Thursday, July 27, 2006 A

"Facing the Dawn"
6:26am

This might have been influenced by my reading of Hathor Rising by Alison Roberts. She describes the Egyptian sense of Time:

"Like the Egyptian year's division into three seasons, the day was also divided into three phases -- dawn, noon and evening. Each day the sun god journeys through these, hour by hour, changing his name and form in each one. Of these three phases he declares in a magical text:

I am Khepri in the morning, Re at noon,
and Atum in the evening."
(Borghouts, "Magical Texts" as quoted by Alison Roberts, "Hathor Rising, page 20)

As Khepri, he is 'becoming'.
As Re, 'triumphantly' sailing across the sky in his boat
"Then, as Atum, whose name means both 'The Complete One', and 'The Not (yet) existent One', he is the Old Man of the Evening appearing as a ram-headed figure within the solar disk."(page 20)

At noon, at full strength, Ra is able to do battle with Apep (The monster that would destroy everything in existence) his own self, but not at evening, for "old age and decline set in", and this is when he needs Set's protection.

Thursday, July 27, 2006 B

"Julia at Ciao Bella"
7:15pm

This sketch both gave me practice with the live sketches (that I need so badly), and also let me take advantage of the wonderful ambiance at Ciao Bella while Julia sipped her 'Absinthe Italiano'. This one, I'm pleased with this one:

Friday, July 28, 2006

"Laura and I and the Ogres"
10:40pm

Oh! I forgot until this evening to record this morning's dream which featured Laura (today is 4th anniversary of her death.) It's not a romantic dream by any means. Laura and I are transversing this strange green domain with odd trees. There are horrible ogre monsters after us, which we are trying to elude. (This sounds greatly like our last days together, spent in the cyber world of 'Everquest', strange green environments with monsters.)

As so often happens, I had a peeing dream amongst this scenario, too. I left the main scene to go up to a green and white building, which had a restroom. I'm there in the stall trying to do my thing, when two of the monsters come in, all hairy and nasty. I am terrified they will see me and attack me. But to my great relief, they never paid much attention to me, for they were much more interested in attacking each other! They are going at it, fists jabbing, loud growling and...

...then I wake up. As I relayed my dream to Julia, she asked "What's it mean?" I replied, I think it just has to do with all that Everquest playing we did together. It was a strange, alien world, and we explored it together. Yes it was an adventure. Laura had that quality of making anything an adventure.

Saturday, July 29, 2006

"Assembling a World"
6:02pm

I am not up for study, the book is closed, nor am I up for writing. But a chance sighting of two kids playing Legos inspired the following:

Sunday, July 30, 2006 A

"New Camera"
1:13am

Yes! I have a new camera! It is a Canon Power Shot S2 IS and I'll be a long time learning about all its features. It does all the way from the basic 640x480 up the way up to 2592x1944! That largest size is for print outs bigger than 8 1/2 x 11 (216x279mm). The 'Medium 1' (2048x1536) size seems plenty sufficient for me. I hardly know anything about it, yet managed to get a fair picture of me:


This is totality of what the camera eye captured, reduced to small web size...


This is crop of me, with my furrowed brow, click to see it larger...

I didn't alter these photos in any way, except for sizing. Since using the Opera browser, which has a function that shrinks and enlarges photos as well as text, I've used it for my image reduction needs. (The old Picture Publisher reduction algorhythm is pretty lousy, and tends to distort and muddy details.) So I get a picture the size I want in Opera, hit the 'prt scr' button and then 'paste as new image' in the image editor, saving the image as either .jpg or .gif.

Sunday, July 30, 2006 B

"Macro, I've Got Macro!"
6:00pm

This is totality of what the camera eye captured:

Crystals are tourmaline, then moldavite, then a ruby, an amber globe and a yellow topaz, and another tourmaline.

This is crop of 100% size. The little presentation pillar is exactly 3 cm (1in 3/16) at its diameter!

Tuesday, August 1, 2006

"Lots of Linear..."
9:15pm

I could be boring you with mundane griping about our recent electric bill, 183 bucks! for an apartment only 672 square feet in size. But, maybe you don't want to hear that, cause your electric bill was twice as high. No, I won't do that, then.

I'll just share more of my weird artwork. The first is one of those intuitive doodles:


The nekkid lady seems to be perusing a giant computer monitor...

Now I look at my doodle, the lady has a bit of a pose Julia had earlier this week when talking on the phone. She got interrupted from her bath, and propped one foot up on a stool, which made her rump stick out like that. I did a quick sketch, but thought it thoughtful NOT to scan it for future generations. There could also be a bit of the mysterious mythic going on there.

The other is a continuous line drawing of an image in Hathor Rising of Khons, the moon god. The photo of Khons in the book is one of a statue at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The proportions went whack as I carefully kept the pen to the paper at all times:


It's hard to tell here, but he has a crook, a flail, a Djed, and a Was-scepter, in addition to a menit-necklace and a uraeus.

As you can see from the photo, his nose got really, really long! (Wow, what an interesting bio that one has, see this touregypt link.)

Tuesday, August 2, 2006

"Crossing by Khons Again"
9:38pm

This entry's title comes partially from the meaning of Khons' name, 'The Crosser' or 'The Traverser', referring to his being a Moon God, and "[the moon's] waxing and waning through different phases of existence." Hathor Rising, page 79. I like the expression of the statue view in the 1903 photo seen in that touregypt link.) So, not content with one continous line drawing, I did a second:


There's just something in the expression of the eyes...

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