So today, I was feeling like a diner breakfast so I walked a block to the Chelsea Square Restaurant. From the outside you may not like its appearance; same inside. But set aside the looks and instead focus on the service and the food. Its a diner, remember!

The food is better than most diners. Particularily the fresh toast. Delicious thick Challah bread, dipped in a milk egg batter with cinnamon. It was toasted perfectly. Perfectly! I really don’t think I’ve had better fresh toast before in my 40 year old life. They had more pedestrian syrup so bring your own maple syrup to make it “off the charts”.

A friend of mine is missing his daughter. Karen is 16, and was last seen with a girlfriend of hers on June 1st 2009.

Karen Hendrickson
6 years old
Blue eyes
5’9”
Has a scar under left eye
Blonde curly hair
Medium build

Last seen in Burien early morning on 6/1/2009

If you have any information about Karen’s whereabouts please call
(206) 396-7471 or (206) 715-1649

The authorities have been notified.

Now this is worth a repost. Cute Overload is a site that has some amazing pics and videos of different animals doing cute thing with each other. For example:

Man and a dog doing squats to Beatles music while Jeno’s Pizza Rolls bake in the kitchen

Fawn (baby deer) and bobcat snuggle together

and one of my favorites…

Squirrel and puppies napping together

For extra added fun, here are teddy bears that went to space in a weather balloon.

How fun is that? My boyfriend, Jeff, is on the ad for Lomo Redscale film. He does look good and its a fun shot. Click UrbanOutfitters.com > 35 mm Redscale Film Pack and he is the little image at the bottom. You can even zoom in by clicking the big picture when it comes up.

FYI, this film is special because when it was manufactured it was loaded into the canister backwards. So the light comes through the “wrong” side of the emulsion. Then magic fairies say its gonna be red rather than the normal color balance. Why? I don’t know. The fairies I figure.

This past weekend, I chose to start a new art business. Its a business that provides a platform for artists, feeds my soul, and generates revenue; a great triumvirate. I’m focusing most of my working effort on this and I’ve chosen to pause my Speakeasy Cubes art installation. Its a tough call to make but I believe the right one.

Its hush hush for now as I pull together the business plan and team. I won’t be sharing details on it here for several months. So when you see me, please ask me about all this in person!

I spend all day today soldering and finished everything needing it. All three Boarduinos (an Arduino clone made for breadboards) are done as well as several breakout boards for other components.

I’m running test programs on them tonight to see if any problems show up. Tomorrow night, I’ll start on some simple programs to familiar myself with the Arduino development environment and platform.

It is with great sadness that I say goodbye, at least for this lifetime, to my housemate, Eric. He passed away, suddenly, in a motorcycle accident on Tuesday 6 May 2008.

Eric and I were housemates and shared a bathroom for a year in my home in the East Village of New York City during 2007-2008. When I moved to the city back then, Eric became a friend that gave me hints and regularly had a warm smile when I came back with some fantastic story; joshing along with my tale.

I really enjoyed the difference in age between Eric and I; he was about ten years my younger. His approach to many things opened my eyes to other options. He was a good debater and a deep thinker. He worked through his ideas and opinions. We had fun all along the way and enjoyed good debates like Barack Obama vs. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Or the similarities and differences of hooking up between homosexuals and heterosexuals.

Eric was actively engaging in life and pushing forward. In addition to motorbiking, another of his passions was making documentaries. He had recently made a trip south to Central America to visit family and film footage for a documentary he was making. I’ll miss the excitement of seeing his first segment edited.

I do wish that he was still here with us; that I could have a conversation with him in person. But that will not happen. Eric has left this physical world. So for now, I say goodnight and I wish him well on his journey.

Here are some pictures I took from the 2008’s Night of a Thousand Stevies #18. An amazing night!

I’ve got my new jellyfish tattoo. Its on my left arm, elbow, shoulder, scapula, and chest. Yes…its large. Its a jellyfish designed and inked by Jeff Cornell of Hidden Hand Tattoo on MySpace (or Hidden Hand Tattoo website) in Seattle, Washington.

