General Interest

La Maison Verte Travels Part 3

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On Day 4, Kinga stopped by with a heat gun that works very well, so I was able to continue to begin a couple pieces of artwork!  I took another walk through the Jardin Botanique and then worked in my studio until evening.  We had been invited to an annual neighborhood event starting at 7:30pm - the fête des voisins, known in the US as a block party.  Neighbors in the vicinity brought potluck dishes and beverages and we all doused ourselves in mosquito repellent and had a convivial gathering until the streetlights went out at 11pm.  I brought broccoli fritters and wine, but people didn't start eating until at least a half an hour after the start so my fritters cooled and weren't so tasty.  Other people made great food, though!  I also got to know a little bit better the villagers, though I am definitely hampered by my lack of French.  I had thought that most French would understand Spanish, as that's been my experience previously, but at least in this region if they know a second language at all it's a little English.  Which is of course welcome, but I am feeling the language barrier strongly compared to my travels in other countries.

Day 5 was market day in Nogent-sur-Seine, the nearby town with the train station and grocery stores.  Paula and Adrian were nice enough to let me tag along (and to wait for me since I was much slower given the newness of everything).  Market day is like a farmer's market plus a pop-up dollar store; I bought a new cardigan which has already proven to be a great purchase given this unseasonably cold and rainy weather, and I also bought some fresh produce and some desserts from the boulangerie (bakery) nearby.  They also drove me to the grocery store to get a few more staples; I then led four store clerks and a helpful English-speaking customer in a quixotic quest to find me popcorn kernels.  Apparently that's a really strange request; they sell buckets of carmel corn in the front of the store, but people don't make their own!  I personally really prefer very lightly flavored popcorn - just a little salt, usually - and everywhere else I've been that's an easy accommodation but apparently not here!  When I got back from shopping I was pretty exhausted.  I may have still had a little jet lag, plus I didn't get enough sleep the previous night.  Either way, I slept for the next few hours and then puttered around in the studio for the rest of the evening.

Day 6, Sunday, is brocante day in France.  Every Sunday during the summer a different town or two holds a brocante (basically a flea market or boot sale).  A large number of the locals go to these regularly; apparently it's the only way to buy dishes/bikes/easels if you're trying to save money.  I was warned that they're not worthwhile if it's raining, but Adrian and Paula wanted to go despite the weather so I tagged along.  It was enjoyable to see one, but the rain did deter most of the vendors from even attending and those that did quickly covered up (or just packed away) their goods right when we arrived as the rain picked up.  So it was mostly a soggy bust.  When we got back, more studio time!  The rain is annoying for excursions, but great for my studio practice...

Day 7 was Monday, a day when pretty much everything including the Jardin Botanique is closed in France.  It was also still raining.  I took a walk around the village despite the rain as I was feeling cooped up.  After visiting the storks and the town center, I inveigled my way into CAMAC, the other artist residency.  I explored the gallery (and saw an interesting sculpture of an elongated soccer ball which I enjoyed) and the studio of one of the artists, and then as I was heading back out that artist, Augustine, actually spotted me and invited me into his room.  He was leaving the next day (he was a May resident), so I was fortunate to get to see and discuss his artwork with him before he left.  While discussing his work, he asked me what I planned to work on and I brought up 3P Quick Cure Clay.  He was really interested, so I invited him back to my studio then and there since he was leaving the next day.  We acquired another interested artist-turned-temporary-CAMAC-cook, Sasha, and set off for my studio.  I showed QCC to them, and they both marveled at it - in fact, Augustine was super excited and interested in it and wanted some for himself.  I told him to give me his contact details and I'd pass along the website where he could buy it.  Augustine was also particularly enthusiastic about the two works-in-progress I had, which was very heartening.  Particularly since these type of heavy relief pieces are somewhat new to me, I'm not 100% certain of what I'm doing so hearing positive feedback was really nice.  They also gave me some constructive criticism, which I later incorporated into the piece and agree that it was helpful.

