My classes yesterday:

Wed. 9:30am-12:00pm - Drawing One: Observation. Okay, you already know about this one. Nothing new...quite literally, in fact. We're working on the same drawing for a number of weeks. I really don't like that at all, but I guess I see the value of it. Hopefully this will teach me patience...which is one of those unfortunate things that can only be learned through being forced to be patient (or terrible tragedy, I guess - seeing footage of New Orleans is enough to make anyone feel fortunate to be in their current circumstances)(not that I'm complaining about being in art school).

Wed. 1:00pm-6:00pm - Comics Two. The one I've been waiting for. This semester I got Vincent Stall as my teacher. I've been tailing the elusive Mr. Stall (also known as King Mini) for quite a while; Zander Cannon drew him in the letters section of The Replacement God once or twice while they were roommates downtown, and I've always been curious as to how accurately Zander's depiction was. He's more animated than I had imagined, and he's similar to me in that he makes silly noises and comments in odd voices when he's looking for something or killing time. Unfortunately, he's also quite the potty-mouth, which is a little unprofessional, but at least he's funny and fairly upbeat, and he seems to know what he's talking about. He likes Sam Hiti, so really, he couldn't be all bad. Fun fact about Vincent: he never learned to read in the traditional sense; he learned primarily from reading comics and memorizing the order in which letters go visually, so he's incapable of sounding out words to find out how they should be spelled. Fortunately, his wife is an English major and he's very good about using the spellchecker.

Branches is keeping me quite busy this week. I've finished cutting out all of the flyers we've needed to fill mail boxes at school, and filled said boxes with said flyers. I've posted small posters of the same image on all of the bulletin boards at school. I've made several posts about events related to Branches on the school's virtual bulletin boards. I may throw together a poster for our table at the Club BBQ event tomorrow at lunch, or I may just tape flyers along the table's edge. It actually isn't a huge amount of work, but with my homework starting to come in it makes my days feel pretty full. Fortunately, the pressure should only really last this week, and all of the work is over - the first week just has a lot of setting up to be done, and a number of events. Things should start to calm down now, at least as far as my organizational responsibilities are concerned.

The in-laws are coming in to visit this weekend, and we're going to try to expose them not only to the "Brothers Grimm" movie, but also to the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. The weather has been lovely this week, and is supposed to continue through the weekend, which is nice. The last time we went, it had rained before Faire, and the entire site was filled with giant mud puddles, which made navigation rather unpleasant. I look forward to seeing the artisan tables, the games (the ones for sale, not the carnival-style games), and of course, cool costume stuff. The Faire - excuse me, "Festival" - out here is even more lax about being 'period' than the Faire back in California. In Devore, the Faire-cops would insist that you took workshops on properly archaic speech, they would inspect your costume to make sure everything was accurate, and would send you home if it wasn't. I don't think they even care in the Minnesota Festival. There's barely a pretense in their brochures. To be honest, on one hand, it seems a bit more honest to me, since it's just a chance to relax and have fun, and people are going to be showing up in cheesy barbarian costumes and hippie duds, anyway. It's kind of like a mini-Campaign fix for me. On the other hand, there's something within me that gets unpleasantly jostled when I see the Teriyaki Stick stand, and a little part of me is invariably disappointed when I ask for something and the vendor/actor responds in Teenaged Boredom rather than Elizabethan English. Oh, well. It'll be fun; I'm looking forward to it. And I'll get to wear the super-cool Viking shirt that Laura made for me...