30 Day Drawing Challenge - Day Six

Via The Dawnie Project

Day Six - Favorite Book

Oh dear. I'm afraid I'm going to start looking like a cop out! But seriously, I cannot pick just one book. I'm actually thinking that I should have added a book to my "best friend" picture because books are like my friends. I really love them. In grade school, I remember cleaning off the shelves of Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume. Then all the Little House books. Then the Chronicles of Narnia. There was this one really great book I checked out again and again - i just found it recently and check it out for my son - it was about how the Roman's built their cities. The librarians must have thought I was trying to build my own city, for the number of times I checked that thing out! 

I will read just about anything. I like it all. One vacation to hawaii when I was 13, the house we rented had a shelf full of vintage (like 60's era) Harlequin Romance novels and I read every single one of them while lying on the beach, or next to the pool. They were horrible and they all had the same scheme and they were absolutely perfect for a vacation - you could easily finish one in a day. 

Some of my favorite books, in no particular order:

Outlander

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

The Red Tent

Jitterbug Perfume

Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Cannery Row

Gig

I'll read anything by Stephen King and I don't care how nutty he gets

The Hour I First Believed

The Color Purple

The Poisonwood Bible

Eat Pray Love

I could keep going. But you get the idea - there is no real theme there. I usually have more than one book going at a time. Right now I'm slogging through Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which is really difficult for me to get through for some reason, The Game of Thrones, The Double E, and Writing Down the Bones. Plus I have at least 4 others that I haven't started yet. The reading list is never ending. I have a couple of books that I will read at least once a year, but there are so many new ones to read, I don't get around to re-reading very often.

It would be more accurate to say the Library is my favorite. 

Happy sketching!

30 Day Drawing Challenge - Day Five

Via The Dawnie Project

Day 5 - Best Friend

I find it impossible to point to one single person as my "best friend". I have been lucky to find many people who are all incredibly important to me, all in different ways. So for this one I drew a picture of the thing that lets me keep in touch with everyone one of them: my trusty computer. 

I also put a coffee cup out there because coffee is also my best friend. 

Happy sketching! 

30 Day drawing challenge, day four

Day four of the drawing challenge - favorite place

My favorite place is, unequivocally, home. I like a lot of other places, don't get me wrong. The forest is always nice, the top of a mountain, any body of water I can swim in, the coast (east or west). But what I really love is coming home and seeing that door that means I'll be walking into my own, private sanctuary. Glinda knew what she was talking about.

30 Day Drawing Challenge - Day Three

Via The Dawnie Project

Day Three - Favorite Food

Sushi. Sushi is my favorite. If I could eat it every day, I would always enjoy it.
When I first learned to love sushi, there was only one place in the greater Portland metropolitan area that had conveyor belt sushi. and that was Marine Polis Sushiland. Sushiland was on the opposite side of the West Hills from where I and all of my friends lived at the time, so we only made it there about once a month or so. Someone had to have the idea, then someone had to have a car that was running and had gas in it. Then we would pile as many people as possible into the car and drive to the west side.

As we sat on the vinyl waiting benches, watching the sushi go around and around the conveyor belt, we would joke and count all the things that we were going to grab as soon as we sat down. We would wait for a booth to open up and then most of the talk would subside except for the people on the outside of the booth asking the people next to the belt to grab certain dishes before they were conveyed to the next person waiting to grab it up. Plates would pile up. The sign on the wall said: Green Plate $1.00, Orange Plate $1.50, Blue Plate $2.00. In those days, the blue plate was reserved for special occasions. We mostly stuck to the green and a few orange.

Mmmmm...sushi.

30 Day Drawing Challenge - Day 2

Via The Dawnie Project.

Day 2 - Favorite animal.

I couldn't decide. I have always loved Elephants. When I was 10, I got to ride an elephant and I pretty much wanted to take her home with me and keep her in my backyard afterward. The elephant handlers started giving me the evil eye after my ride was over and I wouldn't go away. They keep a pretty tight handle on those girls, I'll tell ya that much.

