Red Eye!

We took the red-eye from Seattle that got in this morning. I, in fact, do have red eyes from not much sleep and a long drive previous to catching the plane. We drove from Port Angeles on the Olympic Peninsula to the airport via my sister's house.

Back home now. More to come in some form, but here are a few pics to keep you happy! I discovered that I love starfish.

turning point

Yesterday was a turning point.

My 6th graders graduated and students are off for the summer. This means I can work on curriculum for next year. This past academic year is, except for writing student reports, behind me. I am losing a wonderful teaching partner and hopefully gaining a new one. I am leaving a more familiar curriculum and going to one in which I have more passion. I am possibly leaving the model of co-teaching and moving to team teaching.

My scores for the last two tests I took for Massachusetts licensure arrived, and I passed. I am on my way to being certified in Mass, and I will have a student teacher next year (for the first time).

This summer, I am engaging in some powerful professional development, something that has been absent in my life for three years.

Reena and I are closing on the 20th.

So much change, and most of it is positive. Of course it means leaving some really good things, but they all have had impact on my life and will remain with me in one form or another. Nothing ever is left completely behind.

Who knows what other transitions this summer holds? Life continues to be fluid.

fireflies and black & white

I thought this experiment with black and white looked like a swarm of fireflies. I am going to post the full resolution image. Click on it to get all the texture and pattern in this fractal.

picture removed

renewed faith in people

There are instances that renew my faith in people, and on the way back from picking up lunch, one such event occurred. There was a table set up in front of a house near mine, and two girls were sitting with the eager energy of young sales people. Another youngster, a boy, was playing various tunes on his oboe. I crossed the street to see what they were selling and found that they were trying to raise money for Rosie's Place. The kids had made bracelets and oragami and were selling off some of their toys to do this fund raising. Not needing any more things around the house, I just made a donation and walked away feeling better about life.

see the details

Here is a new fractal that I have reduced much less than others that I have posted. The grain in the background and feathery details are still barely visible at this resolution; however, they are much reduced. The full scale image has far greater detail. Click on the image to see it larger.

New York and Back, and good news

Yep, back from the experience of taking 11 sixth graders to New York City. Good times, though stressful. Of note were a very enjoyable tour of the Museum of the Moving Image and a fairly rowdy Yankees/Sox game that we left early as the crowd was getting too obnoxious for 6th graders to be around.

On my return, I was able to access the first of three score reports (it came in two sections) for the MTEL

001 Communication and Literacy Skills: Reading Subtest

Status: Met the Qualifying Score
Minimum Qualifying Score: 240


001 Communication and Literacy Skills: Writing Subtest

Status: Met the Qualifying Score
Minimum Qualifying Score: 240

Yup, I passed the first section. I have to wait until June to find out about the rest.

Cookie reviews to come

On the verge of a cookie fest, I present you with this new fractal.
And the winner is: everybody who baked, ate, and enjoyed the cookies!
Molly's toasted peanut and chocolate oatmeal cookies took top rating, but all of them were good, and a good time was had by all. The cookie picture is missing all the wonderful contributions from the friends. You can see some of them in the foreground in the people picture.

spidey really big

Yep, Spidey 3 at the Imax last night. Decent movie, huge, lots of fun. Fun to see Topher Grace as a bad-ass.

better

Yes, time is the ointment for such events. I am one day removed from the lunacy. Though, the DNS that we utilize at school somehow failed to connect our IP and our domain leading to no incoming mail and an unavailable web page. I was going to try to deal with that at lunch, but it got resolved which was a good thing as I ended up having less than 30 minutes to scarf down a sandwich between parent teacher conferences (from 8:30 to 5:30 with no other break).

But I am feeling better. More later. Thanks em and jim. love ya.

silver lining

Today sucked! I feel that I let down every component of my community in one way or another, I taught poorly, I reacted to stress in non-constructive ways, and I really upset my wife.