Day 8, Tuesday, was still very rainy.  I had breakfast and then spent most of the late morning and early afternoon planning what I wanted to do/see in Paris on Thursday, because Paula had to go into Paris that day for a doctor's appointment and so it would be a cheap and guided way to ease into visiting the city to go with her.  It is supposed to rain on Thursday, so though my first desire is to see the Jardin des Plantes and associated zoo, I decided to stick to more indoorsy activities.  I've already made the rounds of the tourist destinations (the Arc de Triomphe, Sacré-Cœur, the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame, and so on) so I'd like to get a more local taste.  I'm planning on hitting up some local markets and concept stores, and also hope to acquire more socks.  I only brought five pairs, and given the weather and the fact that Europeans eschew dryers, it's a bit of a problem.  After making all my plans, I realized I'd pushed lunch until very late and was starving.  I popped downstairs to urgently make food... and the gas was finished.  No more cooktop for me.  I walked over to the Jardin to ask if they could kindly switch the gas over, but when they came it turned out the other one was also empty and no one had bothered to refill it.  I was not amused, as I was at this point in full-on hangry mode.  Finally it turned out that the electric plate on the cooktop was still functioning, so I used that and satiated myself.  Then Patricia and I consulted on when I could go to the grocery store tomorrow, but it turned out that tomorrow was inconvenient for her so it would be better to go that evening.  So we went out to get more groceries (and stopped at a local hardware store to get spray varnish for me as well; I can never bring it because it's an aerosol) and while out she invited me over to dinner.  She also invited Andy, a British transplant to Marnay, and we had a very enjoyable evening - to the point where we outlasted the streetlights and Andy had to drive me the few blocks home because without the lights it was pitch black outside!

La Maison Verte Travels Part 2

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On Day 2, Patricia very kindly took me on a tour of the Jardin Botanique de Marnay in the morning.  For such a small town (Marnay has 247 residents), the garden is surprisingly large - 2 hectares - and contains a wider variety of plants than I would've guessed, as well as a small greenhouse.  It really is quite beautiful.  She also took me on a tour of the village, which is so tiny that it has no shops at all.  A woman drives a van through every day except Wednesday to sell bread - a mobile bakery - but otherwise all shops are to be found in neighboring towns.  The local attractions are the Jardin and CAMAC, which is another artist residency.  It's an older, much more expensive, fancier (i.e. residents have private bathrooms and are provided food) residency; from both a fiscal as well as a focal matter point of view, I'm pleased with La Maison Verte.

That evening was Paula's residency exhibition, despite it being Wednesday and not the final Friday of the month.  (I inquired as to why, and was told the garden's director had another obligation on Friday so it was moved.)  Paula is a Professor Emeritus from the University of Mississippi and does a wide range of work in a variety of media, with figurative gestural work being the main focus though other subjects are also explored.  The event was nicely populated, and I met many of the other people who make up the main group of friends and neighbors involved in La Maison Verte.  Unlike many rural towns, a large portion of the residents here are actually international transplants, which I found really interesting.

On Day 3, I took another trip to the Jardin Botanique and also make a trip down the road to see a stork nest that Paula and Adrian had told me about.  Then it started raining, so I broke for lunch and then started some work.  I'm using 3P Quick Cure Clay on this residency, so I put a a little down and went to cure it... and I killed my heat gun.  Every other electronic I've ever used internationally has worked just fine with a standard adapter, but apparently my heat gun required a voltage converter as well.  Since I didn't use one, I fried it.  I panicked a bit, as I really need a heat gun ASAP in order to progress artistically with what I'd like to do on this residency and am not even sure where to acquire one around here, but after talking with some of the locals, it appears that one of the other people who helps run the residency, Kinga, has two heat guns herself and will lend me one.  And this new one will natively function with the outlets, so I shouldn't have any problems.  Fingers crossed!

