Drawing in Sanguine

Come on, peeps, post stuff! I will be gone for the rest of the week visiting my parents and you are not being interesting! *tantrums*

I know, I know -- I'm one to complain. Heh.

As the US political compaign heats up, I thought I would post my semi-annual bipartisan unrealistic political rant.

If I were running for president, my one campaign promise would be this: I will veto any bill, no matter what it is, that has pork spending attached to it. Yeah, you heard me. Earmarks = vetos. Not only that, since I realize that as president I will be somewhat pressed for time, I will hire a staff of fifteen full-time bill-readers to inform me which bills contain pork. No matter how well you try to hide it, we will find it. And then, I will veto it. Thank you very much, and God bless America. *waves to crowd*

Yeah, I figure it would take at least two years before Congress stopped trying to attach earmarks to bills. But eventually, they would either give up, or, they'd pass the line-item veto.

If only I could be All-Supreme World Dictator. *sigh*

Drive less?

YOU NEED THIS ICON!

By cleolinda... get them here

33-year-old woman from Uzbekistan (I think) competing in gymnastics for Germany who won silver in the individual vault = MY NEW HERO. She has been in FIVE Olympics and still kicks rear. O_O

She moved to Germany to get better health care for her toddler-age son who has leukemia, in return for offering her gymnastics skills on their team.

*SOB*

I am such a sucker for the human-interest stories.

Also, how cute was the Jamaican girl who won the 100-meter dash? She was so excited about winning she was like *SPAZZZ*

(This has been my Olympics-related rambling for 2008. Thank you for reading along.)

I think I've clarified some of my own thoughts about Breaking Dawn. Here and there other reviews have sparked some ideas that helped me sort out some of the vague feelings that troubled me while I was reading.

( If you don't think there are spoilers here, think again )

1. Why isn't everyone as normal as me?

2. Why, for the love of everything holy, is it impossible to find bone-in chicken breasts at any grocery store, meat market, or Super Walmart in this town?

---

And from thefridayfive, ( Questions about memories )

( Impressions so far )

More later...

I just figured out a possible reason why I didn't care for mullet!Brandon in the new Sense and Sensibility.

Ryan and I just rewatched the totally fantastic Our Mutual Friend (1998 miniseries) and there was mullet!Brandon as the Creepy Schoolmaster!

Ew.

Scrawled on bathroom stall wall:

I
love
Edward Cullen

Underneath, in much smaller, neater letters:

Nope
I
[heart, filled in with red ink]
Jacob Black

Me: BWAHAHAHAHA!

( Spoilery musings about New Moon )

I am seriously addicted to reading Stuff Christians Like. It is sucking my willpower just like dementor!Anne in my userpic.

Fortunately, God has sent a thunderstorm so now I have to shut down the computer, making it impossible for me to give into the temptation of reading Stuff Christians Like for the next two hours.

It's lemony fresh!

Here is the setup for my still life, only lacking the old bottle I added later when I decided the composition really needed some balancing.



And here's the painting. It has some glare on it, unfortunately. It's so hard to photograph paintings effectively. They lose all dimension.

I just watched the movie version of The Jane Austen Book Club and actually... (DUN DUN DUN)... thought it was better than the book.

In my review of the novel I said I felt rather ambiguous -- it was interesting, but disjointed and extremely narrative-heavy. I'd guess two-thirds of the book is backstory.

The film takes everything that was fun, romantic, moving, and Austen-y about the novel, and fixes all the awkward disjointedness. By leaving out almost all the backstory stuff, the script is able to connect the characters much closer and make them feel like real people instead of little backstory-vehicles. Rather than a group of short stories forcibly strung together on a thread labeled "Austen", the plot is now an intricately intertwined story about six people and how they relate to each other. And as a result you can actually relate to them. Brilliant.

I went back and skim-reread some of the book and I think it really suffers by comparison. The book is so self-consciously arty, jumping up and down and yelling "hey hey look at me observing human nature over here! See how insightful I am! Notice the tragicomedy?" -- that you want to reply patronizingly, "yes, I see you dear, that's very nice." The book is not very kind to its characters. It observes with that kind of weird first-person plural narrative that you're never quite sure about, but fails to draw you in.

The screenwriter/director of the film, Robin Swicord, took some liberties with the arrangement of the novel. Of course ordinarily I deplore adaptations that mess with the original, but here I really think she knew what she was doing. She aligned the characters with Austen novels a little differently, cleaned up the plotlines, clarified motivations, and actually improved it.

So I guess I'm recommending the film, with the usual caviat that it includes "Mature themes" and general sinfulness, if that is likely to bother you. However I really like how several of the characters make choices toward the end -- there's some really good thoughtful stuff there.

My painting professor in college, a native Midwesterner, used to paint (well, he still does, I imagine) landscapes with farm fields, little old towns, things like that. I never saw the attraction -- to me, landscapes should have either 1. giant mountains or 2 the ocean. I clung stubbornly to my mountain landscapes. They reminded me of my childhood on the west coast. Midwestern scenes just looked ugly, flat, boring, bland to my eyes.

