Favorite childhood book
April 28, 2010
For my first several years, we lived right across the street from the library (pictured below). At first, of course, my mom would check the books out for me. But then came the magical day when I was old enough to have my own library card. Boy, did I put it to use. In the summer, if I wasn???t at the swimming pool, I was reading. You could only check out six books at a time, for two weeks. I never needed the full two weeks, especially when I was was burning through the Nancy Drew books. And when I had finished with Nancy Drew, I took up with the Hardy Boys. I don???t really remember anything about any of the plots, only that I read them all.
(Just today there was an article about the 80th anniversary of Nancy Drew.)
I always liked to read, and right through high school, I continued to read quite a bit. In junior high, I made it through most of Robert A. Heinlein???s books. In high school, I tried to get into Kurt Vonnegut to impress a boy I liked, but I just couldn???t (on either count).??
When I was very young, I remember summer vacations at my grandparents??? and reading every book from my mom???s bookcase. A lot of those World War II era stories, I didn???t get. But I remember loving The Little Engine that Could. Back at our own house, I remember being vaguely scared of Where the Wild Things Are.
What is your favorite book from childhood?
photo of library by Google Street View
book photos from here
March 17, 2010
What did you want to be when you grew up?
April 27, 2010
I wanted to be a writer. Who didn???t? Who doesn???t? From childhood, I had visions of writing novels for a living. That, or raising horses. The two interests dovetailed one time only. The only novel I have ever finished was a short one about intrigue on a Thoroughbred farm, completed when I was about thirteen. When I discovered the author Dick Francis around the same time and my mother hesitantly let me buy one of his books, I thought I was in heaven. Unfortunately, my writing career did not parallel his.
As late as my seventh year in college, I still sort of thought that the writing thing might come together.??
I had an eight-year effort in getting my bachelor???s degree. My parents both zipped through in four years and were horrified when I dropped out two and a half weeks into my first semester, and not much longer into my second semester. Then I tried it out at a couple of technical/vocational colleges in the area before returning to the university for a couple of more or less successful years, if you were judging by the fact that I actually completed semesters.
I got the bee in my bonnet that I wanted to live in Minneapolis and so decided that the easiest way to accomplish that would be to transfer schools and move into the dorm. Nothing to it. But it soon became apparent that I???d have to graduated eventually and thus would have to choose a major.
What all did I pass by on the way? Communications, music, computer programming, journalism, graphic design, and a few that I???m forgetting. I eventually settled on English as my major, just English. I never had any desire to teach but I needed to pick something. I was good at reading. I???d worry about the rest of it later.
I did graduate but found that without the journalism or communications angle, there were no writing jobs. So I went back to school and ended up getting a commercial art degree from yet another technical college, and thus began my graphic design career.
I guess I lucked out, because at my current position we do most of our work for book publishers, and one of those publishers put us in charge of everything about a new imprint they created. That meant we were responsible not only for the graphic design and production of those books, but also for finding the authors. It happened that I and a couple of other people were interested in writing, and thus began my writing career.
I am not writing novels. I am writing supplemental materials for beginning readers, as in, five??? to eight-year-olds. I have to my credit such scintillating titles as It???s K, The Jelly Bean Machine, and It???s a Baby Gazelle! It gets fun when I both write and design a series (the books are always in series of at least six).
I backed into being a writer and I guess I shouldn???t knock it; I have technically achieved my desire to be an author. How many people can say that they???re immortalized in the U.S. Library of Congress? I can!
I have the hots for Anthony Bourdain
April 21, 2010
Maybe that???s overstating it a bit. But he does give the impression that he???d be a blast to hang out with. And I have dreamed about him. So I bought the opportunity to see him in person on Friday.
I don???t have any idea what his ???show??? might consist of. Is he hawking a new book? Does he tell stories about the making of ???No Reservations???? Is he going to editorialize for an hour? Does he have a stand-up routine? Dunno.??
Tickets were mostly sold out by the time I got around to making my purchase. See, I originally didn???t make an effort because for a number of weeks I was under the impression that he was appearing on the same evening as Craig Ferguson, whom I also adore and who, when push came to shove, was the one I chose. But as I was leaving the box office, I just happened to pause at the Anthony Bourdain poster to sigh at it and be sad that I had had to make a choice. Then it jumped out at me. The date on the poster was not the same as the Craig Ferguson ticket I was holding in my hot little hand. I could go! I turned around and marched right back to the nice young fellow at the box office window who probably already thought I was a loser for buying the first single ticket.
