two ways of looking at a wednesday

(one) It was a beautiful day out.  I propped open the studio door to let in the sunlight and heat (and the cottonwood fluff tagged along).  I got to ride the my brand-new-to-me bike today, as the trusty Jetta has needed to retire for too long now. 

(making a home on my apartment porch last night!)

(two) Forty minutes of biking plus the heat has left me wiped.  And then three flights of stairs, after the biking and three hours on the treadle press--my quads are singing their complaints.  Fluffy Sasha insists on standing over me and the laptop, and probably will for the next hour or so until my emails are done.  It's still light out, and I would love to be doing anything other than working.  Oh, and dinner.  Goodness, it's almost nine pm...what in the world to have for dinner? 

mixed-tape mondays: snow day!

So, it was just a quick trip to the studio today--after blasting through a knee-high, two-feet deep plowed-in snowbank, my key broke off in the studio door.  I did manage to get the broken key out, but then lost my steam.

And so I went home.  Apparently, this storm was epic!

censorship.

I hope you all know about PostSecret.

Today Frank posted the following on the blog:

******

11/08/2008

MySpace Censorship

Last Monday, the PostSecret Blog on MySpace was the most visited Blog on MySpace. The next day MySpace administrators removed postcards and comments from the Blog and prevented more than 100,000 people from viewing it.

Many people have emailed me concerned about what happened. I am posting a response here because I am unsure if an explanation on the MySpace Blog will go uncensored.

As I write this, the MySpace Blog is unblocked but the latest postcards and comments have been removed completely. MySpace has set my Blog so that only friends can see it. If you friend me now I will add you.

http://www.myspace.com/postsecret

I will try and post more secrets on the MySpace Blog next week (November 15th) and see what happens. I hope you will email your friends about this and encourage MySpace to repost our secrets.

There is a censorship discussion about this now in the PSC.

PostSecret Media Contact: Dan Adams

******
If you have a myspace account, please add PostSecret as a friend.

my two cents

Life is busier than ever here, but I want to take a few seconds to remind you to vote tomorrow.
Those of you who know me, know that I'm snarky, bitter, and decidedly not patriotic. I regularly refuse to join in political discussions. You couldn't catch me with an "I Voted!" sticker. But I registered to vote when I was eighteen, and have voted in every election since. Even junior year abroad--I lived in Paris--I voted by absentee ballot.

Elections are not just about the president. I know, that's a big one this time around, but in Vermont, we're also voting for governor, state reps, attorney general, and too many more to list. Sure, the prez gets all the glory (and the shame), but the local guys are the ones responsible for snow plowing, road repairs, property taxes, and funding for our public schools.

I'm not crazy about either one of the major candidates--and there are those of you who will be quite upset when I say that. But I will be standing in line at City Hall to cast my vote tomorrow. Will you?

Letterpress posters by the ever-impressive Amos P. Kennedy Jr. (top) and the awe-inspiring Yee-Haw Industries (bottom).

chapbook -- day 3

My soundtrack for the day--Breakfast of Champions (Kurt Vonnegut is such an inspiration!) read by Stanley Tucci. I think I've read it a dozen times, but having it read to me is such a great treat!It's so small, but this smudge tripped me up for a good hour today. I ended up wiping down the whole press!
It's a bit of a walk to the sink, so I've been using (and reusing) latex gloves for my clean-hands work.
Grr. Hate it when that happens.
Relaxing in the midst of chaos. But really, I just wanted to show you my favorite socks (pink and purple stripes) and the best clogs ever: Dansko Piper in blue cabrio--now totally discontinued :(

Chapbook countdown: finished two more text pages today...only five more to go!

chapbook -- day 1

click on the picture for a larger version!

It's been awhile since I mentioned this project, but it's taken awhile to get off the ground. I have the great privilege of printing a poetry chapbook for Well Lit Press. The publisher contacted me eight months ago, and it's been a long (but very illuminating) process. I'm very glad to finally be working on it!

The only downside is...just to the left in the photo. Yup, crutches. I did a little something funny to my knee last week, and have been limping very, very slowly since. Today I got the results of the MRI: sprained ACL, torn tendons, and lots of swelling and bruising. The forecast: maybe knee surgery, maybe not. I'll know more on Tuesday, when the orthopedic surgeon will be back from the long weekend.

Chapbook countdown: despite the injury, I've finished three of the eleven runs for the text. Lucy is cooperating very nicely; I'll keep you posted as to the rest!

P.S. Buy your copy now!

a bit of a surprise

Look what startled me out of my business card reverie:
It was only the engine car, but when a train rumbles by, less than ten feet from where you're printing very small pieces of paper, you take notice.

Also note the amazing clouds + sky: after two weeks of almost non-stop rain, it's still hard to be indoors!

good news + summer cherries

kitchen window with cherries, 6/27/08

I received *very* good news this afternoon...my business loan has been approved! The VP at the bank said that they were very impressed with my business plan and projections for the future, and that they'd be more than happy to lend me more money in the future! Hooray!

