I set a goal to write something once a week this year. Just get something on paper. This week will be no different. While I am technically 2 days late to get this on the site, I am doing it. So without hesitation I present two new photos from Bar Carlo.

I ate here this weekend again. I have previously written something about the place, but was apparently at a loss for words then as well. Here is a link to that.

As an update, they do movies every Wed night. Starting next month, each week will be based on a theme for the month. You can check out their website or follow them on Twitter for updates, I certainly do.

As always, their food is delicious, the staff is friendly, and the coffee is good.

Speaking of good...  theGOOD uploader is in beta test.  If you use flickr a lot, and would like some extra features, check it out at www.thegood.com.  Good people @ theGOOD!

Enjoy my egg sandwich with chicken sausage.

Or enjoy Krista’s vegetarian benedict over polenta.

My wife stopped eating meat about 8 weeks ago. You can imagine my celebration. Since I am a carnivore, it has led to more interesting dinner choices. We now have to find places that fall into the category of meat friendly or vegetarian options available. In Portland, the land of soy milk and organic honey, it has been pretty easy. That is how we gluten-free roll here in the Pacific North Wet.

Realistically, she doesn’t eat meat because of the movie Food, Inc. She is voting three times a day,as they say. She has made a choice about how she will support the food industry. The way our food is processed and the way our food is made is becoming less about the food and more about the profit. In that scenario, we lose. The balance is lost.

The amount of time and energy needed to get the burger from the field is turning out to be a costly process that may or may not need to happen. This is one of the reasons I could talk her into trying out Foster Burger today. They use local, organic, ingredients.

I have paint envy. I want to paint, I just can’t. It may have something to do with some graffiti trouble in my past, but I am guessing it is more about technique or skill. I can doodle, draw, do graphic arts type stuff on the computer, etc… But I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to put something on a piece of canvas. I spend a lot of time sitting there with a paintbrush, paint, and a blank canvastrying to paint something as simple as this...

I assume the bridge between painting, and what I do, is gapped by the actual act of putting paint on a paint brush. I am also pretty sure that by using the brush, with paint applied, to transfer paint to the canvas, is the next step. Got it.

I now have a white canvas and a blob of paint that may or may not be a snail. It really depends on how you squint at it. You know, to make your vision blurry. If you don’t squint, you are just happy it doesn’t smell as bad as it looks.

Maybe if I move it around a little. That should hel…… hmm, I have a larger snail. Great. Let’s try some blue instead. Oh yes… much better. Are those flies?

As I watch this process unfold, I am thinking about great artists and their works of art. You have Gustav Klimt with his amazing “The Kiss” or Alphonse Mucha and his wonderful pieces like the seasons series, one of my faves. While the two people were different in style, they both had an amazing ability to project what they wanted you to see. When they painted you were left seeing something.

Even Picasso and his very odd style was understandable. You could see something in his artwork. Frida & Diego Rivera (what a lovely couple) were very capable of allowing you to see what they wanted from their artwork.

Politics, love, anger, jealousy, hate, or frustration, it all appears in artwork. Your emotions, my emotions, are all a part of this artwork. Yet here I am with a pile of crap on a white background, but if you squint, it MIGHT look like a snail.

So, while being followed around goodwill, I looked at the “dropped off” artwork around the bins and there were original pieces by real people. I could see the brush strokes by Jonie Vanderhaul, from when she painted the picture of a barn in some field. Unfortunately, when she gave this “to my friend Edna”, Edna decided to donate it to Goodwill, lest it clutter her guest bedroom wall, where she has that picture of a sunset she cut out of an old calendar and framed with a recycled frame from her 1st wedding. I can just see her saying, “oh thank you it’s lovely”, when she received it from Jonie during a Tupperware party. Now it sits lonely, in a bin full of Angels smoking cigarettes and what I think is promotional poster for the new Marlboro Reds. Either that or we have Russians in our midst. Mental note taken.

While I am almost positive that Jonie is not famous for paintings, I am positive that she meant to paint a barn in a field, not a bunch of sunflowers. It isn’t like she started and her flowers looked more like a barn, so she adapted.

So why is it that I sit here in my ‘studio’ with 4 paint brushes covered in various mixtures of colors and no matter what I do, I end up with something that looks like a pile of scat in a field of snow? I think it is because nobody ever sat down with me and said, “hey, nice snail!” I could be wrong.

So what I am left with is the realization that painting may not be my surprise ability I did not know I had. While I continue to try, if you know anyone that is interested in a snail shaped pile of crap in a field of fresh snow, I know where you can get one. I also have a picture of 8 tulips by Jonie, I think…..