Join the Fold

I just spent some time at Joseph Wu Origami, a rather large site devoted to the Japanese art of paper folding. In spite of the rather small images, the site is worth visiting. The section on Illustrations is commercial work by Mr. Wu (I keep wanting to call him Dr. Wu -- curse you, Steely Dan) and is of less interest than the Gallery section, which features work by a number of origami artists. I would particularly recommend the gallery of undersea creatures by Vincent Floderer (click on the last thumbnail in row three on the gallery page.) The site also features a section with instructions, most of which are in the PDF format. I didn't download any of them, since I dislike the Acrobat Reader intensely -- and I doubt that I'd have the time or the patience to do origami, anyway. But there are a few instructions in JPG or GIF formats, including instructions for making a butterfly from an American dollar bill. The site also has a section of articles on the subject, and a generous assortment of links to other origami sites. Even if you have no desire to fold paper into cranes or flowers or bugs yourself, its fun to see the results of other peoples work. When I have more time, I'll have to look through those links to see if there are sites with bigger pictures, though.

ps. -- my apologies for the awful pun in the subject line.

Rainy Night and Clear Day

One more gray day has turned to a rainy night. This is turning out to be a very wet April. The fuzzy little stems which are shed by the mulberry tree this time of year have clogged the rain gutter along the front of the house. Now, even though the rain is gentle, the gutter is overflowing in that spot near the front door, and a loud cascade of water is falling into the flower bed, crushing the sourgrass. I remember to clean the gutters of the autumn leaves, but always forget the mulberry stems of spring. In the dark, the cats are apt to jump down from the porch and land in the pond which has formed in the flower bed. They are always so annoyed when that happens.

I got a couple of rolls of film back today. One of the pictures is of a rubber duck head I found, which I will post in found_objects later. (Update: My found object is posted here.) I have a picture to post here, too -- behind a cut because it is rather wide.

( Flying )

I took a picture of a landscape, and actually didn't even notice the vapor trail of a jet in the sky until I got the prints back. Since I liked the top part of the picture better than the whole thing, I just cropped it to show only clouds and sky and vapor trail. It jogs something in my memory, but not enough to jar it loose, so I simply look at the picture and wonder why it makes me happy.