Also, I'm very pleased to be eating these cherries right now. They're organically grown in Shoreham, VT at Champlain Orchards, and I scored a pint of Ulsters because they were leftover from this week's Pete's Greens CSA share. My new studio is the Montpelier pick-up point, and I'm excited that so many folks will be by the studio every week, and that I'll get the extras!

baby steps

Getting moved in to the new studio is taking longer than I'd hoped...so in the meantime, I'm...
printing quirky wedding invitations (they're getting married on the groom's dairy farm...)
staring at the space that's almost-mine
and watching the wildflowers that grow in the old railroad tracks just outside the new space.
Happy Thursday!

more room on the shelf

I have many exciting (new!) things to tell you about, and many pictures to show you, but until my internet starts behaving itself, this will have to do.

These are the 106 books most often listed as 'unfinished' on LibraryThing. The rules are that you bold the ones you've read all the way to the end, underline the ones you read for "school", and star the ones you started but didn't finish.

I'm following ampersand duck on this one, and adding italic for those I've re-read.
Via ampersand duck, and many, many others before.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
*Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
_Madame Bovary_
The Odyssey
_Pride and Prejudice_
Jane Eyre
*The [A] Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
_Great Expectations_
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
*Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
*_The Canterbury Tales_ (I was an English major, and read Paradise Lost instead!)
The Historian : a novel
*A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
*Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
_The Grapes of Wrath_ (junior year of high school!)
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
*The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
*Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
_The Prince_
_The Sound and the Fury_
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
_The Scarlet Letter_
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
_The Aeneid_
Watership Down
*Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth (but only if listening to the book on tape counts)
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

I feel so less well read right now...

it's been a hard day's night...

Nothing to report, really. New books are in progress, mostly because my internet has been down this week, and my cell phone provider's towers went down today, so I've been catching up on everything but my internet presence and my hunt for a studio space.

And if you haven't seen A Hard Day's Night, truck over to your local hip video store, and watch it tonight. It makes me giggle!

ready, set, go: totally off topic

Not that I have a topic, per se, but I generally try to stick to work stuff. But lately I've been doing too much "work" {here's the short list: printing wedding invitations, co-managing a venue for the Green Mountain Film Festival, making amazing lattes, waiting on your table, making bingo journals, teaching workshops here and there, driving to and from here and there, putting bids on more print jobs, losing my mind in the projection booth at the savoy, designing business cards and cd cases for him, designing baby shower invites for her, and definitely not doing my laundry} and not enough fun stuff.

Fun times chez moi:

all refrigerator photos c/o noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com

Reading No one belongs here more than you. {Two words: brilliant and devastating. If you don't know about Miranda July, where the heck have you been? Go here now!}

Listening to my favorite song three times in two days. It's that good, really. And I just found the r.e.m. + David Letterman video on youtube, and it's here for your viewing pleasure. Also, r.e.m.'s new single is totally stuck in my head: supernatural superserious is my theme song for the week. And it can be stuck in yours, too.

{As a side note, I've been crushing out on r.e.m. and michael stipe for eighteen years now. That's longer than I've known almost anyone else in my entire life. And it makes me feel really, really old, instead of just thirty-ish.}

approaching the dam

(crossing the winooski river 2.17.08)

I cross this river almost every day. Today, as things and thoughts were slowly swirling around in my mind, I looked down and saw the thaw. It's still *mostly* frozen, and nothing's going over the dam, but there's a little bit of river peeking through.

I have so much to tell you about the last two weeks, but it will all have to wait for the dam to thaw. Until then, I've been getting my fill of other folks' blogs (eva's icons, the short livingroom, hot off the press) and you should too.

À bientôt.

looking ahead...

I know it sounds a little cuckoo, but I can't help but be afraid of March. This year, I'll be projecting films for the Savoy Theater as part of the Green Mountain Film Festival--and as I'm still a novice projectionist, just the thought of messing something up in front of a crowd gives me the shivers.

And then there's the workshops: I've just updated the workshops page on my site to reflect dates that still have openings, as well as to announce a new date for Experience the Letterpress Thing (March 15) and a new workshop: Getting to Know Your Tabletop Press. Only one date (so far), March 8. And here's what it's all about:

A unique, hands-on workshop where participants bring their own tabletop press to work on.

The daylong class begins with a review of the press: its parts, operations, care and maintenance, adjustments, and more. In the afternoon, we make our presses ready to print.

Topics and techniques include setting tympan and packing; ink types, mixing, and inking the press; setting and positioning gauges and grippers; choosing paper; and registering the form. Particular attention will be given to troubleshooting and specific problems previously encountered. If time permits, participants will set type and print.

As always, email me for information, and sign up soon!

il était une fois...

...totally off topic, but I gave myself a haircut yesterday, and was remembering my tragic blonde phase. Ten years ago (just saying that makes me feel old), I was spending my junior year of college abroad in Paris. And decided that there was no time like the present to test out the "blondes have more fun" theory.Yikes! That's me on the left, Kathryn and Tori at the Opéra Garnier in late 1997.

P.S. Turns out, blondes don't really have more fun. They just get hit on a lot more.