Fine Art by Fine People

We didn't end up doing a whole lot while our friends were in town.  Aside from feasting, we did a lot of that, and did a good job if I may say so myself.  Not everyone was in 100% physical condition immune system-wise.  Also Katie has a long term project in the works that requires her to abstain from certain adults only activities like drinking beers or margaritas.  It's a baby project and I'm really excited that she's half done.

Anyway, she suggested we work on some animal projects yesterday, so I brought up a stack of magazines and my favorite giant, sturdy watercolor paper.  Then we went to town on ripping out pictures for potential Fine Ass Art.

We'll start with Felix, who put the serious hurt on several Cat Fancy covers.  I only requested that he keep his paws and Fiskars off my dang centerfolds.  I have big evil plans for those.  In the end, he only used one with powerful effect.



Yes it says I kill mice, and something like mrrtrre, which is obviously how the word MURDERER should be spelled.  The skull on his shirt is a mouse skull, and the other one is just a badass cat skull.

Katie's might be my favorite.  I believe she raided a 1984 copy of National Geographic featuring manatees on the cover (sooo cute!) and a Cat Fancy.  That poodle is gold.  PURE GOLD.  I tell you what.



Oh man, I can't get enough.  I edited it a little and made it look like an old timey picture.  Katie approved.  And she left it here for me because she's awesome like that.

And for mine, I used an elk basking in fiery colored fall foliage and some model from a magazine.  Boom!



Also a little butterfly action for good measure.

Ok, this post was a total life diversion from what I promised myself I'd be doing, which is going down to the basement and starting work on a few new small wallets.  I'm doing a super business-y meetup in Denver tomorrow so HB can plaster itself on Denver just a little harder.  All business, no best friends gyro meat feasts.  That last part was a lie!  Super best friends month isn't ending in September!  Remember kids, friends that gyro together stay together.

Cat Business As Usual + A Tricked Out Fire Device

I've been on a blogging break because I haven't had anything to blog about except maybe cleaning my house, and I wasn't good enough to remember to take horrifying before pictures.  So my house is clean-ish.  I'm not done, but it's looking good!

My girl Katie and her husband Rob have been visiting since last Wednesday, and we've been having an awesome time petting kitties and feasting.



Jezebel has been super lovey dovey lately.





We have also had several visits from Big Bad Bertha, also known as Bowie's cousin, instigator of all cat drama at Skull Mansion this summer.



I didn't get any super clean pictures of her because she is nonstop on the move to pet herself all over everybody and anybody.



She is so cute.  A glorious beast for sure!

Let's see, what else?



Felix caught a beetle at Waneka Lake and gave it a ride halfway around the lake.  We pet some dogs and stuff.

Today we did some super boss collage crafts.  You know, animal heads on human bodies, a little watercolor and sharpie.  The usual.  I'll share pictures of those soon, but I'll leave you with my project pride and joy.  It only took a few minutes, which makes it the best kind of project if you ask me.  You're asking, right?



Behold!  I pimped my fire.  I pimped it so hard that it now owes me a debt of gratitude for how cool it is.  That subscription to Cat Fancy is paying off in ways I never thought possible.  You can have one too if you find a sweet cat picture and simply Mod Podge it onto a PFD (personal fire device).

Happy Friday!

I hope everyone has a luxurious weekend planned.




Ain't no luxury like a boulder lounger, right?  I dragged my family out for a hike on Labor Day weekend.  I read that it wasn't that hard, but it turns out that it was pretty strenuous, with something like a 1400 foot elevation gain.  We did it slow and steady and encountered a mountain rescue after someone hurt their ankle.





Totally worth it!  Anywho, my plans for the weekend including cleaning (pretty much all I've been doing this week), the library book sale tomorrow, possibly the Pirate Con (haven't quite decided if I'm up to paarrrrty), and probably more cleaning.

Today I'm meeting Laura at the airport.  It turns out our awesome friend Liz from high school is also having a Denver airport layover this afternoon, so this airport business is turning into a glorious reunion!

Sasquatch Hunting 2013 Part 3

I think this shall be my final installment of the Sasquatch series.  While it pains me to say that we did not in fact meet up with Sasquatch, we were lucky enough to encounter a variety of other creatures.  I already told you about the spawning salmon, and I'd now like to introduce you to our friendly neighborhood porch bat, Batthra.  Pronounce Bat-thra.



