Kristen Ankiewicz

The latest drawing is here. You are all reminded to buy stuff.

In the process of editing monsters.net I discovered a converter to change HTML characters into plain text, for displaying source code on the page.

<h2>
This is some HTML.
</h2>

Normally the above snippet would display like this:

This is some HTML.

Three red monsters decided to fly off into the sky, today.

Does anyone have an example of rounded corners with a drop shadow using CSS/image sprites, and an extensible content area? I want to achieve this kind of drop shadow, but with curved corners:



So far this set of examples from Yahoo is as good as it gets, but there is no single combination of all the features I want. The example that uses one single image seems better suited for dialogue boxes of set height, rather than extensible boxes. I like Leslie Sommer's examples of curved corner boxes that uses CSS sprites, but I would like an example of a curved corner box combined with drop shadows.

We hiked Windy Hill Open Space Preserve today. This owl was sitting peacefully at in the grass.



I haven't hiked in a while, my feet are complaining.

I haven't really dealt with my old posts on lj, or anything. However I've mostly decided that my most-updated blog should be my home page, ankiewicz.com. Also, I've updated it with photos from Mexico.

I visited Windy Hill Open Space Preserve today. It was full of flowers and wildlife. There were ginormous lurking frogs in a swampy pond (Sausal Pond) making silly sing-songy noises. They sounded more like geese than frogs.

Last weekend I hiked Castle Rock State Park. Also totally loaded with wildflowers.

If you want to see flowers, now's the time!


The hip injury that was putting a dent in my running schedule seems to be healing. I hope to be back into the caving and running routine again soon. (Tip: if your leg hurts on the first day, don't run on it a second day. And a third day.)

Yesterday I made cookies, from scratch, for the first time in my life. AAAUUUGGH BUTTER nom nom nom nom.

Dinner tonight: avocado/tomato/corn/pea salad with blue cheese and buttermilk dressing. Again, NOMNOMNOM.

I went hiking in Henry Coe State Park and posted the photos in my
california gallery:





Alas, I think I overdid the hiking and running, because now my left hip hurts. I haven't been able to do my tuesday-thursday run routine with the coworkers.

I have intended to post some stories about my Hawaii vacation, but WOOSH, time just flies by.

Here's one Hawaii story, anyhoo.

The very first day of our trip we went to see the Wailua waterfall. It was huge and rushing and loud, with a rainbow in the mist at the bottom, and lush greenery all along the sides:




There were at least four signs that said KEEP OUT, DANGER, DON'T FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GO BEYOND THIS FENCE. One sign said PEOPLE HAVE DIED HERE. Out of the blue, a local guy came up to us and told us about a trail that goes to the bottom. We'd be a-okay, he said. It's a little muddy, but there are ropes we can hang onto, no problem.

Well then! Ropes? Mud? Excitement? Disobeying some stuffy signs? Awesome!

The hike was not too long, but it was very slippery and involved ropes attached to trees. By the time we reached the bottom, I was doing the full butt-slide-in-the-mud thing, and we had attracted the entire population of Kauai's mosquitos. BUT! We got to see this:



Double rainbow, even MORE rushing waterfall, lush jungle. No people! The view from the bottom was much more exciting than the view from the top. I don't fully capture it in the photo above, mostly because I didn't want waterfall spray on the camera, but you get the idea.

In more recent news, I have updated my paintings website: http://www.ankiewicz.com/paintings. The blue ones at the top of the small acrylic gallery have some metallic shimmer paint and a bit of glow-in-the-dark.

Work is great, but deadlines seem to rush at me all the time; I need to come up with a better way to manage them. zecco.com is the site. In theory, I could be active in the trading community on the site. I have a $100 starter fund, maybe I'll blow it on some penny stocks.

I have been jogging much more consistently. 3 miles at a go, 4 or so days a week. Not too shabby, but I'm trying to push it up a notch. I might do Bay to Breakers with a coworker. I'm dieting, as usual. I don't feel totally out of shape, but there's a layer of pudding attached to me that I'd like to mostly shed.

I just got back from Hawaii, and I am rested and tanned 'n stuff. We hiked, snorkelled, and took boat rides, and saw tons and tons of rainbows (also roosters). More stories later.

We went on a nice 7- or 8-mile hike up montara mountain (near half moon bay) this weekend. I got a photo of this cute newt.

I've been working on little 5x5x1 inch "boxy" paintings lately. Here are the first four, just completed. A bit rough around the edges, I'm getting back into the technique of it.

