Letterpress

Links:

Short Letterpress Documentary (Wonderful)

Fall of Autumn Filmstrip: Letterpress Printing

Letterpress printing: Thompson Laureate

One step at a time

From Yahoo News

Spiders create giant web

Thu Aug 30, 7:02 AM ET
WILLS POINT, Texas - Entomologists are debating the origin and rarity of a sprawling spider web that blankets several trees, shrubs and the ground along a 200-yard stretch of trail in a North Texas park.

Officials at Lake Tawakoni State Park say the massive mosquito trap is a big attraction for some visitors, while others won't go anywhere near it.

"At first, it was so white it looked like fairyland," said Donna Garde, superintendent of the park about 45 miles east of Dallas. "Now it's filled with so many mosquitoes that it's turned a little brown. There are times you can literally hear the screech of millions of mosquitoes caught in those webs."

Spider experts say the web may have been constructed by social cobweb spiders, which work together, or could be the result of a mass dispersal in which the arachnids spin webs to spread out from one another.

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One step at a time.

Communal Spiders have been predicted by scientists to farm the last surviving mammals on the planet. The scientists, working with the Discovery channel, suggest that these arachnids will be silver.

Mmm... Silver...spiders.

Could they be...

MALTHARIANS?

*Insert Evil Laugh here*

The start of classes

4:04 p.m.

Workout (Check), Laundry (Check), House Project #73 (Check), Letter (Check), Journal (Check), Sitting in comfy, air conditioned, dark office (CHECK), Muscles in pain (Check), Friend called (check), blog (working on it)

Well, I'm back from my 3 p.m. workout and still cooling off. My right bicep is aching because I lifted a bit too much today. After lots of off-again, on-again exercise all summer long, I was kind of leary to get back on the scales here on campus. After the obligatory, 10 minute, cardio sprint, I stepped on them to find I way LESS now than I did when I finished spring quarter. Woo-Hoo!

It must be all that clean living.

So right now I'm back in my office and sipping on a diet pepsi (lack of caff has caused the onset of eye-splitting headaches again so I'm back on the stuff for a while) and cooling down while I look through my stuff for class. Thankfully, tonight is just an introduction and syllabus. There's not much to things so I'll be in and out in less than an hour.

My new schedule for Tuesday - Thursday is:
3 - 4: Workout
4 - 6: Office
6 - 9: Class

I should probably be home around 9:30 - 10 p.m. if people are curious why I'm not responding to the constant 'ping' of Yahoo IM.

Owwie (yep, still sore).

Feliz Cumpleanos a mi

How to spend my birthday?

Well, there was only one choice: Campus.

Today is the move-in day for the freshman at Shawnee State. Parents and students were swarming over the dorms and the University center to get checked in for housing and to get their student ID's.

I didn't want to just sit at home and read because I'd end up getting too comfortable and be tempted for a nap or something. After checking in with my buddy, Jim, (who had gotten me some coffee for my birthday) I wandered over to my new perch on the campus. There's a great tree there that provides plenty of shade and with the nearby wall of the 'porch', it's a perfect place to read through my lectures and update them where I need to.

Even though I have my office, it's not where I wanted to be today. Even though it's dark, cool and quiet, I wanted to get outside for a while. The only means that I could do that was to find some shade.

As you can see from the pictures, I was ready to just hang out for quite a while.

A few friends have called to wish me happy birthday; which is very cool. My father actually called while I was chilling in Jim's office and asked if I felt older. Oddly enough, he even sounded sober.

I do feel somewhat older. I'm now on my way towards 40. If 30 was the new 20, then 30-34 was still in the 'younger' years of my life. Now that I'm 35 - I feel older. A friend of mine even said that I am now half of 70. Such an odd concept; half of 70 year old. My grandfathers have lived to their mid-seventies or mid-eighties. My mother's father is still living and still working at 85. So I have lived long enough to have had started a family, had a kid, all of those normal things.

Thankfully, I'm not normal.

It's still light outside so I'm not sure what I'm going to get into for the rest of the day but I wanted to grab a video of the view I had on campus. Not a bad place to spend a birthday.

Did someone say... Crusade?

From the LA Times:

"Maybe what the war in Iraq needs is not more troops but more religion. At least that's the message the Department of Defense seems to be sending."

"Apparently the wonks at the Pentagon forgot that Muslims tend to bristle at the word "crusade" and thought that what the Iraq war lacked was a dose of end-times theology."

