Haven't even caught my breath from the semester and the Holidays are here already. Crazy! Well, it's totally groovie that the break is here and we can relax a little, even if it means being a little mellow for Christmas. A chance to be mellow is the best present I can think of. We managed to put the tree up and decorate it all pretty like

...and then the kittehs saw the wonderful bounty we had prepared for them and de-ornamenated the bottom half of the tree (so far). I swear, just as we were putting up the last ornament, I heard a deathmetal howl "DESTROOOOOOOOY," and there was no one in the room except for Scratch and Toots, looking all innocent. I turned back around and half the tree was gone. They're THAT good. Good thing they're cute. Hey and we've had them officially a year already!

I had a good time this semester

though, taking my second Printmaking class, which I was totally into. My teacher, Ryan, even suggested that he and I could collaborate on a print for a conference next year. You can check out the new prints at my website: http://www.misguideddesign.com/index.php/my-prints/. I also had fun getting my hands dirty in my first ceramics class. You can check those out at

.http://www.misguideddesign.com/index.php/ceramics

I apologize that the images aren't exactly Christmasy, but you know me: Mr. Doom'n'Gloom Artist Guy.

I also finally got College Algebra out of the way after slugging through the basic and intermediate classes. Considering that I'm a math dummy who hadn't thought about math once in

two decades, I'm amazed that I got all A's. Besides that, I also got through Biology and had fun checking out little microscopic critters and the innards of a fetal pig. I also wrapped up my Graphic Design requirements this semester with Advance Studio. It was a little tough having a very different teacher with very different methodology, but I did my best and I still have two more semesters to put together a kick-azz portfolio.

Sue had her usual Tsunami of Essays to survive but she kept her head above like a champ. I think she's getting better at managing the whole Division Chair thing along with her teaching duties. She would probably disagree with me but you and I know she's being modest.

Sue's bro Scott (this sculpture wasn't based on him, I promise) was here for Thanksgiving and it was great to have him for a week. We felt like we ignored him half the time as we both dealt with our respective school work, but we managed to hang out a decent amount of time. He came with us to the Final Friday art show at Newman which included the work of several of my classmates who

graduated this fall. We also brought him to the Aviation Museum–Wichita being the Air Capital

of the World and all–and he even managed to get up to the Salt Mines in Hutchinson one day while

Sue and I were busy. Oh and then there was Thanksgiving and the juicy ham that Sue made for Scott, my mom and I.

Speaking of visits, Sue and I have booked a flight to Pennsylvania to see Pops on January 3rd and we'll be there for a week. Anyone who might be in the Reading area during that time should give us a ring. I may even be able to take a short road trip for a day or two, if anyone in the more distant vicinity is available.

We wish you all a very Happy Holidays and here's to a prospero año!

Jeez, what month is it? Augseptoctember? They're going by too fast for me to keep up. It's like an endless sweep transition like they used to have in old Batman episodes except it doesn't transition from one scene to the next, it just keeps going. I had intended to write this blog during the brief two weeks break before the semester started up, but then my Mac started crapping out on me and then the semester started and then...pant pant. Well, here we are halfway through the semester. Better late than never. Speaking of my Mac, I should give some major shouts and wut wuts to Ribbit Computers, who identified the problem (logic board dying, too expensive for me to replace) and made some minor repairs to keep the thing running while I backed everything up and got a new one and they didn't charge me one red cent for the effort. What?! I know it's crazy! I've been there twice and I still haven't paid anything. I don't know how they do it but they've got a costumer for life, as long as they don't ever charge me anything, just kidding, sort of. But seriously, you should go to Ribbit Computers. Even if you don't live in Wichita, you should get on a plane and fly to Wichita and go there. You'll save money, somehow, I donno, it made sense when I thought of it.

