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It has been awhile, so I thought it was time for another in the collective nouns series. I’m feeling rather sleepy today after all the recent action, so I thought a nice peaceful drift of hogs was appropriate…

The rest of the series can be found here.

Yesterday, I was filling out a police report about finding a burglar in our house when my phone rang. The officers were outside the house waiting for forensics to come and dust for fingerprints—I figured it was them.

I answered, and a man asked for Heidi. This is not uncommon. Before I had this number it belonged to someone named Heidi, and the number was listed on the internet someplace, so I got tons of calls for her the first couple of years I lived here. But it has been over five years, so I was a little surprised. I said no, she hasn’t had this number for ages, and the guy started laughing and said “no, no, sorry—I’m looking for Bambi, Bambi Edlund, not Heidi”, so I said “do you know that every substitute teacher I ever had in elementary school called me Heidi?” It’s true, it must be something about the storybook names. He said he was calling from CBC radio, that he had come across my blog and was especially interested in my Ode to Kingsway series. He asked if it was a good time to talk, which was pretty hilarious considering the circumstances. Anyway, they called back today, and asked if I could come down late this afternoon, and so I was interviewed for about 7 minutes about my project and the focus on Kingsway in particular. It was such a strange experience, considering it all happened so quickly and was entirely folded in with all of the other stuff happening around here the last two days. But it was exciting as well—it’s great that this little project is gaining momentum. Onward!

This morning I heard a now-familiar jackhammer-type sound coming from outside the house, but definitely nearby. The last few times I heard it, I suspected the basement workshop of my next-door neighbour—but another thought crossed my mind as well. We have new skylights in the attic, so when I heard the sound this morning, I followed my hunch and went upstairs. Sure enough, there on the metal cap over the chimney was a flicker, madly drilling into the metal. I thought it must be terribly painful to pound away at something hard like that with no payoff, but then look what he ended up digging out of there—well worth his time (and headache), surely.

At least I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. You see, I took my camera upstairs with me, and I snapped some photos of the scene, so I could do a drawing later. The trouble was that later, when Sidney and I returned home after a quick jaunt, we stumbled onto a burglary in progress, in our house. The dirty bastard stole my camera with the photos, so I’m going from memory here. To add insult to injury, he also stole all of my pens—luckily I found a brown one lurking in with my watercolour brushes. As tempted as I was to do a police sketch of the guy for today’s drawing, I had to do the flickers anyway—I wasn’t about to let the loser win.

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Last week I went over to the library archives to dig up some old photos for work, and couldn’t resist looking up Kingsway—and not only because I was so delighted by the original card catalog, with cards typed (on actual typewriters) sometime in the 1970’s. The edges of the cards are all soft with wear, and the drawers slide open so smoothly, and when they do the smell immediately conjures up images of the elementary school library and posters of Dewey Decimal. It’s fantastic. Anyway, I realized as soon as I started leafing through that this Kingsway series may take on a life of its own. The old photos abound, and each one is more amazing than the next. Dear old Kingsway, hold onto your rumpled hat—we’re about to dig up all your long-forgotten secrets.

This is the southeast corner of Kingsway & Knight, sometime in the early 1940’s. The scene out the window of House of Dosa is rather different today, which is unfortunate—but it’s a give and take, as I suspect old Howie couldn’t run across the street for South Indian cuisine either…

I was asked by the B.C. SPCA to provide an illustration for an article in their upcoming magazine, about rabbits and how to know if one might be the right pet for you. The story is about a woman who adopted a wee bunny that liked to hang out under her furniture. She thought nothing of it, until one night she came into the living room and the bunny’s head popped out of the middle of the couch—turns out he had been nibbling his way through from the bottom up. Personally, I would be just fine with holes in my furniture if there were bunnies in them, but perhaps that’s just me…

Speaking of the SPCA, if you happen to live in B.C. (or even if you don’t) and are looking for a good cause, please check out the Biscuit Fund. The fund is named after a dog that was stabbed and left for dead, but managed to pull himself into a family’s garage. After the local news reports about this dog’s arrival at the SPCA, the donations in response to his plight poured in. People donated far more money than was required to fix up poor Biscuit (who has recovered and was adopted, by the way), so a fund was set up, and it is used to pay for operations for other abused or sick animals. Our much-loved three-legged dog Arlo was adopted from the SPCA, and the Biscuit Fund had paid for his amputation (his leg was deformed as a pup due to cancer), so it’s near and dear to my heart. I’m thrilled to be doing some illustrations for the SPCA, my favourite cause!

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Not only does my sister get to spend her entire day surrounded by dogs, she also gets to take her own pup to work with her. Talk about a fine way to spend your day. And for my sister’s dog, Audrey, it’s heaven—although sometimes I wonder if the other dogs see her as the equivalent of the kid in junior high whose father taught at the school, or whose mother drove the bus. You know, the cocky ones who thought they could get away with anything (and usually could), but who people tended to befriend because it was a good idea for them to do so.

