The other day I tried writing a poem.  I hadn’t tried doing this since seventh grade.  It was significantly easier in seventh grade.  The poem I wrote was about a kitchen:

The summer comes and visits thrice Of kneaded dough and earthy spice The pans lay on onioned sheets Splattered with tomato leaps A mixing spoon betrays the care Of single dreams of pleasing fare The kitchen hears, the cook confides The oven heats, the guests arrive Quick in it goes! With hopes full rest On tender hopes of moistened vests Company mingles with friendly din Alone resets the scraps and tins The night it comes in shades of blur Of forks delight in what is served An overcoming ache of day Comes to a close in laughter made With thankfulness he does return White soldier worn with bits of burn And mottled plates, uneven piles A funny red between the tile Once more it stands to offer ear As scuffles out the guests of dear A quiet friend; he cleans it nice The summer comes and visits thrice

I guess I was thinking of what it would be like to make a lasagna and inviting guests over to eat it.  I’ve never done either, but I have eaten lasagna so I must have figured that was close enough.

I dug these up recently from my box of memories.  Almost ten years ago back in the days of film.  Ah, the good old days… My box of memories is about a cubic foot in size.  Actually most of the stuff isn’t that old, come to think of it.  Nothing like the treasures at my parents’, like my tape recordings of video game music.  Ahh, Jetfighter II.

I painted this for my coworker Deborah’s birthday, which is sort of a poor caricature of our prayer group at work.  She’s the one in brown and turns 29 next week..  I really hope she always wanted a neck like a tree trunk.

Last week at work, to promote employee fitness, they had daily athletic competitions with the people who work in the building.  I didn’t participate but they announced the winner of the 1000 m rowing competition with a winning time of 3:30.  That didn’t sound so hard to me so I thought I’d go down to the workout room today and see what my “guns” could do.  I thought the first 30 seconds were strong.  I just have to work on the last five minutes or so…

This one took quite a bit longer.  I originally had a few more doves thrown in but I figure you just can’t have the whole world read your diary.

For some reason I imagine him writing about how he’s self conscious about his looks.  That’s a very contemplative topic for certain hedgehogs.

Ever since I finished my last exam a week and a half ago I’ve been wanting to get back into painting.  I spent this afternoon trying to paint a girl and a hedgehog with mixed results.  I started with watercolor but switched to digital midway through.  I think I lost a lot of the sentiment of the original but it was way more fun to paint digitally, being able to recolor and resize on a whim. And with friends like “control” and “z” what could go wrong? (besides “computer freeze” and “forgot to save”)

I gave up going on a camping excursion to paint this. I’m not sure if it was worth it.

Some of these are really, really old. And by some I mean most.  The more recent images are toward the top.

Animation

Below is some animation I worked on from My Little World, a feature length animated film about a boy who finds hope and friends through soccer. Music is by Inti-Illimani. [flashvideo file=/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Sequence-03_1.flv image=/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/mlw_small.jpg /] I worked a season on a short lived show called Out of Jimmy’s Head, which was about a boy who got a brain transplant that allowed him to see animated characters. I met a lot of neat people working on this show. [flashvideo file=/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/flash_03.flv image=/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/flash_small.jpg /]

Below is footage of the Ocean Park pandas during my Hong Kong trip earlier this year. [flashvideo file=http://reidea.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/panda_03.flv image=http://reidea.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/panda.jpg /] If I had to be covered in food I’d also have the same exact acoustic guitar loop playing as background music.

I found out that WordPress allows you to import your old blog from blogger.   I’m sure some people want to know what I ate for dinner five years ago, but maybe I’ll just sweep it under the rug for now . . . I’ve been trying to take my mind of the last actuarial exam I took (exam MFE).  To that end, this website is working rather well.  Having to wait a month and a half for the results is like turning the lights off at the last few seconds of an NBA final and having to wait a couple months to see if the shot went in.  And I’m sure if Kobe had to wait he’d be coding his own website too.

Re: idea started in February 2001, after a series of emails to a friend.  We were writing about ideas for a website (subject re: idea) and it eventually became a personal blog.  My friend Scott is the guest columnist.  This site used to be about sleep habits and other minutia but I’d like to try to post more artwork.  We’ll see. In case anyone wants to contact me you can write me at theohemm, followed by an ampersand (@), followed by yahoo dot com.

About Me

One of my earliest memories is my brother falling out of the car when we lived in Illinois because the car door was unlocked.  My family moved to Oregon when I as 4ish and I used to play chess on the tiled hardwood floors, practice my fastballs with a tennis ball (electrical socket = strike zone), and draw mazes. This is my brother.  He’s named after a state but he’s trying to throw off people with that shirt.  His name is not Tennessee.  This picture was taken in Thailand.  Thailand is totally not like Tennessee either.  This photo is probably throwing off a lot of people. This is my mom when I graduated from college.  After graduation, I worked for my alma matter doing technical illustration for archaeological academic publication.  I went to Syria for two summers on archaeological digs.  It was as hot as Thailand, (and possibly Tennessee) and you wear long pants for propriety.  There was no air conditioning either. (Apparently they just use shampoo in their air. Ha ha ha … ahem.) I moved to Los Angeles and worked in the animation industry for three years,mainly doing flash animation and some traditional animation as well. I currently work as an actuary (it’s a long story) and help set reserves for a large insurance company. It’s pretty similar to animation except that you deal with a lot more data and you don’t really animate.  And in animation I never got tested about the drift of bond prices following the Cox Ingersoll Ross model given the partial derivative of the interest rate, for some strange reason.