This afternoon the temperature rose tentatively above freezing, but mostly the sun came out and that promptly cleared the side streets of ice, and I was able to get out and get a bigger hard disk for Bagheera.  I’ll put it in Monday and run the restore on the drive overnight, and we’ll see.  Since it’s not the system drive, the restore shouldn’t spring any problems on me, but I’ve never had to restore a Mac disk yet either, so we’ll see.

While I was working on something at the drafting table this morning, I came up against a problem I’d faced before when it comes to drawing backgrounds.  There is so much Stuff in your day-to-day environment that you sort-of know what it looks like, but when pressed to actually draw it you’re fuzzy on the details.  Things like bus stop benches, trash cans, telephone poles and power transformers.  You know what all these things look like generally, but not in any detailed way enough to draw them convincingly.

I remember watching a documentary on the cartoonist R. Crumb, and a passage where he described, early on in his career, driving around the city he was living in with a friend and a camera and shooting dozens and dozens of shots of nothing but common everyday cityscape stuff like transformers and street lights and storefronts and bus stops and traffic lights and such like.  He said he’d been feeding off that library of background stuff all his life.  Take another look at the backgrounds in his cartoons sometime, and you can see what it did for him.

So I decided to go out and start my own gallery of background trivia, for what I was working on now and future reference.  When I came back I discovered I’d dropped my lens cap somewhere in the snow.  Oh Dang!  I figured by then some passer-by had either snatched it up for themselves, or it had been kicked somewhere or driven over by a car and I’d never find it, or never find it in one piece.  I didn’t have a spare for that lens, so I waited until the camera store nearby opened and took a walk, thinking I’d just buy a new one.  But just on the off chance, I re-traced my steps.  I found it at a corner near where I thought I might have lost it, laying undisturbed, flat on its face in a small drift of snow and sleet.  The cap was all black, and in the sunlight it must have been absorbing a little bit of heat.  It had drilled its way about an inch into the snow.