On the bright side, I was admitted to the U Mass writing project for this summer. Too bad the rest of the day was so bad that it really tarnished my joy in this.

fractals to cell-ebrate

Cell-mitosis-that is what made me think of this fractal design. Even the bubbles trapped by the slide cover are symmetrical. This is what mitosis in every cell of a fractal beast would look like under magnification.
With all the spring flowers out there, my eyes are a bit itchy, but I am doing much better this year than in years past. My nose seems to have benefited from being drilled out this past winter. I love spring flowers, and there is something beautiful about the combination of purple and green. Lilacs are in full along with wisteria and other purple flowering plants. This fractal is homage to these signs of spring in full stride.

tests finished

I have just finished my MTELs! I hope I passed because I never want to do that again!

nighttime render

I rendered this fractal over night. The low res doesn't have as much detail as the high res, but you get the picture.

It goes to 14!

With all my complaining, I now have all 14 promised channels of baseball. I don't think it had to do with my complaint in particular, but I think Comcast was flooded with emails and realized they couldn't make people pay the same rate nationwide for different service in different regions. Actually, I think that is just what they wanted to do; people rallied around this cause and forced change.

If only real change were so easy.

I am loving the hand-me-down iPod mini that Reena gave me. Have the fm transmitter for the car, new headphones, etc. My own music, no commercials. Life is good.

Saturday is the test day!

Slogging through the minefields

This book, along with the Foundations in Reading, are guiding my study for licensure testing on May 12th. I find it truly dumbfounding that these books are littered with spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors. As I read, it feels as if I am walking through minefields of grammar. Most of it is safe, but there are regular, and still surprising, explosions that distract from the content and course of study.

can't stay away from fractals

I've been cooking a few of these for a while, and here is one that I finally rendered. I have more work I could do with it, but it is interesting as it is right now. I see this one as a swirly creature from a liquid universe breaking through into our own.

and he played with water

An almost surprise visit by J and H with sons R and L was a treat. Found out about this visit while in Seattle, and it was a perfect way to get ready for tomorrow's impending MTEL 4 hour long test for which reporting time is 7:45.Additional: Craig's List is great. I was looking for test prep materials for the next two sections of the MTEL, and there they were sitting on the list for substantially less than new or used prices. Makes me smile. Just got an email from the person and will be arranging to pick up the books. With studying, I may pass these tests. Tomorrow, with no studying, I may or may not. We shall see.

Back from Seattle

Hey all,
I am gone to Seattle and back. Had time to be with sisters and bro-in-laws. Good fun. Here are some images from the camera phone. On a walk around my older sister's condo, I saw many flowers and much green. Heather, tulips, and other late spring blooms were everywhere. The trees had blossoms, and there were many magnolias just past full glory.On a hill near her house, you could look across to downtown Seattle. The lump of buildings in the center-left of the image is downtown.
From the highway on the way back from one sister to the other, we passed the Space Needle. Camera phones are not really good for capturing detail, but they give the impression of the place.

very busy

I have been very busy recently. My students have turned personal narratives into picture books. I scanned the artwork, and today most of the students were able to hand bind their own stories. Here is an example of the art they produced:

recycled flamingos

Pastel diversion

Here is my pastel diversion from the browns and bronzes with which I have been consumed. The Easter Bunny on LSD?

just can't stop!

Here is my latest endeavor. I will be exploring other color sets, but right now I am really enjoying the browns.

Sepia Fractal

This new fractal reminds of old sepia toned photos. I decided to try something new in colors. I think this one has about 12 layers. Enjoy.

some new fractals

Well, can't keep an old habit down. Some fractals have leaked out of the system over the last week. Here are some smaller res versions of them.

P.S. I love to hear from anyone who is reading this blog. Please feel free to post comments. It helps keep me posting.

Pinholes part trois

I took picts of the pinhole setup with my camera phone. Here is the cart with the cameras. Each one is a Quaker Oats container taped to an L shaped piece of wood.
Next, you see the developing area with safe lights and chemicals. I had already put away trays.




Here is the drying room with all the student's pictures hanging up. The last day of shooting produced quite a few pictures in the three hours the kids worked. To the right is the paper loading and enlarger station. If we had time, we would have used the enlarger to make positives from the negative prints.