La Maison Verte Travels Part 1

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The flights over were the smoothest international trip I think I've ever had.  Both left approximately on time and landed approximately on time, my one layover was short but not stressfully so, none of my luggage was lost - it was as enjoyable as long, overnight travel can be.  Figuring out how to get to Marnay via train in Charles de Gaulle airport was a little harder, but I had scheduled myself a couple hours of leeway time to arrange it so I had time to sort it out.  I ended up needing to buy a train ticket into Paris, and switch lines once before taking a separate train out into the provinces.  There were a lot of stairs involved, and with my two fully stuffed bags (the biggest one weighed 49 pounds, and the smaller went unweighed but I'd guess approximately 35-40) I was a bit of a sight.  Luckily that meant that for most of the stairs (though sadly not all) I was helped by very nice strangers because on the few staircases I had to manage on my own I had to take the bags one at a time, one stair at a time!

Waiting for my last train involved sitting in an open-air atrium, and I couldn't help but notice it was quite cold.  Surprisingly cold, given that I've been in the region before - earlier in the year, even - and also had looked up the weather as an added precaution when packing.  I'd decided to only bring two long-sleeved shirts, a light jacket, a light cap, and four pairs of socks to go with a pair of sneakers; the rest of my wardrobe is filled with tank tops, shorts, skirts, and sandals.  Locals have confirmed that it decided to be unseasonably cold, but that that may continue so I might be buying some more cold-weather clothing while here.

One of the people who created and runs the residency, Patricia, was waiting at Nogent-sur-Seine to pick me up.  Nogent is a nearby town (about an hour's walk but a 7 minute drive, apparently) big enough to have a couple grocery stores and the train station.  We stopped to get groceries, and then after getting locked out of the car and having a nice stranger help us get back in, we headed to La Maison Verte in Marnay-sur-Seine.

La Maison Verte lives up to its name, literally - it is painted dark green - and the ground floor has a large studio work space, a living room, the kitchen, and the bathroom.  The second floor contains three bedrooms, one with a desk inside and one with a separate small desk/studio space as an attached-but-separate room.  I was given the bedroom with the attached-but-separate small studio space, which is quite nice.  I am a little saddened that the bathroom is on a separate floor, though!

Typically residencies here run exactly one month, so there are two artists here for the rest of May - a married, retired couple named Adrian and Paula who are actually in the process of moving permanently to Marnay from Oxford, Mississippi.  Their daughter is one of the artists coming in for the June residency period and she's a pescetarian.  

I'm a little odd in that I requested to stay a little longer (five and a half weeks); I did that because the closing exhibition for the residents is on the last friday of each month but since that's June 24th for June 2016 residents, that would only give three weeks to prepare!

I was supposed to go with Patricia to check out Le Jardin Botanique later in the afternoon, but after sitting down I was pretty sure I was done with learning new things until after I slept so I pushed it off until the following morning.  My next request would probably have rendered that visit unaccomplishable anyway - I wanted to turn my heater on since it was very cold in the house.  This request seemed simple, but the radiator didn't want to work.  Patricia called on some colleagues to help figure out how to get it on again, but after turning on the main heat in the house (no luck), learning there was a gas tank responsible, turning that on (no luck), checking on it, learning it was out of fuel, and then telling me that getting fuel was not possible due to strikes, they found a portable electric heater somewhere in the town for me!  That all took around two hours, and after that excitement I fell asleep for the night.

Bison Are the First National Mammal!

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How cool is this - President Obama has signed the National Bison Legacy Act making bison the first national mammal (though bald eagles are still secure in their national animal status).

To celebrate, here's a gallery of all of my bison paintings completed thus far!

Spring 2016 Student Art Exhibition Reception Photos

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Here are the Spring 2016 Student Art Exhibition photos!  We invited local artist Beth Snider to be our guest judge in handing out Miller Awards, so you can see her presenting those in a couple photos.  44 students exhibited in the show (which ran from April 29 through May 5).  Classes I taught that were represented include Typography, Printmaking, Painting I & III, and Advanced Studios in Mixed Media and Tattoo Design.

End of Year Art Exhibit 2016

Animal Autonomy Is Becoming More Academically Accepted

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I feel like there's a new groundswell of acknowledgement regarding animal sentience and intelligence happening lately in the academic arena, and I'm digging it.  Here's Dr. Frans B.M. de Waal discussing his perspective in "What I Learned From Tickling Apes," published in The New York Times.