Sometimes this is evident when Audrey is around other dogs that don’t recognize her status—she has a tough time accepting their disinterest. After she had followed this wee guy around the lake for a bit and he kept ignoring her, she finally made sure he couldn’t help but notice. She got down to say “Hey there! Hi! How’s it goin’? Nice jacket,” but all he said was “Move it.”

We are in the midst of one of Vancouver’s cruelest weather tricks: most years, at some point in February, we have a week that feels just like spring. It has been downright hot in the sun this past week, and even after dark the air has lost much of its chill—today was perfect for a light jacket and there was no need for a scarf or gloves. I even saw a girl wearing capri pants and flats, and of course the legion of Vancouver lads that wear shorts 9 months of the year were all giddy with excitement (that’s right Chris and Roger, I’m talking to you). I went for a walk at lunch and saw ducks bobbing with their legs in the air—an activity they may well do year-round, but that always feels like springtime to me. We all fall for it, this artificial April. But I know better than to surrender, because I can still taste the letdown from previous years, the harsh reality that inevitably slams us the week after this pseudo-spring. It’s the worst stretch of winter coming up, those last lingering wet cold days that come after we are reminded of what warm weather feels like.

Unless of course this time it really IS spring…

For the first time in decades, you can stand in the middle of our garage and spin around with your arms outstretched. Sidney and I spent several hours this morning removing dozens (and I mean dozens) of old cans of paint, several broken tools, wobbly tables, rolls of wudged-up plastic, boxes full of useless shelf brackets, frayed 1960’s extension cords, bags of wooden curtain rings, and a thousand other bits and bites. By the end I had been rewarded with a number of unearthed treasures, including her ice skates from when she was a teenager, several pieces of antique silver, a Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee tin (which I love far more than the silver), and this—the most beautiful tool ever. I couldn’t help but draw it tonight, and as I did so I couldn’t help wondering: do you think the fact that I drew this over the fancy old silver is why so many visitors assume I’m a guy?

When I received the email announcement of the Illustration Friday theme for this week, “the ory”, I must admit I was a little mystified, as I had never heard of an ory. But, as always, Wikipedia held the answer:

The ory is a wiry-framed, ill-tempered and slightly nervous flightless bird, native to the lowlands of the northwestern region of North America. Its diet consists mainly of navel oranges, salted sunflower seeds and root beer, and it prefers to nest in damp, drafty areas like garage-entry basement suites or 24-hour laundromats. Daytime sightings are rare, but the ory is often active just after dusk and can be spotted darting under suburban streetlights alone or sometimes in pairs, although it is rare to find the animal in groups greater than three.

The ory is a vivid aqua colour with a highly pigmented tangerine beak, and can be recognized by the scabby, eczema-ridden knee joints on its long spindly legs. It is often used for scientific research, mainly due to its extensive knowledge of quantum physics, its knack for lighting bunsen burners on the first try, and, to a lesser extent, for its exhaustive recall of 1950’s beat poetry. Its distinct call is shrill and nasal, and can often be heard echoing under downtown railway bridges and in mezzanines of used bookstores. The mating ritual of the ory is so rare as to appear nonexistent and has never been observed or documented, leading experts to wonder how they are able to proliferate so rapidly in areas with high occurrences of noodle shops and comic book stores.

So, there you have it. Isn’t it nice when art can be educational?

Fanatic is a strong word, although it may well have been used to describe me, had anyone stumbled across me in the middle of the Nevada desert, crouching at the edge of a yellowed field, talking to the translucent-eared hare that insisted on pretending he wasn’t listening to me.

I had the good fortune to attend the HOW design conference in Las Vegas a couple of years ago, and I stayed a few extra days to explore the surrounding area. I expected to love the dry heat, which I did, and to spend plenty of time swimming in Lake Mead, which I also did. But I wasn’t expecting the place to be teeming with bunnies, which it was. The cottontails were incredibly adorable, and I chatted with them a fair bit as well, but it was the hares that won my heart. They are the gawky teenagers of the rabbit family—I suspect they have six-sided die in their furry pockets and excel at math. Their back ends are so disproportionately large and their ears so goofily long that they are downright cartoonish, but you know they could knock your teeth out with one kick of those hind legs. I have no interest in returning to Las Vegas, but I intend to spend much more quality time just outside it, squatting in the middle of the desert at 6am, telling my secrets to the hares.

And luckily, I don’t have to worry: what happens in the desert outside Vegas, stays in the desert outside Vegas.

Go ahead, make my day.

I have twice received the “You Make My Day” award from fellow bloggers, and as tough as it is to choose the five blogs that make my day, here they are, including the two who awarded this to me—it may be against the rules, but there was no way I could make this list without including them. Please check these folks out, they’re incredibly talented (and, as an interesting side note, two of them use the oft-ignored square bracket characters in their names):

Sketched Out
free[k]hand
The Cats Demand Answers
Wagonized
An open [sketch]book