Winter Marches to Spring

The weekend is here, and yesterday was close to 50. A nice reprieve from the cold weather we have been having. I saw people running around in shorts. Because I planned and worked so much during February break, I don't have too much work to do this weekend. I took yesterday to walk quite a bit. First I visited Million Year Picnic where I get my comics. I then visited Central Square where there are two artists shops: Pearl Paint and Artist & Craftsman Supply. I prefer the funky basement setting and relaxed atmosphere in ACS over Pearl, but sometimes Pearl has the materials needed. In this case, I bought a frame for my student's art project at ACS, took the T home and then went out by car to get the piece that I left at school and find appropriate mattes for it. I'll post a pic when I have finished matting and framing the piece.

Over the last several weeks, I have uploaded several new spirographs to my Cafepress store. Here are a few of the new designs that have come about from my new sets that have more complex tools. Look in the Sprograph section for others.

Energy of Spring, Trappings of Winter

Reena and I joined Mike and Sarah to experience Solas at the Somerville Theater on Friday night. This theater has great world and folk music shows in a beautifully restored theater and movies in a few other rooms. The only drawback to the kinetic energy and entertaining band was the space left for your legs after you sat down. The seat backs in front of us forced us to sit at strange angles. The music, however, transported one away from the setting and made me want to get up and dance.

In response to making a gloomy winter fractal, I made a spring themed one to celebrate the upcoming season that is now sure to be a while in coming. We are blanketed in ice with more snow on the way. So view this fractal and dream of spring.

Winter Snow and Ice

Yes, we have been hit, and we didn't miss a day of school. Today, I helped quite a few people out of the ice, and I am a firm believer in Yax Trax. They kept me on my feet across the many sheets of ice formed by last night's melt freezing.

In honor of real winter weather, I have created a fractal that I call Winter Storms.

IMAX

What fun. Gigantic forms so much bigger than life. Hollywood expressed as it wishes to be seen. IMAX theaters really let you get into a picture. I was struck by the visuals of the opening credits of Night at the Museum. They were computer graphics that took various perspective angles as if they were solid forms floating in space amongst the museum displays. In the IMAX, they were outstanding. The seat rumbling with deep bass sounds was entertaining, too. All told, seeing Stiller and Williams do their things was a wonderful reintroduction to the living world outside my apartment. The 3-D clip before the movie was mesmerizing, too. The group that went consisted of 6 people of whom 5 were teachers. It was amazing how many of the lines translated to what we often want to tell kids. At one point Robin Williams admonishes Ben Stiller who wants to hit the animated monkey, "Remember who is evolved." I know this movie got poor reviews, but I enjoyed the silliness and fantasy of it.

Solid food once more

As I recover this Friday, I am again back on that wonderful solid food of saltines.

Jim pointed out to me that the image of the virus and the image of the cupcakes look remarkably similar! Enjoy his chop to the right. Too bad I didn't get any of the cupcakes in my belly instead of the viruses.

Roomba is busy in the living room circling around and chasing bunnies. Did a few new spirographs today and will post them soon as I lug the scanner over to my computer and scan them. I think my spirograph buying addiction is over as I have almost all the different pieces out there. What a fun toy!

Been playing with the template for my blog. Upgraded to the new formats which are foolproof and take quite some time to transfer over old template info. Updated a few links and rearranged my links a bit. What do you think of the new look?

Third time's a charm

Yep, got the stomach bug a third time. Here is one for you to look at. Say hello to the norovirus. Many people in this area are saying hello in all kinds of personal ways.

I found this helpful blog entry to explain what is going on.

Here is a Globe article about it.

a walk on a pond

It is cold. So cold, in fact, that I walked across a reservoir with my buddy. The melting and freezing of ice around objects left partial skins of ice hovering around rocks and logs. One stone had thawed and frozen a space around it in the ground.

Reena and I poured packing peanuts between the screen (where the storm window is missing) and the window in our middle living room window in order to help insulate it and block a bit of the wind. We'll see how that works when we get a windy day. It looks cool, though.

These photos are taken with my camera phone and are not the greatest quality, but it is convenient for taking quick snaps.

