I really like this group drawing assignment from Lynda Barry. Each student drew a self-portrait as a member of a jazz band. Then the students copied several of the portraits on to a stage to create a whole band. This is a fantastic idea!

Lately, I have been having my own students do some self-portraits. We did One recently during our “career week” in which we drew portraits of ourselves doing the job or profession we thought we wanted to do as a young child, around 9 years old. It was pretty fun.

We also did the “drawing jam” exercise as Lynda B. discussed in her book Syllabus, (p108-9) in which you fold a piece of paper up so it makes 16 squares. Then you pass the paper around with each student writing the name of a job/occupation or a type of person. So you could have “doctor” or “dancer” or “nerd” or whatever. You only get 10 seconds to write this as a title in one of the squares. You keep passing the paper around until each square is filled. Next, you pass the paper around from person to person, allowing one minute to make a drawing of that person. Each person in the class makes the sixteen square paper and you are working on making one minute drawings on different pages each time until all of the pages have sixteen drawings on them.

In my class, we took another day and colored the drawings in with crayons. They colored and I read a chapter to them out of the book we are reading as an assigned reading. The book is Darius the Great is Not Okay. It has been a long time since a teacher has read a book to them and also a long time since they colored with crayons. But one thing I have noticed with college freshmen is that they enjoy doing things they enjoyed doing in elementary school but have long since forgotten about.

Some other Lynda Barry assignments I like:

Jim – The Devil Cat. (Make a comic about a story you just told or heard)
Three Phrases (What happens when you use different captions on the same drawings?)

Yesterday we had the first snow of the season. When I went outside in the morning, it was foggy and below freezing. As a result, there were several frost-encrusted spider webs around my yard. They were beautiful, so I took some photos.

In a Facetime chat with my friend Maximo Alacar this week, he mentioned they were having “salmon head soup” for dinner. Max is my buddy from the Navy. He grew up in the Philippines and is largely responsible for the predilection that my family has for Asian food.

“You try the fish heads, Bill.” -Max Alacar

Around here, we eat rice probably as much as we eat potatoes, which is an unusual thing in Kansas. I’m kind of picky about the rice I eat. No “Uncle Ben’s” or “Minute Rice” around here. I like to go to the Asian store to get white jasmine rice fresh from Thailand or Vietnam.

But I’ve never had fish-head soup before. Below is the recipe Max said to try. He said it is called sinigang na ulo. I might actually try it.

spinach
tomatoes
onions
Tamarind sinigong soup packet

Max said I could use the head of the trout I caught a while back that is still in my freezer. The vegetables, I can grow in my garden. Since it is all wintery, and I’m out of fresh garden vegetables, it might be a while until I get around to trying this dish. 😉

I have to admit that when I heard about sinigang na ulo, I also heard a theme song for it. The Doctor Demento song “Fish Heads.” But this morning, when I went to look for the song to share here, I was surprised to learn that there is a video that goes with the song. I had no idea! Anyway, here is the Fish Heads song with video. I dedicate it to my dear friend Max.

Yesterday when I was out exercising my dog Daisy, she got really excited and wanted to chase after a creature she saw. It was a fox! There was a fox running through the edge of town! I’ve never seen a fox in town here before. I was on my bike, so we followed it for a while, but wow that thing was really fast!

I’ve been hearing a lot of Barred Owls lately. I didn’t hear much from them during the summer months, but we have been hearing them all winter long for several years now.

According to Wikipedia, these owls haven’t been common on the Great Plains states, but in recent years they have followed the Missouri River and its tributaries westward. This makes sense to me. We live right along the Republican River, one of the Missouri’s tributaries. The barred owls have finally found their way to us. Sometimes I can count six or seven hooting and calling to each other. If you haven’t heard their calls, they are really unique.

This is a recording I made of them calling outside of our house a couple of years ago.

Lynda Barry’s self-portraits using old catalog cards from the library. Computer databases make these obsolete. What a wonderful way to repurpose these.

See some more:

Card catalog series.

If you feel lost, draw.

I thoroughly enjoyed the movie A Dog’s Purpose. It is a heartwarming and family-friendly film. I don’t enjoy going to movies at the theater anymore. I’ve repeatedly spent too much money only to be greatly disappointed. I have a habit of DVRing shows that seem to have potential when I’m scanning through the listings and this is one that I had recorded. This way, if the show doesn’t work out I can just stop and delete it.

I wasn’t even tempted to stop watching this movie even though I’m not a big fan of animal movies. If you are a dog lover, you will like this one. It’s well worth your time.

Artist Francoise Gilot has been an artist for over 75 years. As a young woman, she was with Pablo Picasso for a decade and bore him two children. She was the only one of Picasso’s many love interests to walk away from him before he left them. You gotta admire that.

Her 1964 memoir of Life With Picasso was recently re-released back in print.