Supermoon I and Supermoon II, Digital Paintings

These are efforts to capture some of the energy of the recent supermoon with the You Paint program, as seen from upstairs.

Supermoon II D The end result of my second attempt. Supermoon II

Supermoon I AUG 13, 2014 The end result of my first attempt. Supermoon I is extremely simple.

Here are the lead up steps to Supermoon II. Supermoon II   I blocked it out.Spermoon II B and filled it in. Supermoon II D  Small adjustments made the final product above. There are a lot of possibilities for the work, but limited capacity for any one work with this program.  The picture would not accept any more changes, and if I had not saved it, the picture would have crashed, and been lost as it had been several times before.

A Special Grandmother

Just as people say that the most beautiful baby in the world is their grandchild, I say that one of the most beautiful older women to have graced this planet was my grandmother.

DSC03832 Meet Melusina Bernhardina(sp?) Dorothea(sp) Nordmeyer Seehausen, seen here when she may have been about sixty.   The youngest of thirteen children, people said to her father, Henry Nordmeyer, “She is lovely.  You’ll have to keep her at home with you”, as he was heading into his older years.   He said, “No, she is going to have a life.”  After some training in singing, it is said that her voice teacher cried when she left her training to marry.  This was her choice.

DSC03829 Always involved, she originated an art program in the  public high school, wherein reproductions of pictures by famous artists were placed along the hallways.  The funding that she found for this came from recycling newspapers.  Earlier, she painted this self-portrait of herself as a young woman.

When I was a rather arrogant, fresh-water biology graduate student, and I noticed how observant she was, I said to her, “You could have been a scientist.”  She just chuckled.  Now I know how hard-working her family had always been.  Of course, she had the capacity to have become a scientist, had she wanted to, and had she had the opportunity.

Science And the Public

DSC03838 Hilarious! But deeper down, there are a couple of reasons behind this.

  1. Ebola, if you catch it, is much more immediate than climate change, although the latter is already detectably going on.
  2. Ebola sounds so individually horrible,  whereas climate change is out there, and does not seem to personally hurt us.

Of course, altogether, climate change is affecting everybody on earth right now, and could even conceivably be aggravating the ebola, by way of increasing stress of change on plant, animal, and human immune systems.

Climate change is already affecting us because we see a lot of drought, more fires, bigger storms, even earthquakes caused by fracking to access the natural gas, which we need to supplement the energy provided by oil and coal burning.