the journey of a thousand steps starts with a single tuesday. welcome.
big week this past week. i finally have an apartment again. i wrote last week’s edition from a little cabin up in the woods where i spent three days quietly growing increasingly certain that enough logistical pieces were going to fail to fall into place that i would not be able to pick up my new set of keys last thursday.
you have to move your power over. you cannot do this online: you must talk to someone on the phone. you can do the first two steps of it online, and then you reach a screen that tells you in apologetic but firm orange font that handling a transition of this nature is beyond the scope of the web site and a human being must become involved, any time from 7am-5pm Pacific time.
you have to update your renter’s insurance. i am increasingly of the belief that renter’s insurance, like many forms of insurance, is a scam, but of course whether it’s a scam or not has no functional bearing on how required it is to move into a new apartment. you have to do this over the phone, too: you have to call them up and leave them a voice mail which they promise to return by the end of the business day and when you speak to them on the phone two days later, they will assure you it is in an incredibly simple process, nothing could be easier, we’ll get that taken care of right away, when did you say you need it by? oh absolutely that will be no problem. and then they will also try to sell you life insurance, which is even more of a scam, and become irritated with you when you attempt to politely convey your disinterest in acquiring a new policy at this time.
you have to sign a lease, at some point, too, and you would like to do this before the morning you are supposed to pick up your keys. you can exchange a series of polite and friendly and increasingly brittle phone calls with the person who is charged with sending you a lease to review and sign, and you will be assured that the lease is their top priority, and it will be emailed over right away, before they leave for the day, they just need to update a few bits and pieces, and by the way the rent i quoted you when you toured, that was for a 19 month lease, the rent for a standard 12 month lease is actually one zillion dollars, did you want to go with the 19 month or the one zillion dollar option? and you can grit your teeth and think back over the past month and a half of wrangling and searching and touring and applying that has brought you to this point, in a small cabin in the middle of the woods, high-centered between leases, with a stinging exhaustion in your lower eyelids that will not dissipate for three weeks yet, and you can offhandedly agree that 19 months sounds perfectly reasonable and is in fact not an incredibly bizarre lease period that may loom in some moment in the medium future like an iceberg out of the pre dawn fog and tear a giant gash in your life plans right below the waterline.
and with those small things set in order, you can pick up your keys and move into your tiny new apartment and inflate your air mattress and fling yourself (gingerly) down on it and get a good night’s sleep in preparation to start the next 19 months of your life.
1. painting
we’re back! back in the comfort zone. well, kind of! nighttime scenes are still very intimidating to me, although looking back on the art i have done in the past year-ish, i’m not sure that’s as much of an honest statement anymore.
this week i knew i wanted to spend some time talking about houses, i have been putting it off for two weeks now, so i wanted to do something relatively straightforward that would nevertheless stretch some muscles.
very basic. this sketch isn’t adding much to the process conversation i don’t think. the moon moved but otherwise, there ya go.
for night time paintings i try to lay down the sky first. it’s always brighter than you think, it’s definitely not black, and getting a good foundation down will let you extrapolate the rest of the night colors from there.
i got some good contrast in from the get-go here. wow! unusual! i have about a hundred different color palettes saved in my painting app on my ipad, some from previous pieces, some from photos, some default palettes that came with the app, and some are honestly a mystery to me, but when i was flicking through them i noticed one that would work pretty well for this scene, and i hewed (hued?) pretty closely to it. palettes! they’re helpful.
adding in some more detail, some reflections, some messy foreground plants, some distant cabins. at some point i need to re-evaluate my foreground plant techniques. my defaults are not really doing it for me anymore.
scroll up to see the final.
2. poem
“fog poem” - fall 2021
the old path behind the store
where there are still branches, they don’t scrape our heads anymore
and when the fog settles in
to our wrinkling faces,
it’s like we’re coming home
and when the lights come on,
one by one,
we tell ourselves we could have never left
3. breakfast burrito
a very short food section this week, since i do not really have a kitchen yet
i am back to working in the office most days, and i’m flirting with the idea of eating breakfast again. usually i don’t. for some reason it’s becoming appealing again now that i’m leaving my apartment most mornings. and breakfast burritos are very easy to make a bunch of ahead of time, freeze, and microwave when you get to work.
you can even keep a bunch of hot sauce in the work fridge. you can share it with your co workers too. you can offer them hot sauce instead of your take on bachelor in paradise or the mandalorian.
i think all those items up there are pretty self explanatory. cook them up and wrap them in a burrito. i am 31 years old and still pretty awful at wrapping burritos. i am probably going to watch a youtube video after this.
yum!
4. eight cool houses
i grew up in a neighborhood in south anchorage that, as far as i know, was mostly built up in the 60’s and 70’s, and at a much more granular pace than some of the big neighborhood-scale developments of the late 90’s and early 2000’s, in which many of my friends lived. as a result there are a lot of weird houses with weird angles and weird roofs and unexpected geometries and very little repetition and just a lot of neat stuff going on.
i took a walk around when i was up there and took some pictures of some of the ones i saw that particularly struck me, and now i’m going to share them with you. and what’s more i’m also going to share a little sentence or two about why they struck me. wow! how lucky are you?
let’s kick it off with one of my favorite roof shapes: the classic “shed.” huge single-pitch roofs like this can create some very cool spaces inside (or some very useless spaces, i guess, to be realistic). also, people don’t really go for bold paint schemes like this any more. they require maintenance and nobody wants to do that. anchorage is also full of giant decks, which are perfect for enjoying anchorage in the summer. and anchorage in the summer is probably one of the top 10 places to be in the united states and maybe the world.
this one used to be blue, and the corners used to be sharp. i’m not sure when they rounded them off, but the collection of forms is unique and fun. i do not love the railing windows but the rest of it i’m digging.
check out that entry! it just kinda peels back in there. very slick. the siding is still in great shape, too. gotta love cedar!
i am a sucker for shed roofs, as i believe we have already covered. it’s hard to get the proportions on them to look right on a bigger house where you need more than one pitch. one gable would be the obvious move, but pretty big and dumb. but by kicking one shed up above the other, you can get a nice row of clerestory windows along there. the covered walkway is a little goofy but was great for trick or treating.
this is one of my favorites. so much cool stuff going on here, and as an ensemble it becomes really clear that someone put a lot of thought into this house. the angled siding that matches the roof pitch is a move i never see anymore, but which we gotta bring back. the railing uprights being repeated that densely makes them read as almost a fabric. you could build that railing with like four uprights total but it would look tacky and cheap. and check out how the window trim on the far windows extends vertically to connect the two groups. even the downspout looks good on this one.
picture this with horizontal siding. tacky, thoughtless, overwrought. but with angled siding? fun, bold, adventurous.
this one is very close to the other “cube” house, and actually treats the entrance in a similar (but more angular) way: folding into the mass, welcoming you back. i have never seen this one from the back but the sloping side wall in that top pic lets me know that something unexpected and dope is definitely going on back there.
finally, something incredibly basic, but i just wanted to point out how big a difference it makes to connect that garage roof into the main gable slope. if you built this same floor plan even 10 years after this one, i bet you would disconnect those roofs and end up with a boring collection of suburban gable-boxes just kind of jumbled together. but that roof coming over gives you a nice tall entry hallway (i assume) and keeps the massing tidy. then of course you can tack on a bog-standard cedar deck later if you want, i can’t stop you. but the frame has some nice stuff going on.
well that’s it for this week. nary an em dash in sight. and hopefully i will have a kitchen island by next week and therefore something a little more interesting to eat. but we’ll see. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.