Adventures in Mississippi

I went to Mississippi a few weeks ago and I just remembered that I have not written about it. So, after work I drove five hours to my mothers house in Mosspoint Mississippi on the coast. Upon arriving I crashed out until morning. Upon waking up I had to make my way out to the largest store (Walmart) in that tiny ass town to purchase jeans because all of my cloths were dirty before I left and Ashley had kindly taken all of our dirty clothes to her parents house. It was like walking in to the Twilight zone. All of the men and some of the women seemed to look like Limmy from the band Motorhead.

So I start looking for paints in my size and I start to notice another trend. All of the pants sizes seem bigger around than they are long. I wear a 33X34 pants size and all the pants were marked things like 38X28. After looking for about 15 minutes I find a pair that will work and start up to the counter. On my way I see some neat fedoras and decide that I didn't know which I wanted so I bought them both.

The last time I was in Mississippi I went to this great PoBoy restaurant that use to be a Chinese restaurant, that was run by Koreans. At this restaurant you can order PoBoys of various sizes from 6" - 36" and they have all the good Asian condiments such as my favorite, Saracha sauce. I tell my mother and step father that I would really like to go find that place again and my mother declines going but my step father says that he would go with me. It took about an hour but we eventually found it again (it had been about 2 years since I had been there last). I walk in and start talking to the lady at the counter, who seems to have some difficulty understanding my questions, when a man walks out at starts(in broken English) impatiently asking what I want. I tell him that I want a 12" shrimp PoBoy only lettuce at which point the lady starts to write down my order and the man turns to her and screams what I said into her ear. "12 INCH SHRIMP POBOY! ONLY LETTUCE!!! she finishes writing it down, ignoring the man and takes it to the back. I get my sandwich a few minutes later, put some saracha sauce on it and head out.

Unfortunately, I only was able to stay for 2 days, but on the second day fulfilled the last objective that I had come to do, other than seeing my mother, walking on the beach, and shrimp PoBoys. I went out to find an alligator. Mississippi has 3 major natural resources: Mosquito's, Spanish moss, and alligators. None of these things are very hard to find but I had forgotten that I was still technicaly winter time and Alligators were fairly dormant at that time. The first place we went to find them was a place called Sou Bayu. We went here for several reasons: It is the home of one of my step fathers best friends, it has a bar on the property (so we can drink while looking for the alligators), and this is the last place that I saw alligators in the wild... about 10 of them last time. oh and did i mention that this place is a mobile home park too? oh yah classy! So we get there and grab some beer (bud or miller are the only choices... sigh) and walk out of the bar to talk to the locals and find some gators! to no avail unfortunately, all of them were sleeping where ever alligators sleep in the winter. So we left. On the way home my stepfather had the idea to go to an alligator ranch to at least get some pictures so we did. Not quite as much fun as finding wild ones but at least I was able to get my pictures.


After that I headed back to Birmingham so I could get back to the grind of studying and working. It is always lots of fun to go to odd little towns and see the local color, take in the local cuisine, and find the local wild life. I hope to be able to do it again soon.

Snow?

If you ever come to Birmingham and talk to people, about snow, who are above the age of twenty, that have lived here their entire life, about eighty percent of them will begin recounting the "Winter Storm of 1993" where 13 inches accumulated for about five days and brought this city to a stand still. Needless to say we do not get much snow here, but when we do every one freaks out. For the last few days I have heard of this cold front that is bringing snow to Birmingham. I am usually skeptical of winter weather advisory but apparently they were right this time. I woke up this morning to my boss calling me ... unfortunately I can only assume that he had the phone in his pocket and accidentally called me an hour before my alarm went off. Any how, in my groggy daze I looked out of the window and was blinded by the reflection off of snow that had covered every where. It really is a beautiful sight if you are not use to it. Still sleepy I went back to bed until my alarm went off. After explaining why I could not stay home just because it was snowing to my girlfriend, I got ready for work and walked on out side to my truck. By that time the snow was melted off of the roads so I had no difficulty going in to work. It continued snowing for hours until about noon when it stopped. The sun came out, the temperature increased, and by 1:30 you could not even tell that it had snowed. Yesterday we had probably 1700 visitors to our mu seam, and that has been standard for the last few weekends, but today due to the snow, I bet we only had 150 visitors all day. People here are so afraid of the snow that they postponed all plans for some thing that was gone by 1:30 and we don't close until 6:00. It really is amusing to watch people react to life. I really do hope that I get to go to Sapporo and experience snow enough to get tired of it.

This is the snow at around 10:30

And this is a picture at 1:30... man I wish it had stayed longer.

