'wearing my pen down to the bone.' or 'i'm blaming it on the lighting.'

well, i am happy to report, that after a shy handful of figure drawing sessions, replete with generous guidance from man at the helm, jed d, that i have graduated from level one of the sketchy school of Egon Scheile, where my stick figure blobs have crawled out of the Precambrian crayola muck to grow arms, legs and sometimes even muscle definition to march upon off grey sheets of pen and colored pencil pastures. which is not to say i have fully mastered this thing called PROPORTIONS. quite the contrary. looking at my drawings one would question whether or not the sitters actually had real biological limbs at all, much less proportionate ones. or if i had just returned from the scene of some misfortune involving an elvin dwarf, a 4 story building and free fall. but my improvement is steady nonetheless.

tho, upon reviewing my handiwork from one such recent session, i thought for sure a capless pen had run havoc in my pannier and tagged several of my notebook pages. but no, upon closer inspection, the clumsy scribblings turned out to be my full fledged attempts at sketches of human beings. funny, i don't remember being in the presence of such skeletally improbable naked people. . .

this is what not having internet looks like.

well, not this here exactly, but the gap in time between the last post and this.

and although I know you are hungry, this will be but a snack; I am taking a short break from writing an art proposal that is due man~ana. one of these days I will figure out how to insert a tilda above the 'n'. until that time, I will busy myself with other things. such as aforementioned art proposal (it involves BABYSEAL. if I am selected, you will be notified). and climbing mountains.

yes, that's right. Mountains. I and several dozen others, of which, only one dozen I was on a first name speaking basis with, ascended the switchback summit of Mt Si. the clouds watched from above en masse, silently weeping from time to time. me thinks for my sneakered (I only read the email about the snow after the day had come and gone) stick legs and what I was about to do to them. I made it up to the top in under 2 hours, ate lunch, stared at a sleeping goat from afar, then got a little, er, excited/carried away and ran down the whole way back to the car.

4 miles in 4o minutes, just shy of a 4,000 feet descent.

it was exhilarating. and slightly painful. at mile 2 my thighs started to doubt my sanity. mile 3, both my big toes, speaking for the 8 others, began to protest. everyone held their muscley tongues till we all got down in one piece and now, with each step I take, each getting up from sitting down in my seat, their screaming is all I can hear. never have such a solid percentage of my legs been so sore to the touch. never have I attempted such back to nature tomfoolery. never have I applied so much arnica to so much of my body. never has all this ouchiness been so worth it.

next week, rattlesnake ridge trail. updates to follow.