Satruday, February 26
Feb. 26th, 2022 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gottawonderToday I am grateful for:
Warm weather and sunshine.
My sweetie had a fairly early appointment in town with the optometrist, and I'm glad he went. It was due.
We went to the city for our "fun" day, and it was nice to do something different.
We mainly went to see the exhibit of Maud Lewis paintings at the art gallery. She is what you might call a naive artist, or a folk artist, who painted mainly the every day things she might see commonly. Things like people sledding, teams of horses and oxen, model T Ford cars, the fishing boats and cats.
In person, her work is MUCH more appealing than any of the reproductions of her paintings that I have seen in books or prints. They are very crisp and bright, and kind of perfectly balanced. They are like little jewels.
There were lots of paintings in the exhibit that I have never seen before, her work doesn't seem to have a complete catalog anywhere. This group showed some of the variations in her style, where the books tend to focus on paintings that are her trademark style.
She would also paint objects for people, like milk cans or window shutters.
We were only able to look for about 45 minutes before the gallery closed, but hopefully we can come see it again before it moves on.
We went to the used book store, the smaller one we go to sometimes, and found some good choices.
Then we went to a chain book store because we needed to find books to complete a series and had no luck second hand. I also found a promising book of Tolkein's illustrations for The Hobbit!
We then went to a big Asian food store (big Asian community in this city), which is always an interesting experience. Partly because almost all of the other shoppers are Asians, so it kind of feels like you traveled somewhere. It's interesting to see the different food (salty fish skin chips anyone? Squid puffs? A vacuum bag of spicy pickled quail eggs? How about some hawthorn flavored candy?) and the different packaging. We have a few things that we have tried before and liked (I have a preferred brand of soy sauce, veggie dumplings, dried mushrooms) and we buy a few things just to try. My sweetie bought a creamy nougat candy this time that is really tasty, kind of like peanut butter flavored nougat. I got some good black tea in a nice tin.
My sweetie got some "gravy" flavor chips to try, I got some cooking vinegar.
I was really interested by an appliance that looked a bit like a tea kettle, but you could also boil eggs in it, or cook soup. The idea was sort of like a small hot plate with a multi-purpose pot. I could really see people living in dormitories using this, or someone using it in the office to heat up canned soup if they didn't have access to a microwave.
There was also a fancy pressure cooker that didn't require a stove top, it was an independent appliance, and it was almost $800! It was smaller than a microwave.
We made a brief stop at Winner's, then headed home.
Today I learned that Dreamworks hires former scientists from NASA to use their math skills and understanding of physics to develop realistic CGI programs for things like bubbles and flight, and so on.
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/the-nasa-scientists-who-create-hollywood-magic-20140730-zyipv.html
Warm weather and sunshine.
My sweetie had a fairly early appointment in town with the optometrist, and I'm glad he went. It was due.
We went to the city for our "fun" day, and it was nice to do something different.
We mainly went to see the exhibit of Maud Lewis paintings at the art gallery. She is what you might call a naive artist, or a folk artist, who painted mainly the every day things she might see commonly. Things like people sledding, teams of horses and oxen, model T Ford cars, the fishing boats and cats.
In person, her work is MUCH more appealing than any of the reproductions of her paintings that I have seen in books or prints. They are very crisp and bright, and kind of perfectly balanced. They are like little jewels.
There were lots of paintings in the exhibit that I have never seen before, her work doesn't seem to have a complete catalog anywhere. This group showed some of the variations in her style, where the books tend to focus on paintings that are her trademark style.
She would also paint objects for people, like milk cans or window shutters.
We were only able to look for about 45 minutes before the gallery closed, but hopefully we can come see it again before it moves on.
We went to the used book store, the smaller one we go to sometimes, and found some good choices.
Then we went to a chain book store because we needed to find books to complete a series and had no luck second hand. I also found a promising book of Tolkein's illustrations for The Hobbit!
We then went to a big Asian food store (big Asian community in this city), which is always an interesting experience. Partly because almost all of the other shoppers are Asians, so it kind of feels like you traveled somewhere. It's interesting to see the different food (salty fish skin chips anyone? Squid puffs? A vacuum bag of spicy pickled quail eggs? How about some hawthorn flavored candy?) and the different packaging. We have a few things that we have tried before and liked (I have a preferred brand of soy sauce, veggie dumplings, dried mushrooms) and we buy a few things just to try. My sweetie bought a creamy nougat candy this time that is really tasty, kind of like peanut butter flavored nougat. I got some good black tea in a nice tin.
My sweetie got some "gravy" flavor chips to try, I got some cooking vinegar.
I was really interested by an appliance that looked a bit like a tea kettle, but you could also boil eggs in it, or cook soup. The idea was sort of like a small hot plate with a multi-purpose pot. I could really see people living in dormitories using this, or someone using it in the office to heat up canned soup if they didn't have access to a microwave.
There was also a fancy pressure cooker that didn't require a stove top, it was an independent appliance, and it was almost $800! It was smaller than a microwave.
We made a brief stop at Winner's, then headed home.
Today I learned that Dreamworks hires former scientists from NASA to use their math skills and understanding of physics to develop realistic CGI programs for things like bubbles and flight, and so on.
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/the-nasa-scientists-who-create-hollywood-magic-20140730-zyipv.html
