This summer, in Victoria, I started a new job with a house painting company. Before lunch on the first day, I was already annoyed with myself.  I'd found a dead bird in the woodpile on the less travelled side of the house and I wanted to take it home. If there's one thing I really despise, it's acting like a crazy artist, and it's worse when you're doing it on your first day at a new job, and then it's just gross when it involves dead animals. 

I obsessed about it all night, and made a move at the end of my second day when no one was watching. The mummified carcass of a pileated woodpecker was sealed in my lunch bag faster than...uh... fast food; I scanned it under lab conditions that evening. As disgusted as I was with myself, I was captivated by the process. I just sat and watched the twenty minute scans, one after the other. One rarely sees nature this well preserved, and the combination of static nature and the slow analysis of technology was an open challenge to my painterly abilities.