Mimosa Pudica Remembers You

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Here's a neat article from The New York Times on one of the plants I work with in my interactive installations, the Mimosa pudica or "sensitive plant."  I do have to qualify their results, however, because none of the plants I've grown has ever stopped recoiling from human touch/interaction.  I wonder just how repeated their "repeated exposure" was.

Linguistic Relativism and Color

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I was discussing with my colleague Susan this afternoon how I've read that men are more likely to have color identification and distinction issues in part because they are culturally raised with a more limited color vocabulary - girls are encouraged to learn names for (and wear) a wider variety of colors, and so women become better able to distinguish color differences in part because of their vocabulary.  I've also read that young Western children kept away from cultural discussion of the sky as blue often label the sky as "nothing," "white," or "grey" before being taught the appropriate answer. These types of studies demonstrate that how we perceive the world is not only down to our biology but also to cultural and linguistic cues.

I decided to try to relocate another study I'd previously read about, so as to refresh my memory on the exact details and perhaps learn more.  The research focused on an indigenous people who had in their language a different color category for what in English we would call a variant of yellow-green but at the same time did not linguistically differentiate blue from green.  I remembered that I had looked at two circular grids, one having all green squares with one being very slightly different in hue and value and one having one cyan square and all the rest green squares.  The all green grid was as easily scanned and the odd one out identified by these people, while the blue and green grid was a stumper.  For Western people, the difficulties were reversed.  After a decent amount of googling, I learned the tribe was the Himba of Namibia, the two grids can be seen here, a clip from a BBC documentary explaining it is here, and, if you're so interested, you can read an academic study on the topic entitled "Knowing color terms enhances recognition: Further evidence from English and Himba."  As you'll find out if you watch the BBC clip, the Himba also label the sky as black and rivers as white, and have a more limited color vocabulary than English speakers use. 

I also, in my research trail, learned a few other facts from various sites:

  • This overall topic is called linguistic relativism and as it applies to color, there is still some debate as to how relativistic (versus universal) color differentiation actually is. 
     
  • Very young sighted children are no more reliable than blind children at correctly identifying color (sometimes up until the age of four).
     
  • [In] languages with fewer than the maximum eleven color categories, the colors followed a specific evolutionary pattern. This pattern is as follows:

1.  All languages contain terms for black and white.
2.  If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red.
3.  If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both).
4.  If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow.
5.  If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue.
6.  If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown.
7.  If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains terms for purple, pink, orange, and/or gray.

I am fascinated and somewhat alarmed by the thought that English is holding me back from the world of green that the Himba and Koreans get to experience.  I've wished for the mantis shrimp's color spectrum vision and ultraviolet perception in the past, but perhaps I don't even need more rods and cones - perhaps all I need is new words.  Though since the brain stops developing around age 26, it sadly might already be too late for me.

Someday I'd Really Like to Meet a Woodcock

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I'd like to meet a woodcock primarily because they are ridiculously proportioned animals that I'd enjoy drawing and painting, but also because they have a really cute bobbing walk and their mating call is called "peenting," which you cannot deny is an adorable name.

Here's a short clip of a woodcock dancing:

And here's one of peenting mixed into a snippet of Collective Soul's famous "Shine" song:

Anti-Intellectualism - an American Cultural Failing We Need to Fix

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Most Americans know who Albert Einstein was, but comparatively very few people know who Neil deGrasse Tyson is.  They know who Kim Kardashian is, though!  In the present in the United States, entertainment and lowest-common-denominator appeal are revered and expertise has less impact than demagoguery.  When people stop admiring intelligence, they stop working to attain it.  That's where we are now.  The United States has a lot to learn from other older, more mature cultures, and I hope we can wisen up soon.

More Succulent Flowers!

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A few more of my houseplants decided to flower in the last couple months!  Here are a Gymnocalycium pflanzii v. albipulpa, Anacampseros rufescens, and Gasteria glomerata in various stages of blooming.  I also had a Phalaenopsis orchid in bloom but forgot to take photos; another one's been growing a flower stalk though so I should be able to photograph that one in a couple weeks.

My Pet Anole Marvin

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I previously wrote a post about my pet crested gecko Lex.  She was an intentional pet - I researched the species and care requirements and decided that we would be a good fit.  I also have an unintentional pet, however.  His name is Marvin, and he is an anole lizard. 

