and ice skates too

It’s… a Lomo picture!! I haven’t used my Lomo in ages, but I joined Snapfish and got free developing for a roll, so used a roll up. This is from an exhibit fairly recently at our nifty fairly new art center. You aren’t supposed to take pictures in there, so the Lomo is perfect. The exhibit was a collection of Outsider Art, and was titled "If You Can Kill A Snake With It, It Ain’t Art". This particular piece is by Howard Finster, a loony artist from near Athens, GA. He built a whole world out of random pieces of stuff, and called it Paradise Gardens.

Sadly, as I’ve just discovered from an article in the New York Times while searching for photos, Paradise Gardens has fallen into ruin since Howard Finster’s death in 2001. Baker B is very interested in Outsider Art, so did some reading up on Howard Finster years ago. In a connection with my last entry, he let REM film their first video at Paradise Gardens, and they used his artwork for one of their album covers. AND he was in the video Shiny Happy People, oddly. In something I read or saw, he kept referring to REM as "The REMs", so we still often say The REMs too.

Anyhow. I don’t know how this entry turned into an essay about Howard Finster. I’ve always wanted to go check out Paradise Gardens, though.

Sadly, the pictures aren’t real clear. Being a Lomo and all. And I was trying to take them fast. AND I hadn’t used it in so long I’d forgotten how to work the weird little distance meter.

Baker B in the elevator. Yes, the elevator is the size of our house, and has a cushiony bench to sit on. The art center only has two floors, so it’s not exactly a lengthy trip anywhere you’re going. It reminded me of Red Dwarf, where it takes so long to get from the top of the ship to the bottom via elevator that they show movies and serve you meals. Except it took like three seconds. I’m not sure what Baker B is looking at there. The ghost of Howard Finster??!!??

I’m taking a little break from enrolling transfer students into Fall classes. I’m honestly not sure why we are the ones doing this, but each college has to enroll the transfer students before they come for their orientation. I guess since they haven’t met with advisors until they do come to orientation, we try to at least get them in a few classes before they are clear to register themselves. So it sort of makes sense. What I have to do is see what they have already taken at previous colleges and figure out what they’re still going to need. Especially in Core courses that everyone has to have. It’s pretty easy if they’re missing a bunch of core stuff; not so easy if they’re not. Major stuff tends to have prerequisites they haven’t met. But, whatever. We put them in what we can. And I do hope everyone likes Theatre, because anybody I have who is missing a Humanities is getting slapped into Intro to Theatre, where there are lots and lots of vacant seats. At 8 in the morning, which is when most classes that still have seats are meeting. Everybody hates 8 in the morning classes.

So far so good with the whole Being Queen thing. Drama Queen has been doing an exemplary job, and has been a few minutes early every day – with the exception of the one day when she didn’t even call until 8:30, having just woken up. Her kid won’t sleep through the night, and she’d gotten up and pulled everything out of the refrigerator and put it in the kitchen floor. Her kid is 2 1/2 so it seems like a very very bad idea to me that she’s running free at night without Drama Queen knowing it, but I’m not sure what she should do about that. But the kid also apparently unplugged her alarm so after she’d gotten up and cleaned up the mess at 4 AM she didn’t wake up on time. Our boss said she can overlook things like this if it’s once a month or so, but I should just keep track of her time and keep the boss posted on what’s going on.

And now I really need to get back to my poor little transfer students.