today aaron, antonio and i took a trip to the loop to find antonio’s golden goose: an all-cereal restaurant called ‘cereality.’ this is a new place located around my old stomping grounds – the civic opera/mercantile exchange area of town. turned out that the restaurant wasn’t open yet – far from it, in fact – and we ended up eating at blackie’s and paying $14.00 for parking.

being in the nw loop stirred up a lot of memories for me though. eating lunch by the river behind the boeing building…soup from specialty’s…rushing to the opera after work…catching the train for ravinia…chinese from eat & drink…movie lunches. mostly lunch memories actually, now that i think about it.

tonight eric made more of his awesome chili and i watched the second episode of ‘beauty and the geek,’ the single greatest reality show ever. are these real people?? they’re like caricatures of geeks and airheads.

today it was so hot it felt like i was walking on the surface of the sun. buying a car (with a/c) is looking really attractive.

the thing about chicago is that one day it’s still 50° and windy then the next day it’s 90° and so humid you can’t tell if the sheen on your body is sweat or condensation.

i got up early this morning and went for a run and i was fine (creating my own breeze and all) until i stopped outside my door. the sun broke through the clouds and it felt like a spotlight was on me. within 2 minutes i was soaked in sweat.

i can tell you’re all so excited about this entry already.

anyway, this afternoon eric, pat, jess, lindsay and i went to the belmont sheffield music festival and saw mike & joe play for a crowd of sweaty, wasted yuppies. ok, they weren’t all yuppies. some of them were flaming gay and also eric smelled some hippies (patchouli!). lots of dogs, too – it was so hot i thought this bulldog was going to literally trip over its tongue.

the band was great and so was the street food (bbq chicken skewers). eric predicted that they would play at least one u2 song and he was right. actually i think they managed to play every single one of the ipod/itunes commercial songs. after they finished we went to sheffield’s and watched pat and lindsay play some pool. pat, jess and lindsay stuck around to eat some of the world’s largest polish sausages (pat’s assertion), eric went to mayfest in lincoln square with jon, cecile et al and i came back home so i could drift in and out of heat-induced unconsciousness while watching the simpsons and family guy.

yesterday maria and nicole came into town! they picked me up at work and then we went back to my place so they could settle in and shower. eric drove and we met up with lindsay, pat, jon and brian at the daily in lincoln square. we ate and had some blue moon…and many rounds of shots. after dinner we walked to the rail on damen and drank some more (more shots), played bar video games and took some great pictures of maria being obscene with the game/video machine.

we continued our bar crawl in wrigleyville. brian, pat and i got there first and as we were passing the cubby bear pat started freaking out because a nirvana cover band was playing there. he grabbed us both and INSISTED that we go inside. he even paid for our cover and bought us a round. the lead singer of the band really had the kurt cobain thing going on – he had longish stringy blond hair and a fuzzy shapeless cardigan and everything. everyone else showed up and after awhile we went down the block to a bar that had a little dance floor set up. same drill as before – more beer, more shots – but this time with dancing. these three guys were there – all roommates i guess – and one of them was a really good dancer. brian kept yelling ‘you got served!’ and ‘serve it up!’ over and over.

we closed that bar and then headed over to western to tais til 4. tais was really crowded, even when we left at about 3:30. pat drove maria, nicole and i home and i was in bed by 4am.

today i got the day off work, so we slept in until 11. mark drove over to pick us up and we went to a korean restaurant…called…’korean restaurant’…for lunch. the bulgogie and cucumber kim chee were sooo good. while we were eating adam called and we passed the phone around – his wife is having a baby in december!

after lunch mark took some pictures of us outside the restaurant and while he was lining up his shot some random guy came by and took a picture of us with his camera phone. sketchy much?

maria and nicole left about an hour and a half ago and i miss them already. lindsay and i are trying to plan a trip to st. louis sometime this summer and pat said he’d like to come too. i don’t see these guys nearly enough.

this weekend should be pretty low-key…pat invited me to a concert sunday afternoon but i think i’ll probably spend most of the time recharging. i haven’t seen a movie for awhile so maybe i can catch ‘cinderella man’ and see if it lives up to the reviews.

photos from wisconsin, last night, my mom’s retirement party and the office party are pending.

view workshop photos.

this weekend i attended the STA‘s woodtype workshop at the hamilton wood type and printing museum. dawn gave me the workshop (plus car rental) as a gift and i can honestly say that it was the best gift i have ever received. i had a lot of reservations about going – driving up there on my own, meeting new people, being creative on demand – but it was one of the best experiences i’ve ever had.

i left for two rivers, wisconsin on friday morning. traffic was light and i made excellent time; the drive only took 3 hours and i was the first one to get to the museum. hamilton is much larger than it appears in the photographs on its website. i actually drove past it twice before i realized that giant factory/warehouse was it. i walked in and dennis (the teacher), michael (newly-matriculated workshop assistant), david (newly-mfa’ed) and norbert (pantographer) were the only ones there. i introduced myself but was so early that i went to the hotel to check in and change. when i got back to the museum most of the other participants had arrived. everyone was incredibly friendly and easy to talk to. dennis and michael had prepared some posters for the workshop and set up one of the presses so we could print the word ‘welcome’ on the posters. we each got to have a go…it’s mind-blowing to think about how awkward we all were that first time compared to how natural the movement became by the end of the workshop. we went over the basic format of the weekend and norbert gave a pantograph demonstration.

the rest of the weekend we got up early for a group breakfast then printed all day. we looked at examples of each others’ work and dennis brought a lot of his prints for us to view. we had lunch at a local sandwich shop and the hospital cafeteria, ate dinner at a 100 year old german place and had chinese buffet twice. the fellowship was fun but the printing and the museum itself were incredible. the atmosphere was so inviting. two rivers is a great little city – everything feels like it moves nice and slow. everything felt simpler and clearer while i was there.

