Happy Birthday Mom!

I know it's been a while...much too long!!
But I have a very good reason to blog now, because it's my mom's birthday on October 4th.

It's about week five here at CalArts and my 'new life' has become relatively normal by now... I don't mean normal as in predictable; I mean I feel pretty comfortable here, especially socially because of the amazing people I've met. The homework load can sometimes seem unbearable...but somehow we make it though. It's a crazy vicious cycle, we've discovered, because as soon as we are over the homework hump on Thursday we have to start again on next week's load. Late nights have become part of normal life too; which can be unfortunate sometimes. But only if you have a class the following morning. I try to avoid that situation...!

Each morning I get up (sometimes with the help of my wonderful roommate Tahnee--she had to wake me up for class once!), get ready and go straight to class. On days when I have classes later in the day I might head over to the cafeteria for breakfast. And there are always animation students around--in the cubes, in the cafe, in the main gallery, in the Palace...so I always see someone, sometime, somewhere, every day. It's an awesome environment.

Now I'll give you (a.k.a. Mom-wink wink) a tour of my route around school!
Here's the entrance to Cube # 8! Instead of a full curtain we've got a window curtain. It adds a bit more homeyness to our humble abode...part candy shop, part tea shop, part living room. Seems like we get the most visitors! We've got a guest corner with my nice blue carpet, right next to Perky the percolator. There's also a guest chair right by the entrance. And then there's always standing room in between our desks! Note the cleanliness of my cubemate's desk verses my desk (the extremely cluttered one). Below that is a bird's eye view of our guest corner with Perky and our Ikea lamp. Perky is becoming quite popular here. We've made mostly tea, some coffee, and soon we might even make some cider and cocoa. It's actually getting a little chilly outside at night now.
I took a picture of the fish I animated for traditional animation last week. I wish I could upload the video of it for you, but maybe later in the semester when I have more stuff to show I'll learn to upload it... Animating it was a blast.
I also bought a packet of monster eye stickers at an art store at the beginning of the year--they've made the rounds of the cubes and now many cube numbers have faces on them. Even my video tape has a face!

So that's it for now...I should start working on Color and Design. We just watched a bunch of animated shorts and The Hunchback of Notre Dame...such a good movie!

I'll try update more to tell some real stories, instead of just the general sweep of things. Have a great day tomorrow, Mom! I just showed everyone your blog and we were all very impressed by the Popeye family!! LOVE YOU and HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!

(I always eat fruit!)