... someday.

It was spectacularly clear and beautiful out along the Mississipi/Rock River. It was iced over, sunny and clear and the eagles were out. So my husband and I took a drive out there and took some spectacular pictures of the eagles. I took one of one perched in a tree eating his fish.

I'll be sure to post them today!

Nian have been my no-to-secret obsession to the point where I've created a character who's is robot skinned like a Dancing Lion named Shen-Li. Sometimes he looks traditional and sometimes he looks non-traditional. Either way you slice him, he's not traditional.

But what confuses me most is at the forum I lurk at where they perform, build, and display their real life dancing lions. I suspect it's like all places where there are extreme traditionalists where anything that makes light of it is intensely frowned upon. As an outsider, I can still understand why they jealously guard their traditions but... It just makes me very sad to see them politely smother people trying to be lighthearted. I'm not sure I'll ever post there and I'm content to lurk instead.

You see, I intend to build a Nian one day, but not traditionally. There are very few resources in America and I've been having to sift through site after site. I've always had this inner vision of how the Nian behaves so the only solution is: to invent my own Nian. Starting with Shen-Li.

I went to what they called a "Starving Artist" sale at a hotel lobby here where we live and I was hoping to find something to terrible it couldn't possibly be faked. I was disappointed, it was mostly paintings of artists pretending to be other artists. I don't like Kinkade because I was submitted to it at an office I used to work at CONSTANTLY, and what they had there were things made to look like Kinkade badly. LoL! Some where geometric that looked like throwbacks from the 80's, there was even gold glitter paint on some of it. That was fun and at least something I could relate to.

There were only three animal paintings, all of which were African. There was an elephant, a zebra mare with her foal, and the one I wound up buying. The giraffe. I bought a $60 dollar giraffe. It was the most fun and amusing picture there so I took it for myself. It's just its canvas without a frame so the next step is to go find something just as fun and funky to frame it with.

Did you guys know about the sequel? I'm so stoked! [link]