Social Butterfly, Sick Puppy

I've been both recently. School party with awesome food, dinner out with friends. O.k. the list doesn't go on for ever, but that is more social than normal.

On the reverse side of that coin, I got a touch of the stomach flu that is going around again. Not as bad as Jan 1, but enough to make me unhappy yesterday. I am through with all the stomach upset!

Do you remember what it looked like when leaves were on the trees?

Here are some very fancy cupcakes that are sold at a diner close to my school. They look so great that I can never eat one for fear of the taste not being as good as the visual.

Jay

Yep, convinced the guy to come visit so I could blow off my three day weekend and enjoy myself. The best medicine in the world. Had a small gathering last night. Friendships are gold, one of the most valuable things in my world.

doing better

My nose seems to have passed the major healing state and is on the vaguely irritating once in a while stage. Much relief. I am breathing through my left nostril in a way that I don't remember doing for a long time. Much joy!

Jay is coming to town this weekend. Much more joy.

bad start

Well, 2007 started with nausea at 3:30 and finally tossing my many fine eats from the celebrations at around 6:30. Still up. Sucky way to start a new year, but it can definitely go up from here.

a big year

This certainly has been a big year. Marriage and moving the school building stand at the top, but it has just been a long year with teaching. The recent nasal surgery is my first surgery besides wisdom teeth.

I am looking forward to next year hoping to regain a bit of bounce. So, raise a glass to the possibilities of a new year. I know it is just a continuation of what has been, but there is a psychological break and feeling of starting fresh.

Cheers.

Kaleidoscope Krazy

Yep, I have officially gone kaleidoscope crazy! Patterns, my Cafepress store, is testament to that. Here are a few more of my favorites shown on various products since the images are smaller than my source images.

Kaleidoscopes

I just started playing with a kaleidoscope plug-in for Adobe. What fun. There are quite a few examples on my cafepress site, but here is one of my favorites

nose job

Having not been able to breathe well through my nose for quite a while and not having any success with diet to change it, I decided to see an ENT. Deviated septum and thick turbinates led to a surgery yesterday. This morning was no cake walk, but I am doing better.

No pics with this post!

Yep, that is me in a tux! Hasn't happened since junior year in high school!

funky website kaleidoscope

check this one out! This is an image from our honeymoon that has been kaleidoscoperized.

Internet secured!

I did it. I moved the server and associated little boxes of blinking lights over to the new building, and it all works. Yay. A process started August 1 is now over, and I can move on to other things.

honeymoon pics

Honeymoon pics are up.

School on the horizon

The new building is coming together. It looks beautiful. The new year is fast approching, but I am not getting excited as I usually do. I have not spent hours developing curriculum or reviewing what I have already developed. I don't know what is holding me back, but I am sure when the kids hit the room that I will be energized.

On another topic, I have started editing my novel again. A group of friends have signed up to help edit and revise with me. This is a great way to keep the pressure on to continue doing it.

Reena and I have joined Netflix and we are seeing how that works to get some movies in the flow that were not coming in from my voracious appetite for buying movies.

busy day still going

Today was a very errand-running type of day. Actually it started off with my making a huge push to get the revamped freedmanriles site off the ground. Pretty successful with some minor issues to deal with. I am in the process of editing the pages Adobe puts out for a website of photos to resize the images on the page but not to actually resize them. Some wedding shots are ready. The site still needs work, but it is functional.

Then, I had a 1.5 hour, deeply-needed massage. I feel so much better. Ready for camping next weekend.

I then tried to send a bottle of wine through the mail. Oops. Can't do that. I deposited the marriage lisence in the safe deposit box along with other essentials that we don't need at hand (like passports). Next I stopped by school to get the next year's calendar and chatted with people including Alicia. If you read this A, congrats on the new kitty.

Off to Framingham (a 20 or so minute drive) to pick up a tent that can house both Reena and me this weekend. Luckily there was a FedEx next to the REI, so I shipped my package of glassware.

Back home to work on cleaning and straightening the house. Bedroom is now uncovered. This means that everything in there that had to find a room in my study is now crowding my already-crowded space. Tomorrow is going to be clean study day.

