Backing up my entire northern life

It took almost 4 years, but I have officially filled up my iPhone. 6 GB of photos alone, it was time to clear out a bit of the riffraff. But upon going to see what was actually on the thing I found everything that we've done in Canada. It hit me that I got my first iPhone the first morning we were in Duncan. It's a library of odds and ends, good meals, funny people watching, beautiful scenery, Einstein, worldwide vacations and portraits of everything I found notable, in order. Birthday Christmas Easter Summer Birthday First Snow First Blossom Camping Changing Leaves Christmas et al. My art, others' art, art I want to make, art I WISH I could make. Before clearing 1500 pics off the phone I doublechecked 3 times that the files were backed up on my laptop. The pictures of my youth barely fill a little shoebox, yet the digital images of the last 4 years number in the thousands. Somehow they all mean something, even the little memories seem worth keeping (at least for a little longer...)

Here's to 4 years of artful days. I present to you:

iPhone, a cross-section:

new project::l'avocat

in the baby stages of a new project highlighting all of the places we love to eat drink and be merry here in our own backyard. along the way i came across this nugget of truth (paraphrased by me):

Apparently, during a two millenia-long game of Telephone, the Aztec word ahuácatl, meaning testicles because of their shape, was hijacked by the Spanish invaders and became abogado. When these little crocodile pears were shipped back to Europe, they were anglicized to avocados and then avocat in French. Their original etymology was lost in translation. To the Europeans, l'avocat meant the advocate - a new meaning for the mystifying fruit was born.

and such, the path that leads us here is rarely that of which we expect.

Confession

While tying up a few loose ends on this here cybernook, I had a realization: this site barely has any "art" on it (or at least  t r a d i t i o n a l  art). Somewhere along the way my initial attempt at documenting my own work faded by the wayside. Instead a the focus seems to have shifted to the things I encounter as time rolls on. But if you look at life through "art" colored glasses, isn't all life art? Composing complex dishes, exploring the world surrounding, pondering life's mysteries. It's all art to me. Let's go with that...

how'd we get here?

we're dawning upon the era where the concept of first generationers and even the children of immigrants are becoming more rare. this means that over time, even just two generations on, we lose our link to how we got here. grandparents who would rather not reminisce about the hard times in the old country are failing to pass on the stories in hope of instead focusing on the present/future. the funny thing is, the future seems to keep coming no matter how hard we try, and instead all we are doing is forgetting the roots of our past. not saying it matters if we descended from royalty or paupers, but to know the story of how our lineage moved through the centuries perhaps would help us all to realize that we aren't all that different. thinking of the hope the young families had as they sent their children in waves across the Atlantic or through the desert makes what we do today somehow have meaning. maybe our rewards are not merely for our own benefit, but fulfilling the dreams of those who brought us here. 

so, after minimal digging, a reassurance of why i love the internet, some creative spelling guesses, and a new membership to the ellis island foundation, i found not only the passenger info for my dad's paternal grandparents but for his mother's family as well. hard to believe only two generations back and the holes had already begun. here's to keeping the story alive and an experiment in where a day online gets you -- 

La Bretagne - Sailed from Le Havre, FR to Ellis Island, NY, USA

Landed 1 April 1902 carrying my great-grandfather Eugene

La Savoie - Sailed from Le Havre to Ellis Island

Landed 30 August 1902 carrying my great-grandmother 

Anna and 6 month old son Eugene

SS Cameronia - Sailed from Glasgow to Ellis Island

Landed 21 May 1921 carrying my great-grandmother 

Anne & her children John, May and Gertrude

(meeting their father Michael already in NYC, arrived in 1920)

{taken out the window when driving through Trentino, 

travelling from Verona to Innsbruck, Spring 2011}

originally Eugene and Anna were from the beautiful towns of Merano and Bolzano in the Trentino - Alto Adige area of the Tirol region of Austria (northern Italian state Sud-Tirol after 1919) and they were listed as last residing in nearby Brixen and Mals. the entire area is world-renowned for Alpine ski resorts, wine making the arts, towns that have been settled continuously since Roman times near 800 CE. a place franz kafka and ezra pound found inspiration, in good company...  

