Extended Weekend

I'm getting two extended weekends in a row, and it feels good. I got last Friday off from work because of Cesar Chavez day, so I took the time to collect my brother for the weekend. He's for the most part disabled after his time spent in the army, so he's not up to much physical activity without a bit of pain involved. We ended up spending literally all of Sunday watching movies on Netflix: Upside Down, Zoolander, Kung Fu Panda 2, The Boondock Saints, Red Lights, and Hanna. All of which I have already seen before.

He literally spent all of Saturday watching Being Human (US version) until he ran out of episodes. I saw the UK version already, so I now know that the US and UK versions are terribly different and will consider watching the other, once I'm done with Grey's Anatomy (currently on season 7) and caught up on Mad Men.

As for next weekend, I've taken off Monday and Tuesday to extend my stay in Seattle with my besties from Dosimetry School. The last time we met up was this past September in Las Vegas where we went primarily to see City and Colour at the House of Blues. This rendezvous was chosen in Seattle at this date because we wanted to see Young the Giant, which I'm super excited for. We're going to meet up at the airport on Saturday. I'm hoping the rain will clear up for Monday when we intend to have at least some time outside without being soaked all the way through. You can count on me to let you know about my trip when I get back!

I Love You, Mom

It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized exactly how hard-working my mom was raising me and my brother by herself. My parents have been divorced since I was a toddler, so I have no memory of anything else and the separation doesn't bother me at all. I lived with my mom and saw my dad every other weekend. He moves around quite a lot between nearby and 300 miles away in Southern California, so he would either drive up or my brother and I would fly down. We kept track how many times we flew until the numbers were well over 200 and I was probably 8 years old.

My mom put herself through college without any help from her parents while I was in elementary school, and she graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Kinesiology with the hopes of becoming a physical therapist. Unfortunately, the training program for physical therapy is very competitive and despite her 4.0 GPA she could not get in and could not use her degree for any of her following jobs. She would work early and work late, having to drop us off at our friends' homes so their parents could watch us until we could go to school or back home, and she could never participate in the weekly carpools herself. In the summertime, she bought a season pass for each of us for a water park and we would stay there all day while she was at work/school. This was completely fine because we were great swimmers, there were lifeguards, it was really fun, and she wouldn't have been able to afford a babysitter.

My mom hasn't had very good luck in her lifetime. Unsupported by her own family, every choice she has ever made was to help me and my brother lead better lives than her own. She lost her jobs for various reasons, and never for incompetence. She was just very unlucky. She was a substitute middle school teacher for a while until she trained to become an appraiser. For some time, she managed to earn a large salary and even earned an award and spa vacation for being such a highly efficient worker in the company, but was laid off when the economy tanked in 2008 and caused all home values to plummet.

Then she trained to become a nuclear medicine technologist and held that job for a bit before she was in a bike accident and broke her arm and hip. She was afraid she would lose her job for not being able to work, but lost it instead during that time most likely because she was a whistle blower. She has since been unable to find a job because the place she worked at refused to promote her as the fantastic worker she is. She is overqualified for average jobs and would have to go back into training for new jobs at her education level. No one will accept her for anything. The system sucks. Meanwhile her broken hip turned into a hip replacement, and then she later suffered from appendicitis and a lengthy and stressful divorce from my step dad of 10 years. It's like anything bad that could happen did happen.

Before she lost everything, she managed to help me climb out of the trouble I would have been in if she couldn't have encouraged me through my educational career. Since I was two years ahead in mathematics through middle school and high school, my mom asked our local state university if they would accept me with what units I did have along with taking the Proficiency Exam. They accepted, so instead of moving on to my junior year in high school, I became a freshman in college. It took me 5.5 years to graduate from college, since I was working part-time throughout and it sometimes delayed my progression through earning my Bachelor's degree in Mathematics. I ended up saving just enough to support myself through a year of dosimetry school in Texas before landing a job back home (somehow) and a spot in the high tax bracket.