"It's time to actively strip the so-called war on terror of its religious connotations, not add to them. Because religious wars are not just ugly, they are unwinnable. And despite what Operation Straight Up and its supporters in the Pentagon may think is taking place in Iraq, the Rapture is not a viable exit strategy."

Once more with feeling...

Ahh HELL no.

-Tom

New Graphic Work

Ok, I've been working on this pilgrim logo for a while and I decided that the original version (here) was too empty. I wanted to put something in the background to give it a sense of scale and theme other than just a blank, black figure. So I began digging around for something that I could grab and alter to fit into the style of the image. Finally, this morning, I found some mountain clipart on a free clipart site that matched perfectly.

Pilgrim design v 2.0 with Mountain background

What I want to do now is to combine some urban elements to the image to give it a combination of both places where a Pilgrim might walk. I want to split the background down the center of the figure and have the city-scape on one side and the mountains on the other. Now I just have to figure out where to put the moon. I think that the moon would look better on the mountain side (the rural) and a star on the building (the urban) side. I'm going to have to decide what fits on each side once I find the nice, clean lines of the city element.

Bookplate v 1.0

The bookplate is something that I've been wanting to create for a while; something that I could use to mark my books. I wanted something that I could easily print out from my home office and use on everything from paperbacks and such. The image of the Hermit from the Rider-Waite that I've altered for my blog and such seemed a logical choice. It's a nice color of green too for the background.

A Walk in the Rain

Around 2:30 p.m.

I was not exactly jumping out of bed this morning but I knew that I had to get some work done on my lectures. Rather than trying to fight all the distractions in my home office or the office on campus, I decided to go for a walk over to my favorite watering hole, Hatti Beasly's.

When I crested the hill on 17th street I saw that the gray clouds of a storm were on the march. The air was cool and the weather was perfect for a mile hike. With my IPOD for accompaniment, I didn't notice the many people who were out on their front stoops enjoying the fresh breeze. It wasn't until I got to the shoppe, right around noon, did the storm make the decision to send only wind at us. I was so disappointed.

After grabbing an Iced Cappuccino, I grabbed my favorite perch out in front of the shop and dug into the new Sociology text. I have been reading the text for the past few days to get a sense of what had changed from one edition to the next. The good news is that there weren't that many changes. This left me with the task of thinking about how to run the grades for the class; how many assignments I would have, etc.

Unfortunately, Hatti's closes at 2 p.m. for the afternoon after their lunch rush and doesn't re-open until 6 at night for their coffee and gelatto rush. I did find out that the name, Hatti Beasley, came from the deed of the nearby property that the owner also owns. The owner had always wanted to develop a coffee house and the name stuck with him as great thing for marketing.

Around 2 p.m., I decided to head back since the gray clouds were on the march once more and this time they carried with them the promise of rain. Before I was even half-way home, the cloud artillery opened up and began to pour. Thankfully my bag comes equipped with a mini-brella to protect its contents from moisture.

Now that I'm home and mostly a drip from the hike, it's stopped and the sun has come out to drive back the clouds and guys like me.

Later.
-T

Some Flickr Fun

Found here

Letter Writing

For a while now, I have been writing my friends by hand. To me this is a bit more personal than just sending an email. When I started to think about why I felt it was a more personal touch than something digital, I got into a bigger topic than I had originally intended.

When you write someone a letter, there is a personal connection between the author and the reader. When you write a journal, there may be a personal connection between the author and some future reader. Similarly, when you make a scrapbook of photos and the like, the author is attempting to make a connection with the past. The consistent element of these three forms of writing is that of a connection.

When you write you're making a connection with someone.

Though information may be exchanged within the letter; letting someone know of a birthday or an anniversary, the main purpose is to make the connection with the other person. The digital age has attempted to assist with this process by creating dozens of chat programs and email system, but that is only for the information. With chat programs like yahoo and MSN you can communicate via voice-chat so that you can hear the other person's voice. Additionally you can use a web camera to see the person you're chatting with. By these additional bits of technology, the digital systems are attempting to add that personal connection.

However, I would argue that the digital 'connection' is not as strong as that of the analog. With our society embroiled within a war in Iraq, soldiers have been separated from their families once again and those connections need to be reinforced even more than before. Though several soldiers can communicate with their families through occasional phone calls and emails, it is a brief moment in time and lacks permanence.