Tonight, after running a few more errands, is get back to revising story night. I have started, but must get through some more notes before I am ready to send out to the readers who will be checking, reading, or just ignoring it.

Oh, and I gotta get dinner.

new shirt

Here is my new fractal shirt!








Check it out in my store!

Back to norms

Normal is too many things to do.
Normal will be prioritizing those things-all of which are very interesting-and doing things that must be done and things that I really want to do.
One of those is writing.

In the mean time, here are a few picts from the honeymoon. More to follow!

Wedding Wear

Here is what I will wear for the wedding. For the many guys who have asked, "What shall I wear?" here is my answer. Hope it helps you.
This shirt in natural color.



























These pants. Hopefully not as wrinkled.


















These shoes. I will be wearing socks and undies, too, but I don't think I need to share those with you. All clothing is organic, natural colored, and sweat free labor. Changing my wardrobe over to these types of clothing has been a goal of mine, but this clothing is usually too expensive to buy regularly. I decided to do this for my wedding.

In the midst of report writing madness, this link made me laugh. It is rated Adult, but I did not see anything that would make it so.

I was the


bunny

Procrastination Station

Woot! The ultimate procrastinator. Here are my entries for the contest to rename the "Bag of Crap" that they put up once in a while to rid themselves of junk. It costs one dollar and ships for five. What a bargain, and it sells out in about two minutes! Before this, BOC was turned into Bulgarian Olympic Committee and regularly named Bride of Chucky by wooters.
Boat of Cheese, Bevy of Calligraphers, Battle of Crumpets, Bodacious Otherworldly Curves, Boiled Octopod Confection, and one I am not going to post here. Which one is your favorite? All told this was probably 5 hours of work.

Where is My Plate?

I have not posted for a while due to the inordinate amount of work general stuff to do around here (read that as end of school year reports and routines, wedding planning, new building planning, IT services at school, keeping up with regular chores, etc.) Do not think that I don't have time; I do. However, when I am under great pressure, my free time tends to be filled with mindless things such as solitaire or entering silly graphic contests at Woot(mine is the one with crumpets). And now, my cheese entry. My fractals have suffered similarly with very few out recently, and those I do make are just not making me happy. They have names like green mess and blue monster. Here is blue monster. Imagine a blue tentacled thing coming up from the deep. There is some neat texturing on a higher resolution version, but I am not sure if that came out in this smaller one.

Frankenstein's Monster

Here is a green Frankenstein's monster from Ultra Fractal. I was playing with some ideas, but the end product is not really what I had in mind. Fractals do grow organically, and I rarely plan them out, but in the midst of creation, there comes a point of synthesis and of decision in which I decide what I am going for. This one eluded me, though the end result has interesting elements. A true collection of parts that do not quite make a whole, the anti-synergy. The sum is less than the parts.

INVITATIONS!!!!!!!!!

Finally, our saga of hand-crafted invitations is over. This is what has been keeping every free moment, if not working on them, then thinking about them.

Supplies were purchased at the Paper Source. We had taken an invitation making course there earlier this year. Many trips were taken to the store, in Cambridge (located a small walk from our apartment) and in Brookline (a drive away), and we even ordered some materials as a special order.

Then, we assembled the tools we needed to create the invitations. The big items were a Konica-Minolta printer. This printer was won at an auction for my school. We had been wondering how we were going to print out the color pages of our invitation and avoid the hassles of going back to change files or dealing with the inconvenience of being away from home to do the printing. That was taken care of by this serendipitous auction, and a family from the school then turned around and paid for the printer for us. Wow!

Other tools and supplies came from Staples, Pearl Art, Bob Slate Stationer, and many other sources. In this picture, you can see the cutting board that made life easier. It had a regular cutting head as well as a perforator. Also, it was made of steel, so I stuck some business card magnets to the back of a ruler and was able to use that as a positive stop to speed up the cutting process.