It was a busy summer for Sue and I. Like a crazy person I slugged my way through a full 15 credit hours. It wasn't intentional. I had signed up for a couple Gen Eds and then realized I should get my coop work credit out of the way. Then Heather, the awesome design instructor who built Newman's program, announced she was leaving and this summer would be my last opportunity to take her helpful summer portfolio classes. Suddenly, I had five classes going. Well, I survived and the portfolio classes were very useful. Usually taken by seniors about to graduate, they help you put your portfolio in order and develop a logo and letterhead. I still have two more semesters to go after this one but I'm one step ahead thanks to all the work I put in this summer. Oh and speaking of Heather leaving, guess who had the stress of finding her replacement with no time to spare. Yeah, Sue had a busy summer too.

Another thing I intended to do before the summer was over was work on my website. Well, I managed to get something up and running though

it's a bit generic looking right now and a far way from being complete. But the slideshow is pretty neat and some of my work is posted. Go to www.misguideddesign.com to check it out and perhaps give me some feedback, it would be most appreciated!

So, the summer. Hmmm, the summer (cue: grainy, sepia toned footage) It was so long ago. Sue and I did manage to have some fun in the midst of all the craziness. We made it up to Kansas City twice: once to see Rasputina play at the Beaumont Club, and a

second time when good friend Erika came to visit. This was Erika's second time visiting, though her first seeing our new house and enjoying our comfortable guest accommodations. Welllll, comfortable after we cranked up the portable air conditioner. It gets kind of, um, airless up their in the summer. Between the two visits we saw

and did lots of cool stuff in KC, visited a couple museums, ate

some tasty meals, browsed an impressive farmers market with lots of ethnic fare and hung out in Laurence. We also took Erika to Tanganyika, a local wildlife park, and to Bartelli's, the only New York style pizzeria in Wichita (it got a thumbs up from Erika and my mom). Btw, some of the pics on this post were taken by Erika, but I won't say which ones, hmmwaahaha. We're looking forward to two more visitors soon; Marisa, who will be speaking at Newman about the Islamic Spring; and Sue's bro Scott, who will be here for Thanksgiving. See more pics from our summer below.

Wow, time does fly. The kittens are just about a year old now.

Scratch is pretty huge but Toots, fitting for his name, will be a small boy. They are hella energetic and like to wake us up bright and early in the morning. Thankfully they are great company for each other. I can't imaging how friggin annoying they'd be if either one of them was by himself. But we

love them. And my mom has been here for over a year! I think we knew it would be a good move for her in some ways, getting out of the Post Office, retiring somewhere with a reasonable cost-of-living. But we didn't guess how

great the change would be. She made friends right away and seems to have a more active social life than she had back in NY. She belongs to a book club and reads ravenously, goes to a gym, and now has even started volunteering at a couple local ranches working with the horsies. The ranch work has been a life-long dream of hers and she seems to be enjoying the experience immensely. She is proof that you can be busier after retirement than before, but in a good way.

I'll probably get into this semester more during the next blog, but I will say that I'm taking my second printmaking class and am loving it so much that I'm considering getting a double emphasis

(graphic design & printmaking). It will depend a lot of whether or not they can get enough enrollment to put together a special class in the spring but even if they can't I'll probably get three classes of printmaking in before I graduate. It's such hard work and can be frustrating but I love the process and it feels really good when it comes together. Anyone who wants to come to Wichita in the spring to take a printmaking class should definitely consider it. You won't have to pay for lodging and will probably get a lot of your meals taken care of too. Totally sounds worth it to me. Just sayin'.

So anyway, I feel like I'm skipping a lot of stuff, but that's life these days. Got to www.misguideddesign.com and let me know what you think. I'm definitely not a web designer (yet), so any advice would be accepted gratefully. For those of you planning

visits (you know who you are. Oh yeah and now everyone else does too), we look forward to seeing you! And we hope the rest of you are happy and healthy and all that good stuff. Talk to you soon!

