Volume up for this one
No volume for the following one. I forgot to add this to the one above. This one actually occured before the above one. I recorded it the morning before.
Month: March 2024
Tree Trees Green
According to a DNA test I did a few years ago, I’m 9% Irish. So today, St Paddy’s Day, I did some math and figured I should spend 9% of my day celebrating it. So for at least 2.25 hours this evening I hung out at the good old Eltham Pub with folk music and Irish tunes from the nephew and co. There was food, friends, drinks and laughs… lots of laughs when Brodie Buttons sang his highly educational Mary-Jane song and a table of old folks pulled prune faces and left. And now I know exactly when to plant and when to harvest if I ever want to grow a crop hidden in the bush. Haha. I recall visiting one of their past homes one day and at the back of the vege patch was a huge wall of the special stuff. He’s definitely got a green thumb, that young man.
I got to thinking on the way home about my DNA test and how I’d like to get Brodie to write me a song about “If you want to be my lover, you’ve got to get a DNA test”, cause I could be related to anyone up here thanks to a great grandfather being a local travelling salesman. And I could also be related to folks around Newcastle thanks to a grandfather being a High School Head Master and my father having a doppelganger who grew up a few suburbs over from him. At least I know I’m definitely related to the 3 above mentioned males because I’ve got strong DNA matches to people in their family trees. Buuuuut, I’m not having any kids with anyone so maybe being related and not knowing won’t be a problem. Haha.
About 2 years ago my rather aged Uncle learned that his dad wasn’t his father, but that he was the son of a famous aboriginal tightrope walker from Lismore. Being a very religious man he wasn’t so happy about the shock discovery, but my cousin has been having fun exploring it all. Sometimes you just can’t be sure who your father is. Haha. I’m not related to the circus fella, but it’s now part of my family story. Watching to below ABC video and seeing the photos, I swear its like looking at my uncle when I was a wee-tacker. He used to look almost identical.
“You’ve got three minutes”
Today I decided to go check out a ‘sketch club’ thing. I had to bring my own art supplies and just do whatever with whatever was presented to us.
I knew I would only get so many minutes to draw before the model moved, but I didn’t realise how quickly the minutes was when your brain wants to get details right. You just can’t do details. Like faces or fabric folds. I learnt that the hard way.
Here’s a few of my first attempts. There were a few more with scribbles through them like the middle image from frustration. Haha.
After trying and failing to sketch realistically, I decided to play with the shapes I could see the bodies make. Btw, all models were fully clothed.
Then after taking a break and deciding to just do whatever first came to my mind, I came up with these two to finish off the session. The hare-person actually started out as a woman with a weird paper hat. And the last one for the day was playing with light and shadow whilst restricting myself to moving my pencil side to side only.
So that was a bit of fun in the end, even if the first half was definitely not fun. Haha. I think I’ll have to go to sketch club again.
It was interesting to see what I could produce when restricted to three minutes. A mess mostly, but also exploration of ability and imagination.
Message for Europa
Woah! This is cool. I hadn’t even heard of this mission till this morning. I might not do ‘news’ but I am subscribed to NASA and JPL on YouTube, but I just haven’t bothered checking out their posts in a while… till I saw the image for this one today.
Message
I wish I’d seen this earlier so I could have my name on the list going to Europa, but anyway, at least my name should be going to the Moon and Mars still.
—
And now for something self-related to destroy this cool post. Haha.
It was a strange sequence of thoughts that led me to discovering this ‘message in a bottle’. When I woke this morning and worked through my morning thoughts, plans for the day and memories of yesterday, a song appeared in my mind and got caught up there. This song triggered the memory of a realistic dream I’d had this very night.
It was a wowser of a dream. I only remember it as a moment. It was a very normal moment for me too. The crazy part was that in that normal moment I recalled a memory of something happening in the past as if it really had happened, but in real life it has not. The memory helped me make a decision in that dream moment. I am not going into the details, but I did end up quickly grabbing my computer and writing down what I could recall. Is it called ‘writing it down’ when I’m really ‘typing it up’?
At first I hadn’t realised the song in my head triggered the dream remembrance. After writing it all down I went to grab my morning coffee and the song returned to my mind. When I get songs in my head like that, I try to recall the lyrics of the bit that repeats and figure out how the song got there in the first place. Then I look at the song lyrics as a whole. I’m a bit of a lyricophile. So here I was making a coffee and singing the song aloud now, when I realised the words I was singing related to the dream. That was when I realised the tune in my head caused me to recall the dream.
I rushed off to find my phone and check out the lyrics (not trusting my memory for some reason even though I knew every word). I played it on spotify first. Then I thought about watching the old video clip for it. I didn’t quite get there, for as I opened YouTube a suggested video on a channel I’m subscribed to got my attention instead. It was related to the dream in a way and my mind was wandering that direction, so I followed my mind and clicked the suggestion. The next suggestion was from another subscribed channel, NASA, for the above first video. I got lost in the wonder of it.
I love working with themes myself, so really loved the way they played with the water theme. I mean, hey, how clever is the idea of ‘sound’ waves as part of the water theme.
So as I drift on into a cloudy Sunday, I share with you a song that continues to swirl around my mind.
Now To Morrow 