My building at the school is closed at lunch, but I heard someone on the stair landing today. I called down, “Did you see the sign on the door?”

One of my science students was there with a girl. He looked up at me and said, “No.”

“This building is closed at lunch. You shouldn’t be in here.”

They get up. “You’re weird, Mrs. Pedersen.”

“I’m weird?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s okay. I like weird.”

“You’re one of the nicest teachers I know.”

“Ha ha. Bye, now.”

We have three cats and a cat door. Sometimes a cat brinsg in live prey so that he can play with it in a more contained environment. I wish this were not the case. Here is what I came home to this afternoon:

The couch by the front door. Dove feathers.

Behind the couch.

The rug in front of the couch. The cat toy ignored in favor of something livelier.

The number one suspect leading me into the dining room.

The dining room floor near the cat door.

The dining room floor far from the cat door.

On the deck outside the cat door. The poor bird lost its most accessible feathers first.

No dead bird anywhere. I have no idea where it ended up. I hope the cat took it back outside and we don’t find it via smell in a week’s time.

Update 5:50pm My husband found the dead dove, partially eaten, in the backyard. He’s decided to stop feeding birds. I’ll spare you the photos.

I found the culprit, Athena:

Front left paw.

Actually, these sketches were done on note paper provided by my Press-A-Print trainers last week. Yes, I was still paying attention to the lectures.

The high school has bought a whole Press-A-Print set up for the students to learn how to run a small business. It’s a great opportunity for them and should be a lot of fun. The idea is to run the whole thing as a real business, serving students, clubs, sports, other schools, and eventually small businesses in the area. Another teacher will be in charge of having her students actually run the equipment and the business. My graphic design students will be the “art department.”

The nice thing about this deal is that it is not a franchise. They provide the equipment, supplies, training and support, but they don’t regulate how you run your business. I’m tempted to invest it in myself once I get really familiar with the equipment at the school. The most fun during training was learning how to do screen printing – my first time ever. Now I want to buy a screen printing machine at the very least. I could design T-shirts and print them right then and there, and then sell them somehow. These two sketches about might work well as T-shirt designs.

On Saturday morning, my boyfriend and I had a nice four-mile stroll throughout midtown and downtown Sacramento. I’d noticed spray-can stencil art on the sidewalks before, but on this particular morning I was amazed at the quantities of messages that had accumulated.

Of course, it is illegal to paint on the sidewalk or walls, or leave stickers up, in public areas. However, this phenomenon is worth a photo essay. The stencils appear to be more popular than ever in Sacramento. Mainly they appear on the sidewalks, typically at the corners where people wait to cross and may glance down.

I took photos all kinds of beyond-the-law street art. Perhaps soon, I will display the stickers and cement etchings in another post.

For now, I shall offer you this gallery of stenciled spray-can art. Most works are in one color, but some are in two. Some are tastefully arranged in combinations. The paint fades after being trampled upon for a while, so some images are clearer than others. I have no idea who the artists or stencilers are, though I managed to track down Vagicorn on MySpace. If you live in the area and know anything more about these works of art, please let me know. Likewise, please let me know if you have a similar gallery online somewhere.

Click on any image below for a larger version. The images are in chronological order as we walked.

mystery symbol	chimp with cigar	Vagicorn	Madonna
cow	Vagicorn transport	faint woman?	fuck the man
happy to be here	squirrel with acorn	cum dumpster	vagicorn
faint person	free Tibet	keep music evil	combination
movement	headless figures	consumer California	hoods
faint image with crossed rifles	dollar sign and heart	stop drop roll!	stop drop roll!
cement mixer	Moped	backhoe	truck
car	cement mixer	combined vehicles	R.I.P.
Vagicorn	ephemeral

UPDATE 1/31/2009: All these images and more street art can be found in my new Gallery.