Now I can take care of my mom for taking care of me. Which is great, like the American Dream, like it really is possible to dig yourself out. But I wouldn't have been able to if I didn't have any help, at least not that young and naive. I wouldn't have had the wisdom or the ambition or the intuition on my own. My mom's the one who suggested I look into dosimetry in the first place. It makes me very sad to think of the millions of people who are stuck where they are because they can't get the help or opportunities I did. I am so very thankful for her. I feel like all the luck she could have had went to me instead.

The issue now though is that, having lost everything, she kind of broke. I'm all she really has left (my brother lives out of town), and I've been forced to move back in with her because she can't afford to live by herself and she doesn't want to move. She's become very difficult to live with and I feel very stuck. I think that's why I wrote all of this up, to remind myself of all that she has done for me so that, even though all I really want to do is move out, I can push myself on to keep supporting her. I'm just afraid that I might become unhappy in the process.

Portland

July 2013

My coworker was backing out of time off he had initially decided to take for a Fourth of July weekend and asked me if I would like to claim it instead. Sure, why not! It took a while for me to figure out what I wanted to do or who I would want to do whatever with, but I eventually landed on a road trip north to Portland. Hooray for spontaneity!

DAY ONE
My lovely mother agreed to go with me so that I wouldn't have to travel alone (I'm so not ready for that). It took about 9 hours to get there, driving through flat planes of farmland and weaving through mountains and past Shasta in Northern California. Through one stretch of Oregon, we were startled to find what looked like tumbleweed floating through the air. We were very confused. There were tufts of casually floating grass everywhere in the sky. I don't know either. But you'll know when you're really in Oregon because everything is suddenly so green. It rains much more in Oregon than it does in California, so the plants are very happy and they show it. I would love to live in Oregon some day, maybe in retirement.

We arrived earlier than we expected, so we decided to let our first visit be to Multnomah Falls, a couple of miles east from Portland. It's a very popular destination, and since it was also July 4th, it was a holiday and therefore very crowded. A really cool place where you can view the wonders of nature (a very tall waterfall) without having to hike at all to see it. It's just off of the freeway with loads of parking, a gift shop, and a cafe. There's the option to hike up to the top of the waterfall too, but I wasn't about to go up that far.

Afterwards, we dropped off our stuff at the hotel and visited downtown's charming Pearl District with both high end indie stuff and homeless people areas. Not really sure what to think about that, but it was really hard to find a place to eat on the Fourth of July.

DAY TWO
The next morning, we got up early to make our way to the famous Voodoo Doughnuts. A line out the door didn't surprise me, but it did surprise me that the line also started at the door, so it was pretty misleading. The doughnuts were well worth the wait, as they were superiorly delicious and creative flavor-wise. Their main staple would the the Voodoo doughnut, a raspberry filled in the shape of a voodoo doll and shanked with a pretzel stick. The other must-have is the maple bacon (oh my god) bar. Yes, bacon. On the maple bar. It was like eating a bacon maple sweet pancake breakfast to go. I really liked the butterfinger doughnut, too.

Next we visited Washington Park where the Japanese garden and Rose garden reside among a crap ton of other things. The hills in this park are forested with these tall canopy trees that are amazing to be under. It feels very secluded. Roses don't interest me very much, but the Japanese garden was immaculate. I couldn't put my camera down!

If you want a great view of the city of Portland, visit Pittock Mansion just up the road from Washington Park. There's a nice area with benches to sit there for a while, or you could pay to go inside the mansion, which I didn't bother doing myself.

Leaving Pittock Mansion, we weren't really sure what to do next, but were heading west anyway, and eventually thought, hey, why not keep going all the way to the coast? The drive was very pretty and hilly and forested, and we eventually made it to Seaside where we got out of the car and visited some of the shops along the beach. A huge statue of Lewis and Clark alerted us to the fact that this very spot was the end of their adventure across the country.

