Pneumonic...

I used to use the planets as a pneumonic device to remember the mnemonic device for the planets.

The planets themselves were easy for some reason I could see them lined up in row, remembering which ones were bigger or smaller, hotter and colder helped.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were easier for me to remember than “My very excited mother just served us nine pizzas.” My mother personally wouldn’t be too excited to serve us at all.

Had the pneumonic device been more exciting… I might have remembered that.

I did use that pneumonic device to remember the classifications:

King Philip came over for great sex.

I had imagined Prince Philip from sleeping beauty grew up to be king, and still a hottie at that, I'm sure the sex was great!

Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species.

I knew the order of the spectrum before my dad taught me Roy G. Biv. But I wish the president had known about Roy G. Biv before he came out with his color codes for terror. The spectrum is red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. His color code went (form highest to lowest levels) red, orange, yellow, blue, and green. It irked me to say the least. It also irked me that nobody noticed or reported on the breach in the spectrum. But that’s another story.

So now there are new planets (Ceres and Eris) and a new pneumonic device to remember. Maybe this one will stick with me.


My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants.

I’ve got to say… I like this one.

We don’t have places like this in Boston.

This is what I remember form my dream the other night. I was standing on a bridge with a few people fishing on either side pulling up colorful fish after fish. The sky was grey and purple… the trees were that bright green of early summer. And the buildings around us, we were in a city where white and grey… old and stained. But the colors of the fish, and turquoise water and the trees were so saturated. I thought we don’t have anything like this in Boston. And that’s all that I remember!...

But I was painting this at the time I had the dream and I think it influenced my landscape.



The words were peacock, tent, stormy, drinking, and glamour.

Things I like about this piece:

That middle tree, the expression on the peacock with its head down, the color of the sky.

Things I don’t like about this piece:

Her mouth, the rainbow quality to the color, I should have made the tent darker or lighter.

Now I have start my Christmas card. Which is scaring my right now. I have some ideas but nothing solid yet. In a fit of despair I looked for inspiration in the one place I knew would enchant me. My big book of Jim Henson. Somewhere in the middle there are pictures of the Jim Henson Christmas cards through the years. Many simple, others elegant, others warm. 20 years from now I want to have a collection of card half so impressive. Which means I have to get started on this. Sigh… why is it so hard to get started?

Oh blank page I’m coming for you.

Now here I go again, I see the crystal visions

Last night I dreamt that all Long Warf had been converted into a submarine dock. And the military was sending subs in and out of the Harbor… The ferries were gone and the subs were moving so fast, too fast. I was afraid they’d crash into the docks. Sometimes they would slow down or go under and you got the feeling that they were diving under the city.

Then there was a talking cat. The cat was really a teenage boy that went missing 14 years before. He was under some sort of spell, and he needed to get back to his old apartment to find something to break the spell. So we decided to help him. There was a moment when we needed to find the key to his apartment and I knew to look in this metal mail slot for a magnetic panel that revealed a key. We walked up two tall flights for stairs, sneaking quietly into his apartment.

It was this amazing loft apartment build into a church. How I didn’t realize it was church before was beyond me. It was beautiful. His parents had died when he was 15 some sort of accident. And that’s when I did the math, this cat disappeared about 15 years ago when he was about 16 he’d be about my age. Hmmm… this could be interesting.

And then I woke up.



I did this drawing a few weeks ago. The words were genie, tropical, restaurant, dreaming, and believe it or not lamp. This is what I came up with. I wanted there to be a difference in color between dream in reality… of course the dream is in a little more in the real colors, and the reality is very dreamlike in color.