March 2009 Archives

Enough for today, can't keep my eyes open. Very Canadian quote of the day from the dog park. It was barely above zero, but generous sunshine. "It's like the south of France", my dog walking friend said.

Other people at DrSketchy's had way way better drawings, just being honest here. It was a very nice night, I even met some people I know, and socialized. The model was fabulous, what a beauty. In real life she is a personal trainer, I hope in different shoes though. I remember the very first time I ever saw shoes like these, it was in the trend setting TV quiz "one out of eight", hosted by Mies Bouwman. They were one of the prizes the winner had to memorize, no matter, long story. And the Osmonds performed "crazy horses". I was swept away. And now all of you go download Bob Dylan's give away.

I had another go at George and I think it's better. Enough now, tomorrow I'll start the actual piece. Quiet Sunday here, I've been watching episodes of this series, I just discovered it today, breath thaking. I'm afraid you have to understand either Dutch or Russian to appreciate.

This is what I wanted to do yesterday, but couldn't because of the maultaschen. Now I'm back on schedule. Hopefully next week I'll be able to show you where I'm going with all of these pages. Michiel told a Jehovah's witness this morning he should repent, I thought that was funny. An idle attempt to speak their language. I am sorry for you sir, the tragic teenager replied. I do wonder how these kids came to be what they are. Did they grow up in Jehovah's witnesses families, or were they won over? Who keeps their clothes so unbelievably impeccable? Do they iron their own shirts?     

And we had Kartoffelsalat too. All excellent, but then we all had a little too much of my Glaucoma treatment. You know why we German catholics eat Maultaschen on Fridays, don't you? Because we're not supposed to eat meat on Fridays. And what's inside those Maultaschen you ask? Well, meat of course. I thought you're not supposed to eat meat? Well no, but it's wrapped in dough, and it's a known fact the Lord can't see through dough. That is why are also known as Herr-Gott-Verscheisserle.

I should do this much quicker, but this is as quck as I can. There are going to be nine celebrities in my drawing, I have sketched six of them now. They are not going to be terribly big, so I don't even need that much detail. They should be recognizable though. I lock myself in our spare room to do the sketching, no electronic distractions there. Orbit joined me there for the left page, he doesn't like to be alone. While I was working on the right page, he went up to Piffin's room, which was a first. So I am done before lunch, lovely. Time to clear the breakfast table.

I see some promising Tony's on the left page, but George is a headache. Which means he will probably turn out great. Eventually. And about yesterday, I was stoned as a shrimp of course, after two puffs. Peace!

I am postblogging this, my last tweet (posting tweets is a just a practical way of retrieving a day) will explain why:

Waiting for the kids to leave the house.
Yes, alone at last! (usually at least one has forgotten something and will briefly return)
Oh, almost forgot, I have to go see DrYan again today, for the test results. He will tell me if it is glaucoma.
I am slowly going blind, DrYan said, unless I use eyedrops for the rest of my life. Or -according to the internet- marijuana, yummie!
@EllendeBruin glaucoma. Oftewel kokervisie. En nee, dat heeft zeker niet iedereen. Het is een akelige ouderdomskwaal (!) die 1 op 200 treft.
@sevensheaven glaucoom, heet dat zo in het NL? Wist ik niet eens. Peace!
@EllendeBruin ja, de druppels! Het schijnt niet erger te hoeven worden dan het is. Als ik blijf druppelen.
@sevensheaven dankje. In het Engels is het glaucoma, glaucoom kende ik niet. En staar, inderdaad zeg. Nouja, aan de jointjes maar.
I tried some old pot that was lying around. But old, disgusting! Will try some fresh weed later. I'm a hippie!

Desmond is hard, Hillary is easy. But Desmond will get there too, just needs some work. How was your weekend? Ours was just fine, glorious sunshine. And we finally got to see Coraline, what a wonderful amazing film. And in 3D! Oh my, this was my first time ever sitting in the cinema with a pair of those stupid glasses on my nose. But wow! I was all childly excited, already at seeing the trailers. I want to see all of them! All! I want to see Up, and I want to see Monsters vs Aliens, I want to see everything pop out of the screen and come at me!

