I’ve meant to write about these earlier, but I don’t want to overwhelm with a bunch of posts all at once.
Luminary Procession
This was the second year that there was a night-time procession the night before the Procession of the Species parade (it’s a big deal around here). It was drizzling, but not too bad, so C & I rode our bikes downtown to see what was happening. It was beautiful, with lots of lovely eerie hand-made lit creatures and abstract objects.
Until…the most lovely item I saw the whole evening was an enormous translucent white tree (a TREE sized tree) with a raccoon appearing to emerge from one of the branches. After lots of music & dancing and such, they brought the tree into the center of the crowd. We had run into a couple of friends, and one of them joked that they were going to set it on fire. (Earlier a group of fire-dancers (?) had performed: very cool!)
And then they did.
They set a representation of a tree — with an animal in it — on fire.
Then people started cheering, and I freaked out. Quietly — 15 or 20 years ago I’d have been screaming — but definitely freaking out. I had to turn away, and C held me while I cried a bit.
And that ruined the whole damn thing, in my mind. Really: WTF? Burning a tree with a raccoon in it? If setting something on fire was the point, how about something that ought to have been on fire, like a phoenix? Or something abstract? In any case, it just hit me in precisely the wrong spot, and we biked home together fulminating about how much people suck. (Although the bike trail at night in a light spring rain with just our headlights was beautiful.)
Waiting on a Train
I read the book back in January, and really enjoyed it — C did too; it’s unusual that we read the same non-fiction book and both like it. So I was pretty excited to hear that the author (James McCommons) was coming to speak at Orca Books. (C saw the flier and called me immediately; unfortunately, he couldn’t go.)
It was a tiny group: maybe a half-dozen? Which was disappointing. And further disappointing was his presentation style: reading bullet points in front of half a dozen people, looking away from the audience and at his slides. 🙁
On the other hand, the slides with graphics were cool, especially maps. Whenever he got into a story connected to a factoid, then he came alive, started looking at us, and got engaged. The Q&A was pretty decent, with one guy asking several good questions. Plus the guy sitting in front of me, an older fellow with a snazzy beard and a cane, was IN the book. He’s the head of a rail passenger advocacy group, and was incredibly enthusiastic and knowledgeable. (His wife was delightful as well.) We chatted a bit after; I got to hear about McCommons’ possible next book topic, too. I bought the book, signed, for Mom…I hope she likes it!
Redesign, con’t.
I’m almost done with the latest redesign. This time I feel like I’ve gotten something visually coherent that I enjoy looking at. 🙂 The archive pages are a bit of a mess, and I want to redo the question mark graphic for the formspring posts, but otherwise, I’m happy with it.
The basic shape came from sketching on paper, thinking about what I want the design to do: focus on longer writing, mostly, but still include the other bits. Visually, I was inspired by some new bed sheets that are blue and white with an abstract pattern. Then I saw a bokeh tutorial for GIMP and made a few version in blues. I got one I liked (still need to make a longer version), then browsed around in kuler until I found a color scheme that clicked. Then I browsed around for a little bird graphic and a little pushpin icon. For the HTML, I started with the Starkers theme to keep it as simple as possible; most of the theme work was to include or exclude bits of content based on category. Then, lots of futzing with CSS later, and here we are.
I am still tempted to try completely redoing the structure in HTML5 – header, footer, article, etc. We’ll see. I’m sure it’ll be good practice, at least.