Robyn Hill Hendrix

summery summary

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summary of weekend:

  • didn’t know what to do with myself
  • walked around lake calhoun (pretty sure every other person who lives in Minneapolis also did this at some point this weekend)
  • tried not to be too whiny, but kind of failed.  Sorry, Ariel.
  • did not get tacos at calhoun because line was too long (backtrack to preceding bullet point)
  • ate cake flavored vodka flavored cake
  • drank sour milk
  • looked at lots of adorable pictures of kids that fam & friends posted on facebook
  • overconsumption of visual culture via Pinterest
  • made a list of all the clever & ridiculous blogs that make me laugh (see “Giggly Things” in my blogroll to get some lolz)
  • ate a lot of pepperidge farm cookies
  • Didn’t go to a party hosted by a friend of a friend, where I probably would have ended up having this awkward yet funny conversation:

Host: “Oh hello, I recognize you but I can’t remember how we knew each other at Carleton.”

Me: “Yeah, you were a nude model and I used to draw you naked.  Thanks for letting me tag along to your party.  So what are you up to these days?”

  • received a drunken text referring to “people huts” (???) from a friend at said party, in which she somehow managed to make an accidental hyperlink by typing I.am.  I didn’t even know you could put hyperlinks in text messages.  Was disappointed I didn’t get more funny drunken texts from her & still wonder what ppl huts are.
  • called my grandparents to wish them both a belated happy 93rd birthday (both were last week) as well as a happy 4th of July
  • wondered what it would be like to be 64.166 years older than I am now.
  • had some good girl talk about boys (what other kind is there?)
  • saw some boys dancing in patriotic underwear, got coated in citronella, bug spray & pot fumes while overhearing hilarious fireworks commentary from (hipster?) U students next to us, ran into pretty much exactly the people I expected to run into, and guffawed/winced/groaned/smiled at people’s tiny weird video creations at the Soap Factory’s Ten Second Film Festival
  • finished a painting
  • got new business cards in the mail!

Pocket Sized Robyn Art!

4th of July weekend #ftw!

dentist office co-win-kee-dink

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So, I had a dentist appointment this afternoon.  Not generally blogworthy, right?  Except that when I sat down in the chair, just as the dental hygienist was asking me if I had any specific concerns about my teeth, I looked at the large photograph directly in front of me on the wall.  It was a photograph of Whale Rock at Wilson’s Promontory in Victoria, Australia.

Whale Rock, Wilson's Promontory, Australia

I was completely unable to answer the hygienist’s question about my teeth and probably made a weird noise while I pointed at the photograph in disbelief, finally managing to exclaim “I’ve been there!”

Rewind 6 years and a few months:

Whale Rock, Watercolor Sketch at Wilson's Promontory, Feb. 11 2005

Detail of Whale Rock sketch, Wilson's Promontory

I was there winter term of 2005 on the Carleton College Studio Art in the South Pacific study abroad program.  The dental hygienist was very excited to learn more about the photo since she had no idea where it was or what it was about.

Of all the dentist’s offices in all the city, I had to walk into that one…

Adding to the coincidence is the fact that directly after my appointment I met up with my friend Megan who was picking up a painting I am donating to her Hand in Health fundraiser coming up June 19th at Intermedia Arts.  Megan was on that study abroad program in Australia with me and was equally amused by the story of my strange dentist office discovery.  Oh, and did I mention, she happens to be studying dentistry at the U of MN.  Strange circular connections abound.

I suppose Whale Rock is a very frequently photographed landmark, so I was bound to come across a photo of it somewhere eventually…but I still like to enjoy the magical quality of moments of serendipity like this.  Humor me, aight?

got something adorable in the mail today…

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A week or two ago my aunt Jackie who lives in Ohio asked me if I would contribute to a project for her friend’s grandniece Ellie.  It is a traveling journal that each kid in her 3rd grade class is doing for geography studies.  Each person who receives the journal is asked to write (and perhaps draw?) about where they live.  This journal started in Beaverton, Oregon and has traveled to Chapel Hill, NC, North Hampton, NH, Atlanta, GA, Canal Winchester, OH, and now to me in Minneapolis.  I will fill out a few pages and then pass it on to perhaps one more person (but who? could be you!) somewhere else in the country before it is due to be mailed back to Ellie’s class in Portland on June 1st.

Cover drawing. I think this is Multnomah Falls!

first inside page w/instructions and ellie's note

one of my aunt's pages with Ohio garden photos & her doggies

I am so excited!  So, I should include something about the Mississippi.  What other geographical features should I mention and/or draw?  St. Anthony falls?  We don’t exactly have…mountains….hmm.  Maybe I need to get some friends involved.  There are ten blank pages left, wouldn’t it be great if it was all filled up?  And who wants to join in and do the last entry & mail it back?  (Ann?  Want to write/draw about Leavenworth?  This sounds right up your alley.)

They also ask us to mail a picture postcard, which means I need to find a really sweet, iconic, or maybe not so iconic, Minnesota postcard to send to Ellie’s class.

“The Mississippi’s mighty, but it starts in Minnesota at a place where you could walk across with five steps down.  And I guess that’s how you started, like a pinprick to my heart, and at this point you rush right through me and I start to drown…”  -Indigo Girls

blog styling still in progress

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I’m still tweaking things around to get this new blog setup to look similar enough to my main site that viewers won’t feel like they’ve gone to a completely different web page.  Fiddling around with wordpress has been more frustrating than I thought it would be; for some reason it takes forever for the changes I make to go through.  I have this vague unfounded hope that creating a new post will wake up the system somehow.  But at least I figured out how to get my tweets into the sidebar, so I guess that’s something.  all the wordpress widgets seemed to be useless but copying the html from twitter’s profile widget builder into a text widget in the sidebar seems to be working nicely.

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving!  Mine was pretty low key, baked a bunch of pumpkin bread and took some over to Alex’s family’s house where they were having a Thanksgiving meal.  Ended up watching Avatar not once, but twice.  Kind of ridiculous.  I justified the second time with the facts that I was watching it with family members & friends, and it looked a lot better on their big screen than it did in the morning on our computer monitor.

Had to go to work today, but listening to MPR kept me going.  Science Friday had some great stuff this afternoon.  The bacteria-themed Ig Nobel awards were hilarious and were followed by a flashback rebroadcast of a show from about twenty years ago in which they discussed “the future of the internet.”  Laughed out loud at the ponderings about how “even the White House is using the internet now” and the callers referring to their “work station” instead of a computer.  My job would be so lonesome if I didn’t have a radio in that kitchen.  Wish I could play podcasts in there though, that would be amazing.  Except it would probably hamper my productivity because I would put off going downstairs to get the extra ingredient I needed just to hear the rest of whatever conversation I was listening to.  Maybe I do that anyway with regular radio…?

I was going to post a pic of my nifty “Springboard Artist” mug that I got when our workshops ended (sigh) set on my drafting table next to a new painting (of berries!), but I have once again lost my memory card adapter (double sigh), so that will have to wait.

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