If we keep this up, Sue and I will have to clone ourselves to keep up with our crazy schedules. Definitely the busiest semester for both of us, but we've survived. At least Sue had some accomplishments this semester like when she and her fellow English dept colleagues organized what everyone has been calling the...best...Litfest...ever! Some of my festival highlights included the participation of Wichita's first slam poetry team and a visiting appearance by NYC Nuyorican slam poet Carlos Andres Gomez, who wrapped up the festivities with a kickass set that brought the house down. He's a truly decent guy, too, who stayed afterwords to talk to just about every last person there. The ICT Slam Team (Wichita is sometimes called ICT after its airport - Intercontinental) just started up last year based out of a very cool new poetry cafe on the eastside of town call Poetic Justice, a must-visit if you're in town. The owners of the cafe are awesome people dedicated to bringing some cool and positive youth culture to Wichita. We hope they succeed.

Another highlight of the Fest was a reading by English depart sooperstar professor Bryan Dietrich from his work in progress, a sci-fi novel that he's been writing. Bryan is an accomplished poet who has published several books (including his latest: Prime Directive, in stores now!) but this will be his first work of fiction and from the teaser he gave us, I can't wait for him to finish.

Oh and I guess I should also mention that I won first prize in the Sheridan Edwards Review's prose category. "What!" you say, "That's impossible!" I know! That's what I said! But there it is. I even got to read an excerpt of the piece I submitted, The Void, at the Fest. The SER is Newman's literary journal that every year accepts writing and artwork submissions from students and the public and this year I submitted almost all of my pieces from last semester's printmaking class along with the short story. They accepted almost all of it and I was pretty stunned when I found out about the prize for the story. If you have some time, you can read it here, a short surrealist tale about a world turned literally up-side-down.

Well, as I alluded to earlier, this has been one tushy-kicking semester. I haven't had time to work on music, go to Taekwondo, or practice Chinese. Every moment, seven days a week, has been spent working on projects. With two design classes and two studio art classes, I spent a record amount of out-of-class time working on my assignments. I won't lie and say I didn't love it though, especially painting class. See some more examples of stuff I've done below - not best you've seen, I'm sure, but I've been having fun. I decided to act like I'm in art school and start getting dark and angry. Everyone else was doing sunflowers and rainbows but that made it all the more important that I do people with their heads being blown off. I'm not sure why, it just was. I even got to play around with street-style stencil art techniques which was awwwwwwesome. I'm just a noob at it, but I plan on doing a lot more of stuff like that when I take painting 2. Later this summer I plan on creating a portfolio site so I can better display all the design and fine art stuff I've been doing, and now maybe some writing too!

Oh, I said I loved painting

class but I also got a kick out of sculpture, especially the last assignment: metal work!

That's right, nothing makes you feel like a man

than wielding a blow torch and slamming bright orange shards of superheated rusty metal with a sledge hammer! Arrrrgh! I call this one

Mosquider, it's already got a spot staked out for itself in our garden.

There's been a bit of drama in the design program at Newman: our design instructor, Heather, is leaving and who knows what the program is going to look like next fall. I'll say I'm a bit worried but Sue is on the job. She's been put in charge of the search committee to find Heather's replacement. I'll miss Heather's guidance, she's built a fun and challenging program, but at least I'm taking two portfolio classes with her this summer before she's gone for good. The portfolio classes are usually taken by those about to graduate, which for me won't be until next summer, but it seemed worth it to take advantage of Heather's being around for a little bit longer.

Along with the two portfolio classes this summer, I'm also taking Sociology, which started yesterday and Intermediate Algebra, so no rest for the weary! But I'm enjoying the classes so I can't complain. Sue is excited to be taking a watercolor class which started yesterday. It's a five-days-a-week class, so it's pretty intensive, but she's really looking forward to be doing art stuff. The other bit of drama came earlier this semester when Darrel, the graphic designer I was working with at University Relations left to take a job closer to his home, leaving me virtually alone as the only designer in the department for a few weeks. They shielded me from having to shoulder the full workload by myself but it was

a good opportunity to show that I can stand the heat.

