Linoleum block print: Ohio River Scene

Here's the 6 x 9" linocut I've been working on. I don't think it's too bad for being the first one I've done since Reagan was in the White House. I'm pretty satisfied that the cutting on it is done, although there might be a few tiny areas I could fine-tune. What I really need to work on is my ability to put ink on the block. My brayer is a little too hard for the job, I think. There is also a strong possibility I just need more practice to get rid of the white spots where ink is supposed to be (see the far lower right for what I'm talking about.)

For those of you unfamiliar with the process, or who just don't remember it from your elementary school art class, linocut printing involves taking a sheet of linoleum that has been mounted on a wood backing. One cuts into the surface; the areas that are cut away remain white. Printing ink is then applied with a roller to the raised areas. A sheet of paper is then pressed onto the lino and mashed down really well to pick up the ink.

I want to work on a multi-color print next.

3-year-old comedy

I was just reading The Order of the Stick (at http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0623.html) when Jill walked through the room. She slowed down, looked at the monitor, and got a big grin on her face. "Charlie Brown!" she exclaimed with delight. "Not quite," I told her, although I guess I can see the resemblance.

On a somewhat related note, Jill was sitting on the potty yesterday when Kim walked in, and I overheard their conversation, which went something like this:

Said Jill, "I made a mess, but I cleaned it up."

"You did? What kind of mess?"

"When I pulled down my panties, some poopies flipped out, but I wiped it up."

"Uh, OK. Can you tell me where it was?"

"On that carpet."

"Where on the carpet?"

"Riiiigghhhtt where your foot is."

Map: U.S. states vs. other countries in GDP

A little bit fun...

 

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2007/06/10/131-us-states-renamed-for-countries-with-similar-gdps/

 

Last night I had a tense dream that the city was taken over by the walking dead and I was hiding in subterranean tunnels and sewers.

 

My sensitive metal detector

Last night I retrieved a cardboard box from the garage
and started dismantling my metal detector to ship it back to the manufacturer.
After I had it broken down, I got a damp cloth and wiped dust and grit from the
shaft and inspected the parts. Then I thought for a moment…I hadn't ever taken
it apart this far since I first received it a year ago. I decided to experiment
a little more.

So I held the unattached detector coil in my hand,
and plugged into the batter/circuit box the long cord that is normally wrapped
around the detector shaft. I turned it on and waved it around. It seemed to
function fine. I was basically just holding the battery pack in one hand and the
coil in the other.

I cleaned the shaft a little more and put it all
back together. It worked fine.

Just now I came back from lunch, which I spent
detecting over at the park near my office. I had no trouble with the detector,
and found about 95 cents in coins as well as a little metal car.

My theory: There was some debris caught inside the
shaft/handle of the metal detector that was rattling around and throwing things
off.

I think it's fixed, but I'll be keeping a close eye
on it.

linocut printing progress

Last night I pulled a print from the linoleum block I'm carving. It was just a test. I have a lot of cutting yet to do on the linoleum before I have a finished image, but I wanted to see how the cuts and gauges I've done so far carry over into a print. I'll post a picture of it later, probably along with the finished version. For now I'll just say I'm pretty pleased with how it's turning out. I think that by the time I work on my second piece I'll have a pretty good sense of how to handle it, and I'm even more excited about starting on a multi-color print.

 

metal detecting

My detector is beeping erratically and annoyingly, even when pointed at the sky. It is going back to the manufacturer. Yay, warranty!

 

art/baking/garden

Last night I started cutting on my first linoleum block print since high school art class. I really don't have any good idea how it will turn out. A little natural finesse and intuition are qualities I feel I possess when it comes to exploring new media; I think I often get a pretty good sense of how to manipulate the physical objects to get things to look pretty good. There are, however, some basics here that are unknowns to me. How deeply do I have to cut to get a good printable relief? Is my ink any good? For multi-color reduction prints, which will be my next project, will getting accurate registration be a job that's just too frustrating for me to want to fool with?

--

Yesterday I made some apple bread from scratch. It turned out really good, and even better with cinnamon butter on it. The recipe called for a cup of grated apple, but I grated a whole apple and ended up with about 2 cups, all of which I threw in. I liked the results much better than the orange mini muffins I made on Saturday.

--

I actually mowed on Saturday. It was mostly to run all the gas out of the mower, but I also wanted to chop up and obliterate the leaves that I'd missed while raking. Some of the grass was actually long, but it was brown and horizontal so it didn't look too much like it needed to be cut. It did look better once I had mowed it, though.

