Yay for Good Art History Lectures!

The cool part about my job is that I get to basically sit in on classes because I run the Lecture Hall, where a lot of Art History courses are taught.  I'm already supposed to know most of the material, but who remembers all the thousands of slides shown in first-year AH surveys?  Well, not I!  Actually, I was sleeping during most of those lectures.. At SFAI, the art history professors are mostly pretty engaging and humanistic, and I find their lectures really interesting.

Today, I've seen several awesome things:

> Anamorphosis by the Quay Brothers to expand upon the method used by Renaissance painters to embed symbolic images into paintings.  

A famous example, Holbein's The Ambassadors, where a skull is found at the bottom.

A still from the Quay Brothers' animated short film, Anamorphosis:

> Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights...

...turned into a metal music video by Buckethead:

> Some paintings I forgot that I love so much by Pieter Breugel the Elder:

The Hunters in the Snow

The Corn Harvest or The Harvesters?

The Tower of Babel

I love the awkward perspective and flatness in the paintings, and the colors (though we have to take internet reproductions with a grain of salt)!

If anyone is interested or wondering, this material was shown in Claire Daigle's ARTH 101 course at the San Francisco Art Institute, Spring 2008.

Lazy Sunday

hanging out the window...

so sunny!

a typical Sunday spread...

Dolores Park, 65*.......

okay, okay, okay...

so what, you may be asking, is my excuse this time? well, to be honest, we haven't been doing very much. the weather's been cruddy, vanessa has work and volunteer obligations 60 hours a week, and I (confession time) have been watching too much Project Runway and Make Me A Supermodel. hey, at least it makes it worth the cost of having cable!

earlier, I alluded to a weekend birthday surprise trip, which we did and I've been unsuccessful in trying to get vanessa to write a guest post about her surprise. the poor thing's just been too busy, and tired when she has a minute to do anything. maybe she'll come through and write something on her own, but I'll spill the beans because it was so fun!

we went to monterey and went skydiving! then we went to the monterey aquarium, which is a really amazing place to visit. it shows what's found in the monterey bay and surrounding marine sanctuary.. stuff you'd never guess is right there, like sharks and jellyfish! we wanted to also go whale watching, but it was rather chilly and we didn't have enough time. so.. i won't ruin the story, but here are a few good pictures from the trip:

big jellies, the size of your head.

lots of jellies that look like coral.

giant kelp, shark, and a swirling school of tiny fish (anyone remember that from the Blue Planet or Planet Earth?!)

white anemones, tiny orange anemones, and a rock fish in the back. rock fish live up to 80 years and don't reproduce until their 20's -- they've been overfished and the population is endangered.
electric jellies! these guys are really tiny, about the size of my pinky.

the past week here has been really beautiful.. sunny and warmer, so I've enjoyed riding my fast bike without rain fenders on my commute and felt a little more in shape. it's ridiculous, but I'm actually losing a lot of strength and stamina because everything is so close here. you'd think that all the hills would make me stronger, but honestly we tend to take the flattest routes because most of the hills are just too freaking big to tackle. my median gear ratio has dropped a few inches and I'm tired after a 3-mile ride -- crazy after my 25-mile commutes on a fixie! my excuse is that the weather's been too gross to do any long-distance pleasure riding for the past month, and I'm thinking that once the weather gets its act together we'll be doing much more riding. I have lots of opportunities to ride before work, too, since 3 days of the week I don't even go in to the office until noon or 2pm. shame!

well, I think I'll be on to other things today.. I hope you're all doing well and toughing out the bleak winter days. I heard the sun's been absent around Chicago lately.. I definitely couldn't have withstood it again!

Friday Morning in Russian Hill

Around the school...



Coit Tower/Telegraph Hill, and the East Bay

A zoom of the new bridge to the East Bay under construction

Fisherman's Wharf area

A nice home across the street from SFAI (it has the views above!)

Comments!

Hey everyone, thanks for commenting on my posts! Sorry I haven't been responding in a timely manner.. I finally set up the option to actually be notified when someone leaves a comment.

More fun posts coming after the weekend.. it's Vanessa's birthday and we're going out of town for some special activities!

Miscellaneous Pictures

One of our charming little succulents...



Window views...



Do you see Vanessa? She's in there!
Yes, Christmas is still celebrated in full force here despite the lack of snow...

