Hot Stuff

Today was a very different day! First, I was up until 3:30 am working on a library school assignment (one that I am ignoring for the amount of time it takes to write this post) and trying to get rid of both a sinus headache and the caffeine buzz obtained in an effort to (rid) said headache.

Then, I got up bright and early at 8am to shower, style my hair--gasp!--then left a sleepy Alex in our bed and drove over to Joel & Kali's place. We spent a funfun day taking photographs. That is, Joel took them with both 35mm and digital cameras, and Kali and I alternately posed and held up foamcore boards and a car sunshield to bounce the light onto each other's faces. We took the photos in the McKinney square area, which is really pretty and has lots of unexpectedly beautiful corners.

Anyway, it was good company and good fun, and I am glad they asked me to tag along. I now have a slight sunburn on my shoulders and a high-heel-produced blister on either heel to show for it, but it was worth it. We started out with a cloudy sky and cool morning, and ended up with a bright, sunny, and blazingly hot afternoon!

I came back to pick up Alex in the afternoon, and we drove over to his parent's house for my family (early) birthday bash. The most amusing, yet cool-in-an-extremely-geeky-way part? I'm a (soon-to-be) twenty-seven-year-old girl who had a Batman-themed birthday party. :-) I had a Batman cake, banner, balloon, candle, napkins, and plates, and I also received the Batman Animated Series Season 2 DVD set (DUUUUUDE!) and the Batman Begins movie art book (again, duuuude!). I particularly liked the fact that the Batman cake frosting utilized two "likes" of mine--the yellow moon background was lemon frosting (it's traditional for me to have a lemon cake my on birthday), and the Batman-ish parts were all daaaaark chooooocolate (DUUUUDE!). We also had mint chocolate chip ice cream, and lots of family laughter at the two smallish nephews (13 months old and 3 years old).

Hopefully, I should be able to add photos of at least one of these events later in the week. I'll post at least one model-ish pose of me, once edited by the talented and gracious team of Joel & Kali. :-)

Oh, AND I got Scott McCloud's book, Understanding Comics, which is all ABOUT comics as an art form, and IS written in comic form itself--awesome! (That distinction between ABOUT and IS will get grins only from any fellow SLIS 5210 class members, I think, working hard on their cataloging homework. Go, library nerds!) Anyway, this book was high on my wishlist after I took SLIS 5223, a course on metadata, where we had to create a final project that was a report on creating metadata for a specific collection. I picked sequential art, specifically a fictitious collection of comics/animation/etc. that I pretended was housed at the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum (my second librarian dream job, after the Metropolitan Museum of Art and before the Library of Congress). So I'm planning on reading this book, then launching myself into a few Batman graphic novels to begin my "serious" comic-reading career--er, hobby. I've always been into comics from the animation side, but I think it's high time I see what has been and can be done with the static page.

Starr's List of Alternate Careers, version 3.1

1. Graphic Novel Artist/Writer (...that's an inker, not a tracer...)
2. Children's Book Illustrator
3. Tango Instructor
4. Italian Shoe Designer (for this I would have to have an Alternate Nationality, as well)
5. Nursery Owner (plants, not babies)

Banky: "I just want you to know that I respect your work as an artist. I'm something of an artist myself. I... I was the inker on the comic book."
Chaka Luther King: "Yo, man, you a tracer, okay? Nobody else got the heart to tell you. You trace. You go around the lines. You are a tracer, okay? You think Fat Albert had a tracer? No! Bill Cosby did the whole thing with a roller, and it was excellent!"
--Chasing Amy
(in truth, Mallrats is by far my favorite Kevin Smith movie, but you just can't beat this quote)