The kittens and pigs say hi. Toots and Scratch are getting ginormous quickly, especially Scratch who is on his way to becoming the longest kitteh in the world! They are still adorable and loving furballs but have gotten into an annoying habit of waking us up at five in the morning. Unfortunately, we've had to start locking them upstairs at night so we can get a decent night's sleep.

Mom hurt her wrist in a dog walking incident earlier this year but hasn't let it stop her. She managed to go on a short trip to Savanna, GA and met up with one her friends from New York, and has since had the cast removed and is undergoing therapy to restore movement. She's kept her good humor throughout the ordeal.

So anyway, keep scrolling to see some of the work I've done this semester, caution: some disturbing subject matter. We have no plans to visit people right now, so if anyone feels like a long weekend in the heartland, we're all for it! We love you all and hope you're doing well. Talk to you soon!

Burning Monk, a triptych of the disturbing photo from the Vietnam war of the Buddhist monks who burned themselves alive as a protest. The background was made to look dull and washed out while the flames were rendered bright and with texture that makes them jump a little off the canvas. One of my favorite from the semester.

Two companion pieces called Victoria Fascista and 500000. The first is from a photo from the Spanish Civil War, the second a fascist propaganda poster from the same. I got to play around with stencil and spray paint for these, rendering the backgrounds in oil paint and building stencils for the subjects. Tricky to get it looking as neat as I wanted but some gritty street messiness was desired so I'm happy with them.

Boxman is a wood relief cut. Self explanatory: a man stuffed inside a box.

The Most Comfort is some sort of post-apocalyptic advertisement for gas masks. Can you tell I like typography and doom-and-gloom? Came out a little more cartoony than I planned but I wanted it to be graphic and poster-like so it's not far off the mark. Possibly inspired by nuclear meltdowns in Japan.

Pastele with Rice and Beans was our first assignment, food, meant to correspond with the Litfest which was food-themed this year. All of our pieces, along with the drawing and photography classes, were hung outside the Art Dept during the fest. This one celebrates those awesome meals Grandma made when I was young.

This was the first sculpture assignment, a giant hornet made from wire.

This was the last assignment in my Materials And Processes class, a desk sculpture toy, a collection of blocks or pieces that someone could arrange in any way. Mine is called D3 - Desk Droid of Doom. The tag line under the name on the box says "All your desk are belong to us" for those of you who recognize that early Internet meme. The boxes are hexagon shaped and have magnets in them so they fit together in a variety of ways. The boxes have various abstract mechanical graphics on them. We also had to construct packaging. D3 is a workstation defense system designed to keep away annoying coworkers, tyrannical bosses and pushy clients.

Season's greetings from Kansas! It's hard to believe the winter break is over already. It was an eventful one, in some good ways and some not so good. Of course there were things I really wanted to do with the free time that I just didn't get to. I guess I was so wiped out from the semester that my body's enforced laziness response (ELR) kicked in (that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it). We hope that you all had a great holidays and that your New Year has started out on the right foot.

Our Christmas and New Years were pretty low key but fun. We hung out with Mom on Christmas and enjoyed one of her famous lasagnas. Of course she had trouble finding her usual ingredients from the local Dillion's stunted Italian section, but it was exploding forth from the pan like usual and it was tasty. New Years was spent with friends Sonja and Michael at a local Indian place. We couldn't get into the New Years party they were throwing so we listened to the cheeky Bollywood dance remixes from the next room and feasted our hearts out on a wide assortment of curries and vindaloos.

And suddenly: Kittens!!! That's right, I

said it, kittens. Little bundles of fuzzy energy annihilating everything in their path, walking on our heads, climbing up our backs, perching on our shoulders and flopping in our laps. We adopted them from a local shelter and they were one of the more exciting

things to happen to us this break. Introducing Toots Hibbert (grey tiger, aka "Toots") and Lee Scratch Perry (white long-hair, aka"Scratch," "Lee," or "Lee Scratch") 4 & 7 weeks old respectively when we got

them a few weeks ago, they aren't litter-mates but they were

raised together almost from birth so they might as well be brothers. They are just about the most friendly and playful little guys I've ever met. Ya know how some cats have issues and will hide under the bed and hiss at you?

