eff fashion

tonight's dinner:
quinoa with a sprinkling of gomasio
red lentils with seaweed and indian spices
fresh corn from sauvie island
yum

it was suggested to me today that my bigotry over skinny jeans was misplaced. one thing i can say for the latest fashion trends is that i've seen bigger girls wearing leggings and short skirts and looking cute and confident. i sometimes wonder how much being a teen in the early 90s affected me and friends' body image. i mean, NO ONE looks good in tapered, high-wasted, pleated jeans.

evidence:


come on! jennie garth is hot and she looks weird and dumpy in those pants. ew.

i don't know. maybe i'll get a pair of skinny jeans. with today's stretchy-fabric technology, they are probably fairly comfortable...

we're no strangers to love

i love random and fairly stupid things.

like this:


i don't know who made it or where it came from, but it's pure dorky genius. now i have to see if their statistics are correct, or if they just made a pie chart without really doing the math.

the darkness

i'm not really into this whole dark thing when i'm waking, the dark thing when i'm on my way to work, and the dark thing that stays because it's overcast and pouring.

i love portland and i love the rain, but today, i'm not happy about the darkness.

a new project

maybe it's 'cause it's 1:25 a.m., but i think i just came up with a genius plan. i shall draw 100 letter Qs. it's an interesting letter and i usually pick that one to copy from a font, so i might as well make a project out of it...

gothic versals


uncials and textura miniscule


some Q tail types


belizio, falstaff, and bell

in which i don't participate in 24-hour comics day

i'm working the 8-2 shift for the 24-hour Comics Day. looks like there's some amazing stuff so far. (the participants are about to begin their 12th hour!) we had an injection of coffee from the awesome and asskicking backspace. hot, dark, and plenty.

we also picked up the 5-pizza donation from Hotlips. i think i have a sickness because I can eat pizza forever. if i didn't stop myself, i could eat those 5 large pizzas in the back room. even the one with corn on it.

however, i am getting sick, so i limited myself to only 3 slices. so far.

yesterday i celebrated the glorious sunshiney fall weather with jess, lara, and leah by taking a drive to sauvie island.

for those not-in-the-know, sauvie island is a strange little pocket of agriculture and beauty just north of portland. during the fall there are corn mazes and pumpkin patches! honestly, i'm so in love with sauvie island... to get there from my place one must drive over the spectacular st. john's bridge. it's a super tall and green suspension bridge with two gothic spires. when you get to the west end it's all forested and it seems like you're entering a new land.

i gotta go drink some more coffee. maybe post later.

clear out that cobwebby brainattic!

here's a headline from Advertising Age:
Agencies Sweat as Clients Look Less Liquid

Ew.

And for something a little more scholarly, I found a quote that has been rolling around in my head like a glass marble in a metal bowl.

From Oregon Library Association Quarterly, Fall 2008:
Read something interesting once a day, at least. Read "one level up" or outside your area of expertise. Read related literature... Try to get a sense of what is ahead of you, not what's already happened.
-Deb Carver
Dean of Libraries,
University of Oregon

This is really hard to remember. Sometimes, I only read the computer screen for work and then the back-side of a DVD cover while sitting on the couch. Even if I'm not "reading up" I think I'll try to learn something new every day. For example, you may have noticed that there is only one space after my periods. This is because a designer/illustrator friend told me that double-spacing at the end of a sentence is like, sooooo 1995. (Not a quote, italics are mine.) I was practicing some hand-lettering and read in a book on typography from 2005 the same thing. So no more double-spacing!

rosy fingers of dawn

i took the bus to work monday in the dark. it was beautiful and chilly out.

there was an old man on the bus who had a big orange button on the crown of his meshback cap that said: i am riding the bus.

the possible implications of this button made me laugh and made me sad.

weeee-oooooo

I'm wondering if there's a funny cyclical occurrence where every 3 to 4 years you run into people from your past. I ran into some friends from college with their 3-year old daughter while I was waiting for the bus. They're pregnant again and look happy and healthy.

Today, one of the new instructors realized that we had a practicum together in college. The last time I saw her was at the Horsehead in Eugene and she told me to read Cabinet magazine. (Which I now have a subscription for and is my favorite magazine of all time.) Of course! That's why her name looked so familiar on the new faculty list!

Weird; I wonder who I'll see next.

phoenixian

my friends lost their house recently to a fire. years of correspondence, love letters, art, books, and almost their dog and cat. perished or semi-immolated.

i am so sad for them and sometimes the sadness is physically painful. but they are the kind of people who use their infinite creativity to make life more wonderful.

witness their new blog.

photos of things lost, melted, morphed are beautiful and touching. i don't know what it's like to watch your life go up in flames. just days after getting married and weeks before beginning their master's degrees.

a blog about a blog

One of my photos was used as an illustration for a blog entry on this website: See Also... A library weblog, by Steve Lawson

Here's the closing line:
But if we want to want to show them the richness of the complicated, multifaceted, multi-format environment that is the modern day academic library, I can’t think of a worse way to teach that than with newspaper obituaries.



The funny thing about this is that I took that photo while working for the Oregon Newspaper Project at the University of Oregon. We microfilmed over one hundred current titles and old issues of the Oregonian.

That microfilm ball was a long time in the making. My boss, a film aficionado and amazing photographer, was always the first to defend microfilm. "It has a shelf life of 800 years! And what if all the computers crash?!" She is actually infinitely more eloquent than my paraphrase. Afterall, she's the person who taught me the word "maven." And in context.

Now I work in a small art-based academic library and we are always looking for new and exciting ways to promote information literacy. I agree with Mr. Lawson in that forcing people to find print sources of death notices is not the way to do this. The last time a student asked after print obituaries, it was for an art project.

soup sunday

it's soup time again and i'm a little sad and a lot excited. (love soup.)

the rains are finally here and jess, lara, and i inaugurated autumn with a trip to the southern oregon coast where lara grew up. it POURED. sometimes the sun would come out and we'd get excited because we'd be in the car on the way to the next destination. but inevitably, once we exited the car, the rains would come back. there's an amazing storm-watching spot near coos bay and thankfully a little shelter. but you can't take photos of the scariest stuff unless you have a waterproof camera.

oh yeah, soup.

i returned home this afternoon and lamented the need to go to the store. upon excavating my refrigerator, though, i found that i had some ingredients for a soup:
golden beets
russet potatoes
onion
garlic
celery
mushrooms

i've never made a soup with this combo before, but it looks nice. we'll see how it turns out in a bit.

i'm also not doing any laundry because THAT is a chore, but i have fresh undies, socks, trousers, and a funny grey suit i bought on the coast for 25-cents.

life, as they say, is good.

journey to the west

i'm going on a coastal adventure with two of my best girlfriends this weekend.

here's how i imagine it:
mist unfurling through the trees and craggy roadways
drinking hot chocolate and talking about men
wearing chunky, nordic sweaters, but somehow looking slim and gorgeous

yep, it's a lifetime movie.

more probably, we'll be dirty and wet and tired, but very satisfied.

hooray!

the weirdest thing i've seen in a while

a billboard in an ethnically mixed neighborhood recruiting people for border patrol. the image is a scary, black-clad, and bulbous-helmeted guy on an ATV.

i thought it was a joke. but it's not.