Sunday, March 30, 2008

Sorry!

It's been a while, hasn't it? I was lax about updating the old blog for a long time, but then have had two people tell me, recently, that they actually do check in here to see what I'm up to. Honestly, there hasn't been all that much going on this month, but we have been up to a few things.

Early in March, we took the Clipper up to Victoria for a long weekend, to celebrate our 15th anniversary. Yes, we've been married fifteen years...it amazes even me sometimes. I've gotta say, even after that long, my husband is still my best friend, and if anything, I love the guy more now than ever before.

We had a great time there; we stayed at the Empress, and of course had High Tea there. We ate dinner there one evening too - a wonderful, wonderful meal in a truly gorgeous setting. And we spent plenty of time tromping around the city, trying various beers, doing some shopping, and - my FAVORITE thing - we visited the Victoria Bug Zoo! They let you hold all kinds of interesting insects and critters; here's me holding an Australian Whip Scorpion. No worries; these aren't deadly.
Me and scorpion

The rest of March has been fairly uneventful. I finished the class I was taking, and have signed up for another for Spring quarter; this time a photography class. Should be interesting. I'm also teaching Intro to InDesign at the School of Visual Concepts again, starting in April. I haven't been as diligent as I'd like as far as drawing and painting, but I did do a couple of pastel sketches of animals on this quiet Sunday afternoon. Here's a surly tree porcupine.
Por que?

That's about it; I'm still employed, for those who know that my employer was recently going through some changes. In fact, I have been doing a few illustrations for them, too. It's remotely possible that you'll have seen some of them online, and some in papers around the country...here's one example (I did get permission to use these as portfolio pieces).



I did the drink, the little bee, and the honey-dripper as separate pieces, and a designer assembled the whole piece. This, I think, was a billboard. I have very little idea of where most of these ended up; I just brought them the drawings and they did whatever with them.


Here's the little bee close up; I like how he turned out:

I did several other little bees, and they may eventually end up being used somewhere else.

It was very fun doing illustrations for something "real," if you know what I mean. I should be doing some more soon, I'm told. I also did some that I don't think I can show yet, as the promotion isn't public. But I'll try to as soon as I can.

Anyway, things have been pretty good. Ah, another thing: we're having the last portion of our fence around the back yard finished in April: a gate that will provide us a totally fenced-in yard. And you know what that means! I'm hoping to adopt a dog some time soon after that. We want a young dog that's all right with cats, of course, and who won't bark or dig big holes in the garden. We plan to give him or her as much exercise, attention and training as we possibly can...I've been watching The Dog Whisperer and reading training books in preparation. I've wanted a dog since...well, for most of my adult life, and finally it looks likely. I'll post more when it happens. :)

That's it, friends! Keep in touch, and I'll try to do better.


EDITED 1/17/09: Hi there! I've noticed that a LOT of people come to this page, and I think it's because they found this image (Bee Profile Final.jpg, above) on Google Image Search. I'm really curious what you were really looking for when you came here...can someone please email me and let me know? Most of the hits seem to come from Asia and the Middle East, so you may not be able to read this, but if you can, please email and let me know what you find interesting about my little bee! I'm super curious! Thanks! Email is: sonyaseattle -at- yahoo -dot- com. Or leave me a comment. Thanks!!

3 comments:

Shell said...

Nice pic of you, you look so...young. Aaargh. LOL

I wish we had done more tourist type things when we lived up there. Never did go up into Canada, didn't have a passport. :-( After the first year we moved up, I was somewhat immobile or actually bed bound, that made things tuff. Anyhoo, now we can come up there for vacations and do all the stuff we didn't get a chance to before. I guess I could ditto that for SF as well. LOL

That is awesome that you got some of your work published. I know what you mean, it' feels so validating to be able to point to something in print and say "I did that, I got paid for it too." ^^

Cute little bees, I love what they did with it. Odd they used a designer, since you are a designer too. I like how it looks like a chalk board.

Speaking of Starbucks, glad to hear your employment is not in jeopardy. Everytime I google for graphic design jobs, Microsoft in Redmond comes up. If you ever got sick of Starbucks, you could probly go there.

Woohoo, new fence. I sure hope you can get a great dog. Tiki was a rescue dog from the SPCA and has added SO much to my life I can't even begin to tell you. Luckily, she doesn't dig or bark and her poops are small. I would avoid retrievers as they tend to be diggers and will tear up a yard.

Nice to see you updating and YES I do check in.

P.S. Plz e-mail me at my msn, I crashed my pc and lost my address book. Need to add ppl back in.

ttyl, shell

Shell said...

Oh, I almost forgot to say Happy Anniv and congrats. 15 yrs is quite the milestone. It will be 14 for us this Aug. ^^

Oooh, I'm lovin' the Mac btw and now have RSS subscriptions to my Blogger friends. YES. Only downside is that Safar is not supported fully on dA or DS or MySpace, so I had to download Mozilla. They only went up to IE4 or 5 for Mac so that wouldn't help.

We crashed my Dell trying to install a cheapie digital tablet on it, J is still trying to retrieve the files from the hard drive, Got my art files and bookmarks transferred to the Minimac but not my word docs or address book. I had lots of HTML/CSS layout codes on that pc as well as some journals and poems. *sigh* Hope we can get it.

Anyhoo my dear, I will ttyl.

Happy painting!

Bernard said...

Hey, there's a bug zoo in Victoria? I didn't know that. Cool. And they let you hold the bugs? Now I have a real reason to visit there! :)

Happy Anniversary!