After the printing was completed and the paper cut, we worked for a long time assembling the pieces. Envelopes lined the floor as the glue that ended up not working was drying. Stacks of unsewn invitations waited to be punched and sewn. The finished invitations then had to be stuffed in the envelopes, no mean feat if you have tried to restuff yours, and the envelopes had to be addressed.

Much work, and now it is mostly over. Yay! On to the next priority.

Invitations and the occasional fractal

These days are taken up with invitation madness. We are making our own, and the final fiddle-faddling with them has commenced. We hope to get them out by the weekend.

Recently, I have taken to reading a bit before sleeping. This has led to some late nights as I get caught up in a book. Right now, I am reading Lucifer's Hammer which I never read before. It is a good story with many characters whose paths are beginning to cross. Unlike the linked review, I like the book. The review complains about a slow beginning, but I thought it more like a European paced movie--enjoy the ride as it slowly builds.

I also cranked out another fractal amidst all of my curriculum development and wedding planning. It reminds me of tide pools.

Flying, Flowering, Fitness

My dear and loyal readers, my absence has been due to flying. Well, not entirely. I was not separated from the digital domain, but I was on vacation and decided not to write. We had about a week in Philly, and I am back now.

I have been marveling as spring progresses and the flowers burst forth. It always hits me anew, and I like that I never get tired of seeing life exploding out of tree branches and popping up from the ground. A faint sheen of green heralds this exuberance, and then the birds, the blue sky, and the flowers have a fiesta.

I am taking an exercise class through the Cambridge Adult Ed. program. It is fun, and it involves lots of stepping around in patterns with which I am unfamiliar. I seem to be getting the hang of it, but I still look like a fool compared to the rest of the class who have been doing these types of movements for a lot longer. Interestingly, I am the only male in the class. This seems to be a theme in my life with my classes at BMC and my career as an elementary school teacher. Good thing I got a couple good male friends out there to balance things out!

On my way back home from exercise, I used my new camera to get more familiar with it and to take picts of some of these beautiful blooms. I have a long way to go to get to the point where I know this camera as I did my last one. I did find in the dusk light conditions that I had to use the flash a lot more than I wanted to. Ah well, the learning curve commences.

The Eggs Hatched!

Here is what you get when the eggs hatch. A clutch of fire salamanders.

Clutch of Fire Salamander Eggs

This is what I imagine a clutch of fire salamander eggs might look like. The two in the middle might be ready to hatch!

Magnetic Fields

Yesterday, my students learned about magnetic fields by sprinkling iron filings on a sheet of paper under which they had placed a magnet. I still find this phenomenon fascinating and almost magical. Perhaps the preparation for this lesson led me in the direction I took on my newest fractal. It makes me think of two stars with their magnetic fields revealed.

Long Term Benefits?

What are the long term benefits of hacking? If we were all playing a game, and one of us decided that it would be fun to steal the ball and run like an idiot around the field with it (with or without clothes), that would make the game a lot less fun for the rest of us. After a while, running around the field like and idiot loses its appeal, and then the individual is confronted by a ruined game and pissed off people.

Similarly, I could go to the library, rip out page seven of every book I can, stuff the pages in my backpack, and run home chortling at the mischief I have wrought. Again, this would affect a lot of people in a negative way, I would have the temporary satisfaction of having a bunch of page sevens, but in the long run, I would not really get much out of it. In fact, if I needed a resource later on, it might be missing page seven, and I am sure I would not keep all of those around.

I only see hacking as a glorified I-can-piss-further-than-you kind of action. Bragging rights for how many people's work one can screw up.

One of my current, favorite sites appears to have been hacked. Woot is fun to check out for the wacky deals on items, the silly write ups, and the crazy competitions. I get great entertainment value from this site. This morning, the "I want one" button on the main page was chasing my cursor around, and I kept getting "server is too busy" pages. My guess-a hacker is sitting somewhere with his version of a bunch of page sevens and laughing like a possessed gibbon. It could also be Woot! just having some April Fool's day fun.

On another note, I just received my new camera, a Canon Powershot S80. I look forward to using it to take photos similar to the one on my Cafepress store. I will take it out with me today and see what I can capture. I already saw some forsythia blooming that I would like to image.