Well, I wasn't supposed to be here...

Earlier this year, the Saturn's wipers started acting funny. So in June, I took it in and it got a brand new wiper motor. A couple of weeks later, when I had to use the wipers coming back from The Dalles, it was still acting funny. So I took it in again on Monday. They still saw nothing wrong with it, but replaced the then still new motor with yet another new motor.

On Tuesday evening, I started down I-5 heading towards Bend. As you Portlanders might recall, it was raining that evening. I got maybe 2 or 3 miles down the road when the wipers went kaput all together. Now, that was NOT funny. It was dusk, not the best visibility, and I had no wipers in the rain.

So on Wednesday morning, the tow truck arrived and the Saturn went into the shop again. Wednesday afternoon, the shop called and said they don't find anything wrong with the car except the 2nd new motor is most definitely dead, so they're going to give me ANOTHER new motor. Except now I've run them out of motors and they'll have to have one shipped to them.

Well, now, that is not a very satisfactory answer! And I told them so. What are the chances that I'd have 3 bum motors in a row? Me think the car is killing the motors. But apparently, they find nothing wrong with the car.

This is now Thursday night, and I've not heard from them again. Did the 3rd new motor not show up? Did it show up and then died immediately upon meeting the car? What?

So rather than spending 3 days away visiting family in Bend and Hines, I found myself here and trying to get my brain to focus on work that I hadn't planned on doing for a few days.

Write Around Portland

First thing first, this is my very next deadline, the broadside for Write Around Portland. (This is the mockup.) After talking to Carla, the organizer, I found out that although some component(s) of the broadside needs to be printed on the letterpress, it need not be the text part. This makes a huge difference in terms of how I can do the text. So I'm doing all the text wrapped around the tree trunk, and I'm doing the background (the gray on the right, the hawk shadow, and the orange on the left) as pressure prints on the letterpress.



Here is the texture that will go under the paper to create the pressure print. The hawk shadow is cut out in fun foam with the edges feathered and layered (haha, but you know, like haircuts). The rest of the texture is matte medium applied to mylar in varying thicknesses, which will hopefully create varying density of the background color. Not having pressure printed before, Diane will be helping me with this tomorrow. The mylar is sitting on a sheet of newsprint, so where there is no matte medium, you see the yellow newsprint underneath, and that part will not print. Where it's white is where there's matte medium, and that will print, we hope.



On the Relay Replay book

I was able to meet one of my senior's children this week when he came out to visit his dad. We had a very good couple of hours at the coffee shop. He told me about their lives together a bit, and I told him about the concepts that I've been working with. He seemed happy with the directions that I've been exploring, and promises to get me some water from the St. Claire River to include in the book!

And OK, I can't help it, I'm really liking the darker window frame with the orange highlight. Here's a shot from the day time.