I think that anybody living on my street will recognize them. My dear neighbours Susanna and Steve needed profile pictures for their blogs and facebook pages, and sometimes, very sometimes, when I have nothing else to do, I am happy to oblige. Rest assure, nothing to do is over again. This was nice practice for the many portraits that I am going to draw for one of my newspapers.

Caption, anybody?

These authors never stop selling, it is a great thing. About yesterday, about Twitter. Laura asked do I not get distracted enormously. Answer of course is yes, yes I do get distracted. There is no denying. I am an easily distractable person, I welcome distraction. Maybe I have a diagnoseable concentration condition. I didn't nearly get as much work done as I had planned today, but that also happens without Twitter. And that is why I need and love deadlines. When there are deadlines in sight, I drop everything, and I work really really hard. Swear to god. But I thought of another reason why I like to Twitter. When I was a wee little girl, I already carried my heart on my tongue. Much to the dismay of my parents. Often, after dinner table conversations, they turned to me and stressed that the whole street didn't need to know about whatever. Of course I disagreed, I loved (and love) sharing stuff with the whole street. I don't think there are even family members left reading my blog (let alone Twitter!), I think they lived in constant fear of me talking too much.

This is my Twitter home page. Not a big deal, I like it though. Twitter is far more communicative than the blog. The blog has other qualities. But now that Twitter is exploding, every journalist on the planet is writing about it, even my dear friend Ellen. And I believe she is going to mention me in an article tomorrow, so I'd better write something worth reading here, my god, the pressure. I tweeted a mountain of tweets after she told me about this, trying to prove we Tweeters do not only Tweet about going to the bathroom. I tweeted "Elianneke met a woman who copies her life. Same age, husband same age, her oldest as old as my youngest. Creepily similar kids. Different dog though." I know this is short, but dispute that it is shallow. If you want to know more than these 140 characters, just ask me. Then I tweeted: "Elianneke is so happy to see that others mess up professionally too. Print shop's website was gone, I had to bring them a CD with my file. Lovely." Their website was not only gone, it said "Reported Attack Site!" What a way to chase away customers. Next Tweet: "old friends coming for dinner this week. I said it didn't matter which day. But now I have to have great food ready every day, just in case." I ran into them last night, my old neighbours Heidi and Daniel, who have moved away to Cobourg. They are house sitting somewhere around here for the March break. What a stupid thing, to tell them to come over on which ever night. I made a very nice dinner tonight, with lamb and coriander and whole wheat pasta, but they didn't show up. "Elianneke met someone who knows her brother. Which is pretty special with Eliane in Toronto and brother in Groningen. The person was in awe." Which is partly a lie, but Tweets are so short, no room for nuances. My friends Ron and Saskia were over from Rotterdam, and we met them at Betty's last night. Turns out Ron knows the company my brother used to be the managing director of, which is impressive enough, me thinks. "Elianneke saw 5 different worlds in half a hour, driving from Eglinton Square http://tinyurl.com/dapppo to Cherry Beach http://tinyurl.com/chrj96." See yesterday's photo. "Elianneke overheard in the dog park: "I can't drop 60 pounds, I'd be hot!"" This was a teacher who tends to treat her students motherly. But it's funnier somehow without context. That was it, more or less. And my Tweets will become even more interesting, because I finally received the briefing for my next Major Illustration. This will be exciting!

No time to blog, my dear neighbours Kristin and Paul gave me their car while they're on holidays in Mexico, so we are driving around like mad.

Somebody went for a haircut today. It's already the third or fourth time he went to the House of Lords, and it is really the only place we've found so far where they know how to cut long hair. This art is probably preserved in their wallpaper, or in their floorboards, or the ragged old furniture that they haven't changed since the seventies. If you ever come to Toronto as a tourist, especially a European one, go for a haircut. They sure don't have anything even remotely like this in Amsterdam.

