I love my neighbour birds, but sometimes they're a challenge. The scrub jay couple that live in a big tree near us wake us up every morning at the bedroom window, waiting for peanuts. Sometimes, they literally sit on the windowsill and just yell.

This week started with one landing for a peanut and the other being too hasty to go in for his (for some reason, they can't both just sit nicely together), so a brief scuffle occurred resulting in one coming into the bedroom, flying into the glass door, twice, then hiding in my wardrobe. Chasing a bird around at 8am in my PJs is not usually how I like to start a new week.

The rest of this week has been fairly uneventful. Alex has been away on a work trip to Shanghai, so I've mostly been filling my time catching up on horror flicks. I watched a few oldies, but the most interesting recent one was Hereditary, which ended up not being exactly what I expected, but actually somehow better. It's got some really inventive shots and a nice slow build and doesn't rely on a lot of exposition. I'll probably watch A Quiet Place tonight.

This week's ikebana class consisted of a 3 material, 7 stem shoka and a more traditional moribana style freestyle arrangement. Teacher said I should be receiving two diplomas next month!

I started my weeknotes when I moved to the USA, and I lost count somewhere along the way, but I think we're at week 267.

XOXO This week started with me at XOXO 2018. For various reasons, it wasn't my favourite. It was roughly 4x larger attendee wise and I think that's way beyond my human crowd size limit. Art + code were standout highlights, with basically everything in that track being fascinating (I would go to a conference that was just that sort of thing exclusively, tbh). The main stage conference track was a bit too one-note/preaching to the choir for me, but Open Mike Eagle was excellent, as was Hari Kondabolu. I really missed being in Portland, too. This year everything was under one, very large, roof, rather than scattered around an area of Portland. We could have been in any city.

Ikebana I'm 10 months-ish into my ikebana practice at the JCCCNC. This week I made a 2 material, 3 piece shoka and a freestyle arrangement in class. Related, our class is supposed to be taking a study trip to the Ikenobo school in Kyoto in February so I'm working on my language lessons again, both for that and so I can understand more of the tut-tuts I receive in class.

Day job Work is workin'. Lots to do, interns start next week!

Walked ~30.6 miles.

A couple of months ago I read Jenny Odell's transcript of a keynote she gave at a conference. It's a good talk and well worth a read/watch, but the part about her bird encounters caught my attention the most.

I ended up reading "The Genius of Birds", which she mentions and that book referenced some sections of "Gifts of the Crow" which I read immediately after. The latter covers a lot of the same topics as the first, but focuses on Corvid research. Since reading them, I'd say I've become mildly obsessed with crows and their kin - I generally have nuts in my bag now just in case I meet a friendly one.

I highly recommend at least reading The Genius of Birds - it's an easy-going read in a light-hearted tone and just generally full of fascinating little stories about bird research and their obvious intelligence and charm.

I just moved house, and it turns out that a member of the corvid family already frequents my yard - a pair of bright blue Scrub Jays. On just the first day of my hanging out with them, they already know what the deal is. So happy about my new neighbours!

I made a comic for my dad's 60th birthday recently. It's the first time I've made a comic and the first time I've ever really dealt with making something in print. It was a lot more work than I expected, so I've got a whole new appreciation for comic book artists, inkers, colourists and writers. I basically learned a bunch of stuff that in hindsight should have been really obvious.

I screwed up:

• My margins. I just assumed that if I worked on Bristol board with an even margin on everything, I'd just be able to make it fit nicely when I scanned it and set the page. Of course, the physical paper size of Bristol board does not in fact match the aspect ratio of the classic printed comic book that I wanted to create. Thus, I have margins on the top and bottom of pages that are too large. Obviously.
• Where to focus my energy. I thought the colouring was going to be the bit that took forever. That, and cleaning up the line work and all that fiddly stuff.  Turns out, Photoshop makes that stuff really fast if you just watch, like, 2 youtube videos and keep a simple palette (even then, I made some compositions overall too dark while others were too light). The bit that took me forever was figuring out what to actually put in the panels and then the physical act of hand drawing them. I should have applied what I'd learned from my actual career and lead with the user stories and got that bit down before worrying about the UI.
• The subject and style. Rabbits are basically expressionless blobs. They are terrible visual subjects for storytelling. I'd have had an easier time if I'd gone more cartoony and/or more fantastical.
• The story telling. I am not a writer. I do not know how to construct a story. I can barely string a blog post together. Comics are apparently 99% creative writing and creative writing is so, so hard.