neck. It's a little bit puffy, just a tiny bit. But because of that, it feels like there's pressure on my throat. It's a really freaky sensation, though faint enough that I can ignore it most of the time.
Stupid bee.

Anyway, I finished filling a sketchbook today. I think I only have about 5 or 6 of these big ones. This one's been in progress for about 2 years.
Not I get to start a fresh new one. I wonder what my first drawing should be. Hmm.

Lots of good story ideas in my sketchbook. Almost all of my Retriever pairs are in there. Except for Rishi. Poor Rishi is last. I'll have to do him and Menth soon. Then maybe I'll do some of the teachers, like Master Rall and Mr. Handal.
Recently I've been using pictures from other artists on DA to practice different styles and techniques. I kind of twist their drawings to fit my own characters. XP I posted a couple of the paintings on DA. I forget if I put the second one on my blog yet... better check.
I finished coloring a couple more, but I don't think I'll post them.

I think my best pictures in here are some of my Retrievers, some of the pictures I copied from other artists ( XP ), and my pictures of Elsa, Chao, and Jack Frost.

A World Without Sunsets

We had a beautiful sunset this evening. The sun was a vivid gold, dying the clouds, sending beams of light up into the sky.
When I was at the nature program last week, the instructor told me a story.
A while ago, there were three Chinese girls in a program he was part of. The whole time, they were on their cell phones, not appreciating nature at all, even though that's what their program was about.
Finally at the end, Sundara took them on a walk up the hill, just before sunset. He blindfolded them and lead them up the hill. Then just as the sunset was approaching its most brilliant, he took off their blindfolds.
The girls all gasped and stared open-mouthed at the sunset before them.
And for several minutes, they were speechless and riveted to the scene before them. They remained there until the sun was gone.
Sundara was a bit confused about how entranced they were. It was definitely a beautiful sunset, but not many people would be so absorbed into a sunset as these girls were.
It turns out that these girls had never seen a sunset before.
They were from Beijing, where the sky is so dirty that bright sunsets don't happen, apparently.

I knew Beijing had dirty sky, but to think that people there have gone their entire lives without seeing a sunset is shocking to me.
And Beijing is not the only place with bad air...
This is the kind of world we live in. A world where thousands, or millions, of people live without sunsets.
This is the world I want to change. Because everyone should be able to watch the sun set and the sky turn to fire and gold.

More hearts.

I know I said I'd stop but some of these are so TT^TT


If any of my recent hearts are reported, I'll just attach them to this post. Probably.


Here's the big batches of hearts I made.

Mark Twain says Write

Yesterday, Mark Twain told me to keep writing.

Okay, it was a reenactor of Mark Twain, but it was still fun. He asked me what I was studying. And it wasn't until I said environmental studies and "creative writing" that I realized the parallel and laughed. And he remembered that apparently, because when he saw me later he said to keep writing.

I wonder what it must be like to be a reenactor. It seems like it would be fun.
Actually. I sort of did do that once. In high school, for a trial we put on, I had to dress up and act as Mark Twain. I stuck a big fuzzy moustache to my lip with a glob of glue from a gluestick. Because the special glue we bought wouldn't open, even when someone tried stomping on it.
Mark Twain is definitely a great writer. I've gotta read more of his stuff.

Getting Outdoors

I have had very limited internet access over the past several days, so I'll write this post now. From Friday to Sunday, I went up to Nevada City to do a program about getting more in touch with nature. I stayed up there with Mom a couple days longer.
It was a very nice program.
The first evening, before the program started, I sat outside, intending to read some of the books the program was based off of. They're by a person named Joseph Cornell. The four I read over the weekend were good books. One has a bunch of activities for getting kids outdoors and having fun. Anyway, that first evening I didn't really read much. Instead I ended up watching a flock of young geese and a bunch of 7 turkeys (with one young one) warring over the grass. It was funny. The turkeys kept chasing the geese away. Then the geese would come back and the turkeys would chase them away again.
Then the second day, I followed a doe and her two little fawns. I went slowly enough that the mom didn't even look at me. The babies looked at me a few times though. I wish I had the good camera with me~
On Sunday, we closed the program. And I spent about an hour picking wild blackberries. They tasted really good~
Then on Monday morning, I found a group of nine bucks. I spent about 20 minutes among them, moving incredibly slow. I've never gotten so near wild deer before. It was really cool. And that time I had the good camera. Maybe I'll put up some pictures. One of them even lay down about 15 feet from me. They were very relaxed. I wish I could have spent more time, but I had to go meet my Mom.
I spent another hour picking blackberries. And then I helped a old friend pick cucumbers and sort fruit from the farm.
And that evening we went swimming in the Yuba River. It's such a beautiful place to go swimming. With all the rocks and caves and tunnels, and big granite boulders to go jumping around on. It makes every pool seem incredibly lame.
It was such a nice trip. I didn't do too much, but I relaxed and spent a lot of time outdoors.