I also dug up more gladiolus bulbs. That's pretty much all of them now. I don't know for sure where I'll plant them in the spring, but I have lots of them- and I'm willing to share. Many of them are new baby corms ("cormels") that might not flower for another year or two. I hope they will be safe in the garage during the winter.

CNN’s stupid T-shirts

A while back I noticed that CNN was marketing T-shirts featuring its daily (and hourly) headlines.  It's not a bad concept, really. It seems to me like a way to make money, and they do it in an innocuous manner, although it does make their brand of journalism a bit cheaper. What does bother me, though, is their selection of headlines for the shirts. They bypass the good ones and only use the lame and boring ones.  Here is one from today that you can get on a shirt:

 

Gonna Procrastinate? It'll cost ya!

 

And here are the ones that they skipped, all of which are much more interesting or provocative:

 

Woman, 88, yanks nude intruder's testicles

 

Death, mutilation of al Qaeda suspect a mystery

 

Israeli PM: No point in discussing truce

 

One of the coolest photos ever

This was taken by the girls' Aunt Pam at her apartment. I think it was during September's prolonged power outage. It has multiple layers of fun and visual interest.

Walnut ink drawing

This drawing is 6 x 9 inches. I think I like the other drawing better because of interesting shadows and the asymmetry, but this one is much better than I at first thought it would be: the simplicity of the symmetry and the dark punctuation of the window shutters come off pretty well in this small format.

 

Walnut ink drawing

This is 12 x 7 inches on paper, using my homemade walnut ink with a brush and dip pen. I'm quite happy with it, even though there is a very obvious problem with it that drives me bonkers. Oh well. I still like it overall.

 

birthday race

For those who have not yet heard the story, I had this conversation yesterday – Jill's birthday:

 

Jill: "How many days until Christmas?"

Me: "Uh, four. Four days until Christmas."

Jill: "Four days until Jesus' birthday!"  And then, in a sing-song taunt: "...I beat Jesus."

 

 

"I'll just check with the boys down at the crime lab, they've got four more detectives working on the case."

I can't imagine this happening in this country; definitely not in this city.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081222/od_afp/finlandcrimeoffbeat

I thought it was interesting, especially in relation to the movie scene from which the above subject line quote was drawn.

I think I just ate some Christmas candy, although it might have been some sort of little decorative guest soap.

Speaking of blurred borders, at what point does a muffin become a cupcake? Because yesterday building management gave everyone a nice breakfast in the lobby, and I grabbed what I thought was a muffin. After a couple of bites I decided it was probably an un-iced cupcake. How does one distinguish?

Sandhill cranes

After reading my Dad's comment on a post below, and doing a little internet research, I've decided that he is probably right--I think the birds I saw high above me at Otter Creek were sandhill cranes.

Otter Creek excursion, part the last

On the way home I stopped at the Garnettsville Cemetery, close to the park. Garnettsville was a town that existed on the area that would later become the border between Otter Creek Park and Fort Knox; it disappeared when Fort Knox was created. The cemetery is still there and open for business next to the highway, and this part of the cemetery in my photos had the weather-worn graves of some of the area’s first white residents.

I drove through, reading a few head stones, and found it both fascinating and touching. There were the graves of soldiers who died in the Civil War; babies who’d lived just a few days; farmers and mill workers who were born when Andrew Jackson was president; and married couples, men and women who’d outlived their spouses by decades before being buried next to them. Old headstones were worn and toppled, with thick old trees growing from the graves they marked. New headstones, looking shiny and modern, spread out across the other end of the yard.

- - - - - - -

I saw myself on the six o’clock news that evening, on both WHAS and WLKY. I was in the crowd. You would have had to look quickly and closely to see me.

Otter Creek excursion, Pt. 5

I drove down to the boat ramp and walked out to the spot from which I had painted three of my best paintings, all the same view. The water was clearer than I’d ever seen it, giving me a good view of submerged rocks near shore. I enjoyed the scenery for a few minutes, and then walked back to my car. The WHAS news vehicle was parked near mine, and the cameraman was taking footage of the river. I remarked to him how pretty the area was, and he asked me how to get down to the boat ramp.

