Travel ATCs

I made these a while ago for a swap. I ran across them again, so decided to post a couple. As I recall, this was actually an alphabit swap, and I had to use the letters C,E,S,X and A. Here are C and E:



I color-copied some maps from an old grade-school geometry book for the background, then used the silhouette stamps from ????. The letters are QuiKutz.

Iron Man

I finally saw "Iron Man" on Sunday, in an attempt to spend some time in air conditioning. Har. The theater was warm, but the movie was surprisingly entertaining.

The movie tells the beginning of the Marvel Comics superhero "Iron Man." The man is Tony Stark, played here by Robert Downey, Jr., a billionaire playboy who runs Stark Industries. Stark produces the latest in technical armaments for war. Tony's inheirited the company from his father, a developer of the atomic bomb, and is mentored by Obediah Stane, played by Jeff Bridges.

While on a look-see in the Middle East, presumably Iraq, Tony's humvee caravan is attacked, and Tony is kidnapped by what we suppose to be terrorists. Tony is severely injured in the attack with a shrapnel bomb -- produced by Stark Industries. He is saved by a doctor, also a captive, who inserts an electo-magnet into Tony's chest cavity to prevent the fragments from piercing his heart.

The terrorists want Tony to build them the newest Stark missle, dubbed the "Jericho." Tony and the doctor spend many days dimantling old equipment, welding, etc. and produce not a bomb, but Iron Man's exoskeleton.

As you might guess, Tony escapes the clutches of the evil doers, and returns to LA a changed man. He wants Stark Industries to stop making weapons, a move not endorsed by an increasingly menacing Stane or the stockmarket.

Mamma Mia!

I've been trying to post all week, and haven't been able to get in. I can't leave comments on websites, either.

I saw "Mamma Mia!" on Wednesday afternoon, with a theater full of other women. Most reviewers panned this movie, but at least Roger Ebert was honest about it: he admitted the movie wasn't made for him, but for women and girls. And it is a woman's movie. I enjoyed the movie, and so did my audience-mates.

The plot is paper-thin. Donna, an aging hippie, runs a hotel on a Greek Island. She's raised her daughter, Sophie, as a single mother, and is in the midst of preparations for Sophie's wedding. Unbeknownst to Donna, Sophie invites three men who might be her father. You can tell almost from the first instance who Sophie's dad is. But, much singing and dancing will have to occur before the happy ending, and a couple of mysteries will be revealed.

The music is very catchy, even if you weren't a particular ABBA fan in the day. I bought a pricy Diet Coke at the snack bar as I entered the theater, and the 16 or 17-year old girl who waited on me let me know she LOVED the movie, and she'd sung along with it when she saw it at the drive-in. She bought the soundtrack, and knew all the lyrics by heart. She was very cute.

Y.ou K.now Y.ou R.ock Challenge

Well, here goes. My stamping friend, Julie Koerber, has a new challenge blog. I am determined to participate, since closure of our local stamp store means no more fun classes. I hesitate only because I've seen the challenge entries already posted, and there is SERIOUS talent in these challenges.

The challenge was to create a card using an "album" cover as the jumping-off point. Being old, I chose an old disc, the Brian Setzer Orchestra's "Dirty Boogie":


After several tries, I came up with this:


I sprayed Radiant Rain (Irish Mist, Sky Blue) on 140-lb hot press watercolor paper, and wiped with a papertowel. I have not perfected the blob-less application of these beautiful glittery sprays, so wiping after applying eliminates those glitches.

The stamps are all Impression Obsession. I went with the drink theme, although I used coffee in this iteration. On the album, the smoke from a cigarette is highlighted with white; I highlighted the steam from the coffee cups with a white gel pen. It's only slightly visible. I topped the card with a Martha Stewart border punch, to add some angularity, and balanced that with the stick-on pearls, which also adds a little more white.

Dog Days

July is traditionally the month during which the "dog days of summer" begin. According to Wikipedia,

[t]he Dog Days originally were the days when Sirius, the Dog Star, rose just before or at the same time as sunrise (heliacal rising), which is no longer true owing to precession of the equinoxes. The ancients sacrificed a brown dog at the beginning of the Dog Days to appease the rage of Sirius, believing that that star was the cause of the hot, sultry weather.