There were two choices on the seats???about halfway back on the main floor of the auditorium, or on the end of a couple of short rows in the orchestra pit. I went for it. I will be up close and personal (though slightly off to the side). I will sit there, attentive and steeled for the possibility that he might pick on people in front.??
Seeing this ad today in the Downtown Journal got me all excited again. Bring it on, Tony!
Favorite TV character from childhood
April 18, 2010
I suppose there can be little discussion about this. It was the Bear from the Andy Williams Show.
I???m not saying I didn???t watch other shows. I can remember quite a few that I always tuned into, either on my own or as part of regular family viewing. But I didn???t have the same emotional connection as I had with the Bear. To be truthful, I don???t remember many details.??
There was Andy Williams himself, and I was just old enough to be grooving on his greatest hits record album that my mom had (???It???s my happy heart you hear, Singing loud and singing clear ??????). And there was the Bear. The Bear who was eternally optimistic despite Andy always slamming door in his face.
I loved the Bear. The Bear was a little bit goofy, but more importantly, he was always denied the cookie he so desperately desired. As I???ve thought about it in the last few days, I wonder if deep down I wasn???t, as an only child, secretly identifying with the Bear. I didn???t want for any things, but I wasn???t spoiled either. But I didn???t get my Lite Brite until I was 35.
How much did I love the Bear?
In my early childness, my dad was a university music professor (101, theory, composition), so my mom, dad, and I often attended recitals of one kind or another. The recitals were held in Lehr Auditorium and there were always refreshments served afterwards. After one recital, I remember working my parents hard to be allowed to take home an extra chocolate chip cookie because I was determined to mail it to the Bear. Now, I don???t know if the cookie ever actually was deposited into a USPS mailbox. What I do know is that I dutifully sealed it in an addressed envelope and my parents patronizingly assured me that it had been mailed. Forty years later, I think I can be pretty certain that my parents were just humoring me when they nodded and said yes, they had indeed sent the cookie off to the Bear.
Aren???t parents wonderful?
Favorite typeface: Hobo
April 14, 2010
All day long I knew I was forgetting something, but I couldn???t quite put my finger on it. About ten minutes ago, it hit me like a thunderbolt. Hobo.??
I had dutifully reported my current favorite serif and sans serif typefaces (Archer and Gotham, respectively). They are clean and modern and make any design look good.??
BORRRR-ING.
You all recognize Hobo. You know you do. You see it everywhere and it takes you right back to the groovy 1960s and?????70s. At least that???s what you think. Hobo was actually designed in 1910 by Morris Fuller Benton. I didn???t knock myself out, but after a few minutes of internet searching I failed to find much more about its history than the following:
The Hobo font is a dynamically tapering face in which all strokes are accentuated curves, achieving a superb decorative effect. Hobo almost suggests a freely drawn alphabet with its unusual robust roundness. The Hobo font was designed to be used at large sizes. It has no descenders: the lower case g, p, q and y are incorporated into the x-height. The Hobo font imparts a friendly personality to display work such as invitations, menus, signage and packaging. (reference)
And about its designer:
Morris Fuller Benton (November 30, 1872 ??? June 30, 1948) was an influential American typeface designer who headed the design department of the American Type Founders (ATF), for which he was the chief type designer from 1900 to 1937. Benton designed more than fifty typefaces, ranging from revivals of historical models like ATF Bodoni, to adding new weights to existing faces such as Goudy Old Style and Cheltenham, and to designing original designs such as Hobo, Bank Gothic, and Broadway. (reference)
Hobo don???t get no respect. In my office we joke all the time about using Hobo in our designs. And then when we???re acting out on our exasperation with client revisions, we declare that we will refine our design by outlining/inlining/adding a drop shadow to Hobo. We don???t mean it in a nice way.
I got to thinking about why we treat Hobo so disparagingly. I???m always aware of when I see it out in the wild. One of the conclusions that I drew about why I pay attention to it is that beyond its surface hokiness, it is a darned readable typeface. From a distance, you know that it???s Denny???s Doughnuts (Rockford, Illinois), or Love From Minnesota (IDS Building, Minneapolis, Minnesota), or the Copa (barely readable) Cabana (Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin), or that you should have Happy Feet (Mall of America, Bloomington, Minnesota), or that Ginny Smiths [sic] the best stand for cappuccino/coffee/milk/ice cream (Minnesota State Fair, St Paul, Minnesota). When you???re at Emo???s Dairy Mart (Peoria Heights, Illinois), reading the menu isn???t the hard part. The hard part is making a decision.
