A Soft, Summer Night with Dagny

I'm sitting here in the backyard at night, puffing on a cigar and listening to the crickets. I spent the day studying economics for a course I am to teach at DeVry on Monday evening. It is kind of interesting, if GDP, GNP, supply and demand, monetary policy, inflation and deflation and that sort of thing grabs you. No? No wonder people run from me at cocktail parties. I'm lying -- I never go to cocktail parties.

The rhythmic chirping of the crickets takes me back to childhood in Missouri, where there were great big, green metallic June bugs, and 17 year cicadas, and my favorite bug, lightening bugs, or fireflies if you prefer. There was something magical about these tiny hobgoblins, emerging silently from the grass with their tiny blinking lanterns to flit about the yard while I watched in wonder. We don't have fireflies in California. All the good stuff lives somewhere else.

I am learning Poser 7. I bought Poser 5 four years ago, installed it, found out how hard it was to use and learn and never touched it again. This week, however, I had a reason to learn, the need to replace Pamela's figure on her blog. The new owners of Poser do a better job of documentation, like including a tutorial and reference manual. So I have created the woman from stock models in the Poser libraries and she looks pretty good so far. She's naked, but that's because I haven't yet learned how to dress her. I will though. We named her Dagny, after the famous heroine of Atlas Shrugged (the novel). Here's a preliminary look. She will get better as I learn to add realistic effects.

Here's a closeup of her face. She's kinda cute.