One afternoon we discovered that the porch had become a resting place for our nighttime bug-eating ally.  Luckily enough, Laura has two porches and two doors, so we simply started using the other one in case Batthra had rabies or some shit.  The morning after we discovered her, I checked, and she was still there.  Then sometime IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY, she left.  Whatchyoo flying in the day for, Batthra?  Probably gots the rabies.  Or else she moved to the barn in the neighbor's yard, which is what we had been telling her to do.

For my very last day in Washington, I requested a trip to the old growth forrest to see some BIG ASS trees.  The old growth forrest is just that, old and growy.  We only hiked in for a few minutes before we encountered a skronked up wasps' nest in the middle of the trail.  Laura suffered her first ever bee sting this summer, and apparently there is a such thing as ground hornets or whatever that be stinging the shit out of people who go off trail.  We decided to stop there and make do with whatever big ass trees that were in our immediate vicinity.



Here is a big ass tree.



Here's me by the big ass tree for reference.



Here are some dead big ass trees.  They call these nurse trees because there all kinds of baby trees growing out of them.



Then Laura remembered that I had pointed out some BIG ASS trees on our way home from hiking the day before, and took me to a "secret" place with giant cedars.  She works at the visitor center, and said they don't mention this place much to outsiders.  She'd never actually been there herself.  It indeed had the big ass cedars, as well as a little trail to the river.  The river here looked glorious, straight out of a fairy tale or some shit.  It was also conveniently located above Nooksack falls, the end of the road for the salmon on account of they can't make it up a waterfall that size.  So no dead bodies or salmon infestation.  We took our shoes off and did some wading in the freezing cold glacier run off river.



Oh look, it's me in the crotch of a stand of big ass cedars.  Please note my cool new look.  Leggings rolled up, boots on with giant man socks pooling out of the top.  I know how to work it forrest-style.

Then I decided we better stop at Nooksack falls because we had to drive by it on our way home anyway.





Here is a not good picture of us at the falls.

Then we hung out at home for a while before taking one last trip to the river to see if we could call forth our Bald Eagle amigos, using unsecured poodle bait.



Butter was running around while I shot this, and if you blow it up and look closely, he's in this picture several times!

Alas, no eagles answered our calls.  Then of course Laura said she saw three on her way home from dropping me off at the airport!  Blast!!

I have a few more random out of context pictures to share before I wrap this thing up for good.



Magical yawning Little Kitty.  Laura's friend got this cat a few years ago, and he happens to leave town every summer.  That's when Laura gets kitty custody.  I've happened to be lucky enough to coincide my visits with Little Kitty's presence that last couple times I've been there.  Apparently LK's other owner calls her by a different name, Shuksan, after this pretty mountain here.



She is a tree climbing beast and I love her.

One day at the river I set my camera up on a timer for a breast friends forever picture.  Just as I sat down, the timer went off as a bird crapped on Laura's head.  Then I had to wash it out before we could proceed to retakes.





Here's a good one I obviously edited heavily.  I'm addicted to phone apps, ok?

I think that ought to do it!  Laura just informed me that her trip home to South Dakota to visit her family this Friday includes a 5 hour layover at the Denver airport, so I'm crazy excited to go hang out with her and have airport fun times in a couple days!  Reunited so soon!

And Felix is back in school today, just in time before I went completely crazy.  Now I better try to do some more entertaining stuff so I can have crap to write about here.

Sasquatch Hunting 2013 Part 2

Ok, where was I?  Mountain hiking?  OK!

So we drove up to the end of the road, and by up, I mean up.  The switchbacks were pretty hardcore.  I'm kind of scared of heights (mostly plummeting to my death), and the drop off on the edge of the road was pretty yikes-y.  However, one of the best parts of this hike was instant glorious mountain scenery.  We practically could have just sat in the parking lot for four hours and still had tons of majesty to take in.  But we didn't.



Here's a panorama of Laura on the trail.  What you can't tell from this is that the trail is on the side of a mountain, and it's pretty much straight down to the valley.



