Today in pictures.

this is the test print. it worked.
we will have a chapbook.

Today began with struggle: to get up, to get motivated for the day, to fit in all the things that needed to happen in class. When you meet just one day a way, and you're in the thick of a project, sometimes your so-called "lesson plan" is as grass, in the Biblical sense, i.e., it is toast.

But then, sometimes good things come of the lesson plan
that came to naught. For instance, the layout works and the students talking to the printer make the transition from layout to document that will print the way it's supposed to. Which means that we have a go on our thick project, i.e., we have a chapbook.

"I triumphed over Adobe."

This is the person who made the layout work. She is a student and she has a bright future ahead of her.

The bright sun signifies that things
got a little hazy. You can see that, right?

Now, after that triumph, things get hazy. I know I ate a sandwich, and I know I went to a meeting, and then another meeting. I also know that I went to Tulie and had a cookie with an old friend, and then I drove downtown to have dinner with the historian. And then: a movie.

We saw Salmon Fishing on the Yemen. It was basically Big Miracle, but on the Yemen. With salmon instead of whales. Frankly, I loved it. Don't judge. Ewan MacGregor = good.

who knows what manner of false blossom? 

Also, it is spring. Which makes all of the above feel a little more blissful.

Lately,

I have been using my awesome new phone and its awesome new camera apps to take pictures. (I've missed some salient occasions, too, such as when D came over to visit on Thursday evening and offered me a bit of his cookie. Alas. Soon I will remember the awesome camera/apps at every occasion, and make myself obnoxious thereby. Yay!)

Rem Koolhaas's Seattle House.

Today, after buying a pile of books at Elliot Bay Books, we spent a couple of hours in the Central Library of the Seattle Public Library. It was pretty amazing. I think the Salt Lake City Library is a more beautiful building, but this Koolhaas-designed space is more interesting. (I took tons of pictures--here's my flickr set, if you're interested.)

What mesmerized me--I could have watched it for an hour--was a functional digital installation by George Legrady, "Making Visible the Invisible." There are six plasma screens behind the research librarians' desk on the 5th floor. At different times, the screens display streams of information that are constantly changing: the titles of books being checked out; a "Dot Matrix Rain," which is the Dewey Decimal categories of the books in a digital fall; key word map attack, which is the key words associated with the titles, blooming forward and fading out; and the vital statistics for the day so far. (We talked to a research librarian, who said that so far on most days, books win out over other media--it's close, but books usually win. That's one for you bibliophiles.) Here's a little video to give you an idea.