My daughter Erika, a professional web designer and font freak, had been making noises for awhile about changing the font on my blog. I love Mac's Skia font and have used it here from Day One, even though I vaguely knew it was not showing properly on PC computers, defaulting to Verdana which she felt was hard to read and looked terrible especially in larger point. My problem has been finding another font I liked as much as Skia that is also free. We decided on FF Nuvo Web Pro (if you want to know more, check the little ikon on the bottom right corner of this page).

Today was spring cleaning day and the font is the new resident here, and one I'm still looking at as a stranger in my six year old home! So, dear readers, please let me know how it looks for you or if there's anything funky going on anywhere. I've already noticed some of the archives are a little weird but it's probably not worth the effort to weed through and correct.

One of the changes I myself had long been desiring was to have my images clickable to view larger. Erika suggested instead to just post them larger because most people nowadays do have larger screens. A few other tweaks here and there and it's done!

Thank you, Erika, for all your expertise and hard work. I'm in awe when I watch you rapidly type away at code, such a foreign language for me, and thus create such wonders on the web! And you've been doing this since you were about thirteen!

Oh, and the image above is the result of some play with text and image layers in PhotoShop... enjoy!

What does an insomniac artist do at 3 am instead of sleeping?
Scanning and blogging. Might as well be creative, eh.

Macro views of the tiles on top of a coffee table built by my husband over 40 years ago, weathered, much used and loved.

Edited March 10th, 2010: A few curious folk have asked for a description or photo of the table. I'm really enjoying the abstraction and designs that come out of seeing the macro images out of context, so I feel a wee reluctant to start showing off the furniture but here is a view. The colour of the tiles in this photo, taken under incandescent lights, is close to reality whereas the macro shots in sunlight gave forth amazing brilliant colours.
   

As you can imagine, art has been my main interest in my life right from when I could hold a crayon. I took art in high school along with the required variety of academic subjects. In math my marks were in the A's until the end of grade 11 and my teacher, an old maid as we used to say back then, encouraged me to study mathematics in university. I told her I'd decided on studying art but thanked her for her excellent teaching of algebra and geometry that helped me learn so well, not because of an innate ability or gift in me. This was proved in my final grade 12 year when I had a male teacher who spent most of the class time bragging about his upcoming potential political career to a select group of favourite male students. As I struggled to understand trigonometry and what else, I've since forgotten, I became extremely stressed to find my marks dropping to near failure. I did pass but with a low mark, not good for my final average for graduation. Funny how these two teachers, plus a supportive woman art teacher are amongst the few I still remember from my high school years.

All this came to mind this morning as we were finishing breakfast and reading articles to each other from the newspaper as we often do on weekends. Husband, who's good in math and has an interest in its history, read a fascinating article from his iPod Touch that astonished and amused us highly, with its references to a mix of arts, literature, mathematics, history and satire.

With another movie just out based on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Melanie Bayley, a doctoral candidate in English literature at Oxford has written an article for the New York Times called Algebra in Wonderland. Some quotes to start with to inspire you to read the whole thing:

SINCE "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" was published, in 1865, scholars have noted how its characters are based on real people in the life of its author, Charles Dodgson, who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll. Alice is Alice Pleasance Liddell, the daughter of an Oxford dean; the Lory and Eaglet are Alice's sisters Lorina and Edith; Dodgson himself, a stutterer, is the Dodo ("Do-Do-Dodgson"). [...]

Yet Dodgson most likely had real models for the strange happenings in Wonderland, too. He was a tutor in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, and Alice's search for a beautiful garden can be neatly interpreted as a mishmash of satire directed at the advances taking place in Dodgson's field.

In the mid-19th century, mathematics was rapidly blossoming into what it is today: a finely honed language for describing the conceptual relations between things. Dodgson found the radical new math illogical and lacking in intellectual rigor. In "Alice," he attacked some of the new ideas as nonsense -- using a technique familiar from Euclid's proofs, reductio ad absurdum, where the validity of an idea is tested by taking its premises to their logical extreme.