A view from the top of 21st Street, in the Noe Valley neighborhood.. our house is in the middle of the picture, near the big yellow and orange building in The Mission. You can also see SF General in Potrero Hill, the big brick compound with steam rising from it. And the hazy ridge of hills beyond is the East Bay. It's so cool to be able to see so many things from one spot! Totally not used to it.

Thriving succulents on the sidewalk...

A view of the southeastern part of the city from a quite dramatic-looking cypress tree that we found in a magically lush hill-top park, which we found while on a wandering walk one day.

A view of me from the same cypress tree, continuing the family tradition of not being so photogenic.

Typical SF.. so good!

Cool chocolate in the shape of a Swiss Army Knife given to us by neighbors who went to Switzerland over the holiday!

The car that caused a lot of ruckus this morning around the corner from our building... I still don't know exactly what happened, but there was an undercover cop running through our yard right after I heard about 15 full seconds of screeching and metal crunching. I'll have to keep my eye on the news.... Yep, we still live in the *interesting* part of town.

Market Street on a January morning, sunshine, trolley, palm trees and all!

At least Vanessa is cute! Remember that not-so-photogenic thing...? Sorry. Look at Vanessa again. Isn't she cute?!

Long Overdue Update

It's inevitable perhaps that I'm about to write this next line: So, it's been a while since I wrote anything here.. Sorry! Maybe blog engines should consider a shortcut button that automatically inserts that sentence, because it's been used in every blog I've ever read! Anyway, it's true, and I don't really have a good excuse. We've been up to a lot of not much, though the gears are still turning and exciting stuff is happening.

Vanessa resigned from the ER at SF General Hospital, and is starting a new job at the Tom Waddell clinic for homeless and marginally-housed folks (plus a transgender clinic!) tomorrow in hopes of gaining a different perspective and new experiences with a mind toward expanding her career and going to grad school at UCSF in the near future. In fact, she just interrupted my typing to relate how excited she is by her career change and the possibilities it implicates. Formidable! She was also accepted to a hard-core volunteer training program for SF Women Against Rape.. it'll be after work until 10pm Mondays and Wednesdays, and all day Saturdays for the next five weeks! So, with her new 5-days-a-week work schedule at the clinic and this training, she will be a very busy lady. At least I know I'll see her for our Sunday morning French review!

I decided that it's time for me to commit to a grad program as well, and have been researching various paths in design.. like industrial design, product design, interface design, and the like. I've seen A LOT of job openings here in those fields, and I've always secretly thought about doing some kind of design. I hate the big egos and bitchy stereotypes associated with it, but I think I'm down-to-earth enough, and can focus on what I want to accomplish, to avoid getting too caught up in the negative stuff. All I know is that it makes me excited, and having an advanced degree in design will enable me to stay here in SF for the long term, which is what we'd really like to do. We love it here! The only catch in this whole plan is that I'll have to build up my experience and portfolio to be accepted to a graduate design program by next January, and the good ones are in NYC -- Pratt and Parsons -- so I'd have to schlepp through two more winters (and possibly a third if I follow up with an integrated M.B.A. degree).. AND be away from Vanessa. Boo! But it's all just in the dreaming/beginning planning stage right now anyway, so we'll see what happens.

What else. We're getting a fancy amazing custom couch in a couple of weeks, and we picked up some more essential furniture during all those awesome after-holiday sales. So we finally have a coffee table and some shelves, and something a little better than a metal kitchen cart to put our tv on. The chaos of balancing cups of tea, bowls of soup, plates of food, laptops, mail, cameras, backpacks, magazines, maps, tv remotes and ourselves on the futon was kind of getting to us. Now it suits us much better.. a place for everything and everything in its place! The only caveat to our master floor plan is that the couch and the tv don't exactly line up, so we have to drag the tv system and all of its cables across the floor when we want to watch something. Oh well.. c'est la vie, non?

Before: CHAOS!

After: ORDER!

We hung our 2008 calendar, cleared the mantle of slowly rotting miniature gourds that have been our companions since Thanksgiving, bought a new fern to replace the one that suddenly and sadly dried out a couple weeks ago, fixed our bikes, I'm finally updating this blog, and Vanessa is painting the funny kitchen cabinet that had a.. erm.. very *unique* hand-painted depiction of a cake (if you've been to our house before, you'll remember it). I think it's a good start to the new year!

PS, Southwest is having a cool $97 one-way deal from Midway to SFO... so make yer plans to visit us! We've been thinking about y'all and missing you lately, so we hope you have a long weekend to escape the dreary winter weather sometime. You know you can stay here for free!