We didn't want to drive back the same way, so we headed a little bit North to Astoria first before going east again. My mom told me that this town Astoria was where they filmed the movie The Goonies. Pretty sweet, but I didn't really recognize anything in particular. By the time we got home we were pooped, especially my mom who prefers to be the driver.

DAY THREE
In the morning we visited Portland's famous Saturday Market. Lots of craft and food booths pop up all over downtown along the Willamette river and you could literally spend hours there trying to visit all the tents. My feet definitely hurt and we had to quit early. Some of my favorite booths involved woodworking or blown glass pieces, but my mom's favorite was a guy who made chains and inspired her to learn how to make them herself.

Our last adventure in Portland was stationed at the Leach Botanical Garden. The garden feels very secluded, but it's actually in the middle of town, which is kind of disorienting. It's very beautiful, and often hosts wedding receptions, but allows visitors to tour the grounds where a stream cuts through forested areas. If Oregon wasn't so beautifully lush and green, it probably wouldn't have felt as magical as it did.

We made our way down to Salem that day in order to spare us an hour of driving the following day on our way back home. And good thing too, because our bed in Portland had a bed-ridden-morbidly-obese-man-sized dent on my mom's side.

Double Feature

I'm going to try to see two movies in theaters this weekend. Yay!

Divergent

Because I read the book, I have to see the movie, of course. The trailer looks okay, but I'm pretty happy that Kate Winslet got the role of Jeanine. I have a feeling that is a pretty solid casting. I don't know much about Shailene Woodley or Theo James, and I'm hoping it won't turn out "Twilight-y". The only book-turned-movie I've ever been 100% happy with was Catching Fire. Which was FANTASTIC, by the way (Can I take this time to say that Sam Claflin looks really, really good as a blonde?).

The Grand Budapest Hotel

I didn't even hear about this film until last weekend when my mom was watching a behind-the-scenes preview sort of snippet on TV about it. It supposedly released earlier than today, but was not available at my local theaters until this weekend, according to my mom. Not quite sure that's true. The cinematography looks fantastic from what I can tell, the cast is star-studded, and the trailer seems to show a quirkiness reminiscent to Moonrise Kingdom and The Royal Tenenbaums. Unsurprisingly, all of these films are directed by the same person. It's been reviewed as 8.4/10 on IMDB, so I'm pretty excited. That high of a rating doesn't happen very often.

Norway

August 2000

When I was 11 years old, my fabled Grandma and Grandpa Tutu took my brother and me to a family reunion in Norway. Both of my grandparents grew up in Norway and met on the boat on the way to America. I don't quite remember how long we stayed there, but we went up and down the country visiting relatives and ended up sleeping in the car during their visits a lot of the time from jet lag. Many Norwegians knew English, thank goodness, so we could converse fairly well. My very first impression of Norway was made when I realized you are never allowed to turn right when the stoplight is red. Safety first.

One of the places we stayed at belonged to a relative of some kind who was very old but very fit and looked at least 20 years younger than he was. He built beautiful, quality log homes for a living, as well as a small hut outside his own home just for my brother and I to stay in while we were there, which fit two single beds and a nightstand. He built his own home, which featured a hot tub sunken in flush to the floor in middle of the living room. We got to use it with bubble bath solution and it overflowed with bubbles enough that I had a hard time peeking my face out over the mass of it.

We played soccer with some distant cousins on a field outside a cottage with a barn and boysenberry farm residing on an island called Kalvøya ("Calf Island") whose only road into it closed up with the rising tide. That may have been my favorite place. Looking at an aerial map of it today makes me question this memory, but a lot of things can change in 14 years. Kalvøya also happened to be the first place I ever tasted Nutella, my one true love, my dear, my only. Since I had learned numbers up to ten in Norwegian, I helped my grandma dial the telephone to call relatives as she read out the numbers to me in Norwegian. En, tu, tre, fita, fem, secs, sieve, otta, ni, ti. 

