Weekly Round Up

This week I...

... hung out with Marcia at Crescent Moon coffee shop and listened to some poetry

 … enjoyed having the Daileys over for a pleasant Sunday afternoon chat about creativity, sub-creation, invention, and discovery.  I created "Dreamville" which the Magician turned into an airplane.    These two photos some things up nicely.

A good time was had by all!

 … did some work on my painted shoes, since I already had painting stuff out while working on the lamp stand.

... spent time with family for Thanksgiving.  Here, Dad teaches my niece Arwen to play solitaire.

 (In real life she isn't that blurry!)

... watched the odometer on the Honda hit 100,000 miles on the drive back from helping Dave and Sarah move into their beautiful new home.  (And then dusted off the dashboard!)

... per my brother-in-law Micah's advice, I downloaded a trial version of BackBlaze, an on-line (and therefore off-site) back-up system.  It only backs up files like photos, Word documents, videos, etc, not applications, but on my really old machine I have 19,697 files that meet its criteria.  So far it has taken about 24 hours of my computer being on continuously to get about 10,000 files downloaded.  Happily I can still use my computer while this is going on.  Anyway, apparently upload speed is always much, much slower than download speed.  I will let you, my loyal readers, know how the system works and if I decide to spend $5 a month for the service.  As Micah pointed out, whatever disaster claims your computer would probably claim your back-up external drive, too, so having your data in a cloud is more than just being able to access it from multiple computers.
... counted my blessings, not least of which has been getting to spend lots of time with my beloved, as we are both off from work the second half of this week.

Just My Type

One the advantages of being comfortable with my nerdom is that I freely pick up books like Just My Type: A Book about Fonts by Simon Garfield.

It is a strange book that combines opinionated musing on the effects of particular fonts, bits of history, some outrageous puns, and odd stories.  There's lots of stuff on cities picking different fonts for street signs and labeling public transportation.  I have to say, it has made me notice once far more than I otherwise would have.

Here are some random bits of information that I am pulling out, mostly so that I have them someplace I can get back to them.

There is actually a tongue-in-cheek movement to ban Comic Sans (pages 17-18).

In 2007 a woman named Vicki Walker from New Zealand was fired for sending e-mail in ALL CAPS.  She later won her lawsuit, claiming that had been unfair, and was awarded $17,000 (22-24).

Even though fonts can be time-consuming and therefore expensive to design, it has proven difficult to establish intellectual property rights over them (225).  If lettering is your passion, you might not want to make it a career….

"It is believed Gutenberg cast almost 300 different letterforms for his two-volume 1,282-page Bible of 1454-55." Only 48 copies of Gutenberg Bibles to survive, and very few of them are complete (28-31).

Finished! Lamp Stand Part Two

Here's where things stood with my lamp stand at the end of my previous post about making it from a dresser drawer:

I'd wanted to replace this:

And here it is all finished!

The trip from here to there starting with priming:

(I also primed some boxes that I use to keep clothes organized.)  Happily, we had primer left over from painting the garage.

I had a tough time deciding how to decorate the door.... flourishes? decoupage?  collage?  It took me a couple of days of thinking, but I  finally settled on stripes.  I taped up the door.  I had to think backwards--wherever there was blue tape, there would be white, and whatever was left white would be covered in blue paint... 

I used a gold Sharpie pen paint for the gold stripes. The black tape is "artists' tape" and it didn't work all that hot, but then, I didn't use it for its intended purpose.

The blue paint was left over from painting the ceiling and it had glaze in it.  Therefore, on the advice of my painting expert and carpool buddy Jason, I lightly score the tape with my exacto knife before pulling it off.

I free-handed the center flourish, and then had to add more flourishes to disguise the fact that it wasn't quite centered!

You can see my practice attempts on the scrap cardstock.  I was most worried about this step but I'm really pleased with how it came out.
 Next I had to touch up the stripes with the paint pen.  You can see a "before" and "after" below:

Finally, I screwed the hinge back in place....

... and put it on my dressing room table.  Viola!  I'm delighted with the final result.  It really helps pull the room together, and it will give me a great place to tuck away less-than-sightly items..

Quotables

A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it is by no means the most interesting.
~ Doctor Who

So what might happen if you or I took some detours today?

Weekly Round Up

This week I....
... had to listen to my beloved tell me the temperatures in Key West, FL (80 degrees) and Quito, Ecuador (67 degrees) because the cold has come.  It's below freezing here, and my half-Croatia husband is remembering his Mediterranean bloodlines and wondering why we still live here....

... confirmed that what I tell my students is true: You have to follow the directions!

This is me looking sheepish:

This is him announcing who is going to clean the burnt weirdness off of the inside of the microwave:

(Sorry, Rachel, I will do better next time!)

Thanksgiving Break Begins Today...

And for that I am thankful!

The big debate: be productive or rest, relax, and unwind?
(I suppose the correct answer is: both!)

Weekly Round-Up

This week I....

... had dessert with my brother from California and his lovely girlfriend Maria.
... took Grandma to church.
... continued to waffle about buying a Mac. (Any suggestions?)
... primed stuff for my next project.....
... didn't take a lot of photos!