Dog walking and potential dog sitting

Jim, Susie and Ian, along with Lucy the dog.

Susie is an experience mosaicist, and this is Lucy's drinking bowl!

Typical view on our walk

My hero

Yesterday, Saturday morning, Jim and I went to see my cousin Ian and wife Susie. We took their dog, Lucy out for a walk. It was an idyllic morning for a walk. Lucy ran around like a mad thing, I took lots of photos to gather images for my australian plants research and conversation flowed freely. It was a lovely morning.

When we got home, it was back to art homework. We had an exercise in class to describe a complicated postcard of a textile. We swapped descriptions, and I had a set of instructions to draw a black/tan textile of an native weaving. The instructions that I had were complicated, but understandable, and I was pleased with my drawing. I suspect my exchange partner will find my instructions much more unintelligible. The textile I described was a multi-coloured mola (hawaiian applique) which was much less ordered than the picture I drew.

Art homework

While taking a break from my homework this morning, I had an interesting chat with our landlords. It turns out they will being going to Italy for a month soon. They were going to arrange for house sitters to come in to look after their two small dogs while they are away. I said we would be happy to look after them, as we were experienced dog owners. I also asked about what the position was regarding rent if we went away travelling for a while, during my university holiday, and was informed they usually came to an agreement with the tenants to either put their belongings into the garage to enable a holiday let, or paid a reduced rent to leave their stuff in the granny flat. We agreed that if we look after the dogs, we can pay a small rent and leave our stuff in the flat. This enables us to have a bit of a holiday, while not paying out for duplicated accommodation costs.

I've spent this morning doing my research homework on Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco Chanel, and printing images of their respective modernist style of dress design. Elsa Schiaparelli was much more imaginative and daring and worked closely with modernist artists like Dali. Coco Chanel was a much less pleasant character, designing mannish, loose, comfortable clothing before moving on to the "little black dress" but had some disturbingly close contacts with the Nazi regime which led to her being persona non grata in Paris, post war.

This afternoon I continued working on my Lucienne Day presentation for Historical Issues in Art & Design. I had a lot of visual disturbance and was headachey but (foolishly) carried on working on the computer. I have managed to remember how to use Powerpoint, although it took me ages to work out how to upload images from the internet (scrambled brains at the time). I need one more session to add the last few images, and then go through the tutor's instructions one last time. If I add in all the verbal comments I need make to fit all the criteria, I think I can make a good presentation. Then that is one major assessment I can complete early on, to concentrate on the others. I do not need to stress out over several assessments at the same time.