We also attempted to swim in a fjord at some point, but it was so desperately cold even in the summer that all I could do was dip my toe in and yelp. I envied a group of native boys who jumped in off of a boulder without even thinking about it. The indoor pool halls were much more appropriate for me, though I managed to slip on the tile climbing out of the pool and my right elbow landed on grout only to start bleeding profusely everywhere and it took days for my elbow to be insensitive to the slightest pressure. I still have the scar to this day. 

We had boat rides through the fjords, visited the famous Vigeland Sculpture Park (ever seen the meme with the guy throwing/kicking babies off of himself?), a dog show one of my relatives participated in with her canine, the Norwegian Royal Palace in Oslo, and were often served a Norwegian delicacy that tasted like it was really just a broth soup with hot dogs in it. It was really delicious for kids though as you can probably imagine. 

The Tutu's

My paternal grandparents spent a lot of time with my brother and me when we were kids since we were their only ever grandkids. I'm sure at some point they had insisted on us calling them the Tutu's, because that's all I've ever done. Grandma and Grandpa Tutu. I'm under the impression it has a Hawaiian meaning. We all did take a trip to Hawaii once when I was too young to remember, but my grandpa tends to bring up often that I would tug on his shirt and squeal "ocean!" to him. He taught me a Hawaiian handshake I still remember. I also ate sand. Because toddlers eat everything. I learned my lesson.


We did travel many places together but spent most of the summers at their home in Arizona where we swam nearly every day. They tried to teach us tennis, but I was always terrible at it, lobbing the ball almost over the back fence every time I bothered trying. My grandma later told me when I was more grown up that I had once said to her that she was my favorite family member because she always gave me what I wanted. That probably meant Kraft macaroni & cheese and sour cream & onion flavored Pringles.


We took road trips from California up to Washington and over to Montana where my uncle's cabin is, listening to sing-alongs all the way there, which we loved. My grandparents used to live in Washington so we stayed a few days with a friend of theirs who had a house on one of the lakes near Seattle and a small yelping dog. We also stopped at what it felt like was either in Spokane or somewhere in Idaho at a farm with some cows I had scared and some kittens I had cuddled. Over in Montana, we stayed for 8 weeks of the summer attending a kids camp only to have our mom crush us in a suffocating death hug when we stepped off of our return flight.


My grandpa took us out on a boat to fish and enjoy the sun, and they got us bicycles to ride over the gravel roads and left a sprinkler on in the backyard for us to run through in our bathing suits. My brother even witnessed a moose stick its head in through the window! Montana is beautiful in the summer, but one winter we enjoyed our first white Christmas. We took out some sleds to find good hills to slide down, though I remember being very timid about participating.


Twice we drove down into Mexico to a place called San Carlos. My grandparents owned a condo there and it has a swimming pool we used pretty much every day, too. My brother and I noticed a bunch of dead rollie pollies on the bottom of the pool that we decided to collect and pile onto the edge of the pool, only to be distraught by their sudden disappearance the following morning. One time my grandpa took us to the beach where my brother and I swam and he fished. When I was swimming a bit far out, his hook caught my skin and I panicked but unleashed it off of me and didn't bother telling anyone about it because I was too embarrassed.

While we were away from home, my grandma would help me write letters to my mom to let her know how and what we were doing. She's the one who taught me how to write postal information on an envelope. My mom kept all of my letters apparently, stashed in a drawer in her bedroom among other mementos from my childhood. We're a very sentimental, nostalgic family.

PS: It's my kittens' first birthday tomorrow. I wanted to get them tiny party hats, but couldn't find even regular party hats anywhere.

Michael Fassbender

I finally drew a new portrait last weekend. It's relieving that it at least turned out well enough, and I remembered to take work in progress shots just for funziez. Enjoy Michael Fassbender! Mmm...

First I contour an outline of general features. This is when I use my light box and grid to stay in proportion. If you want to know more about it, visit my Portrait Commissions tab above. I go into it with a bit more detail.

Next I'll try to add in the shadows and more details. I like to spend a lot of time on the eyes and lips, sometimes using black ink instead of pencil for the darkest regions like the pupil. The nose tends to be the most difficult facial feature for me to draw because it doesn't necessarily have very distinct lines like eyes do.