No, I think how you feel about Hobo is quite similar to how you feel about Lawrence Welk???you???re embarrassed to admit you like it because it???s so forty years ago, but there???s no denying it???s a classic with mass appeal.
Side note: The whole time I was typing this, I was totally seeing this Helvetica or Arial (or whatever my default font in TextEdit is) as Hobo. Hobo text. There is no such thing. I am hallucinating.
Click to visit my Flickr set of even more Hobo photos, which I have been inspired to take to participate in the Hobo 2010 project which commemorates Hobo???s centennial.
Something small
April 12, 2010
As you may remember from the turn of the year, I had the purchase of a new computer in my sights, either an Apple iMac or Mac Mini. I decided on the Mini because it is, well, small.
This is my new setup: the Mini and two external hard drives. The Mini???s drive is 320MB, the externals are 1.5TB each. The external drive labeled CJ (after my black cat) is my Time Machine drive. I hate the user experience of tracking down what you want to recover with Time Machine, but you sure can???t beat the authorize-it-and-forget-it ease of its backing stuff up. My previous backup method consisted of periodically copying things (such as my Photos folder) onto one of the extra drives I had installed in my old computer, which was better than nothing but not so good for the things that had been added in the intervening months.
The other external drive, Dasie (my black and white cat) will be my jukebox. I chose to name the music drive after Dasie because she???s more of a crazy party animal than CJ, who is the steady, consistent personality and more suitable for the important backup function. It is waiting for me to hook up one of the internal drives (Bibi, former rabbit) from the old computer and transfer the files.
To that end, I have an external case to house an internal drive. But today it was busy with the main hard drive from the old computer, (which was named after my rabbit). I could have booted the old computer in Target Disk mode, but I was thwarted by both old Firewire 400 (I did get a Firewire 400/800 dongle. Don???t you just love the word ???dongle???? I do.) and laziness about plugging in the computer and keyboard. Yes, folks, I would rather open up the box, remove the drive, and attach it to a new case than plug in the computer at the outlet (by which I mean grounded power strip).
It seems as though I???ve copied over everything I could need from the old drive. Eventually I???ll reinstall that drive and redo the old computer, and either try to sell it for beer money or donate it.??
So I plugged in the Mini (also named after my rabbit) and was all set to do Target Disk with the old computer and migrate my settings and user stuff and be up and running in no time. That was when I learned of the Firewire snafu. Instead of one-hour gratification, I had overnight gratification. I had to connect the two computers via Ethernet (!) and left the process chugging away overnight. In hindsight, it was probably better that way because then I didn???t stay up all night setting up and playing.
That???s the great thing about Macs. The transition was anticlimactic. There were no hitches. The migration worked perfectly and when I did things like check email and go online, I really wouldn???t have known anything was different because it just worked. The biggest adjustment has been to how quiet the Mini is. I don???t even know it???s there. The external drives are pretty quiet, too. The old computer was kind of like a jet airplane under my desk, which I didn???t realize until the sound was no longer there. Even this afternoon when I had the internal drive plugged in and was using it, it was very noisy. But the new computer mounted the drive and didn???t need to have any drivers installed or any other special considerations. Same with the CJ and Dasie external drives.
Get a Mac. They just work.
This entry is inspired by my photo of something small, my Mac Mini, but when I got to the sentence above, I realized that quite a bit of what I wrote could double as explanation for the March 20 mission (which I never wrote about), which was to share a word that???s not in your personal dictionary. The word I chose is the proper noun Windows, as in the operating system. Thankfully thus far in my computer computer career I???ve not had the OS inflicted upon me, and only use the word in the context of being a Mac fanatic and feeling superior.
Refrigerator magnet face
April 11, 2010
I was very excited about doing this because the weekend before I had stumbled upon some nifty rabbit magnets at Borders and planned to use them as the eyes of the face. Then time got in the way.
For the first part of the day I was bumming because I hadn???t looked ahead at the assignment so that I could do it the evening before, and as usual I didn???t get up early enough to leave myself any extra time in the morning to accomplish it. I resigned myself to waiting until I got home after work and perhaps even until after bowling to make my face.
Then as I was digging my lunch out of the office refrigerator I comprehended that not only were those magnets suitable for face-making, they were suitable for awesome face-making. And not only awesome face-making but entire clown-making.
It was a no-brainer to use the small magnets as the eyes and smile. Then I realized that the wood-spoon butterflies would be perfect as hair. Then the felt flowers let me know that they would be just right as buttons. I added the magnetic bottle opener as the bow tie flourish.
