Waterlilies in VanDusen Gardens.

I am looking for recommendations on interesting, funny, entertaining, or inspiring blogs to read. I feel like I am in a blog rut and would like some help getting out of it. Make some suggestions please, and base it on the ones YOU like rather than what you think I’d like.

A blog I recently started reading is Cake Wrecks on the recommendation of Susie. It isn’t normally something I would read but it’s hilarious! Who knew there was a trend in realistic cake portraiture. (Creepy.)

Pattern

This is the third diptych in the collaborative series with my good friend Kaishin Chu. We started at the beginning of the summer as a way to keep in touch while she is living in China. We take turns selecting the themes and also putting together the diptychs.

Kai is on the left. Rachael is on the right.

Last night I was wandering around downtown with a friend when we came across a woman selling blueberries beside the Vancouver Art Gallery. Her prices were good but I didn’t have money to buy any right at that moment, so I came back later after a stop at a cash machine. They were really good blueberries, big and sweet, and I ate about a million of them while riding home on the bus. In case you’re interested, apparently she is at the corner of Robson and Hornby selling blueberries quite often.

Good things from yesterday:
1. Quality time with a happy little Yuuki.
2. Preparing for a weekend trip out of town.
3. Having a really productive Art Day.

Last night I finished reading Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. It’s a wonderful book about travel and self exploration, and it has inspired me to get moving on some of the neglected dreams I’ve been sitting on for far too long.

A paragraph in the second last chapter really struck a chord with me, given the thoughts burdening my head lately and a continued string of sleepless nights. The context of the words below is that the writer of the book traveled to a small island to be alone with her thoughts and work through the unhappy things that were going on in her life at the time.

The yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I’m a failure…I’m lonely…I’m a failure…I’m lonely…) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.

From Free Will Astrology:

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free,” said the sculptor Michelangelo about a statue he made. Let that approach be your guide in the coming weeks, Leo. Proceed according to the hypothesis that the beautiful thing you want to create is embedded in stuff that’s hiding its true nature, and your job is simply to liberate it from what’s extraneous.

Taken in the pond at Dr. Sun Yat Sen Classical Chinese Garden.

Looking for things to do this weekend? How about either of these:
Dusk Dances in Stanley Park
Aeriosa Dance Company at the Main Branch Library. (Scroll down for details)

Thanks to Siobhan for the heads up about Dusk Dances. I used to look forward to their performances in Toronto every summer and had no idea they were in town.

The rest of my 52 weeks set on flickr.

Sometimes it is a struggle to take a self portrait every week. Most of the time I don’t really feel like taking my own photo, and then there is the lack of inspiration… I really want to use this project as a means for producing a body of my best work and not just do a quick one off to fulfill the weekly obligation.

For week ten procrastination got the better of me and I left things to the last minute. I was also really uninspired. Then I bought myself a bouquet of peonies and decided to use them as the focus of the shot. The original version was quite a technically weak shot, with bad lighting and me looking very tired. Thanks to photoshop and the final touch of a free texture from NinianLif on flickr, I came up with an image I like a lot.

Five Good Things from the last two days:
1. Lemon meringue tarts from the Swiss bakery at 3rd and Quebec
2. Making dinner for two good friends, and making sure a third friend enjoyed a lemon tart after a stressful day.
3. Being one of the first thirty people to have lunch at the newly reopened Moderne Burger. (I have waited a very long time for it.)
4. Excellent weather on a Friday afternoon.
5. Brightly coloured peonies for my apartment.