interesting to think all of these years feeling out of place from my overwhelmingly present Anglo-Celtic-Dutch roots in all my blonde cousins/mother, plus figuring that all Austrians looked like Heidi and the Von Trapps, my dark curly hair, strong bone structure and arty mentality was all explainable. And takes up a full 1/4 of my being. 

my dad's side always proved a mystery, since even my grandfather (first one of the kids born in san francisco, 3 before he and 4 more kids to follow) seemed to not know al the details. i envision a long line of tirolers who worked the fields, sowed the earth and knew the alps for centuries; a hearty line. carpenters, cabinet makers, laborers, good cooks, and excellent wine drinkers. ultimately they settled in Bernal Heights, overlooking the burgeoning city and proudly boasting the last cow in San Francisco  (yes, i've seen the news clipping). 7000 miles from home and settling in the hills and dependent on dairy. you can take the austrian out of tirol but you cant take...

but the most surprising of all? how old my relatives were when starting their families. maybe other priorities came first, but my great-grandparents were 29/30 when their first child was born and when they emigrated, stretching to 44 when the youngest was born making them nearly 60 years old, with all 8 children living at home during the 1930 census. my grandmother's parents were 35 when she was born. and she had my dad at age 40. kind of secretly made me feel like they all got a chance to live a little.

i know my aunt has done extensive research over the last 30 years on my maternal lineage, so I figure the secret is not all lost there. someday i'd love to see the links. i know on my maternal grandmother's side a solid link to prez fillmore. and think i remember ulysses grant being in there unless that was lore from my youth, but if he's there then that means an easy link to FDR and of course Teddy and about 6 others including numero uno mr washington. doubt he had 'me' in mind when he envisioned the future of his bloodline. 

anorexic typography

don't know why i cant get over skinny modern type. but i just cant get enough.

blessed www.fontshop.com

[ff din]

[frutiger]

[altis]

[phoenix]

and because pj is of divine inspiration, go find wishlist [yield], rocking out in boston 2006

Charting the wired world

I am obsessed with charts. Any plotting of multiple sources of data over time is undeniably blissful to me and therefore overwhelms all other thoughts. The more trivial the topic - the MORE I AM OBSESSED. As if the triviality of it all is what makes it something I would have not yet thought of and therefore gains purpose at that very moment since its purpose above all others is now for my own quest for knowledge. CASE IN POINT: the ins and outs of movie box office is really just a reflection of the actual focus of our culture, rather than the pompous ideals we document for future generations to judge (and makes an amazingly beautiful chart).

Bathroom Wall Wisdom

ladies room / mayfair mall / food court

to the victor, goes the blogger

I've never been a huge Blogger champion (are the Google spies going to destroy me for admitting this using their own technology... I haven't yet finished reading the labyrinth that is the new Google Privacy Policy which I actually fully intend to do and for the record think it's creepy that they think it's handy/funny/clever/ironic to provide personality profiles for their users). THAT BEING SAID... I figured I would try out Wordpress. Sure they have many more customizable templates that reflect the wide range of generation x, y, & z-ers out there who wish to make their entire personal life public knowledge, but with slightly more focus than Facebook. But while it was easy to set up, and generally a handy interface, I have to admit I hated it. Only ONE menu is acceptable in this template? Huh? But what if I want to link to links, pages, AND posts? It's not like I'm looking for anything high tech. I rarely even blog (which I HATE its usage as a verb). But sometimes you just want to throw something into the 'cloud' and be able to access it from any node connected to the interwebs. 'What? You don't dream of computers in your sleep? You paint? Like paint WALLS?' You know, those kind of moments. Or those 'here's what I've been doing for the past 5 years' kind of moments. So today proved to be the kicker; the straw that broke the Wordpress camel's back. I figured out enough html code to embed Blogger into the Flash-based online portfolio I feel like I've been working on forever. 1 place for everything to land. And since I've always been pretty skeptical about my name flying around as a searchable item (cue Google Privacy Policy ironic wink) I decided to go with Flash so my name and images aren't really searchable, rather goofy dying code. So thinking about how different my day to day life is then what my night to night life (other than the utter geekiness, because let's be honest - that NEVER goes away), but that when all is said and done, when 5pm rolls around every Monday through Friday and I'm already home for the first job ever in my entire adult life where I'm not either on-call or somehow responsible for the afterhours, yes at the end of the day, I am left creative. And so that is my new home. Which I'm sure you got here via Left Creative in the first place (since really no one had or ever looked at this blog on their own when it was out there floating in space for 5 years). Welcome to my new home, where I am left creative.