This sideways picture shows a camera close up. The lid was created from a disk of cardboard with a rim taped to it with lightproof tape. A thick foil was punctured with a pin to create the aperture, and the inside of the can was painted black with tempera paint. The L shaped block made it easy to orient pictures vertically or horizontally.

House and more Pinholes

Well, we finally found a house we like. We put an offer in and received a counter. Tonight we put in a counter-counter offer. We'll see how that goes.

Yesterday, my students (and I) used their pinhole cameras with quarter sheets of paper to create bigger images. There was snow on the ground and a great deal of light in the air. Here are a couple of the positive images I created on the computer from the negatives from my own pinhole camera.

A Plane to L.A.

Reena and I were going to fly out to L.A. for a friend of Reena's wedding. We would arrive Friday night, do some wedding related things Saturday, and then I was going to hang with my cousin for the evening. Wedding on Sunday was to be followed by some hanging out and chill time in the balmy weather. Returning on Monday gave me a day off from school.

Mother Nature, however, had other plans. We checked flight info Friday before leaving the house. The snow had already started, but the flights looked to all be running on time. Heh heh. Never trust the internet flight info! When we arrived after driving down the street to be closer to the T and taking the subway to a bus, the flight was indeed canceled.

After finding out that we were rescheduled on a flight through Chicago on Saturday that would get us to LA in the evening, I decided to stay behind to continue resting and fighting off this cold. We got Reena to the airport this morning, and she gave me the thumbs up that the flight was on. I haven't heard from her since, and I assume she is in the air between here and Chicago.

Before getting Reena to the airport, I shoveled the walk because the 80 year-old woman on the first floor would have done so if I let her. As it was she shoveled the porch and stairs. The snow was heavy with water, and I managed to pull something on the right side of my ribcage. It is the kind of pain that is constant, but it is also the pain that reminds me that I can still move and live.

I stopped by school and installed a new 24 port hub. I should have gotten a switch, but what can you do. Ebay is limited. It can handle what is coming at it, I think, and we should have so many less network failures because it replaces a tangled web of mini hubs that had been taking the slack for quite a while. I also picked up the kids' pinhole camera test pictures to scan this weekend. I will add some to this post when I have scanned them.

Shifty Eyes

Jeff Goldblum was a favorite actor of an ex of mine and is one of the only positive things to come out of that relationship. His earlier and more entertaining stuff such as Buckaroo Banzai, Earth Girls Are Easy, The Tall Guy, and The Favour, the Watch and the Very Big Fish make for entertaining viewing. The thing that grabbed me is that he shifts his eyes back and forth when perplexed, and as his roles are often that of a scientist or other smart guy trying to solve a problem, we get to see many signature Goldblum eye actions.

While at the concert last night in which Reena rocked the house in the opening number, I happened to see some graffiti in the men's room (not while Reena was singing.) I had to snap it with my phone-cam. Upon completing some internet research, it seems that this is a phenomenon that has been going on for some time and there are whole sites devoted to it. How strange, and how like Jeff Goldblum in a strange way.

Box of Memories

My mom uncovered some work of mine when she was cleaning out a closet. I thought I had taken all of my old material quite a while ago, so it came as a surprise that there was more to see. A box arrived a few days ago, and I finally got around to opening it. It was an amazing glimpse into my life from early (at least 1st grade) to the end of high school.

Here is a book titled, All About Me.
Some description and a self portrait
My family. It looks like Gwen is dripping water or crying and Dad is wearing swimming trunks?? The house is red brick with red clay tiles. Evidently there was a green vase or bottle that I cared about. We often went to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina for vacation.
This must be Danny Koranyi. I think he was the only close white friend at that time who had brown hair, brown eyes, and glasses. I am surprised that I didn't have a picture of Sarah in here, but I really can't be held accountable for what I drew in K or 1st at this point in time.

In another piece of work, I drew this image. Some things do not change!










To the left is a story I wrote in first grade that was typed probably by my mom who volunteered many hours at Delmar-Harvard. To the right is an example from the many binders of physics, calculus and other subjects that represented the high school years. The problem on the bottom must be one of those two cars are traveling...who gets there first types of problems.

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.