Not these guys.

They claimed us and the house the moment we let them out of the box. They just let us think that we adopted them.

We tried to introduce them to the pigs but the pigs literally pissed themselves (good thing Sue is used to that) so we've been trying to keep them apart. I don't think the kittens would do anything, but we don't want to stress out the piggies.

Way back in mid-December, Ken (Sue's dad) & Pauline visited us and finally got to see Wichita and our new home. They stayed in the upstairs bedroom which seemed to be comfortable enough for them and we took them around to the many exciting attractions Wichita has to offer, like the P.F. Chang's and the Coleman camping supplies factory outlet. Mainly it was good just to have them here to see our new life and to hang out with them. I'm sure we'll get back out to San Diego at some point in the near future. Don't ask us when right now though, the semester starts in two days, TWO DAYS!

Last semester went pretty well for me, still going strong and having fun, though each semester seems to be getting more busy and stressful than the last. Sue definitely had her hands full with the Division Chair position and this coming semester finds her teaching even more classes, so needless to say, she's a little stressed. Lately she's taught herself how to make

various origami weapons, ya know: mace, long-

bow, nunchakus. I don't know what that means. Anyhoo, this semester I'll be taking on two more design classes along with painting and sculpture. The only non-art class will be basic algebra which doesn't even meet my math requirement.

Some of you may remember that I was attempting to take college algebra this past semester, well that didn't work out. I knew I was in over my head pretty quickly and so here I am taking a couple steps back. Hopefully I'll get intermediate out of the way this summer

and then tackle college algebra in the fall. Yay, more math please. The student designer position has been going pretty well. They haven't canned me yet and I'm expected to stay on this semester, so I guess that's a good sign. It's been fun getting my hands on various projects

to promote the university or various events.

Now for the not so great news. Sue just came back from more than a week in Pennsylvania visiting Nan and Pop and it appears that Nan's health is taking a serious turn for the worst. She was admitted to the hospital just a couple days before Sue flew out and has been diagnosed with a growing litany of health issues. The doctors have been vague, but the prognosis doesn't seem very good. Ken and Sue's brother Scott are visiting them right now, and hopefully arrangements for her care if and when she gets out and for Pop's care are being prepared. Of course it's always a difficult situation, but having them so far from most of their family only makes it much more so. Any good vibes you can send our way for a peaceful resolution to this difficult situation would be appreciated.

Finally, here are the last two print projects I completed in my totally awesome printmaking class.

This is Soundsystem Selector Version, based on a cool old photo from the 70's of a Jamaican soundsystem operator posing in front of his tricked out ride. It's a drypoint, which is similar to an etching. Using a stylus, you scratch the design into a pane of glass (plexi for our purposes) and the ink gets trapped in the scratches, the surface gets wiped clean. We were going for smaller sizes on these last projects, this one was 5 X 7.

Finally, this disturbing image, called Fire Escape Collapse, 1975, was taken from an even more disturbing photo, a burning apartment building in Boston, a young mother and child on the fire escape awaiting the ladder, a photographer was there to capture the moment it gave way. Amazingly the child survived the fall. The technique is etching, one of the more traditional printmaking processes. You cover a sheet of coper with a quick-drying liquid called hard ground that forms a solid layer that you then carve the design out of with your trusty stylus. It then gets dropped into a chem bath. The hard ground protects the coper from the chemicals so that only the parts you carved away get burned, or etched. Once it's all wiped clean, your design has been eaten into the coper by the chemicals, which you then use the same as the glass plate in the drypoint method to produce the final print. This one was only a 4 X 6.

Here's hoping winter is kind to us all and that you haven't already abandoned your New Years Resolutions. Talk to you soon!