There's a fair amount of backstory, so if you just want photos, go ahead and scroll to the bottom. 

While I was pursuing my MFA at LSU, I spent my final two years in the program obsessively researching, painting, and sculpting anole lizards.  I even contributed to a zoological research blog called Anole Annals about anoles.  Viewers of my work would frequently ask me if I had any as pets or if I was intending on bringing live anoles into my gallery installations.  To the first question, I responded that I preferred to see them thrive in their natural environment - I had kept a couple anoles as pets when I was younger, but I did not have the type of setup to keep them well and as I matured I felt ashamed of my poor treatment of them.  Anoles are surprisingly complicated pets in that they require a heat lamp, frequent misting, and fairly continuous access to live insects.  They are also more skittish than other types of lizards including bearded dragons, iguanas, and crested geckos, and that causes them stress when forced to interact with humans in captivity.  To the second question, I answered that I also didn't want to bring cages or the idea of pets into my work because my focus is on nature and ecological balance.  And I wasn't going to harm anoles by releasing them sans cages into the gallery to desiccate/starve/be poisoned/etc.

After completing my MFA and accepting the job offer at USM, I began to pack up my belongings for the move.  I would need to drive myself up to Kansas from Baton Rouge because of my houseplants (many of which lived on my porch due to the tropical weather).  I had slightly fewer than I have now, but I still had around 70, and the movers wouldn't take live plants (and I didn't want them to as they really weren't equipped to transport them safely within the contract structure we negotiated).  So I Tetris-ed my plants into my car and drove north.  When I arrived at my house, I unpacked them all and left the bulk of them on my new porch for the rest of the summer.  It was July.

Come late October, the seasons were switching and a frost was forecast.  I pulled all my houseplants inside to wait out the winter.  A couple days later, I was tidying the houseplants up (bringing them inside invariably also brings in dead leaves and grass, stinkbugs, spiders, and so on) and I heard a rustle and then an anole popped out of one of my larger bromeliads and ran partially up the leg of my drafting table.

I stood frozen for a minute, wondering how in the world I was going to catch a wild anole in my house who was already nervous enough to hop out of his plant instead of nestling further down.  I went into the kitchen and got a thin glove so as not to let him spook me into dropping him if I did manage to catch him, and then began what I assumed would be a very protracted and ultimately futile attempt.  I slowly walked up to the drafting table and then shot my hand out... and caught him immediately.

I popped him into a plastic storage container and then looked up pet stores in Leavenworth.  There was one less than ten blocks from my house, so I drove there right away and bought a cage and coir bedding for him.  I happened to own a heat lamp already, and over the next few weeks I added driftwood, a sunning rock, a live Haworthia, and other accoutrements to his cage.  I had a new pet.  There really wasn't another option; he would have desiccated or starved left to his own devices in my house, and he would have frozen or starved if I put him outside.  And really, this felt fated - he was more than a pet, he was a totem.  The odds of him safely and successfully hitchhiking a ride up to Kansas and then living all summer without moving out of my porch plants only to reveal himself fairly quickly and allow himself to be caught when he needed assistance... the way in which he entered my life as a bridge between my graduate studies and my broader subject matter and between the two geographic locales... I was meant to care for this anole.

Probably due in part to having been wild, I learned in those first couple weeks that though our situation was fated, he wasn't too happy with such a fate; he was constantly brown despite being a green Anolis carolinensis and preferred I not look at him.  Because he was such an audacious hitchhiker (and because I love Douglas Adams), I decided to name him from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  A grumpy, constantly-unhappy-but-required-to-stick-around male companion - clearly his name was Marvin.

I'm not sure quite how old Marvin is now, but he's definitely reaching the upper range of his projected lifespan.  Given that he was hitchhiking in July 2013, he's likely at least three years old already, but he could be even older than that.  Captive anoles can live to be five to seven years old, so I hope he has another several years in him, but he did have enough of a wild life prior to living with me that he could have picked up parasites or similar stressors that contribute to the shortened wild anole lifespans that rarely top three years.  Last summer, I had to bring Marvin to the vet to have a cyst/tumor aspirated that had grown on his neck; I was pretty certain he was going to die from either the cyst/tumor or an infection introduced by the aspiration or from the stress of it all, but he seems to have rebounded.  How he got the cyst/tumor in the first place, though, is unclear and it already seemed to recur once but fortunately then went back into remission.

