Paul Basye and I are going to play music at a poetry reading so I made these masks to represent us. 

There are a couple of women who want to start a coffeehouse but haven't found a site yet so they do once-a-month events where they set up a coffeehouse in a building for one night, with art and live music. They call it VOX, and last Sunday they had one and I hung up some paintings and gave out stickers and bookmarks. 

This guy was at the last Peace Corps dinner. His name is Fulton (I forget the first name) and yes, many people have told him he resembles George Bush the elder. He told a great story about building roads in Nepal. They had been using black powder to blow up the mountain, which is inefficient and dangerous. He spent about a year and a half arranging to buy dynamite in India. Finally he was driving the dynamite back from India across the border. But he knew that if the border guards found the dynamite, they would confiscate it all. So he waited at a distance until he saw they were on a break and drove quickly across. 

This article appeared in this week's Land Park News. I took the photo myself in the bathroom with a timer. 

This picture appeared in a News & Review piece on Stan Lunetta. Note my mask in the background. 

At the Peace Corps dinner tonight (Mehran --- great Pakistani/Indian food), I saw Rich (pictured) and Mary Howard. They came back from Australia the same day as the SCC choir and saw us at the baggage claim. He is also friends with Terry Throop of the SCC choir. 

I got this great work light at Radio Shack. You wear it on your ear. Resistance is futile. 

Snufflepeep

A couple of years ago I did a cartoon about spelling bee also-rans that included a reference to "Snufflepeep, the spelling cat." (an obscure reference to the musical Cats.) One person was so taken with this that she made a hand puppet out of it.

My Wings Are Like a Shield

This customer is a real Beatlemaniac. She is making a quilt with images from Beatles album covers. Also, she has the same model electric bass that McCartney used, a guitar signed by McCartney and Ringo, and another guitar signed by Jewel.

Our friend Erik Kleven won a critic's award recently and had a blurb in the last News & Review, shown here taped to the Espresso Metro espresso machine. Tragically, a few days later he died in an auto accident. 

We threw boomerangs too

The famous explorer

Our group on the Great Barrier Reef

Australians refer to bathing suits as bathing costumes, or cozzies, leading to the expression Ozzies with cozzies.

Our farewell dinner was held in this gorgeous colonial building. It reminds me of the Governor's home on Monserrat (my Peace Corps island). 

On the plane from Sydney to Los Angeles we sat next to Susan, who could be an advertisement for Australia. She is still gorgeous at 57 and gave us many new expressions, including "skippy" (an Australian living in the bush; metaphorically, a kangaroo). 

Cassandra has been on several of the choir's overseas trips and always gets a new tattoo. She stayed up all night the final night and got a new tattoo on her left foot at around 11 pm. She protected it with cellophane to prevent infection. 

A bold declaration of Australian society's attitude about smoking: legal, but discouraged. 

Orlana, like her friends from BofB (back of the bus), stayed up all night before the morning we started home. In the terminal in Cairns, she curled up with her luggage and plush frogs. 

This dramatic graphic was posted near the big commercial toaster.