25 things

I have had many Friends do this 25 things about them page and I found it so fun to read about them and their randomness that I did it as well. So I thought I would share it with you all.
1. I was raised Mormon.
2. I have the lowest IQ in my family except for my mother.
3. I started my first real job when I was 13 years old.
4. I was the only male in my graduating class.
5. I was a Veterinary Technician when I was 17.
6. I started teaching high school when I was 19 and stopped when I was 23.
7. The FBI has my finger prints.
8. I have been to Australia and New Zealand.
9. I am learning Japanese To teach English in Japan.
10. I make sculptural furniture.
11. I have 2 tattoos and 1 brand on my back.
12. I have very crooked pinky's that I inherited from my mother.
13. I have part of a pencil lodged in my right knee.
14. I spent my last day "off" buying beer and lotto tickets.
15. I have had 16 different room mates over 7 years in one house. 2 of which lived in the kitchen.
16. I was an intern at sloss furnace.
17. It took me 7 years to graduate from college.
18. I am dyslexic.
19. I become obsessed and consumed by what ever I want to learn at the time.
20. My girl Friend is 15 inches shorter than I am.
21. John Watters once stared at me for 45 minutes.
22. My favorite color is red.
23. I have been bestowed the priest hood from two different religions but I am an atheist.
24. my eyes are the same color scheme as my brothers only backwards.
25. when I was a kid I was some times called the Kissing Bandit.

The Person. Part two.

So I have lived a fairly interesting life. I think my parents are to thank for that because they were so liberal with my two siblings and myself when raising us. People say that you can do anything if you put your mind to it but that was a way of life in my upbringing. My parents encouraged and supported pretty much anything that we became interested in. They let us do what we wanted, even if it was a little frowned upon, with out interfering unless we managed to get ourselves in to deep. Mom and dad called it benevolent neglect. What ever it was, I allowed to grow up how I wanted with out being smothered by overbearing parents.

Being raised with this out look allowed me to pursue what ever was interesting. This has blessed me with an odd resume that started when I was around thirteen. I have worked in several plant nurseries, I have been a kennel worker and eventually became a veterinary technician, I installed school networks in New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina destroyed my apartment and all the work we had done, I wired and installed security and home automation equipment, I have worked at an advertising agency where i started out doing data entry and eventually was required to become a web design intern, I taught high school computer classes for four years, I was an art gallery assistant and today I am an exhibits fabricator at McWane Science Center where I get to build, assemble, maintain, improve, and deconstruct kick ass science exhibits. I have been at this most recent job for about eight months. It is a great job; I wake up not dreading to go into work like most of my friends do. It has good benefits and I get to work with intelligent and interesting people.

Unfortunately for me, I have such a wide veritey of jobs because I become bored over time and I think life is to short to be bored. So, I stay at a job for a few years, some times up to six, and then I move on to learn the next trade that seems cool or useful. That is one of the reasons that I have already set my sights on the goal of getting into the JET program over the next year or two.

I realize that the background that I have given is some what sporadic and I'm sorry for that. from now I will only reveal little bits about myself in sections of the blog instead of paragraph after paragraph. I just wanted to establish a base line. till next time!

The Person. Part one.

As of now I have finished the first major step to getting in to the Jet program. Last Saturday on the 13th of December I graduated from the University of Alabama at Birmingham or UAB. I have spent the last seven years working towards a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree focusing in Sculpture. Some people ask me why it took so long. My general response is because I wanted to enjoy college. There are several other reasons though. First is because a BFA degree is an advanced degree that usually takes an extra year to complete. Second is that I have a wide variety of interests and when a class popped up that looked interesting I took it. I don't regret the time it took to complete my degree. Actually I think that I am one of the few people that squeezed everything that I could out of college and in doing so I have made many valuable friends, contacts, and I have learned lessons that can only come with experience.

So what did I make as an art student? Because I did not know much about art when I began taking classes I started off with the basics and took many of the intro classes. At first I became interested in printmaking but after a few classes I was bored of it. Then I became interested in ceramic sculpture. This seemed to be a natural progression, I have always been drawn towards 3-D thinking and was never very good at abstracting into a 2-D format. I took enough ceramic classes to make it my concentration in school but became bored with it so I moved on to regular sculpture. After taking one semester of it I felt slightly more drawn to it than I was ceramic but not overly so. It was not until I decided that I needed a chair for my apartment and did not have the money to buy one that I found where my place was in school.

I set to work one night and made an incredibly cool but very uncomfortable chair, the response was unbelievable. One of the beauties of art is that no one expects it to be functional and the idea of it being interactive was a hit in my department. I set to work making one piece of furniture after another changing the design to become more functional with every piece. Below are a few of my works and as time allows I will make more in preparation for a show in April that I need to get ready for.