The hills were somewhat covered in subalpine wildflowers and blueberries, on which we feasted like kings.  Butter also is good at finding his own blueberry snacks.  He'd run ahead, and we'd eventually catch up to him with his face in a blueberry bush.



I think that's Mount Shuksan.



Here's Laura on the trail approaching the first lake we encountered.  It was tiny and peaceful.  We had to hike through that rock field to get there, but it was magical.



We ate our lunch here, and I told Laura about how Nana used to love carrots.  So we fed Butter carrots and psyched ourselves up to hike on to the next lake.



I think this one is called Iceberg lake.  It was bigger, and the water was a crystal, tropical blue (although I'm sure it was cold as shit).  We perched on top of a climbable Boulder with poodle in tow!





Another hiking party walked by, and we heard one of them say, "What is that?" And someone replied, "I think it's a poodle.  A dirty white poodle."  They won the prize of getting to gaze up on us while we fancied ourselves a couple of washed up mermaids with our poodle sidekick.





At this point we were getting tired and still had a long way to hike back, and decided to head for home.

Coming in part 3, more river action, creatures, and giant trees in the mossy forest.  If you click on my panoramas, you can see them much bigger on flickr.

Sasquatch Hunting 2013 Part 1

Before I get into the incredible awesomeness of my Washington trip, I just want to address the issue of the flood here in Colorado.  We do live in Boulder County, but my home and my family are totally safe in Lafayette.  There is most definitely messed up shit around us, but we have not been personally impacted aside from the fact that Felix hasn't been in school since last Wednesday and school is still canceled until this Wednesday at the latest.  He's driving me nuts, but that's just how it goes.  I almost never ever watch the news, but I've found myself tearing up sometime after 5 every night.  Everything the news shows looks absolutely nuts, but it just looks wet and rainy at my house.  

Anyway.

I got home last Wednesday from visiting my best girl Laura in the northwest corner of Washington.  She lives in a small town on a highway dead ending at a mountain, where cell phones don't work, and has the best nature ever.

Laura has a crazy poodle named Butter (yep!).  Laura and Butter hooked up a little more than 8 years ago, right before I moved to Holland to become international lovers together forever with Chainsaw.  Anyway, that poodle has a lot of energy and requires daily trips to the river.  The river behind her house is approximately a five minute walk through the forest from her house.  We made multiple trips to the river from many different access points. 

It's salmon spawning season, which means the rivers are full of salmon making their pilgrimage to the place of their birth to procreate after several years at sea.  Then they die.  If they didn't already die on their trip.  Dead bodies galore!

In that case, our first stop was a hike up to a point in the river Laura called "The Aquarium."  Earlier in the summer it was her swimming hole, but these days it's full of monster salmon taking a breather before continuing up the rapids.

This is also at the aquarium.  Laura told me that rocky area she's standing by is full of fossils.  In fact, she said, "I dare you to pick up a rock right there and have it not be a fossil."  I found a couple to spite her, but she was right!

There's a pair of bald eagles that live by the river by her house, and I was lucky enough to put my eyes on the pair together twice and one of them alone once.  I didn't get any good pictures, but it was super awesome to bask in their eagle glory!

One day we drove up to the end of the highway to do some hiking, stopping at Picture Lake for some... pictures.  This is the first time I've been to Picture Lake and found it actually doing its job.  We snagged some fellow lake viewers to take some best friends forever pictures of us.

Please note that we are both wearing our 2013 official birthday shirts.  

This is getting long, and I have tons more pictures and stories to share, so I think I'm going to cut off here for part 1.  Please enjoy this picture of Little Kitty lounging seductively until we meet again.  I'll be back soon with piles of majesty to feast your eyes on.

Sasquatch Hunting

Yes, it's true.  I'm leaving tomorrow to go on an extensive mission to search for Big Foot.  Or you could call it going to visit my best girl Laura in Washington, whatever.



We've got big plans like watching for bald eagles (pretty much guaranteed!!!), fossil hunting, hiking, watching the salmon spawn, disc golf, and of course, Sasquatch hunting!

I'll be back in a week with an adventure update.  I'm even going to bring my good camera!  I'm leaving my shop open, but I won't be shipping orders until next Thursday, September 12.