ps. I'll migrate over the few posts I did put up using Wordpress - maybe they'll fill in the gaps. But their server keeps crashing while trying to export. Go figure!

Winter Sunrise

Taken with my phone, this hasn't been edited. The winter sun barely makes it around the north side of the mountains, and casts a sherbet glow over the valley. Plateau-like mountain on left is Mt. Maxwell from Salt Spring Island, on the right is Mt. Tzouhalem (where we live), from the view of Herd Road.

Not a bad commute to work...

'tis the season

saw kid jammies the other day in one of the tourist shop windows in Victoria that said "don't 'moose' with me" on it. for a moment i chuckled. i pretty much forgot about it until the driving home from work listening to bbc world news and holy shit a guy got trampled by a moose in alaska and his wife beat it off with a shovel. what the...?? the guy was 80something. syrian protests and libyan crisis and alaska moose attacks. i mean, of course i feel for the guy, but this is making the bbc world news??? so all the sudden i burst out laughing to myself, alone in the car, because all i can think of is this stupid moose in sunglasses:

which gets me thinking... kids clothes are totally irresponsible. sharks? bears? dinosaurs? moose? that's a pretty false sense of security. those same kids turn into idiots like this guy: 

http://animals.howstuffworks.com/animal-facts/dangerous-moose.htm 

even the rabbits in alaska are evil! don't think he's just asking for a high five.... silly wabbits.

in the blink of an eye

as fast as it came, it went. this year seems to have melted like a hershey bar in the sweltering phoenix summer. yet even the sun seems to be clinging to the dawn, although low on the morning horizon it peeks its weary head out of the morning fog each day keeping the quilt of winter doom far out of reach in the safety of its glow for the residents of the valley to awake to frozen glistening mornings.

but when i look at the utter lack of postings this year when i vowed to be "on top of things" i hang my head for a moment on unkept promises and broken dreams (cue sad violin). but then i think of where i was this time last year in utter chaos and running myself rampant, and a realize (cue motivational piano solo) it's been an amazingly full and productive year. i thought it would take me years to get to this point from where i was. and it only took, well... (a) year. i asked today what hidden hurdles lay ahead and where i thought i would have to stand guard, instead i was told i have an army to fight for my case. not too shabby, when for years i've been the one fighting. the salmon against the stream, the sapling in the snow.

to distant worlds and back, more times than one, this year was a great success. maybe not the most stable, or most graceful. but a year of learning and of settling. a year of trying and (soon) a year of succeeding. the east was magnificent, the west was monumental. and here, hear, in the middle i stand content, and that is a wonderful place to be. cheers to number thirty, steadily approaching. i think i'm ready to take it on, that whole huge rest of existence. o wonder! o brave new world! that has such people in it!

Morning inspiration

Taking in the morning sunshine on the backyard patio, catching up on 3 NEW Wired magazines that just arrived as MIA/POW victims of the Great Canada Post Strike of 2011. Working on thinking local... Cowichan Valley / Vancouver Island acrylic series to come. Gathering more wood tomorrow on my day off... Happy British Columbia Day!