Red and Green Compasses

At China Town a while ago, I found two glass diamonds, just like the compasses from Katani's story. Without the needle in the center, or the marks around the top.
So I dressed up in my Katani outfit for a photo shoot. ^-^

Music Rush

I wasn't able to take band last semester. I didn't want to abandon practice altogether during those months, but sure enough I only pulled my flute out a couple times.
I'll have to get back in shape before the next semester starts.

But I did play some tonight.
And it was kind of amazing. Playing music again got me all energized. The rest of the night I just wanted to dance around~ No one to dance with though. Leaf won't dance with me.
So I listened to Riverdance, and the duet song from the new How to Train your Dragon. Good dancing music, that.

Practice more. O__O
Do it.

Pavani and Arthem

Finished drawing Pavani and Arthem~
It's more dynamic than any of the other Retriever pictures, I guess because I had an idea for it before I was ready to draw. And for once I drew a background. It's supposed to be raining, with ripples in the puddles. I was trying to have the ripples reflect the other colors in the image.




I'm almost done with the Green Team! Only Rishi and Menth left. I'll probably do a couple of the teachers too, like Noni and Bade.

A strange Human Phenomenon

Humans really don't make any sense sometimes.

For example, strawberries.

This is obviously an extreme example (actually I could have made it even more extreme), but here you see a typical monster strawberry you get from a typical grocery store. And next to it are some of the little strawberries that grow in my front yard.
The big ones may be fancy to look at, but they really don't have any flavor, if you stop to think about it. But people eat them anyway and say that they're tasty, because they're big and pretty.
As opposed to my tiny little things. Each on those teeny little berries has more flavor than those monstrous big things. Though admittedly, the smaller strawberries you can get at farmer's markets have a nicer flavor most of the time.

Originally I was just going to write a post about this strange thing that humans like to do.
But then in a book I was reading a few weeks ago, there were a couple pages about basically the same topic which was written in a very powerful way.
I'll sum it up.
Since the beginning of agriculture, humans used natural ways of replenishing the soil. Then during the agricultural revolution, chemicals were found to dramatically increase the effectiveness of dirt for growing food. Suddenly, most people forgot that nothing can last forever, and that as much as you can force something to produce better, eventually it will give out.
We twist and shape the very genes of plants, making them behave in very unnatural ways just for convenience, or because it's "cool." Because of this, crops are completely useless without a host of chemicals and poisons to protect them from their surroundings.
Food is made in factories, and no one knows it because they never see where their food comes from. They just go to the grocery store and pick it up, pre-packaged.
Tomatoes no longer taste like tomatoes, or grow like tomatoes. This is probably why I can't stand eating tomatoes unless I pick them myself. And I have always been like that. Maybe it was subconscious understanding that tomatoes from the store just weren't as good as real tomatoes.
We want to simplify the workings of the world so we can control it.
Well, here's the news. You can't. life isn't that simple. And no matter how much we want to force the planet to do what we want, it won't work. We just break things. Something may have the right arrangement of elements, but does that really mean that it's good? Life goes so far beyond that.
The common method of growing food destroys the very spirit in food. And maybe that's why the 3-year-old strawberry plants growing in a dry section of our front yard have so much more flavor. They are not broken, and they are cared for.

Landmarks

Got back from our train trip to Reno today. I may write a blog post about the dessert. I'll see. but we did see some wild horses~

We were on the train all day, so we didn't do much for 4th of July, except climb on the roof to look for fireworks. The trees blocked anything close enough to appreciate though.

We did get to see a parade from the train though. And watched some stuff on TV as I cut out fabric pieces for a new project.
And I got a lot of writing done on the train~ I think I have officially finished the first part of the book (it sucks, but it's a first draft so it's supposed to suck). Now I need to skip six years, so I must reset my mind. And Ashlyn's mind too. Now I also need to get into the minds of the two other main characters.

When we got home from the train, I wanted to move around some. I biked down the hill and made it to the bottom, just a block away from the library. Now I know I can bike downtown any time I want! Whoo!
Now I'll have to test it out for real.
Now I'm half tempted to tackle tome of the hills behind my house. Those are all pretty steep though. Most of them will be as tough as my hill. I should probably wait a while. Though it might be interesting to bike to band or my creative writing class (probably illogical though, since they're night classes).

Give a little smile~

I said I'd stop, but I couldn't resist.
This makes me want to make about a million of these.
My little hearts actually do help make people's days better.
TT^TT