new art exhibit

Our art tutor, Shawn, is having his work exhibited in Dan's program gallery. His paintings are colorful and when you walk in to the hallway it's really quite arresting. He has some of his older stuff (from when he was in high school) up on display too- these are the very impressionistic gouache landscapes. The oil paintings are ones that he did during his undergrad years. Now he's a graduate student, though I haven't really figured out what his program is. He's in the art department and about the closest I could get was something like physiology - basically he studies body structure, but in relation to art, not health sciences. He's spent the last few weeks in his studio with a lot of bones, learning how to draw their structure and then applying that to his paintings of people.

This is him, on the left, with Dan and several of the program's students and tutors, at the opening ceremony for the exhibit, which was Shawn's first.

the works in progress

Writers At Work

paintings, lately

Oh dear, these are from October! I totally forgot to publish this post. Now I have to catch up with all the paintings we worked on in November.... I'll be back later with those.

cookies, toaster-oven style

That day we were into baking cookies and such. Julie our friend, Devin, and I baked really yummy peanut butter cooties erm cookies. Guess what?! We were actually able to find Amazing Skippy Peanut butter!!! Just kidding about the Amazing, but we did find the peanut butter.

It was Julie's LUCKY DAY. Ye know why? Because she was able to bake (in a toaster oven) her first batch of cookies EVER!!!!! Isn't she cute? She's wearing our teddy bear apron while Devin and I wore our aprons from our Aunt Jessie.


Here we are smiling and happy, ready to eats tons of sugar while sneaking pieces of dough during the time that my mom was in the kitchen. Heehee ;0) smiley face winking yay!
Here are the good looking crunchy with a slightly golden touch to the cookies. It took aprox. 5-10 min to bake. My specialty, the slightly black ones (really I actually DO like the slightly over cooked ones).

Delicious, perfectly sweet, beautiful golden-brown, warm, great when dipped in refrigerated milk, and has the perfect touch of flavor. Yummmmmmm!!!!!! ^-^ :-) @.@ &.& *-* :P :D (these are all my creative invention of smiley faces)

A great end to a great month!

We won!

Merlin
10,156 words in 30 days
****

Devin
80,743 words in 30 days
****

Wendy
103,557 words in 30 days
****

We got up early and wrote, we raced home from Chinese class and wrote, and we wrote instead of watching movies. Merlin let Devin write when her word count was behind and Devin let me use the computer when mine was. I went easy on all the other homework and we can now say we've written novels.

Tia asked if they'd be available any time soon and honestly, you wouldn't want to read them at this point. They're incredibly rough and probably too wordy (we were aiming for quantity here) and though Merlin won two times over (she finished her word count goal AND finished her story), Devin and I didn't actually finish the stories. We're going to work on that part-time this month and hope to finish filling in the general plots and then we'll do some major editing. Besides, I still need a title. Neither of us knows if we'll do anything with them (Merlin's already recognized that her story too closely resembles fan fiction to be able to do anything with it besides cherish it as her first NaNoWriMo Novel. Her novel's style is based on a book she really likes, though the characters are all her own).

Now, we can't imagine November without all the fun and despair. Dan was lucky he missed half the month (his trip to North America), that way he only had to put up with the insanity for two and a half weeks.

All in all, it was a success.