Though I didn't set out to have an anole, this anole set out to have me and I will be very sad when he passes.  For now, he's still being his adorable, grumpily-brown-90%-of-the-time self.  I did manage to sneak a couple photos of him in his green state over the years as you can see below, but the middle photo is more representative of his general mood.

My Pet Crested Gecko Lex

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I've had a pet crested gecko for a little over a year.  Her name is Lex (though I'm not 100% certain that she's a female yet, since juvenile crested geckos don't develop visible sexual organs until they are typically a little larger than she is - but since she presently lacks the visible sexual organs of a male, I'm going with female for now). 

She's really a fabulous pet for me - Lex requires very little effort in the way of care (no augmented temperature requirements, likes to live in a vivarium that dovetails nicely with my interests in keeping houseplants, primarily eats a reconstituted powder which minimizes the need to buy/keep insects) and is great fun to watch.  She has a surprising range of colors and is gorgeous in each of them.  And she will, with good care and some luck, live a long time - the average lifespan of captive crested geckos is estimated to be 10 to 20 years!

Yellowstone Bison Culling

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A great op-ed, "The Bison Roundup the Government Wants to Hide," was just published in The New York Times about the politically motivated annual bison cull that takes place in Yellowstone National Park at the taxpayer's expense.  I'm all for the suggestions of the author, Christopher Ketcham, with the clarification that I'd like any seasonal hunting to be restricted to that which encourages an ecological balance as opposed to one based on farm/ranch priorities, fear, or the desire for trophies.

Printing Online - A Review of Overnight Prints, AdoramaPix, Fracture, and Moo

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Printing can be a particularly fraught experience for artists.  We care more than most about print quality, color accuracy, paper texture and weight, reflectivity, and so on.  Admittedly I haven't tried an exhaustive range of companies providing this service, but I always appreciate others' reviews so I figured I'd detail my own experiences here.

Overnight Prints

I used to order from Overnight Prints for business and greeting cards; they had decent quality products at the low end of the price range when printed well, and though their color calibration/correction was often off (thus not printed well), they would reprint if asked when a batch was unacceptable.  Their online software was quite easy to use and their item creation instructions were very clear.

However, the last time I used them they wildly oversaturated the color on about 80% of my products, and this time when I requested a reprint they told me that the pieces were within the range of acceptable variation and refused to replace or refund the pieces.  I had to eat the loss, and it was a fairly sizable order for me (though I'm sure it was a drop in the bucket for them).  Since they have always been so hit or miss in terms of quality and have now changed their customer service policy and are unwilling to reprint poor quality runs, I will not be using or recommending their services again (I also made this politely but firmly clear to the customer service representative, who did not care).

My original rating for Overnight Prints: B- (moderate-to-low erratic quality, low cost, good software, good customer service)
My revised rating for Overnight Prints due to refusal to reprint poor runs: D (moderate-to-low erratic quality, low cost, good software, poor customer service)

AdoramaPix

While I was futilely arguing with Overnight Prints about that last order, I happened to need to make a photo book for an upcoming exhibition.  I'd never made one before, and after doing extensive online research I ended up going with AdoramaPix.  They had a reputation for providing a reasonable price point, high quality pieces, and fairly accommodating online software (which was particularly a relief in the face of a couple companies that required you to download complex proprietary software).  The process of creating a photo book with AdoramaPix was quite smooth, and the end result was even nicer than I had anticipated. It looked professionally printed and bound despite the fact that it was a single book run, and the price was lower than I expected for such a high quality item.   I will note as my one negative regarding the book creation process that their FAQ and online forums on photo books are quite out of date, though, and none of their contact points for their FAQ/forums/Facebook responded to me when I asked a couple questions.

