They found the missing Metropolis bits!

How cool is that?

So, if you're the kind of person who only reads things when they can do so from start to finish, my little albatross Looking Up is completely online.

Finished.
Done. :)

It'll be going to the printers soon.
(whew)

So, it has gotten to the point where Colt is a bearable human being in Looking Up. It only took 70+ pages. Whew, eh? I will be posting soon about preorders for Looking Up as it will be going to print this summer.

In other news: the house is clean, the garden goes well, the cat is learning a new trick, the s.e.s. kidlets go as well as can be expected, I made a killer banana/pear/almond bread with chocolate and raisins, and Lions of Valletta (the cat book) is about a fourth scripted out.

I am sort of boring, but productive and pretty happy. :)

All of the volunteers have been routed from my garden. A week of wet warm weather had them overpowering pretty much anything that was intentional. I gave them a chance to bloom and they didn't take it. I think that's fair.

I like going jogging on Summit (the 'big house' street) and greatly admire their stately beds of single colored flowers and subdued greenery. Despite two fine art degrees and many classes therein that emphasized the gestalt principles of unity and contrast, my garden aesthetic has turned out to be sort of a magpie take on what I think is pretty and colorful combined with nostalgia for plants remembered from my childhood. As a result, my little flower garden is screaming with a bizarre mix of rioting color and leaf forms. I don't think the paid gardeners on Summit would approve.

Today I planted twelve pinky-red geraniums in the side beds and spread three large bags of cocoa bean mulch over the newly bare dirt. My cool upstairs neighbor told me she was inspired by my gardening efforts and weeded out the back hedgerow in order to plant a motley and ambitious collection of perennials. I used the last few shakings of mulch to cover those as well. It's nice to have a friendly housemate.

The pot of strawberries is doing amazingly well and I have started to consider tomatoes. While I'm not sure that I'd ever be able to live completely off the grid, there's something really satisfying about playing in the dirt.

We showed up too late to get the Larry Craig Bobblefeet (hahahahaha!!!) but went to the Saints Game for Lacey's Birthday anyway. You've got to love minor leagues. Lacey had her name up on the big screen and had her picture taken with all of the mascots excluding the horrible pig costume. The Saints won by 7 points and we all got free Saints baseballs and highfives. After the game they sent off a full 20 minutes of memorial day fireworks set to music and the entire stadium sang along. It was pretty magical. Hope everyone had a good Memorial Day Weekend as well. :)

...and I do believe it! I do believe it's true.

Angela and I took the morning off and went to the Minnesota Zoo today.



( Przewalski's horses, baby camels, and more. +9 )

Sort of a placeholder, but fun. It's full of easter eggs. Can you find all of them? :)

Also, Looking up is getting to what everyone seems to think is the good part and continues to update daily, without fail. Huzzah! Now it's off to laundry and walking in the beautiful sun for me. Vitamin D at last!

But I'll share mine with you anyway. :)




This is Ole (as in Sven and Ole or Lena and Ole): a winter hardy rose specially engineered for Minnesota winters at the University of Minnesota. Neat, huh? Awfully pretty, too.



Oles in situ- you can see both my bike and the steps that lead down to my door. I have mentioned that I live underground, right?



Centenial(pastel yellow/bronze) in the garden. You can see JFK (creamy white) and Tropicana (pinky orange) in the background, but neither of those has seen fit to bloom yet. Ungrateful things. In the Victorian language of flowers my garden now says that it is Fascinated (Orange), full of Grace and Joy (Pale Pink), Innocent and Secretive (White), and Jealous and Trying to Care (Yellow). That is to say, if everything lives.

I've also got asiatic lilies (pink, white, and purple) and gladiolus (random multi colors) going from bulbs, heart breakingly orange oriental poppies, strawberries in a big clay pot, and a blanket full of butterfly attracting wildflower seeds that haven't sprouted yet.

If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful
roses, what might not the heart of man become in its
long journey toward the stars?
- G.K. Chesterton

Brave, the person who first thought to eat a lobster. Cracking the claws, breaking the legs, and prying the flesh from reluctantly shattered chitinous casings turned red from being dropped in boiling water while still living is an indelicate process. We've gotten to the point as a society where there are whole schools of utensils manufactured and marketed to embark upon this miniature carnage in a way that is considered polite at fine dining establishments. Thank goodness! Expensively silver rimmed dishes over tea lights for melting butter sit tensely alongside chrome-plated nutcrackeresque implements of torture and wee forks pronged with needle sharp points, all carefully laid out to minimize your exposure to any muss, fuss, or potential embarrassment in front of important people.

Of course, you can just whack the lobsters with the back of a spoon and pry the tenderly sweet lobster bits out with your fingers and teeth, butter running down your chin... But there isn't any way to market that.

Robert Rauschenberg died last night. He was 82.

"It is impossible to have progress without conscience." -Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008).

Giant Sinkholes in the news!
Also, In the comics, per the usual.

Did anyone catch the Arlo Guthrie* reference in today's Looking Up?

*My dad had Alice's Restaurant on vinyl and I loved it- memorized it when was I was 9. It's still memorized. Some days I wonder what effect my musical surroundings had on my general character. One more thing to blame on the 60's.

In short, it sucked.

'Draw yourself as a teen' meme

edit- and here's me now. Now is better than it ever has been. Good thing, too.




Both are way quick sketches, but an interesting exercise.
----------
Also, "Watch yer dog." Excellent advice from today's Looking Up.

For my awesome scientist mom who loves both this song and JoCo!

Also, Looking Up is getting into the good bits and the cow story! Not the cow story that I told for my MCAD graduation speech, but a true cow story told to me by my friend Natalie. It was fun to draw. :)

My plan was to bike out to the big south field and put a kite in the sky for a few hours today.

It's snowing. Again.

Curse you, Minnesota! If I could, I would move to New Mexico.

Book 2 starts today in Looking Up. This is where all the exciting stuff happens! (Actually, my favorite stuff happens in Book 3, but my favorite bits to draw were in Book 2. :)

You can go back and read from the beginning if you care to. Looking up is a love story about a woman, a man, and a bottomless pit in the form of a graphic novel that updates 7 days a week.

Thanks for reading me. :)
Ursula.

Today's plans included going out to enjoy the spring sunshine... but it snowed. *sigh*

So, I watched Upstairs Downstairs from Netflix, made maple syrup cookies, worked on my term papers, and drew this quickie for Darryl. I like his little garden pictures and am always happy to see them pop up on my flist. I guess I should have asked first, but his characters looked like so much fun to draw that I couldn't help myself! I hope I didn't mangle the colors too badly. :)



(click through twice to enlarge image)

If you don't want to miss an update from the sketchblog(which updates when I remember it's there) or Looking Up(which updates everyday), you can add to your watch list by clicking these links and adding them to your journal- pretty swank, eh? Thanks and love to Peggy for showing me how these work!

http://syndicated.livejournal.com/lookingup_comic/profile

http://syndicated.livejournal.com/umh_sketchblog/profile

Not good, but nowhere close to awful in today's Looking Up.* Also, a new sketchblog.

So, the comic updates every day, 7 days a week. Would folks find it annoying to have a link everyday on the journal, or is that sort of thing appreciated?

*(style biting Tyler's Nothing Better updates - so classy!)