Otter Creek excursion, Pt. 4

On the way back along that trail I began hearing a throaty, faint birdcall. It got louder and louder, so I stopped to try to figure out what it was. I seemed to be coming from the direction of the river, and I guessed it was a bird in one of the trees at the top of the steep bluff. I stared at the trees, trying to spot the origin. Then there were more calls: two or three birds, or more, getting louder. I couldn’t see the river from where I was, and I thought that perhaps it was ducks flying low over the water and getting closer. However, it was by this time getting quite loud, and I realized that the voices sounded like geese, although they weren’t the typical Canada geese “honks.” They were more drawn-out.

It no longer sounded like the geese were near the river; it sounded like there were passing me, but when I looked around me the woods were empty except for trees and fallen leaves. The effect was a little disorienting. After a few moments, though, I realized there was only one place I hadn’t looked—straight up.

Circling in the clear sky, so high that they weren’t much more than specks, were about 50 geese. They were wheeling and calling intermittently. Flying among them I saw something else—they looked like a smaller number of littler birds, whitish. Maybe they were gulls. It looked like a flock of gulls and a flock of geese were involved in some sort of interaction that I couldn’t make out from so far below. After a few minutes, the noise stopped and the birds drifted out of view.

Otter Creek excursion, Pt. 3

I passed a few other people hiking or jogging. Two ladies were watching with binoculars, and one of them said she thought she had seen a bald eagle that morning. In recent years there has been a nesting pair in the area.

I stopped and took a couple of photos at the overlook where I proposed to Kim in 2001. The idea that I might not again be able to return to this spot is the worst thing to me about the park closing, although this area is so wonderful that I have a hard time believing that it won’t remain public land in some form or another.

The first photo is just a shot looking from the trail to the Indiana side of the river. The next picture is of the spot I proposed to Kim, and the third is of the view from the spot I proposed. I also recall sitting on this spot as a Cub Scout and listening to Boy Scouts tell stories about river pirates and Indians.

Otter Creek excursion, Pt. 2

After a while things started to break up, so I wandered around a little. I walked the trail along the bluff over the river near the rental cabins first. The day was clear and brilliant, turning the river blue, and the Hoosier farm and hills on the other side of the Ohio were very pretty in their difficult-colors-to-mix-with-paint sunshiny earth tones.

One of the cabins had been smashed by a fallen tree during a thunderstorm a few years ago, and I saw that it has been replaced by three tiny cabins—cabins 3A, 3B, and 3C. I tried to look in the windows (there were no cars parked there, so I assumed they were empty) but the blinds and curtains were all down.

The trail between the cabins and the river overlook had been the scene of a lot of tree damage in that thunderstorm. I don’t know how much of it was from that storm (I remember the storm, but I can’t remember when it was… I think it was in 2004) and how much might have been from later storms, such as when Hurricane Ike came through in September. Lots of fallen trees had been cut with chainsaws and moved off the trail.

Otter Creek excursion, Pt. 1

On Sunday afternoon I drove to Otter Creek for a rally to Save Otter Creek Park. It was a cold day, with the temperature barely reaching the freezing point, but the sun was shining and everything was looking as pretty as it could in December without the benefit of snow.

The gathering was next to the campground, at a park pavilion. It’s a part of the park that I’m unfamiliar with, but I found it with no problem and with twenty minutes to spare before the appointed 2:00 meeting time.

There were already more than a hundred people gathered, and over the next 40 minutes it swelled to what I estimate was a group of about 200. Someone had started a small fire for warmth, and someone else had set up a giant gas heater. WLKY, WHAS, and Fox41 news crews were there. We signed some pre-generated letters to Mayor Jerry Abramson and a petition, and I listened to plenty of passionate people discuss ideas for keeping the park open. I have no ideas myself, but I thought it was important to be there.

Communication skills

I was awake extra early this morning because Jill joined us in our bed sometime…I don’t know exactly when, because I can’t read the clock with my glasses off, but I guess it was around 4:00 or 4:15. Lately she’s been doing that and going back to sleep, but this morning she fidgeted, squirmed, and whined while still half-asleep until she finally snapped out of it at around 4:50 and asked for a drink. I got up with her hoping that Kim would be able to get a little more sleep before I had to leave for work. She drank some juice and then started playing on the floor, and then we had a conversation that was similar to about 10,000 other conversations I’ve had with her and her sister.

Jill picked up a little plastic toy off the floor and asked me what it was.

“That’s just a little Lego person,” I said.