Orbit doesn't care about anything. Not about broken computers anyway. Although he likes it very much when we watch movies at night. But this morning, when my computer was completely dead, he couldn't care less. Fortunately Orbit just went to the video store with Michiel, which means the computer is alive again. Michiel told me to blog about how lovely the people at the Apple store were, Michiel knows about customer satifaction. Well, I am a satisfied customer. It is amazing how when you walk into that overcrowded store in that nerve wrecking mall, you still get the feeling of stepping into a warm bath. Piffin was carrying the two thousand ton computer, and it was taken from her at the door, oooooh you've carried that long enough, dear. Did you book an appointment at the genius bar? Yes, at 3:40 (it was 3:32, we were eight minutes early). We sat down and waited. Piffin took a picture of herself and loaded it up to her facebook page. At almost exactly 3:40 a young man called us, and he started up my computer. And it just woke up like magic! Turned out it was just one piece of ram that had gone bad, easy to see, there was a red light burning. We could have seen that ourselves, but the computer refused to start up at all this morning, not much we could do. And so relaxed as the young man treated everything, amazing. I am so used to computer problems always going hand in hand with stress and swearing. Lots of swearing. None of that in the Apple store. I told the young man I wanted to hire him. What a joy he would be to have around the house. Almost as much as Orbit, I am sure.

Look what I found in my front yard! I have no idea who is the artist, and I don't know any Richards. But is was on my grass! I will post this on Facebook too, so many of my neighbours are also my Facebook friends, it would not surprise me if someone would recognize Richard.

And I did try to write an entry yesterday, but the computer gods were not with me. I wanted to write about eating big fat burrito's in Kensington, but that is too many meals ago now. I can smell the next one in the kitchen. Roasted vegetables, mmm. I even put some left over bread dough in with the vegetables. Roasted vegetables with oven fresh buns!

tired

I finally went to Dr. Sketchy's anti-art school. Together with auntie Clare, aunt Yvonne, and uncle Danny. Boy, did we have fun. Only Yvonne hadn't eaten before. And I was terribly out of shape, shame on me. Good sketchers there! They have prizes even, drawings getting the loudest applauses are awarded. Only they make you drink after-birth, so I don't know if winning is something you'd actually want. I wouldn't have won anyway, boy, they're good there. Next time we'll try to be there earlier, we didn't see very well from where we were sitting. And that grrrrrllll with that camera... in between me and the model constantly....

And another artschool presentation. I drove it back and forth, very carefully, and now it is proudly hanging over our dinner table. Auntie Clare and I didn't approve of the chain, we liked the burned black wire clothes hangers Piffin used while working on the candelier. We'll persuade her. The assignment was to make something out of at least 50 mass produced objects. I think Piffin solved that puzzle cleverly.

These four people are volonteers from Piffin's class. They sit at the magical old kitchen table that my aunt Ans (who wasn't a real aunt, but a friend of my mother's) gave us, some day back around 1970. Everything that is done at this kitchen table goes right. My friend Klaartje did her art school graduation project at this table. Today, Piffin took the table to OCAD. The assignment was to do something with class participation. The teacher told her this could be her first million dollars. (She left the Value Village lables in the shirts, she is going to return them tomorrow. Ironed.)

Same as yesterday, but with a little room around the chairs. I could carry on through the whole house, but I don't think I will. The table is too small in both drawings, and I know why. It is because the chairs are so much more difficult to draw, and I keep changing them, and then they grow in the process. Believe me, it is a big table, it seats six or eight easily.

Sketching feels like punishment to me, but it is a necessary evil. And my old blog friend I reconnected with on Twitter tweets so many sketchers that I got scared. If I don't sketch enough I'll get horribly out of shape. I decided to sketch our chairs. We never pay more than five dollars for a chair, and we prefer finding them on garbage day. (I need so much more practice...)