I don't know whether it was my stint in even FLATTER, busier, crowded St. Louis; my new appreciation for the serenities of country life; or just becoming gradually accustomed to my surroundings; but my perception has changed. Ryan and I drive through the gentle hills, the roads sometimes shadowed by overhanging oaks, sometimes open to the sky with fertile fields on either side. And I see beauty everywhere. The row of trees by a stream on the other side of a slanting field looks beautiful to me. A marsh in springtime with its curling fiddlehead ferns, that is beautiful too. An old stump in the forest with wild geraniums and may apples at its feet -- yes, it is beautiful.

What landscapes are beautiful to you?

(For enjycellist, who asked for it specifically.)

I found the recipe for rhubarb cake my MIL made. It's on a yellowed index card and I recognize the handwriting as belonging to Grandma M, her mother. The style is also typical of Grandma M, who is a recipe minimalist and clearly doesn't believe in wussy instructions like "cream shortening and sugar until fluffy" etc.

This is exactly as Grandma wrote it down:

Rhubarb Cake

1/2 C shortening
1 1/2 C sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla

Add 1 tsp soda to 1 C buttermilk

2 C flour
3 C rhubarb - cut small

Topping:
1/2 C sugar
1 tsp cinnamon

Sprinkle on batter

9x13 pan
Bake 350 degrees
45-50 minutes

1. I finally ordered a yoga DVD from Amazon. It arrived and I put it on yesterday. Then I discovered why yoga mats were invented. It's impossible to do downward dog on the carpet: your feet slip. So I had to go over to Grandma Taylor's garage and dig out my yoga mat from our packed belongings.

2. Ginger (Lewis's girlfriend the chocolate lab) started barking yesterday afternoon. I went to see what the matter was and Ginger proudly showed me her find: a turtle on the lawn! I carefully picked up the turtle by his shell and carried him to the woods where he could do his turtle-y things in peace.

3. Lewis went into the bathroom this morning to sneak a drink from the toilet, and accidentally pushed the door shut behind him. He whined and whined and whined until I figured out where he was and came to let him out. Maybe that will teach him not to drink from toilets, but I kind of doubt it.

First things first.

Dear Gillian Anderson: Shut up about Tom Lefroy. Really. I mean it. You might as well have just waved a DVD copy of "Becoming Jane" around for thirty seconds.

Also, everyone in this movie? Fanny Dashwood is the Dashwood girls' SISTER. Or if you insist on being all 21st century, you may say SISTER-IN-LAW. However she is not, in any form or manner of thinking, their AUNT. Thank you.

It's impossible to help comparing this adaptation of Sense and Sensibility to the 95 version. In some ways I think they are opposites, each strong where the other is weak. ( With one big, floppy-haired thing in common )

On the whole, it wasn't horrible, but I was expecting so much from this I couldn't help but be disappointed. I'm not a huge fan of the '95 version, mainly because I really dislike the casting of Emma T and Hugh Grant. So I was hoping to find in this version a S&S to win my heart. And other than the character of Elinor, it failed to do so.

Ryan's laptop DIED yesterday. Died and was dead. Now, after we move, I'm going to need that laptop in order to do freelance. The internet will not come to me, so I must go to the internet. That means, the in-laws have dialup so I'll need to take the lappy to a coffee shop with wifi, in order to download/upload/communicate. Dead laptop is useless to me.

However, after much perusal of the Microsoft knowledge base and some other article which turned out to be misleading, I figured out how to make it boot from the Windows install CD. *flexes geekish muscles* We tried to use the Recovery Console, but that was too confusing so we gave up and decided to do a clean reinstall.

I think my computer could benefit from a clean reinstall itself, but in order to do that I'd have to have some operating system CDs. And I don't have the OS CD because my computer was a refurb. *sigh* I guess I'll need to buy Leopard, haha.

ETA: The install failed! We think Ryan's drive is damaged. I don't know whether to hope we can easily fix it by putting in a new hard drive, or to hope it's no good and I'll be forced to purchase a MacBook Pro for my freelancing. *ahem* MacBook Pro! MacBook Pro!

While Ryan's computer is at 15% formatted, I might as well do this meme, which I know I've done years ago--but that was before I knew most of you.

1. My username is _____ because ____.
katharhino -- that's what my dad used to call me when I was little. It's pronounced katha + rhino (as in the animal) which always made me mad because I didn't want to be associated with large wrinkly grey animals. I'm now quite fond of it, however, since it's been my internet handle from the time I opened my very first hotmail account.

2. My name is _____ because ______.
Katharine -- my parents thought it was pretty. And they thought it was prettier with an A in the middle than with an E, which has caused me much grief over the years trying to get people to spell it correctly.

3. My journal is titled ____ because ____.
Drawing in Sanguine -- get it? Sanguine is what you call that terra cotta red color of pencil you see in some old drawings. And it also means cheerful or hopeful. I think it fits my personality.

4. My friends page is called ____ because ____.
The Salon -- it's the name for a group of artists exhibiting together, or a gathering of congenial people discussing great things.

5. My default userpic is ____ because ____.
My hands with my palette -- I want to be an artist, a creator of beauty, in all I do. The photo was taken by a fellow art student named Mike Shuster, when I was working on my painting of the conversion of Paul.