Next, a student of mine wanted to print photos onto glass.  I told her the few reviews I could find online of the company she wanted to do the latter with, Fracture, weren't so hot.  She ordered a couple samples from them just to see, and it turned out that the panning of the technique online due to high noise in the end imagery was justified.  The Fracture prints were not acceptable for exhibition.  I recommended she try AdoramaPix to test out their aluminum prints, which I thought might be similar aesthetically to what she was going for but with improved quality.  She ordered a couple samples of the aluminum prints, and they were much better than the Fracture pieces.  She then ordered a large batch, and again the quality was high.

Then AdoramaPix decided to branch their business out into printing greeting cards.  I was in the market for a new printer for these since I'd decided not to do business with Overnight Prints anymore, so I gave them a go.  Their online software for greeting cards was atrocious.  It wasn't even functional in Chrome, and in Firefox it was still a huge mess - it randomly readjusted the size, typeface, and placement of text on the card; wouldn't display the software correctly in any browser such that I had to zoom out to about 50% scale to access necessary tools that I then had to try to use properly while tiny; and some other similarly frustrating issues.  I decided to risk trying the cards out anyway since my other experiences with the company had been so positive and left a long comment in the order asking for their review and oversight since the software was so glitched out.  I also asked them to review the paper choices I'd made as inexplicably they don't have images of all their papers viewable online (and in many cases the few viewable ones they do have must be independently found in videos on YouTube as opposed to through the building process on their own website).  Dealing with all this grief paid off in a big way, though, when I received my order: these greeting cards also exceeded my expectations and knocked even well-printed items from Overnight Prints out of the water in terms of their professional, high-end appearance.  The printers had clearly read my requests as not only did the cards turn out great despite the software, but they also adjusted the paper type of one of the cards to better suit the product.

I recently reordered some cards, and it appears that they're working on the greeting card software as it was less broken than before - I could use it in Chrome this time - but it does still have some fairly major issues in terms of image and text placement, image rotation, and text size.  I just keep leaving them notes in the order section asking for their review, since that seems to have functioned well so far.

I have now expanded into ordering aluminum and paper photo prints from them as well as the occasional framed print (the framed print software also suffers from weird problems; their online software/site issues are really their Achilles' heel).

I did have to request a redo on a framed print I ordered as there was a scratch/dark hair-like mark on the photo paper (not an actual hair though - it was part of the paper itself).  They requested photo documentation of the problem but then sent me a whole new framed print at no charge.  That means that so far, their customer service is great too, and when I got the new framed print I was happy with the quality.

My rating for AdoramaPix: A (great quality, moderate-to-low cost, poor software/online support, good customer service)

Moo

 I recently had to print off a new batch of business cards, and I needed to move on from Overnight Prints due to their lowered standards.  Honestly, I've been so impressed by AdoramaPix thus far that if they did business cards, too, I would have gone with them.  AdoramaPix currently doesn't offer business cards as an option, however, so I went with Moo.  They have a reputation as being one of the best companies for artists, and I liked that they let me use multiple backs with a consistent front.  Their cards are quite pricey - they cost a little over 35 cents per card at the current size of order I'm making.  For comparison, Overnight Prints charged me around 10 cents per card.  I may end up trying out more printers to see if I can find a more affordable printer, but in the meantime, the cards from Moo are beautiful and I've been asked several times about them by people who have admired their quality (and design, but that's my own!). 

My rating for Moo: A- (great quality, high cost, good software, customer service thus far unnecessary)

Parrot Intelligence

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I'm now more than halfway through Carl Safina's Beyond Words (I discussed my interest in the book previously in this post) and the experiences and information he relates are very powerful messages about animal intelligence.  A much shorter but no less potent read is one of this week's The New York Times Magazine articles entitled "What Does a Parrot Know About PTSD?"

I've long believed that many people, either consciously or subconsciously, choose to deny the breadth and depth of animal intelligence out of guilt about their own practices and values.  Eating meat, supporting factory farming, purchasing leather/ivory/horn/bone products, damaging the environment, keeping pets in traumatic conditions as per the article (and judging animals solely as property in the eyes of the law) - these types of decisions are easier to explain away when the victims aren't sentient.