Beautiful life

Today I had a nice quote from Frank Lloyd Wright on my jasmine teabag.

"The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes."

I wholeheartedly agree with his sentiment, being of great cheer myself. Plus, everytime I come home the first thing I see is an adorable guinea pig sleeping in its hammock, followed by the Pie. And everything, really, is so beautiful and fascinating, even a wee scrap of paper is so full of promise. The tea was delicious. And not laced with any kind of mood enhancer, I promise. Unless jasmine is a mood enhancer? Hmm.

In other news, I heard back from Olympus regarding my camera - it will cost about 100 pounds to fix it, so I'm gonna send the form in and have it done.

Finally, this weekend two labmates and I went to Oxford for some crayfish sampling/birthday partying/sightseeing. Both of them went there for undergrad. I will make a post with pictures from the trip later. I have my cameraphone pictures but will probably hold out for when I can get some of their pictures to put up. Here are two they will not have, though -

Carl in the hotel parking lot; looks like someone was getting dangerously close in the night:

Cute van:

I hope you all have a beautiful day!

The filth-bringers and the world's cutest guinea pig

As promised, photos of the park swarming with student-life:

It does get more crowded than this, a bit later in the afternoon.

Now the weather has gone back to normal - cold and damp, so the park is mostly empty again. Its amazing how variable the park population is. Oh, today for the first time I used the toilet at the edge of the park. It was surprisingly clean and well-appointed. For one thing, it was not a bush.

This is my friend's dad's guinea pig that I am looking after, who became very ill a few days ago. I found him at lunchtime lying on his side and twitching, so he got to go see the vet. He has to be hand-force-fed every 5 hours or so, and he doesn't like that one bit. The vet said he was doing surprisingly well now, though. His name is Gandolf (the guinea pig not the vet) and he is also incredibly cute as you can see. There may also be an action figure in the shot. How did that get there.

Foam and Filth

In case you were not aware, I have been hired to produce a crayfish costume. Actually, they have decided they want two. Oh my. For now I'm making the one, they want one by the end of June. "They" is the Bristol Zoo. Wow. So, the costume will be formed out of foam, of the 2 inch thick variety. Here you can see the large, 6' by 7' plus piece of foam, with the crow bag for size comparison.

That's alot of foam! Now here are some of the pieces. There will be two layers for each claw and arm piece, and a single layer for the body itself. Yeah, its kinda messy to carve it up.

Warning: too much foam can be hazardous to your work ethic and is known to be nap-inducing.

Here's the basic sketch of the costume. We'll see how much like this it will end up looking.

Now on to the filth. It has been very, very warm, and SUNNY lately, which adds up to HUNDREDS of students swarming the park. Like a plague of exposed and pasty flesh. They sit around, they have barbeques on these wretched little disposable barbeque things that leave burned patches all over, they drink, carouse, and leave garbage all over the place. There is no responsibility here, folks. This is the morning after a day of use.
LOOK AT IT.

Then the next day you see the park cleaning dudes out picking it all up, just so the same thing can happen all over again that day! It is so...so terrible and illogical and BIZARRE! I simply cannot understand how this is allowed to continue the way it does. Its silly to say it, maybe, but at Oberlin, lots of students always hung out in the grass on sunny days and I don't remember there ever being a problem with litter left behind. Perhaps A cup or A stray sandwich wrapper, but nothing like this. At all. Ever. Well, in the four years I was there, ha ha ha.

Here was a tiny patch that had no garbage on it, this was Sunday, I went over there today and I honestly don't think I could have gotten this big an area with no trash at all from the same area of the park. Also observe my foot.

I shall try to remember to take my camera(phone) out and get a picture of all the people in the park some afternoon. 'Cause it is a sight to behold, truly.

Oh yeah, also today I sent my old Olympus digital camera out for assessment. When I told the dude at the camera shop how old it was he said it was impressive that it made it this long. Wat. It is only about 3.5 years old. Oh well, I guess I can be happy with that statement.