out of the blue

I sold my first piece of art!

The transaction was finished today, when I recieved a check from Kenlyn. She bought my Sunset Over St. Al's painting, and as the first buyer she got a nice price break. However, any of you who want to buy it will get an arbitrary price that involves work and price of printing, which may not be constant.

Anyway, it made me happy. Yeah, I'm a money-earning artist now! So, it's time for everyone to line up and spend their hard-earned money on my hard-crafted paintings. :)

I'm excited.

Peace!

Over the past two days I did something that I've been wanting to try for a while. That is, Use JavaScript (or something) to make a time-sensitive web page, whose color scheme changes based on the time of day. After a lot of work, I finally got it to be functional, and to look pretty good, if I do say so myself. There ARE a few differences between browsers, but for the most part it's pretty consistent on Firefox, IE, and Opera. There are a few issues I'm working out, but I'm done for now. Anyway, take a look:

( Time-Sensitive Javascript Site )

Today, a nice package I've been expecting came in the mail. A few days ago, I ordered a camera tripod from Amazon.com, for about 1/4th of the list price. So, for 15 dollars, I got a $60 tripod. I've been wanting a tripod for a while, so that I can cancel out the blurriness that my stupid hand makes when I try to take a picture, and now I can. The first thing I did (nearly), was taking a series of pictures around my room, and then piecing them together in Photoshop. I think I did a fairly good job of it. Tell me what you think!

Panorama of Smurf's Dorm

Lots of entries recently. A lot of interesting things have been happening, though. This is a two-subject entry, so I'll try to be brief.

Tonight was frisbee, from 10:00 to 11:00 in the dark. Only eight people showed tonight, so we had a nice game of four on four ultimate. And believe me, it was quite fitting it's name! Devon, who is (I think) the most experienced person who was there tonight, said that he couldn't remember playing such an intense game with that many players. I had a few awesome plays, and I think I did pretty well on defense for someone who hasn't played more than a few times since November. It made me happy.

On another note, Aaron is trying an interesting experiment. I'd try the same thing, except I like talking to people during the day. You see, Aaron has been staying up later and later recently (I was too, for the past week), and he realized that he gets much more work done late in the night, because nobody is up to distract him. So, he's going to try being nocturnal for a little while, and see how it works for him. This has a few downsides, like not being able to get dinner at the Cog, and having to set our dorm aside mostly as a sleeping chamber, but it ought to be interesting. I'll tell you how it goes.

On another note besides my crazy last post, something amusing happened this morning. I had just stayed up until 3 reading Lit, and then I woke up about an hour before my 8:00 class, for some reason. So, I got three hours of sleep. (I suppose you could have done the math, but the idea of journals isn't to think, right?) Having very little sleep often does very interesting things to my mind. So, I'm walking back from Physics, and I go through the outside doors into Crosby. The first thing that greets my sleep-befuddled eyes is a guy holding a bagel, walking towards the doors. For some reason, my mind understands that the guy is about 3 feet from me, but fails to realize that his food is attached to him; it manages to assume that the bagel is somewhere around 10 or 15 feet away. This caused me to see, for a fleeting instant, a bagel about the size of a basketball. That quickly changed from confusing me to amusing me in about half a second. It was quite fun.

There occurred today, in the region of Spokane, a very strange phenomenon, the likes of which I have never before encountered. Promptly following the end of Calculus,at approximately two of the clock, I began to perambulate in the direction of my dormitory. When I had traversed nearly one half of the distance between the two locations, my attention was siezed by something just on the edge of my field of vision. Something of the white persuasion had fallen from the sky, and had stuck a chord in my mind that sounded echoes of winter. But could this strange happening have been that thing we like to call snow? No, not possible, for the temperature had risen well above freezing by the early afternoon. On a fine day who bore a pleasant number of degrees, around forty-five by my reckoning, snow seemed highly unlikely, if not downright impossible. So, I walked on, putting the question nearly out of my mind.

Not two seconds had passed before I saw my second unidentified falling object. Then the third passed by, directly in front of me and not two feet distant. Although a quick explaination flashed through my mind of a strange individual flying overhead with a stash of styrofoam particles, it was soon displaced by the belief that, against all notions of sense and probability, it was snowing. I reached the grassy region directly in front of the noble Campion, or at least the door by which I had become accustomed to entering, and bent down to examine this strange white substance. It remained between my fingers, unlike snow, and only melted at a sluggish rate, until I commenced its demise by crushing it between the powerful digits of my right hand.

The conundrum that befell my poor, troubled mind, as the white substance flurried about my head, was that it wasn't snow–it wasn't flaky enough. It wasn't hail–it fell much too slowly to answer to that appellation. I quickly turned it over in my head, until a flash of brilliance struck me, and I was nearly bowled over by my own genious. I knew that this previously unencountered substance must henceforth be respectfully addressed by a new name! A strange combination of the lightness of snow and the icy reality of hail, this marked a new era of meteorology, in which brilliance would flare in the hitherto unremarkable principalities of Eastern Washington. It was upon us, and I was at the head!