We have booked plane tickets to Kauai, Hawaii! I will be hiking, snorkelling, and VACATIONING from Dec 29 to Jan 9. Wheee!

If you know anything I have to do when I'm there, let me know.

Check out Sluggo Christmas cards:


Uh, perhaps tomorrow, I will add "holiday" cards too.

It's late, I'm tired.

I went to Lilburn cave in King's Canyon National Park, again. I didn't take any new photos, but this is a general approximation, if you can imagine it without snow:



It was kinda dark, cold and rainy on the hikes in and out, so that part was a bit more grueling than I would've liked, but the part in the middle was delightful. I hauled some rocks out of a blocked entrance, cleaned some cave, crawled around a bit, and saw some pretty cave formations, and that's always good.

Note to self: bring extra dry layers next time.

The new cave gear I bought arrived a few days after I got home from the trip. Yay for waterproof gloves, a bright headlamp, and a shiny red cave suit!

Picture coming soon.

My ankles, which I'd been sorta worried about, held up just fine.

Food eaten: tuna; slim jims; wheat bread pita and salsa; wheat thins; nuts. On the way out there were no decent restaurants open, but surprise surprise, even McDonald's tasted kinda good.

There's a particular cave entrance that kinda spooks me, so I have been avoiding trips that go through that entrance (the Meyer entrance). Next time Peter and I are going to just hang out at that entrance and practice it.

I am back from camping in Sequoia National Park, seeing the Giant Forest, and hiking Little Baldy.

We joined in the restoration of Crystal Sequoia Cave, which is a nice tourist cave right off General's highway. We mostly hauled rubble out of the cave, and in return, we ate way too much cheese and beef. We also got to do an excellent little wild tour to see the cave pretties. There were some extremely delicate and beautiful "soda straws," and some formations I'm calling "corn dogs." There was also a "leap of faith" and other stretchy moves that required me to step on or grab onto my fellow cavers for support. Oh, to have longer legs.

Alas, when the caving gets down and dirty, I tend to leave my camera behind. However, there are some cave pictures and lots of scenery pictures here.

This is the marble hall:


You may say WOW that is a GREAT PHOTO, but it is an artifically lit room, so I can't take the credit. The photos I took with my flashes are kinda meh.

I redid most of cavesandmountains.com. More stuff coming soon.

Work is going well. The office is heavily Dutch/Euro. This really only means that at any one time, the aroma of cigarettes, coffee, or chocolate will be wafting by.

Rusty stuff.

Hello, this is me.

So I was lying on my pillow next to peter, and we were looking at each other, all sweet and soft-spoken 'n stuff. He reaches for my cheek with his hand, as thought to gently carress my cheek. Then he says, "hold still... hold still..." and he FLICKS something off my face. The thing turned out to be a spider, and it slowly crawled away over the pillow. Peter gallantly flicked it off the pillow.

AUUUUUGGGGGH.

Of course I had that "spiders crawling on my face and in my bed" feeling for about an hour.

When I asked him why he didn't just kill it, he said he didn't want to smear dead spider on my face. That's a pretty good reason, I think.

Don't get me wrong, spiders are great -- in the corners, eating other bugs, minding their own business. Spiders have absolutely NO business crawling on my face or bed.

Right now as I'm typing this there's an episode of COPS on cable: "Boston/Lynn Massachusetts, Stabbing." Lynn, Massachusetts, as in, my hometown, where the entire rest of my family still lives (when they are not in Florida), and where my dad delivered mail up until he retired just last month. Stabbing, as in, the bloody thing a creepy person does with a knife.

Damn, I should alert the folks! Maybe they can sneak in behind the cops and wave to the camera!

That's how I like to see my home town: on some seedy cable show about seedy goings-on. What ever happened to "Lynn, Massachusetts, shoe capital of the world?" I guess that ended when all the resin-soaked buildings burnt down in the 1960's.

Well, not to fear. The nice little pond in this photo is where my family lives. Not very close to the stabbing section of town.

I went on a weekend retreat in Anderson Valley (northeast of the bay area) with some friends recently. There were many photogenic old rusty things in the nearby area. You can see the whole set here.

The trees were nice too, but you've seen a million trees.

Some of my friends tried slacklining, which is almost like tightropewalking, but not quite. I did not try it, but I did photograph many people flying off the line.

Oh right, I'm back from burningman. This is how the last so many weeks have gone:

plan plan plan plan plan plan DUST DUST DUST germs cough germs cough sneeze cough cough

WORK.

Here are some of the burningman photos. They are not all up yet.