I also love horses, dogs, cats, birds (I love so many birds!), orangutans, and frogs. But as I am the proud mom to a sweet little house bunny named Oliver, I felt like it would be insulting to leave him out of the "favorite animal" sketch. You do not want to insult the bunny. His teeth are very sharp and my shoe laces don't stand a chance as it is.

I know...that is one big rabbit, or one tiny elephant! 

Happy sketching! 

I found this 30 day Drawing Challenge Meme over at The Dawnie Project. She's a super fun lady and you should go follow her right now. I'm not good at sketch. I like using the sketch app on the ipad, though. It feels more forgiving than pencil and paper. Not forgiving enough, but I'm going to publish all my sketches here anyway. 

Day One: Yourself

I just got some new reading glasses. My first reading glasses, actually. 

Happy sketching! 

One Ignorant American In Line at Customs

I would like the record to show that when you get your US passport in the mail, there is no instruction manual.  There isn’t any sort of leaflet along with the passport that tells you to please visit the YouTube Channel for the country you are visiting to see what you will need at the customs desk. There is no PDF to download that gives you information about what questions you will be asked, or what documents you should carry. You get the passport and are basically told, “good luck!”. Indeed!

I probably could have looked all of those things up ahead of time, but honestly, it did not even occur to me to think about any of it. I assumed that once I got to customs, they would tell me what I needed to know. I assumed, wrongly, that if I intended to do no wrong, there would be no issue getting into the UK on a US passport. Au contraire!

It’s not like I’ve never entered a foreign country before. I traveled in Europe when I was in high school. I’ve traveled to Mexico and the Caribbean and Canada, all requiring a passport and a trip through customs. These trips did not adequately prepare me for the disdain I encountered upon arrival at the Edinburgh Customs desk after disembarking my plane.

I would like to provide this short list of thing you can do to prevent the inquisition:

1.     Print out your flight details. Even if the airlines you’re flying with has the fancy new smart phone scanning technology, go old school! The use of phones is not allowed in the Customs area (this is not something that any wants you to know until you get there and all of your flight details are listed only on your smart phone and you have to tell the customs agent that you can only show her an email from your airlines with the flight details, which she will begrudgingly write down), and you should have a piece of paper that shows exactly when you are planning on leaving the country.

2.     When asked how much currency you’re carrying, do not give a precise amount. Just say, enough for my needs. Really, they cannot force you to say how much currency you’re carrying, unless you have more than 10,000 pound. Otherwise, you do not have to declare an amount and they can ask you, but you do not have to tell them. If they ask you how much you have, you can legally say, “less than $10,000” and they can’t really hassle you about it.

3.     The only other thing I can think of is maybe put a change of clothing in your carry on so that when you get off the plane you don’t look like you’ve been on a plane for 10 hours. I did brush my hair and teeth, but I’m sure I looked ragged. Not that I was the most raggedy person in that line, I’ll tell you.

4.      

Actually, I’m not sure what to do when they start asking questions that you are legally not required to answer. At the time, my feel was, this lady, no matter how huge the bug is that is up her ass, has control over whether or not I enter the country. So I played nice. Even when she called my “story” about having a friend come to pick me up “half cocked”. Even when she told me that she didn’t want to find me pan handling outside Marks and Spencer the next day. Even after she made me sit on the Bench of Shame, while I waited for every other person disembarking three different planes to go through customs. Even when she said she’d put some sort of stamp on my passport indicating that I was “trouble” (there is nothing on there that I could see that said “trouble” in any language, but who knows?). I just smiled and said yes ma’am and no ma’am. And finally, after calling my friend who was indeed waiting outside the International Arrival Gate with her two small children (one of whom was screaming now) to verify my “story”, she admitted me to Scotland.

To be fair, her accent put her as a Brit, not a Scot. And everyone I met after that seemed perfectly friendly. Maybe she knows something I don’t, eh? I could have been starting international scandal and not even know it!