She shook her head and said, “It’s not a person, it’s a boy.”

“Boys are persons, too,” I said. “Little girls and little boys are persons.”

“No, boys are jinnelamins!” she replied.

I didn’t know what she was saying. “They’re what?”

“Boys are jinnelamins. You told me that.”

“I did, huh?” I had to be careful. Making her repeat a word that no one else understands more than a couple of times often leads to her throwing herself on the floor and wailing in frustration, and it was still just ten minutes past five; everyone else was still asleep.

I decided to triangulate, in a way, on the word she was using. “What are little girls, then?”

“Little girls are layadees.”

It worked. “Oh!” I said, “Ladies and gentlemen. I got you.”

Pretty Pretty Princesses

Here I am playing a game (The Plastic Princess Bling Bling Blowout) with the girls and their Auntie Pam at Kim's dad's.

Thanksgiving 2008

My Uncle Mark and my daughters playing with cardboard telescopes.

A great great Thanksgiving

Here's Jill, age 3, examining and being examined by her
Great-Great Uncle George, age 97. Jill's singularly Great Uncle Mark spectates.

Water from the Same Source

I found this guitar cover of a Rachel’s tune on YouTube and I really like it. Rachel’s hasn’t had an album out in a few years, but I hear them pretty frequently during NPR news program segueways.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErsxefBwG0E

Co-worker 1: You hit me on the head with a sucker!

Co-worker 2: I hit you on the head with an Eisenhower sucker.

Me: Those are Sigmund Freud suckers.

Co-worker 1: I thought they were Albert Einstein. You bruised my forehead.

Working on a convex canvas, 2004

Artwork from 2004

roundup

I've haven't had much to post on this blog lately. More accurately, it hasn't been convenient to post the few things I'd like to post. I have photos of paintings I've started, but I don't have access to my camera at the moment to upload them. So this will be a miscellaneous junk post.

 

I have art stuff I need to work on. A client sent me some house photos that I need to work with to do another walnut ink drawing for them.

 

Helga and Chris bought some paintings, and I kept one of them to frame before I give it to them. I need to do that ASAP.

 

I have watched the first three episodes of "Arrested Development" and think I understand why everyone kept telling me I should watch it. It's pretty darn funny.

 

I love it when I see a hawk circling in a cloudless sky, particularly the way its wings and head are sharp dark silhouettes against the bright blue but its belly is illuminated warmly by sunlight reflected off the ground below.

 

A week or two ago I was driving with Erin and Jill in the car with me. Erin was telling Jill that God made everything.

            "Everything in the whole world," Erin said.

            "EVERYthing?" asked Jill with an incredulous giggle.

            "The whole world and the sun and the moon," said Erin.

            "And the grass?" asked Jill, laughing. This was cracking her up.

            "Even the grass."

            "And the cars?"

            "The cars, too. But people painted them. And God is inside everyone."

            Then, at lunch about an hour later, Jill asked out of the blue, "How does a grown-up fit inside my tummy?"

 

Today Kim used a gift card she had at Panera bread, and she bought me a gingerbread bagel with hazelnut cream cheese. It was fantastic, and much better than most desserts I've had recently.

 

Hail Ants--oops, I mean, hail Democrats.

I, for one, welcome our new Islamic terrorist baby-killing gay flag-burning overlords, and I'd like to remind them how useful a bureaucratic cog like me can be in your governing apparatus.

 

Kevin and Brian: Face it, we're a reviled minority

(From http://www.pollster.com/blogs/would_you_vote_for_a_fill_in_t.php)

Although you probably already knew this.

Interesting about the Mormons. I hope we don't bump into one another too hard as they fall and we ascend.

Edited to add: OOPS! I hope no one was thinking that I was saying my brothers and I are gay. Nope. It's worse than that, even.

Picked over

I just got back from another little lunchtime detecting excursion, and I don't know whether I should feel discouraged or encouraged. Encouraged, I guess. I went again to the park near work and detected around the baseball diamonds, which is where I've usually been going recently, except today I decided to look around another diamond. I found about a dollar in change.

 

While I was hunting, I noticed another detectorist nearby. When it was time to leave, I walked over to say hi. He didn't look up from his swinging for an instant, but he did say hello and mentioned that he'd found a silver dime. There was another detectorist, obviously a friend of his, working the same field a little way away. They were both obviously retirees with more expensive machines than mine and more time to devote to the hobby than I did.

