Bed Bugs, Black, and Birthdays.

Bed bugs. My friends are getting bitten up whenever they wake up at our hotel so that's fun. I am one of the lucky, unaffected people though one of my roommates has bites all over her. The hotel blamed it on our suitcases and suggested we take all our belongings out of our room and place them (five flights down for some of us) in one tiny room to solve the issue. We fail to see how any of this makes sense so none of us have moved anything. Not to mention that we live out of our suitcases so if they were taken from us that would create larger problems. Oy.

Black. Arkies love to wear black. I can at least vouch that this is true at "modernist" schools (ie. not Notre Dame) because my professor freshmen year smelled like a 5'6" cigarette, had hair like Shakespeare, and wore head to toe black or occasionally spiced it up with charcoal grey. I'm planning on wearing head to toe black tomorrow and numerous people today wore all black for their reviews. I think it's hilarious that a friend wore her black "shroud" to the final M. Graves review. "Not sure if this is a maternity shirt or shroud..."

Oh, also part of my group's project is uncommonly green. We have three sheets of mylar and one watercolor sheet which we printed. A grad student told us we could print on it, spray it with fixative, and stretch it with no problem. I don't at all doubt that he is right, however, the ink in the printers at the Miami studio must be different than the ink back at ND because it did not work and the ink bled to a vibrant green. There's nothing we can do about it except joke and say "One day we'll say 'Remember that time we presented that green project in front of Michael Graves? THAT was awful.'" It's like how we all have horror stories about previous projects that we recount with strange fondness.* We listened to the soundtrack of Wicked while painting it because of the green motif. We also named the fly that was flying around the room "Fred". Yes, we all had a decent amount of sleep the night before.

Birthdays. There were three in the past 48 hours but they were not celebrated (yet?) so there's nothing else of note to say about that. Sorry this is a downer.

So, there's that. Here's a picture of Steve Martin ironing a cat.

*One of my favourites is the night before my very first design project at Notre Dame was due I came down with a sickness and terrible fever and spent the night tossing and turning in bed having nightmares that I still needed to render it. The next day I was eating soup for lunch and it splashed on my white shirt before I had to get up to present. Good times.