Let everyone hail this new phenomenon, and call it by its true name (coined by perhaps the most unrecognized genious of our age):

Snail!

Today, I decided to catch up in Lit, so I read all of the stuff that I was supposed to have read already, as well as the reading for tomorrow. So, I got done with that, and decided to figure out how many pages I read. I was appalled when I figured it out: 175 pages. Now I know why I'm so tired. And, bear in mind that these aren't bloody NORMAL pages, these are LIT TEXTBOOK pages. Therefore, they have quite a few more words on each page than novels, and aren't necessarily as interesting. (There were at least 20 pages of biography that I read. The actual works of literature were interesting, but not as much as they would be were I to read them on my own time, and not trying to finish them so I could let myself go to sleep.) Needless to say, I'm tired. Goodnight.

Well, today I recieved some mail from my parents. Among those were some monks (tasty German pastries–if you'd like to try, talk to me, and you might get one), some easter candy, and a card. The card contained $20, inviting Aaron and I to go to Easter dinner with it. Seeing as I didn't have it at easter, we decided to have post-Easter lunch, and get a David's pizza. (The Maple Street Bridge, like combination–huge and wonderful.) So, I run over, and try to put it on my debit card. They run it, and somehow it doesn't go through, even though it had enough money. I said that all I had was a 20 (the pizza was about 21 or so), and they said that would be fine. So, I pull out my wallet, and realize that I had left it in the card which was sitting in my dorm. I told them I could run back to the dorm and grab it, but one of the chefs offered to cover it, as long as I'd leave money back there sometime. I was very impressed with that, so I went back to the dorm. I grabbed the money, and biked back over with it before eating–walked in and gave him the money, and thanked him.

Why did he do that? He placed faith in a fellow human being that I would come back and leave him the money. He trusted me, and by that trust I was blessed. I would like to think that he was blessed by my returning with the money, because he went out on a limb, but I don't know if it affected him at all. Anyway, thank you, Mr. Pizza Chef Man, you just made the world a better place!

Well, my Art section on my site has all of the sections I want it to: CG, Sketches, Paintings, and photography. I just uploaded the Computer Generated stuff today, and I'm pretty happy with it. I'm considering working out a new layout sometime, but I might just wait until the summer for that. I'd like a simpler one that is less reliant on images. Anyway, go check out the CG stuff, and the new Photography.

( Smurf's Domain Artwork )

In other news, the other day we made pot stickers, and they were heavenly. It's the first time I've made them without mom's help, so I was rather proud of myself–they're not a simple meal. Anyway, I learned a few things, and next time I'll do a little better, until I can make perfect pot stickers.

Well, last night (this morning) was rather insane. Aaron was going crazy because of having work that he had to do that he didn't want to. He seemed to only be able to focus on his watercolor experiments. Becky and I were talking a bit, and then we returned to the room, and found Aaron, shirtless, sitting at his desk in front of his watercolors, with paint all over his chest and face. Later, he was talking to Nathan in the same mood. Now you see, Nathan's girlfriend, Yoshiko, is having a hard time getting back from Japan, because of some form that she has to get mailed to her. So, Nathan was missing her a lot, and he told Aaron that he should go to Japan and bring her back.

Aaron's response?

"Okay."

So he began packing things up, grabbing some food, and was about to leave. I felt that it would be better to just make sure he took enough that he wouldn't get into trouble, so I made him grab a few other things before leaving. I asked him when I should start worrying that he wasn't back, and he told me he'd call me sometime today.

So he left.

At that point, I wasn't sure when he'd be back. I wasn't sure whether his mood would remain with him for only a couple hours, or even a day or two. So, I knew that at the earliest, he'd be back in two hours, and at the latest within the week. I wondered whether he might be hitchhiking his way to Everett, where Nathan and Soren would put him up for the night and feed him, if he managed to show up. So, I expected Aaron to either come back or to call that day.

I wasn't disappointed. At about 9 or 10, he staggers back in while I'm in the shower, and falls into bed. When I get back, I say, "Oh, so you didn't make it to Japan." Nope. But he told me a bit about his journey, which sounded rather fun. Later we talked about biking to Everett someday, and figured out how long the route would be, and how much elevation gain there would be.

To top it off, I was talking to Sarah, and I told her that Aaron had called me today from Everett, saying that he was trying to figure out how to get to Japan. I said he might have to go up to the Bering Strait, but I hoped he'd try to get passage on a boat somehow. Sarah was quite impressed and amazed that Aaron was that crazy until I told her that, actually, he had been back at 9. Alas.

Aaron wrote a description of his trip, which is quite a joy to read. You ought to try it out.
( A trip )