As often happens when I am setting up my photos at the office when, you know, I should be working, someone catches me in the act and then I feel self-conscious and dumb. Sometimes I explain. Sometimes I don???t. This time I could have, but I chose not to because I don???t particularly like the person to whom I would have been speaking.
After I got some positive online comments about my magnet face submission, I decided it would be the perfect spring avatar. This evening I adapted it to the one you see on this account. I would have been perfectly happy leaving it as the magnet face, but as I enjoy seeing the face of the person whose material I???m checking out, I modified it once more to provide the same courtesy to you.
Not very interesting but there it is.
March 31
??
??
Favorite dessert
April 11, 2010
You should answer this not taking calories into consideration, though it is true that last night instead of making brownies, I ate two grapefruit for dessert. This wasn’t because of any hippy skippy 5-A-Day thing. No, it was much simpler than that. I was out of white flour and wasn’t confident enough that brownies made with whole wheat flour wouldn’t taste, well, you know, like chocolate cardboard.
I wouldn’t say I’m a huge fan of dessert. Unlike my dad, I don’t feel like I need a little sweet something to finish off a meal. If something comes my way, I might eat it, but I don’t feel incomplete without it by any stretch of the imagination.
Once again, I am influenced by my mom on what my gut instinct answer is to the question of my favorite dessert—pecan pie. I prefer it without a dollop of ice cream, though I might like it just warm enough to take the chill off. And if I were being completely truthful, I would also say that really, to me the pecan nuts are at least 50% incidental to my enjoyment of this delight. I like the sugary sweet custard, plain and simple.
I like regular yellow egg custard, too. My Grandma H often made it when we’d go visit in the summer. She had brown ceramic custard cups. Not ramekins, just cauldron-shaped dishes. I suppose they could have been considered ramekins, but they weren’t the white ones you mostly see today.
I also like cheesecake—just plain cheesecake with no “fruit” toppings. My favorite non-plain cheesecake was the Butterfinger cheesecake at Pizza Lucé in the Warehouse District in about 2003, I’ll say. I never saw it other than that one day. Pizza Lucé’s pizza is amazing; the Butterfinger cheesecake was out of this world.
Ice cream is sometimes good. By ice cream I mean plain chocolate in a sugar cone, or a chocolate malt extra malt, such as the kind I get at Potbelly Sandwich Works.
By now you may be wondering why I picture brownies. The answer is simple. They are the easiest to make at home with the ingredients I have on hand anyway. Okay, I suppose technically it’s easier to scoop ice cream out of a cardboard carton, but you can’t just whip up a batch of ice cream with ingredients that are just lying around. Brownies you can.
And I like making them myself because then I know what’s in them. So this is the recipe I use. I don’t bother with the cream cheese filling because that would require forethought. I just make the brownie part, and I have adapted it as it is typed in. The original recipe is pictured below.
Today I ate my grapefruit in conjunction with my brunch (this is the best time of year for delicious grapefruit in the Northern Hemisphere and they’re my favorite fruit, so I’m eating them frequently right now). In honor of the question of my favorite dessert I went ahead and made the brownies using whole wheat flour, pictured above. I’m pleased to report that they don’t taste at all like cardboard.
______________
(my adapted version)
I made a woodcut (follow-up)
April 8, 2010
If you have been following this blog for three or more months, maybe you remember that Christmas weekend I went on about having done a woodcut. At the time, I didn’t want to reveal the picture, because the person for whom it was intended had yet to see it. That moment of suspense passed, and I can now reveal what was originally redacted.
It is this, readers, another version of My Rabbit, and here is a picture of it. It’s the third unframed original woodcut taped to my front room wall. One of these days I should take care of that.
March 14
My theme song
April 8, 2010
Of course I have very many songs that I love. But a theme song? I never thought about it. I mean, it’s not like I’m a baseball player going up to bat.
So I thought about it. And I decided on “Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen from their album “Jazz.” This is for two reasons.
First, I have loved Queen since about 1975. As much as I love Del Amitri, which is a whole lot, Queen is my desert island answer. I can’t explain it. Justin Currie is one of the most best songwriters ever and is a brilliant, brilliant lyricist, but Queen overwhelms Del Amitri in musicianship and innovation. Del Amitri is the most awesome bar band ever. Queen is just awesome.
Second, “Don’t Stop Me Now” comes closest to embodying my personal joie de vivre. Do those of you who know me think otherwise? There are lots of other songs that shiver me timbers more, but for general mood and loose interpretation of the lyrics, this one does just fine.
Don’t Stop Me Now
Kelly’s Unnecessary Blog 