sporadic posts
Dinoflagellates: What you Can’t see can hurt you
the elegant dinoflagellate: it’s toxic strength is in it’s numbers Scanning electron micrographs reveals cell wall structure that is used to identify the species. When my husband, Alfred R. Loeblich III, was an associate professor at Harvard, he was assisted by his first wife, Laurel Loeblich, PhD, and his students in studying dinoflagellates – these…
The Health Queen
We’d rather fight than move My mother stood on the hayride that passed as a 4th of July float, wearing a purple suffragette gown, a fake greased black eye (modeled after a Tarryton cigarette commercial), and carrying a sign that said “We’d rather fight than switch [crossed out] MOVE.” She was also defiantly waving a…
Now teaching drawing & painting
Almost everyone in my family is an educator of some sort. Why do I have to be different? After years as a professional graphic designer and illustrator, working in corporate and non-profits freezing little gray cubicles mainly illuminated by the colors of my computer screen, I thought I’d give teaching a try. And hey, I’m…
Vignettes of Mawn
My grandmother, a noted boxer breeder and handler, and former dancer, was eccentric and charming. She struggled with alcoholism and mental illness. And she was one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever known.
Who’s afraid of Joan Didion?
It mildly disturbs me that I’ve never heard of Joan Didion, celebrated author and journalist who died recently, at 87, so I’m trying to catch up. The authors of every documentary and eulogy I’ve read so far, all journalists, seem to feel it’s important to include that she once interviewed a 5-year-old child on acid,…
Some ink on Squid game
While my peers in the 60’s were screaming over the Beatles and the Monkees, I quietly nursed a painful crush on actor Patrick McGoohan. McGoohan played Beethoven in a Disney tv show. (I also had a crush on Beethoven, perhaps because my father frequently played the Moonlight Sonata on the piano as a lullaby for…
Not a frog
This story has been told so many times in my family that we all are numb to its horrors. There are many things of which I always had to be reminded, because I had no memory of it, such as me being pulled out of the pond by my hair because I was so heavy,…
Serious side
One of my favorite bosses once accused me of being a little “zany,” and at times I suppose I am, however one of the things on my serious side is choral music. I have loved singing with choirs since I was a kid. The feelings that are generated while standing shoulder to shoulder with singers…
Why I’m in North Carolina, or, Was the Evacuation Worse Than the Hurricane?
This is an email I composed immediately after the 2005 Hurricane Rita evacuation. I was exhausted. The evacuation was horrendously mismanaged. Some lost their lives on their arduous routes out of the city of Houston if they didn’t leave far enough in advance. Since Rita, which was not a direct hit, there’s been other hurricanes,…
Snow wonder
I brought over a lawn chair for my visiting snowman to relax on, and thanks to Google voice recognition translator, I was able to decode most of what the snowman was trying to say. A little snow cat had jumped up on his lap, and helped put him at ease. “You and I are very…
He’s back – the itinerant snowman
I saw him apparently looking up to my bedroom window. What could he possibly want? I set him up with a nice snow woman last year and they seemed made for each other (see last year’s post “This Really Happened”). Where is she now? What happened? He is so obviously sensitive to the cold. Look at him,…
What to Draw: Lesson 2: Set your intention
Putting marks down on a piece of clean white paper can be a scary thing at first, so you might pick a piece of lined notebook paper, or a piece of a brown paper bag, or a napkin with coffee rings on it, to start. It can be like finding your way blindfolded through a…
What to draw: Lesson 1: Loop-de-loops
Often upon finding out that I am an artist, someone will say to me in an ingratiating tone, “I wish I knew how to draw”. This always has had a kind of false ring to me, because if they wanted to draw, why aren’t they drawing, or at least compulsively doodling? Drawing requires doing, and really,…
Where do they all come from?
Ever since I published that post the other day about the romance between two snow people in my yard, snow people have been springing up everywhere around my house! I don’t know what they want. Maybe my yard has become a dating mecca for snow singles, or maybe they just want their pictures in my blog.…
This really happened…
Out of the frozen Piedmont of North Carolina, a snowy figure arose and walked and walked and walked, searching for he knew not what, until he finally sat down to rest at the bottom of a driveway in Cedar Grove. He did not question the reason for his existence, he only wished he were not so…
A Western Doodle
Curly was the meanest, rootenest, tootenest, doodle in the West, pictured here with his trusty sidekick, Butch the Scorpion. Curly pulled off many a sting with Butch, charmed the ladies, rode many a mile together in the dusty desert. Curly never uncurled to show what he looked like on the inside. Some say he hid…
There’s a word for it…
When conversation lags with family on holiday get-togethers, it’s always good to bring out the word board games. Lately, we’ve been playing a lot of UpWords®, an old board game which is a 3D relative of Scrabble (I’m actually surprised when I run into people that don’t know what it is). Basically, after several minutes of…
Sheep, Pig and Rabbit reunited
Sheep and Pig have finally returned home to rejoin Rabbit in an emotional reunion last weekend. The three papier maché animals, along with a life-sized llama, made Heifer International newsletter headlines when they helped raise $3,000 for that most worthy cause a few years ago. Last weekend we retrieved them from storage at my church. Poor Llama had to be…
Humus erectus: Mulch Man
Missing link found in my back yard! Looks mean and creepy, but he’s the champion and caretaker of all green living things, and very warm at heart. In future posts, I’ll bring him to life in an animation. If you remember my earlier post, which could have been more aptly titled “Mulch Ado About Nothing”, I featured…
Kitty mind control illustration
I looked down from my desk the other morning to see this: Now I know that she is lying next to me because she likes to be with me, but when she is staring at me like that it means she expects something, and if I choose to disregard the thoughts she is beaming telepathically…
Aldwyn 