 

As I mentioned in a previous post, there was another guy in the same park yesterday. So now I get the feeling that this park is hit pretty hard; I've heard that all city parks are. Yet I was finding coins there, with little break between them, for the short time I was hunting.

 

Should I feel discouraged that the park to which I like to go is being picked over so hard, or should I feel good that it's being hit so hard and I'm still finding stuff? And also, isn't it amazing that people lose so much money?

 

Enjoying the loot

This was after last weekend's trick-or-treat excursion at the Episcopal Church Home.

 

Halloween costumes

Kim spent a huge chunk of last weekend knitting the cool caps for the costumes. We need to get better photos so you can see Jill's tail and their trick-or-treat bags.

 

Field trip to Huber's

I didn't get to go with them, but I got to see the fun pictures.

 

Coach Kim

Here is the most beautiful, amazing soccer coach ever. She led her team to victory after victory (victory = having fun while running and kicking a ball.)

 

metal detecting lunch break

I took my metal detector over to the park again today for my lunch break; I found about seventy more cents on the same hillside I've been hunting for quite a few lunch breaks now. It was very pretty out, cool and breezy but with brilliant sunshine. The soil is perfect for digging after last week's rain.

 

As I was preparing to leave the park, I noticed another guy metal detecting nearby, so I walked over to say hello. He was a very nice guy. He said he's a retiree who detects quite a bit, usually going with a friend of his, and showed me a metal toy soldier he found over on the other side of the park. He'd found a few of them in the past.

 

Louisville recycling info

As a public service and as a reminder to myself, here is a link that shows what our residents of our fair city should put in their orange recycling bins: http://www.louisvilleky.gov/SolidWaste/recycling/Recyclable+Materials.htm

So, hey, we can put our our yogurt containers! (We thought we had to take them to a another drop off site.) I was also unsure about pizza boxes, but they are fine as long as they aren't foody. That makes sense.

Battery warning

OK. So some information I've gathered from the Internet hints strongly that carrying a battery in your pocket with anything else metal (including other batteries) is a bad idea. 9 volt batteries are particularly dangerous. Don't carry batteries in your pocket with coins!

 

Just doing my part to keep America safe.

 

Hot Pockets

Yesterday as I got ready for work, I put in my right hip pocket all the coins that I had sitting with my pocket things (all my coins = about ten pennies) as well as four AA batteries that needed to put in my metal detector in case I got a chance to detect on my lunch break. That led to a curious event at about 9:30 as I walked through the office. My leg started to itch; then I felt like something was burning me. I pulled out the contents of my right hip pocket and discovered that the pennies, or at least some of them, were really hot to the touch. I suppose they must have made a circuit. Huh. I won't do that again.

 

So I did go over to the park on my lunch break, and found 98 cents.

 

Old Wyoming painting 3

This is the biggest painting I have, at 28 x 48". It's oil on panel, too, from 2000. This is a closer view of Jelm Mountain, a mountain that I liked because it struck me as a very cliched looking mountain, like the rock on the Prudential commercials. At the top was the University of Wyoming's Infrared Observatory. The pinpoint metallic glint of the observatory's dome could be seen 35 miles away in Laramie on a clear sunny day.

 

I like this the best of these three paintings. It's just a much stronger painting overall. There are a few things about it I'm not entirely happy with, but there are some things I really really like. The one single thing, however, that I think really holds this together and gives me the greatest joy is the line of fence posts across the middle.

 

Older Wyoming paintings 1 and 2

I'm just throwing up some old stuff because I don't have anything new right now.The first painting is from 1999, I think, and is 24 x 24", oil on panel. It's a view of Jelm Mountain from just outside Laramie.

 

The second painting is from 2000 and is a little bigger, 30 x 40", oil on panel. It's a view looking southwest from Red Mountain, which is near the Jelm Mountain of the previous painting. If you think it looks sort of desolate in the painting, well, it sure was. The mountains far off in the distance are Wyoming's Sierra Madre range.

 

Family photo

There are few pictures of the four of us together, since one of us is usually taking the photo. But this time I put the camera on a fence rail.

 

Saturday hike

Kim said that Saturday was National Make Tracks Day, so we got out and made tracks. We spent an hour or so over at E. P. Sawyer.

 

In a box

 

My psychology is rich

Sunday night I dreamed that strange robotic devices were frequently being seen in the sky, descending to earth. They were small, and had all kinds of shapes, usually like big crane flies, fish, or birds. No one knew what they were, but it was thought that they were alien probes.