the museum is huge – a lot of the type isn’t even on display. there is just so much that there hasn’t been enough time to sort and categorize it all. i didn’t print on sunday morning – instead i devoted that time to looking around and deciding how to complete my edition. i was in need of inspiration, so michael took me to the back room (which was as big as the main museum floor) to show me the type that wasn’t on display.

the first half of the back room holds a lot of different kinds of presses, the folding machine and the perforating machine. past these is another storeroom holding rows and rows of cabinets of type. some are wood and similar to the type in the main room. a lot of the cabinets hold job cases of metal type in various sizes.

while we were back there, david and greg, the museum’s director, stumbled across us and showed us how some of the presses and the perforating machine work. michael had to go back to help with the printing but i talked to greg and david for quite awhile. david helped me find the metal type i used for my edition and explained how job cases are laid out (if there is a logical pattern to this it escaped me). he also showed me some of his letterpress work, including his thesis (awesome).

by the time i got on a press to do my last layer everyone else was done and ready to leave for dinner. greg was nice enough to stay with me and help me finish my edition so it would dry by morning. after some press problems and a lot of rearranging furniture, we managed to do the actual printing of the edition in about 7 minutes. then we drove back to the hotel so i could change out of my work clothes, picked up david and hurried to the restaurant to meet everyone else. that night andy (last year’s program director for STA and the other printing assistant for the workshop), david and i stayed up until midnight talking about all kinds of stuff, including guessing each other’s ages. i proved once again that i am the world’s worst estimator while andy guessed david and my ages on the first try.

today after the critique almost everyone left. it was strange to be in the press room and not hear motors whirring and presses thunking. i lost count of how many times i washed my hands over the weekend with that orange soap but it had to be at least 10 times each day. i stuck around because i wanted to eat before my long drive. dennis, michael, david, greg, andy and i went back to the chinese buffet for lunch. dennis did his dollar bill origami trick (met by much sniggering from andy, david and michael – i guess they’ve seen this many times) and i made some more cat stairs.

i can’t wait to go back to two rivers. greg has invited me back whenever i can make it up and david has a couple of workshops in the next few months that i might attend. i look forward to seeing everyone again and hope to keep in touch via email. i made some new friends, learned a lot of new things and most importantly got to break my usual work-eat-sleep routine and do something for the right side of my brain. look for a new design for hyperbolation in the coming months if i can weasel david into the proposed design-for-code trade and a lot of new photographs once i have time to get them processed. maybe michael will got a job in chicago and maybe i’ll see kayanna and nancy in atlanta – best wishes to everyone who attended and a huge thank you to dawn for this incredible experience!

edition details: on saturday michael and i picked out punctuation marks in a variety of typefaces. i wanted them to be scattered randomly across the paper so setting the type and furniture was rather time-consuming; we spent 30-40 minutes working on the layout. i printed this layer in a bright lime green. to make this color i experimented with a few different combinations but finally michael ended up mixing pure green ink with transparency medium and a little day-glo yellow to make the green pop. the next day, after the ink had dried and several aborted attempts to get the color i wanted (very light and very transparent), i ran my prints through a press without ink to emboss the paper. i used two pieces of type (large sans-serif s and large serif d) from the job cases in the back that, judging by the thickness of the dust on them and the time it took to clean them, probably hadn’t been printed in decades. i also used a perfect circle zero from david’s own collection. finally, i set 12 pt. metal type (tons of tiny metal furniture…wish i had had tweezers) in 5 different typefaces and completed my edition with a fairly opaque dark blue.

new people have moved in upstairs i think. lots of banging around and slamming doors and really loud footsteps and stuff – things i was spared of during my first year in this apartment.

from what was i also spared last year?

being woken up at 1am by the rhythmic thumping of overhead copulation.

great.

about a week ago i finished the baroque cycle. after about…oh…5 months. neal stephenson is known for writing long books, but the baroque cycle is one huge epic story spanning eight books in three volumes. about 3000 pages total. for 5 months i hauled one of those books to and from work, reading bits and pieces during my commute and before going to bed. i read all three volumes in a row, one after another so i wouldn’t forget anything. except i forgot that the whole thing is 3000 pages, so inevitably i had to flip back and forth a lot. plus neal stephenson is the best at dropping these bombs that completely change how you consider the past 300 pages you read (more flipping back, re-reading, etc).

anyway, the baroque cycle was great. i’ve discovered that i really like historical fiction. it also had a shockingly almost-satisfying ending. i’ve read almost all of his other books and each one was an amazing beginning and middle with a last 10 pages that felt half-assed and completely frustratingly devoid of closure. if any of you have a few months to spare, or maybe you want to take it slower and immerse yourself for a year or so, the baroque cycle would be an excellent choice. as i neared the end of the system of the world (the last volume) i was sad to see it all come to an end – this little universe that had been living in my imagination for the past 5 months – but also excited to finally be able to read something else.

something more light-hearted, maybe.

something lighter.

something i could fit in my messenger bag without ripping out the stitching that holds the strap to the bag.

thus, in the past week i’ve taken a leisurely jaunt through the akhenaten adventure, a kids’ book i bought last year (first in a series called children of the lamp). it was great and satisfying and so blissfully short. after my next few books i’ll be able to tackle the blind watchmaker or that brian greene, or maybe the 1000 page or so philippa gregory.

home for the weekend, $$ in my pocket, jeans mended, new summer shoes! got to pet coco, watched empire strikes back with my cousins, had a maid-rite!

life is good.

happy birthday mom!