I’ve been playing around with Interstitial Journaling the last couple of days. It is a very promising productivity technique. Will write more about it in the future if the practice keeps up.
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The pens chatted all night as they lay on the notebook watching the ceiling fan trace lazy loops in the sky.
Jellyfish, València, Spain, Daniel Codina, 26 April 2017 -
Laser Printer
My daughter was playing hospital with all their stuffed animals lined up on the bed.
She wrote up a check-in form and asked me to make a few copies, assuming we’d do it by hand.
I told her I was going to do it on the computer. So she sat next to me as I fired up the machine and laid it out in Bluebeam. Bluebeam isn’t really a desktop publishing platform, but it works well enough.
After we were happy with the layout, we printed out a draft copy.
That’s when her mind was blown.
She just entered the age of mechanical reproduction.
After a couple drafts and we were happy with the layout, we took a break to watch the first half hour of The Penguins of Madagascar and eat dinner.
After dinner, she wanted to get back to her hospital check-in forms. At the bottom of the form was a clipart illustration of kids standing on a rainbow. She wanted to color each of the forms.
So the kids and I spent the rest of the evening coloring these forms. We finished the forms but not the movie. That’s fine. It will be here tomorrow.
It’s a little strange. She’s seen me use the printer countless times for all kinds of uses for home and work. I guess it just never registered as a tool for her life until it became her own project (she’s seen me use it many times for her schoolwork). It was amusing to listen to her marvel about the magic of the printer. I can’t remember when my dad bought a dot-matrix printer. I wonder if it blew my mind.
Parenting gives you a sparkles of magic amidst a background of drudgery. This site let’s me record those moments.
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Red and yellow monsters shadowed the boat.
The boy has a favorite park that we discovered on Sunday. One of the perks of working from home is joining him on a visit this morning. But of course now I need to work late.
Life is a series of tradeoffs, but this is a nice one.
Fishermen from Momoyogusa–Flowers of a Hundred Generations (ca. 1909–1910) by Kamisaka Sekka. -
Her elbows peeked out beyond the covers.
I spent an hour walking around Spring Mountain (Vegas’s Suburban Chinatown) while waiting for my car’s oil to be changed. It was a bit like Rip van Winkle, but since it was early, there was no one to confront.
Visciola Cherries (Cerasus visciola) from Pomona Italiana (1817 – 1839) by Giorgio Gallesio (1772-1839). -
A slightly tarnished mirror told him a different story.
Dead bird (1919) by Julie de Graag (1877-1924). Original from The Rijksmuseum, via rawpixel. We went to the park yesterday. On the concrete bench was the twig like leg of a bird. I didn’t look for the rest of the body.
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Upanishads, Vyasa (Vernon Katz, Thomas Egenes, trans.) 2015
Last year, I listened to the library’s copy of the Upanishads during a 3-hour 10K hike in the hills behind our house.
It may have been appropriate to experience this work as an audiobook because these were originally oral texts, but it was a slog. Unlike the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads are fourteen separate documents and it was difficult to keep attention without the structure of a story.
Given their canonical status, it’s my fault for not properly appreciating this experience. Then again, maybe the translator shares some of the blame (I found the introduction to the book incredibly dry).
Or possibly, these teachings should be sampled one line at a time, slowly pondered in a deliberate fashion.
The audiobook format is great for lighter works that wash past the consciousness, often at 1.5x speed. Self-help books flitter into the consciousness to create an illusion of learning that will be forgotten in a month.
The Upanishads are definitely not fluffy self-help fodder. These texts were orally transmitted from father to son. Something that required this much effort must have embodied deep value to survive the attrition of millennia.
It was too much to digest in an endless stream, even at 1.0x speed.
In all, I don’t regret the listen. But this was the barest of introductions. If I want to get anything substantive out of the Upanishads, I’ll have to sit down and read it slowly.
But if the past year of inaction is any indication, I doubt will ever happen.
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Iron and Bronze clashed as Jade reigned supreme.
I stayed obsessed with the Max game board, so here is another version, with 1.5″ squares, which is a better fit for our pieces from Animal upon Animal.
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Red and pink foot mittens were scattered in the corridor.
I made a game board for Max to play with my Animal Upon Animal pieces. Originally it was hand drawn, then on legal paper in AutoCAD, and finally now in lettersized format. This is version 9. Lots of little tweaks here and there, but I’m happy with it.
I’ve never been a great graphic designer, but a some time and many iterations makes me passable.
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The grim giant hopped over the fluffy pink goat.
Big Fish Eat Little Fish, a 1557 engraving by Pieter van der Heyden (from Pieter Bruegel’s 1556 drawing) Serpens ni edat serpentem, draco non fiet
(A serpent, unless it devours a serpent, will not become a dragon)
Adagia, Erasmus