 

I was sitting outside with my dad when we saw one shaped like a tropical fish, about a foot long. It swam up to me through the air. After it seemed to scan me with its mechanical eyes for a moment, two wire-like feelers extended and touched my head. It was unnerving, but I decided to sit through it to try to learn more about what it was.

 

After the wires touched my head, I had a strange buzzing sensation in my skull; it was messing with my brain. It occurred to me that perhaps while it was doing this, I could communicate with it.

 

"Who or what are you?" I thought.

 

"I am called Zardor the Digressor," came the reply inside my head.

 

I wanted to ask more, but the probe was done and it swam off. Before it broke off contact, I got the impression that it was being controlled remotely by some alien intelligence (he who had spoken to me), and that he had a bushy red beard.

 

News of my contact with this alien was reported internationally. It was sort of a big deal.

 

Halloween Parade October 10

Tomorrow is the Halloween parade on Baxter Avenue! 6:30. I will not be in it again this year, but I'm sure it will be enjoyable anyway.

 

 

http://www.baxterparade.com/

 

Twisty mutant and the Carrot of Willendorf

Fallen giant, beheaded

I like the first photo the best. Having the shovel farther away exaggerates the size of the sunflower. It really was pretty big, though. Hurricane Ike toppled it. Standing next to it gave me the feeling I get when I see photos of those colossal squid that get tangled up in fishing nets over inky ocean trenches.

Drawing stage 4, completed

Here's the finished black walnut ink drawing. There's actually a tiny bit of white acrylic paint and black Pigma Micron marker in it, which I used to clarify some details, but I don't think that's cheating, do you?
The drawing is 6 x 9 on bristol board paper.

Here's something funny: my favorite part of the whole drawing is the small spot in the background vegetation above where the driveway ends, behind the dark tree trunk. I like the sense of light and ambiguity, and the way the smaller tree trunks disappear in and out of the leaves.

Drawing stages 1-3

Here are larval states of a black walnut ink drawing. A couple in the Highlands asked me to draw their house; this first photo is of thumbnail sketches as I tried to get a good handle on the composition. I don't know if I mentioned it here before, but it was sort of difficult because the house was actually very obscured by trees. The people wanted the house drawn from an angle from which, in real life--at least, when it's not the dead of winter with the trees denuded of foliage--the house cannot be seen. So I took lots of photos from other angles, and used these photos to plot the proportions of the house and windows, which is what you see in the graphite sketch at the bottom right of the first pic. The I drew a bigger version to try to get a little better visual understanding. This does show too much driveway and not enough window, I was told by the couple, and I agree.
Here's a penciled-in beginning to the actual drawing.

Garden:

 

We dug up some of our sweet potatoes on Tuesday to eat for dinner. I was disappointed  that they were all small, and many of them thin and rooty instead of fat and tubery. The thin ones were sort of tough, with a more fibrous texture, but were still edible and still tasted good. The fatter ones, though small, were tender and tasted good, too. I'll have to research why they weren't in good shape, but I strongly suspect that I just didn't water them enough.

 

There are still some sweet potatoes to dig up, and some of them might be better.

 

I also fixed some fried green tomatoes, which were delicious, but my daughters were hesitant to try them and were displeased when they did.

 

Art:

 

I am almost done with another house drawing commission. I'll put up photos as soon as I can. I'm pretty happy with how it's shaping up. I also have four of five more commissions lined up.

 

Beard:

 

I am soooo close to shaving it off. I keep hanging onto it just to see, you know, how it's going to look tomorrow. Plus, it takes such an act of will and concentration to grow it out, it's hard to abandon two months of diligent work. Every time I kiss Kim, though, I'm very self conscious about it.

 

Coins:

 

A co-worker gave me a small baggie of world coins he found while cleaning. I haven't really gone through it yet, but I did notice a coin from Lichtenstein, which is a new one for me.

 

Metal Detecting:

 

That children's home is pretty frustrating. I'm still interested in doing some more detecting there, and there is still a huge amount of space that I have yet to cover. However, I haven't found much to date.

 

A mirror trick, and other fun stuff.

Here is a fun video. I'm still trying to figure it out.

 

http://www.quirkology.com/USA/Video_MirrorTrick.shtml

 

There's some really cool stuff on this site.