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Artist, writer, unapologetic progressive, LGBTQ+ ally
A super easy way to keep up with your old pal Katy is to subscribe to my newsletter!
Artist, writer, unapologetic progressive, LGBTQ+ ally
My friend Arushi owns a publishing company and she entrusts me with designing some of her books. Right now I’m working on one for diabetes. These are four cover concepts I’ve come up with. Thoughts and feedback are welcome.
If you have to work in an office, wouldn’t it be great to work in one that looked like this? I bet you didn’t know that each year, November 19 is World Toilet Day. In celebration, you can attend the World Toilet Summit: A major world conference devoted to toilet provision and standards, the Summit sees delegates from all over the world attending conferences, experts’ forums, seminars, toilet exhibitions, network meetings and amazing toilet tours. Heck, I’m all for working to provide better sanitation to the underpriveleged, and perhaps convincing certain cultures to dispense with the astounding habit of using one’s left hand to wipe one’s bum instead of toilet paper. I just didn’t know there was an organization devoted to all things potty. You know the “In a world….” guy? The guy who does all the movie trailers, like “In a world, where nightmares come true…” Oh yeah, you are thinking, THAT guy! Well, there’s him and like four other guys who do all that kind of voiceover work. Check out this video on YouTube where they all get together. I had a hard time connecting the images of real live human beings talking with their voices, but as soon as I closed my eyes it was crystal clear. Kind of like when I see someone like Seth Green or Dan Castellaneta talking, I can’t really hear any of their characters’ voices but as soon as I close my eyes I can. Weird! Also: I made my first lolcat! I can’t say that I completely understand the phenomenon, probably because I’m too old to have caught this wave when it started. This one is Bob’s cat Marley:
It seems like my dreams about tornadoes come and go in cycles. I’m in a cycle now where I’m having them frequently. The latest one I can remember involved me and Doc driving south down Plano road, nearly to our house. I saw a big tornado headed our way in the rearview mirror and so recklessly drove the rest of the way to the house, running red lights and all. We screeched into the garage, ran inside, and started gathering things to take to shelter, including the cats in their carriers. In the garage we had a doorway to a set of stairs leading down to a basement, very similar to my parents’ garage stairs to the attic (except down, not up, of course). I flung open the door and suddenly remembered that we were storing a lot of stuff for my parents while they were between houses. Three or four tall bookcases full of books and boxes and junk were piled haphazardly halfway down the staircase, to where it was impossible to get past them into the basement. I found a space for the cat carriers to sit and determined that Doc and I would probably be safe even part way down the stairs. But it was taking so long to gather things, I couldn’t believe that the tornado hadn’t already hit us. I felt this incredible sense of urgency, like it could happen any minute and we were just wasting time trying to think what we should carry downstairs with us. Like most of my dreams, the tornado never actually hits. I just experience the fear and urgency beforehand.
Any ideas what this is? It came from a tree, and it’s about 3/4″ in diameter.
Last night Doc and I spent nearly an hour driving around after midnight attempting to find a drugstore that was still open. We were looking for some sort of over-the-counter medication for his raging migraine headache. Yes, he’s now getting migraines in addition to clusters, sometimes at the same time. It’s unbelievably sucky. Seriously, can the man be in any more pain? Pain piled on top of pain on top of pain. I would not let him drive himself around at the level of hurting he was at, so I pulled on some pants and my glasses and hopped in the driver’s seat. We went to six places before we found one that was open (note to self: Remember, CVS at Walnut Hill and 75 is open 24 hours). Next task: to find out if Excedrin really IS “the headache medicine.”
Saturday Doc and I went out to Fort Worth to see the Ron Mueck sculpture exhibit at the Modern. This…
To continue with Katy’s Habit Of Injuring Herself, Though Thankfully Not As Badly As In 2006, today I received about a dozen mosquito bites in 5 minutes, probably now have poison ivy again despite being unbelievably careful while trimming it off my back fence, and also I burned my finger on a hot skillet while making dinner. And I have a headache, possibly becoming migrainey in nature. Waaaah. Poor me.
As a professional designer of web sites and e-mail communications, I think it’s very important to adhere to standards. Any designer worth her salt uses the best tools for the job and keeps up with the evolution of standards as defined by the W3C. That’s why I’ve spent years learning to write beautiful, lean, mean, efficient standards-adherent CSS and HTML. One of the thorns in designers’ sides is having to write “fixes” into our code to make up for Internet Explorer’s failings. With the recent release of Internet Explorer 7, a number of those failings were corrected and so we had hope that perhaps Microsoft was finally coming around and using W3C standards and stopping the crazy cycle of developing “standards” of its own, the equivalent of taking its toys from the Internet sandbox and going home. HOWEVER. Oh, and do I mean HOWEVER. With the recent release of the Outlook 2007 e-mail program for PCs (and by recent I mean January… yes, I am a little behind), Microsoft decided not to include the newly developed Internet Explorer 7 HTML rendering engine and instead to use the Word engine to render HTML in emails. The non-standards-compliant, circa-1997-ish Word rendering engine. A huge percentage of people use PCs, and a large percentage of those users use Outlook as their primary e-mail program, and that means that Microsoft has effectively taken e-mail design back a decade. How can designers NOT comply with these arbitrary rules set by the maker of the most popular email program on the planet? We have to. We are forced to play their game, and write bad code to accommodate this brand new, horribly crippled e-mail program, otherwise a majority of our users would receive e-mails that look like shit. And e-mails that look like shit make users […]
I love all the rain we’ve been having lately. I think it’s precipitated to some degree almost every single day for the past month, which is unheard of in Texas, especially considering that for the past several years we’ve been living under drought conditions. The rain has also kept the temperatures down; normally it’s in the upper 90s by now, but we’ve been holding in the mid to upper 80s. Steamy, but a little cooler than usual. However, you know who else also loves all this rain? Mosquitos. I have never experienced mosquito infestations like we have right now. I can’t even go out to get the mail without being eaten alive. I mentioned some time last month that I went jogging one morning and was attacked and followed by a cloud of mosquitos. This happened to me again yesterday evening as Doc and I went for a walk. Eventually I just strolled boldly down the middle of streets instead of on the sidewalks, to be as far away from grass as possible. Doc said that every time we passed near an area where they were hanging out, he could see them approach the backs of my legs, flying in formation to the strains of the Imperial March from Star Wars. He acted as my rear guard and smashed any that landed on me. I still managed to end up with a couple dozen bites on my legs, face, and arms. His cotton full body armor kept him relatively bite-free. I wonder if I have West Nile virus?