          

Once I'm fairly comfortable with how the face is coming out, I start filling in the hair to get a better idea of how the finished product may look. I'll add details to the hair at its edges, like stray and flyaway hairs around the face or on the top or side of the head. Michael Fassbender didn't need a whole lot of details to the hair because he had it smoothed out for the photograph. He's classy like that.

A lot of the times nowadays, I don't finish darkening in the hair because it's so time consuming and by the time I'm working on the hair, my hand is sore and cramping from overuse as I tend to want my portraits finished in one sitting. So instead, I would take a picture of the drawing, load it into Photoshop, and fill it in there. I also use Photoshop to adjust the brightness/contrast and white/black levels of the image to make it look as good as it can.

Las Vegas

October 2013

If drunken people, prostitution, and gambling is what you think of when you hear the words "Las Vegas", you're right. It wasn't for me. Instead of partaking in these shenanigans, my friends and I went to see Absinthe, the Bellagio Fountains, and particularly City and Colour at the House of Blues.

They were amazing. Dallas Green sounds live just as he does in the recording booth. Also randomly awesome, House of Blues was cool enough to re-gram my photo of City and Colour on Instagram. 

My friends and I were standing near a group of girls who ended up being there primarily for the opening band, The Paper Kites, and left when City and Colour came on in order to meet them outside. 

To be fair, the Australian band is pretty legit even live, when I heard this song "Bloom" for the first time.
I don't get to see my friends very often. We all met each other in San Antonio when I was in school for dosimetry and went our separate ways. I'm very glad we keep in touch often, and we're making it a habit of seeing each other (hopefully) at least once a year. This year we'll be meeting up in Seattle to see Young the Giant. I'm really excited!

Perfect Man

You know that feeling you get when someone you find incredibly attractive comes into the room and you suddenly can't focus on anything you were doing and you're hyper sensitive about where that person is in the room and what they're saying and you JUST CAN'T?

Now imagine that feeling if the person isn't just very, very attractive, but pretty much the most perfect sample of humanity you've ever met.

Meet David, M.D.
Tall, handsome, Adonis body, deep voice, fantastic eyes and smile, full head of chestnut brown hair with flecks of grey at his temples, speaks fluent Spanish and German (who knows what else), athletic (he surfs on the weekends and works out a bunch), adorably goofy, very funny, incredibly smart (he's a doctor, hello), successful, a huge flirt...

THIS MAN. Dear God, this man. I work with him. It literally took me months, MONTHS, to be able to be in the same room with him without hyperventilating and sweating profusely and blushing crimson when he speaks to me. I'm certain he noticed that I'm terribly attracted to him, because he's been smiling and winking at me ever since. Sorry everyone, I regret to inform you that this will lead nowhere productive for me: he is married. With children. You can't really expect a perfect man to be passed over by any woman. But it's sure fun to fantasize! Especially after starting to watch Grey's Anatomy last weekend.

One of the more recent encounters I had with him involved a pretty strange stunt on his part. I was sitting at my cubicle and he came by to say hi and then suddenly jumped up on the threshold of the cubicle and held himself up towards the ceiling as he said, "I like doing this." That being a really weird thing to do, I was speechless as you can imagine, but also because it tugged at his tucked shirt and I could see the outline of his torso really well (yup, I was staring). He went and did something else afterwards, and I was still too shocked to do anything until I laughed to myself all the way back home.

Sadly, and also relievingly, he will be completing his residency in June or July and shall be moving away where I will in all likelihood never see him again. I will miss him, but I will not miss the distraction. Pretty sure I'm going to need a photo, though. Yes. Yeah. Mmmm...

Perfect Commercial

I don't drink a whole lot or anything, but this commercial is kind of perfect. I was reminded about it recently going through my liked videos on YouTube and seeing the Old Spice guy.



No, you're not imagining things! His shirt really did disappear for a moment.