A soldier in Iraq can't see your ribbon,
Or the flag at your front door.
But a letter they hold in their hands,
To them means so much more.
Supporter Liam Sweeny

To those who need the connection, letters from home are worth their weight in gold. The letters are kept with them and re-read frequently to make sure the connection(s) remain as strong as possible while they are apart.

Even strangers have offered to make that connection to the Troops suggesting that it is more important to have them than the information within them. Pen Pals are nothing new and now we have people offering to make such a connection with people who may need them more than ever.

Pen Pals for Soldiers

Websites such as Myspace and Yahoo offer to help people make these connections (usually for a small fee) and if technology has made it possible for us to reach out and touch the world - why are so many people looking to be a little less disconnected? The massive amounts of technology available to our society has let us access INFORMATION at a remarkable rate. Just try and google something and it will give you pages and pages on whatever you want to look up. However, as we have become more dependent upon "The Information Age", I think that we have lost "The Connection Age".

I will get into this topic a bit more in another post but wanted to toss out the start with these thoughts about writing.

More to come.

-Tom

Mmmm is for morning

My current field book, Owl Cup, Cellphone and Bodum Coffee Press

Around 10 a.m.

In twelve days I will be thirty-five years old. In fifteen days, I will be back in the school year. When I woke up this morning, the first thought was: "I need coffee..." My sinuses decided to pretend that it was fall so I woke up half-strangled with nasal gick.

Yesterday was a day for cleaning and organizing the house as well as indulging in a wicked pleasure: World of Warcraft. I didn't think that I would get caught up in it as much as I did but I also realized that after yesterday, I needed to tackle more of my prep-work for classes. I have my syllabi done and the first chapters done, but I want to get ahead. I also need to start my Blackboard files so the students have something that they can download for reviews and such.

So, when I woke up this morning, I grabbed the new Coffee Press and my field book. It's a wonderful combination for the remainder of my "summer break".

Mmmm, French Vanilla.

-Tom

A Road Trip

It all began with an idea: a road trip down to Berea, KY with my friend June so that she wouldn't have to make the return trip (about three hours) by herself. She was going down to Berea to drop off her son, Adam, to the University there. Since I hadn't really seen the University, though I had been down to a corner of it almost six years ago for a SCA event, I thought it would be cool to head down.
The trip started off at 10:00 a.m. early Wednesday morning at Ashland's central park. I drove up and parked the Saturnator so that I could ride down with June and Adam.

June is starting school herself here in a few days and wanted to borrow my NEC. As I now have an office on campus and can use it to work on my lectures, I didn't need the NEC in my bag all the time. So, since I had it and the charger in my bag for the road trip, I let her take it home. I'm sure that she'll put it through its paces.

After a quick breakfast / brunch in Grayson, we were heading down the road again and the conversation branched and split and retraced its steps a few dozen times. If someone tried to map the topics in the conversation, I would guess that they would swear it was made by a drunken pilgrim.

When we got down to Berea, I was surprised that the University had a student body of around 2k students but had a lot more buildings - a larger 'footprint' than I would have expected. One of the more impressive structures was a replica of Independence Hall from Philadelphia.

I'm not sure what purpose the building has but the design is very... academic. It looks like it belongs on a college campus. One of the things that I have thought about Shawnee's campus is that the buildings don't look like they belong together. Each building has a different style than the one next to it so there's a somewhat disjointed feel to campus; nothing ties it together.

A friend and I have spoken about this and he wants to put a fountain or a statue or both in the middle of campus to sort of establish a 'center' of the footprint. I think this would be an awesome idea; somewhere for the students to sit down around the fountain and such.

The trip down to Berea was not incredibly complicated but June said that it's a solid 3-hour drive. I didn't even recognize the passage of time because it was a good trip. Plenty of conversation to chew up the miles.

Even the longest of trips can be taken in stride,
as long as you are gifted with a friend beside.

-Tom

Cat Pic

I grabbed this pic at my mother's garden. One of her cats, she has about a dozen I think, was crashed out on the old rocking chair and the shot couldn't be avoided. I grabbed my camera and grabbed it as quick as I could. I think the veggies growing in the background and the old basket in the foreground make it look very cool.

Scorch-Journal

scorch-05
Originally uploaded by Green Pilgrim.

This is a size-1 journal that's 1 1/4" thick. I tried a new leather-distressing technique called scorching. I love the feel of it.

It's such a brick. :)

Look here for a nice, big image of the book. I'm quite pleased.
-Me