Jeff did my first tattoo, the tree on my right arm. I knew I wanted a tattoo and thought about what it would be for years. Long time ago I wanted a musical note but it evolved into a tree and then into a specific symbol of a tree and not a specific tree. I had scoured Seattle, looking at dozens of portfolios until I found Jeff. We consulted, I brought in pictures, he sketched, I tweaked, he sketched, then inked. I love it; the tree not the six hours of pain.

So then came the thought, “Do I get another?” Yes! So what would it be? I wanted to have another tree but not a tree. So I though about the ocean. Trees are in forests. There are forests of seaweed. So I decided to get seaweed on my arm. Again I researched online and in the Seattle library. In the library, I found a 20th century scientific book that was specifically on Pacific Northwest seaweed. I found a couple of images in there that were good. Then, I found two books from the 19th and 18th century.

Albertus Seba’s Cabinet of Natural Curiosities: The Complete Plates in Colour, 1734-1765 is filled with illustrations of plants, sea shells, insects, coral, and more. He was an Amsterdam pharmacist and collected all kinds of curiosities from around the world. So much that his collection and later the book he published from illustrations he commissioned of his collection became world known and is one of the 18th century’s greatest natural history achievements. Some of the animals illustrated are now extinct. I was in illustration wonderland. I particularly love the coral.

Then I found Ernst Haeckel’s “Kunstformen der Natur” aka Art Forms in Nature published in sections from 1899 to 1904. Its a stellar book filled with sea creatures, microscopic animals, plants, and a few land animals. There is so much in this book that I like, its hard to not want the book printed all over my body.

But one image stuck with me. The Discomedusae. The jellyfish. I decided that I wanted a jellyfish inspired by these illustrations but for it to be Jeff Cornell’s original artwork. Jeff’s extremely talented and I trust in him. When I was in Seattle earlier this year, I consulted with him, left references for him to noodle on and sketch, and made an appointment for October 4th. An all day appointment.

I grabbed another cup of Vivace coffee, a bagel, and hopped a taxi to his Fremont studio. We tweaked his sketch some and he made a transfer to a stencil. The first, second, and third transfer of the stencil to my arm weren’t quiet right. Number four was the magic one. And then the pain began.

We went for about eight hours with a lunch break and a few shorter ones. A combination of pain and the length of time in pain was a lot; more than the tree tattoo he put on my left arm. He’s a very skilled artist; the pain is just a temporary pain and part of the experience. I could see that we wouldn’t finish it all in one day. There’s a lot of detail and its just big. I’ve got another 6-8 hours of work to go and have made an appointment for his first available full day which is in Jan. I’m extremely happy with how it looks, how it is healing, and the whole experience. Jeff is good and in demand!

Today I went into Supergenius Tattoo to see my tattoo artist Jeff Cornell. I want to get another piece on me by him before I move to New York City. I’m thinking about seaweed. It continues the idea from my other arm’s tree. The tree is strong, stable, provides shelter, gives life, etc. And seaweed is similar. There are forests of seaweed, is provides shelter for fish, and life as food. I also live the branching web of seaweed. Its a common thread with me as I also like the branches of Winterhazel. We talked and he let me look through a book called “Art Forms in Nature”. It was amazing. All kinds of illustrations of nature done in a very classic way.

So I came home and did some research. Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature) is a book of lithographic and autotype prints by German biologist Ernst Haeckel. Originally published in sets of ten between 1899 and 1904 and as a complete volume in 1904, it consists of 100 prints of various organisms, many of which were first described by Haeckel himself.

I definitely see an interpretation of something from his book now on me. I do want Jeff’s own artistic take and not a straight copy. I found a German site which has his entire originally published book “Art Forms in Nature” scanned and available. Its been 70 years since Haeckel’s death so the images are now in the public domain. I’ve downloaded the whole book and really look forward to looking at them all.