I am celebrating the dog days by making doggie cards. These will mostly go to a friend, who kindly requests a bundle of cards as a birthday gift. The first card features a dollar stamp set I got at Joanne's:

The same little chihuahua, using a Martha Stewart border punch as a mask:

Finally, a Hero Arts stamp set:

Hancock

Summer wouldn't be complete without a Will Smith movie, and Hancock is this year's offering.

Smith is an angry, hungover superhero with a bad attitude and a penchant for saving humanity with maximum destruction of property. As an example, in the opening sequence he helps the LAPD apprehend a careening Suburban filled with machine-gun toting bad guys. When Hancock arrives at full-speed, he breaks through the freeway signs, which land on a number of police cruisers and destroy them. He eventually lifts the Suburban, and, flying over downtown LA, crashes into several buildings with the vehicle before he impales it on the tower over the Capitol Records building.

Into this public relations nightmare steps Ray, played by Jason Bateman. He has a plan to revamp Hancock's public image. Ray is the movie's moral center, an ad-man with a heart for the world. He's been trying, unsuccessfully, to get a big pharmaceutical company to donate a tuberculosis drug, in exchange for use of an "all Heart" logo. Not surprisingly, big business is reluctant to bite.

A fun movie. Will Smith is always entertaining, and he sees to quite enjoy the havoc he creates as Hancock.

No more Zoo

Click on the photo to make it marginally bigger.

A layout I did earlier this year; I'm posting it today so I can get in the habit of posting everyday, or nearly so!

All papers are from Club Scrap.

WALL*E

Wednesday was my half day, so I saw "Wall*E" the new Disney-Pixar animated movie. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Wall*E lives on Earth, quite alone except for his cockroach pal. He goes to work as a trash compactor; he is cleaning up an abandonned and despoiled Manhattan, by all appearances. All human life has fled the planet, ruined by the megaconglomerate "BNL" or "Big and Large."

His routine is set aside one day by the arrival of EVE, a drone sent by the orbiting humans to check to see if life has returned to the planet. Wall*E falls in "love" with EVE, and presents her with a green plant he's rescued from an abandonned refrigerator, and has growing in an old shoe. EVE's sensors respond to the plant, and she is drawn back to the orbiting ship, Wall*E tagging along.

The humans have all become very round, nearly boneless creatures whose only work consists of sitting in motorized chairs and drinking all their food in big slurpies, their every need attended to by numerous robots. The Captain is likewise round and attended to by the menacing "Auto-Pilot," whose presence nearly prevents the Captain from responding to the positive indicator of a rejuvenated Earth.

A good movie, many out-right belly laughs.

Back from the Netherlands

Earlier this month I was in Rotterdam for a Zonta International convention. 2,000 women from 67 countries participating in a 4-day meeting to elect new international officers and board members, and vote on a series of by-law changes -- which turned out to be surprisingly contentious.

While the meetings were interesting, my travel companion and I were most interested in seeing something of the country. Big cities like Rotterdam are mostly the same. Rotterdam's appeal comes in its very modern architecture; it was flattened by bombs in WWII and had to rebuild most of the center city. The Erasmus Bridge, aka "The White Swan" is a particularly striking example.



We took the water bus up the river for an hour to Dordrect, the oldest official city in Holland, chartered in 1220. We wandered the streets of the old city, took many photos, and ate lunch in a cafe along a canal.



We climbed the clock tower of the Grote Kerk, up 247 steps to the top crow's nest for a stunning view of the city and the surrounding country. We could see Rotterdam in the distance.






After our short time in Dordrecht, we traveled by waterbus to Kinderdijk, to see the windmills, as pictured above. A system of 19 windmills drains the Kinderdijk polder; the mills were built in the mid-1700's, and most continue to serve as houses.

We toured the inside of a mill; very tight quarters indeed. As we exited, we saw a family dressed in what appeared to be regional costume, complete with wooden shoes, appropriately called klompen by the Dutch. Of course I bought a pair!



The windmills of Kinderdijk are one of the best known Dutch tourist sites. They were placed on the list of UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites in 1997.