The time is nigh.....

4 am again and the shop is finally coming together. Our grand opening is tomorrow, we cheated tonight and came home around 1:30am.
Painting, moving furniture, mopping, putting up art and cleaning constantly. It is SO GOOD we are not working right now, this is the stress of putting together and hanging an art show + 100. Crazy. All our friends helping out, $60 worth of pizza, guests already filling our art studio and music room at the house in preparation for tomorrow's madness. I know it will be the kind of thing where you talk to a million people and connect with 5. That's OK.

Primary Concepts Tattoo and Body Piercing. Open tomorrow, Grand Opening at 6pm. DJs, art and 50 donated burritos. Wish me luck. The new shop looks like a dream come true.

Grand Opening!

Kai the robot dog

My coworkers in Antarctica miss me! Where I was at the electrically-charged front counter of Warehouse 211 (is that right? I don't remember) is now an empty space. There has been no mention of a replacement, but the US Antarctic program has fallen on hard times these days and are cutting personnel like crazy so that's probably why. That or else I am just irreplaceable. No one else that applied was up to par. There just aren't too many tattoo-apprentice antique-book-dealing bohemians that want to sit in a windowless warehouse counting troffers all day long.
Anyhow, to deal with their sorrow (haha) Denise and Mike named a robot dog after me. You can see the resemblance in the family portrait above.
It's funny to see the couch with the stained pink sheet on it where I drank coffee every morning at 7, trying to get psyched about pickling things out of a snowbank. Old, rusty weeping things, in sodden cardboard boxes. Sometimes we would find the invoices for these things and discover that they cost as much as one month of San Francisco rent. Damn.

Photo of a "pickle" from Sandwich Girl


Antarctica is now the can of worms that I have constantly at my disposal in conversation. I can choose to change the conversation dramatically just by mentioning it. You cannot mention Antarctica and then not talk about it for at least the next 15 minutes. I should write a list of answers to the most commonly asked questions. Then bring up that I went there and calmly hand the person the list and wait patiently for the next topic of conversation;

1. I worked in electrical supply.
2. 5 months
3. No, polar bears only live in the North Pole.
4. Drink, a lot.
5. No, the sun never set once while I was there.
6. 1,000+ souls at the height of summer season.
7. Science stuff.
8. No, they are not building nuclear weapons.
9. It's down, not up.
10. I will go back if every other opportunity in life fails. I like my friends and family and trees and cities and living things and decomposition too much and besides I really don't like the cold.

I have been constantly spellbound at my friend Sandwich's Livejournal, in which she is now detailing her experiences getting "off the ice" after a whopping 13 months. It makes me laugh out loud, and feel all misty too. I really was a bit worried about some of my friends who chose to stay and work through the pitch darkness of winter (to pay off student loans1 Well, that was some of them anyway). I could not have made it. I would have gone CRAZY. Anyway, Carrie, Sandwich, Kevin Williams, Kyle, and Wade.....I salute you. Now you're all filthy rich. I am glad vampires didn't bite you in the Antarctic Vampire massacre that I predicted. Now go spend some money.

so much

There is really nothing better than coming home hungry to a pot of homemade delicious chicken soup sitting cold on the stove. AND there was bread. Holy Moly.

Amazing clouds all the way from Santa Cruz up through the Delta today. The light was brilliant and the clouds were dark grey and everything was beaming and renaissance style.

Morning Rain

Morning Rain, originally uploaded by kai smart.

I hope it never stops raining.

The shop is progressing slowly but well. We painted the walls a million brilliant colors, including solid gold and a peculiar mustard green for the piercing room. Hopefully it wont be too overwhelming. The lobby is blue-aqua, and is very soooothing. The tattoo room is going to be teal-grey.

Time to go to work. This morning: a butterfly, small and washy-looking. After- painting a creature on the inside of the office in the new shop. I will post pictures soon.

In the world of music: New Iron and Wine, Beirut, PJ Harvey, and Mekons. Sigh. What a windfall!

Nerd Alert

Well, this is it. The new shop is finally cleaned out by the previous inhabitant and we are ready to start work on it. However, who is this cowering at home in the darkness (our house is a CAVE. No light comes in, EVER), bummed out and feeling overwhelmed? Oh, tis ME, the one who is normally cheerful and rolling with the punches. Damn and blast.

Sometimes it's good to revisit parts of yourself that are comforting and aren't part of the new scary empty world. That part of me is the Nerdy part; fantasy novels, sci-fi television, looking back to reading the Sandman & listening to Tori Amos in Jr. High.

Nerdlikes right now:

Veronica Mars- a modern Nancy Drew show at first too dumb for words, then smart and clever and so addictive that the housemates watched like 14 episodes this weekend. Good T.V. I never thought I'd say it.
Rewatching 80's movies- best of all was discovering that "Pump up the Volume" (one of my favorite movies ever) was made in 1990. That's MY teen decade! Yay!
Geometric Forms Clip-Art- http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/galleries/math/combination_forms.php




Neil Gaiman talks to Joss Whedon in Time

In other news, I now again have my very own computer! It's an old Mac, but bigger than the one I used to have and Mykle put a new harddrive in it yesterday, so it has lots of memory for me to store artsy things and such. I expect to blog blog blog more too, since Mykle doesn't start circling like a shark if I have my own set up.

I am feeling very non-Davis these days. I try to look at my housemates Pete and Lucia and see it through their eyes, they make do, they like it here,...but then I go back to these fantastic places I've lived and it's so bland here it's sort of disconcerting.