jeffpaulsen

Went down to Atlas Tattoo yesterday for session 2 of 4 with Dan Gilsdorf for my left arm koi sleeve. I was there for a 12:30 appointment, but it turned out I wasn't scheduled until 4, so I goofed off in town for a while.

I'm very happy with how it's coming together, and so is the artist.

Here’s a quick side-by-side of the fresh lines and the fresh shading. The reddish shading is actually grey shading plus blood and bruising. Big fill areas like that leak.

Complete pics of the before and after behind the cut.

 

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next session in 3 weeks.

Had another session yesterday, to start the shading and coloring. This hurts less than lining, but there's more area to cover, so the needle lingers over sensitive areas longer. I was able to carry on a conversation the whole time, which I couldn't before, so I'd say this is a net comfort improvement.

Healing still feels like a blistering sunburn for a couple days.

Pics later today, or in the morning.

for your internetting pleasure:

The Shop

The Design

before

after

 

This is to be shaded and colored over the course of the summer.

Go Blazers. Playoffs! Anybody who wasn't a basketball fan last time the Blazers were in the playoffs, here's how it works: we play a best-of-seven series against Houston. We get to see the same players face each other every third night. Playoff-level basketball is very physical, and as a result of this process, both sets of fans will hate the opposing team's players with the fiery hate of a thousand hates. This is not the generalized hatred of the opposing team, or ordinary dynastic hatred left over from previous disappointing championship attempts. This will be extremely personal -- I still remember everything Bill Laimbeer did as a Detroit Piston to make me despise him.

True fact tangentially related to the above: in summer 1990 I was in Germany, watching the World Cup soccer tournament. Some of my fellow exchange students and I saw an Italian player flop in a very obvious attempt to draw a foul. We decided that his name must be "Guillermo Laimbeeri", which none of the Europeans understood, despite our attempts to explain.

A plea for garden advice: the euonymous which I had planted for a hedge out front are diseased in some way. I am vaguely aware that there are sprays that treat various blights and molds. What the fuck should I do? I'm reluctant to guess at what's wrong and just try random chemicals. If they die, I could use a suggestion for a hardy evergreen hedge.

All my trees are fine, as are my lilacs.

Xigi is back in town, for those of you that know him. He is well.

Work is fine. I now have mad skills with WPF, XAML, LINQ, and WCF. I spent geekweek changing all our object serialization code to use the data contract serializer, and it's now so centralized that I'll be able to try others (eg, protocol buffers). I wrote a generic exension method that lets me order any IEnumerable(of T) using an IComparer(of T), which seemed to me like it ought to be built into the framework. I learned about shared code in generic exception handlers. Finally I ported one of our internal tools to use a pure MVVM pattern with WPF and XAML. It was all very energizing and mind-expanding and now I just want to not do a damn thing.

I am looking forward to a new tattoo. Totally psyched for it.