I realize this may not be news to many of my well-read readers but it was to us. This makes me want to read Alice in Wonderland again with new and adult eyes and then see this new movie! Meanwhile husband went searching online for a certain history of mathematics that he'd read and enjoyed years ago.

this flower a few weeks later....

bittersweet beauty in the dying,
like the transparent skin and veins
of an ancient elder's hands

If you are a photographer and PhotoShop user like I am,
you may enjoy this interesting article by David Pogue:
Photoshop and Photography: When Is It Real? in the New York Times

With thanks to Finnish author Anita Konkka

P.S. No, there's no fancy photoshopping of the above images, just the usual resizing for the web. Thanks for asking!

As most of you know, the Winter Olympics have been underway here in the Vancouver region. I haven't commented much on it for I'm one of the folks that's been against it mostly because of the extreme costs, commercialism and over-zealous security. However, I have been enjoying some aspects of it, watching a few events from the comfort of home. I always enjoy the opening ceremonies, and this one was quite good, very inclusive of our First Nations hosts.

But there have been criticisms by other ethnic groups in our country who feel they've been excluded. I've had some similar though less extreme thoughts but have hope for the closing ceremonies. I love the response by Stephen Hume, my favourite columnist in our local newspaper. As always he writes thoughtful and well-researched articles and this has to be one of his best: Acknowledge the past, but don't try to remake it. Anyone upset about a lack of French in opening ceremony should learn about B.C.'s other settlers.

It's long but gives a great and sometimes surprising historical picture of British Columbia's multicultural roots and some of the conflicts that have arisen from time to time. If this subject interests you, please read and comment.

P.S. I forgot to add another fascinating article by Hume, also concerning the opening ceremonies: Tripod glitch fit nicely with Olympic tradition; Ancient Greeks would have appreciated the symbolism since the tripod has a long association with the Games.

   
I look closely around home
I see with new eyes

More flower shots, a study of a gorgeous amaryllis.
I just can't help myself for these remind me of Georgia O'Keeffe.
Odd this passion, for I've never used flowers in my paintings or prints.
   

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where! More komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

If zis mad you smil, pleas pas on to oza pepl.
   

More wonderful signs of spring during the warmest winter in 114 years here in the Vancouver area...

Two of the the first-to-green-out native shrubs in the park, the red huckleberry and oemleria or Indian plum (I think)...

And one of many mini-daffodils coming into bloom in my garden...

These images are much larger than real life, for as you can see, I'm still enjoying macro photography...

You may all be getting bored with too many flower photos...
   

Red is for hearts and lovers and friends this weekend - Happy Valentine's Day! or Hauskaa Ystävänpäivää and Happy Friendship Day as the Finns celebrate it.

Red is for the colour of the maple leaf on the Canadian flag.

Red is for Olympic mittens and clothing for Canadians hosting the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games.

Red is the colour of happiness in Chinese culture now celebrating the Lunar New Year, the beginning of spring and the Year of the Tiger.

Red is for the lanterns lining the streets of Chinatown for the bigger than usual parade and other events, thanks to the the thousands of visitors in Vancouver for the Games.

Did you know that Vancouver's Chinatown is the largest in Canada, and second to the one in San Francisco? And that we have another city with a huge Chinese population from more recent years' immigration, that of Richmond, located south of Vancouver and home of the Vancouver International Airport? That Chinese are our largest non-British ethnic group in an already very multi-cultural city and province? We also have a large number of other Asians here as well, some of whom also celebrate the New Year at this time.

Gung hai fat choi!

(Update: Apologies for not checking that the link within the link in my old Friendship Day post no longer works. I suggest Wikipedia's page about various alternative celebrations around the world to Valentine's Day.)

Some days my body feels old from pain and insomnia though in my mind I'm still young and beautiful.
Some days melancholia may touch me like softly fluttering wings as I remember many loved ones no longer here.

On this day and still holding true are these birthday meditations from a couple of years ago,
while a certain song from my youth has been going round and round in my head:

When I get older losing my hair,
Many years from now,
Will you still be sending me a valentine
Birthday greetings bottle of wine?

If I'd been out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door,
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?

    When I'm Sixty-Four, lyrics by John Lennon and Paul McCartney

Such mixed feelings....

like an explorer of new lands
with a new eye, a new lens
finding exciting textures
to inspire her inner printmaker