#203

Hello, all.
Here’s the art…


Jo and I are finally working on a project that we’ve been talking about for some time. I guess it just kept getting put on the backburner until now. We’re producing a how-to video showing step by step how to sew and hand-paint some Santa Christmas ornaments. If it works out, I’m sure we’ll work on others demonstrating the cheater quilts or paper clay sculpture. Jo is a natural at teaching, and I know my way around video editing, so this should be an interesting collaboration for us.
I wanted to share a photo with you taken from our trip to see colleges last week, but after reviewing them just now, I’ve decided against it. It seems that the collection is about 80% pictures of brick buildings, 10% pictures of common scenes like airline ticketing lines, and 10% pictures of me in restaurants looking very tired as I wait for my food and endure a camera in my face. Our daughter has taken a lot of pictures of me eating over the years. Future generations will no doubt be puzzled by her photo album.

-Dylan

#202

I’m back!
Did you miss me?
Here’s what Jo worked on while I was gone…


My daughter, Kaity, and I just returned late last night from our trip to visit several colleges she’s considering. Our first stop was Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Upon landing in Minnesota, we rented a Chevy HHR, which I nicknamed "the blind spot." I’ve been in submarines with better visibility.
The first thing you see driving into Northfield, assuming that you can see, is the giant Malt-O-Meal factory, conveniently located in the middle of town. As we walked around the college campus, you could smell the factory everywhere you went, which turned out to be a selling point for Kaity. It smelled like a freshly opened box of cereal. Delicious!
I felt a little like an intruder on campus, not being young enough to pass for your average student, and not being distinguished looking enough to pass for a professor. When Kaity wasn’t with me, I worried that I looked like "The Carleton Strangler", cruising the hiking trails on the edge of campus, looking for my next victim.
The town of Northfield is pretty small if you take away the two colleges it’s home to. Their claim to fame is thwarting a bank robbery by Jesse James’ gang, killing two of his gang members in the process. I read all about it in the hotel room’s "attractions" binder, containing two lonely pages.
Next, we flew over to Connecticut and drove our new rented car up to Amherst, Massachusetts. There are five schools in the area: Smith, Mount Holyoke, Hampshire, Amherst, and the University of Massachusetts. If you attend any of these schools, you’re able to take classes at any of the other four, so we tried to see them all, wearing holes in our shoes in the process. I have a cousin that goes to Hampshire College who was nice enough to tour us around there and give us the inside scoop. She also turned us onto a big thrift store that they have in town. Kaity loves finding the strangest antique clothes at thrift stores to confuse bystanders with. She bought a plaid jacket that both of us agreed looked really good… and we noticed that it was getting some looks on campus, reaffirming our belief that it was a quite the find. Later that night, standing in front of the bathroom mirror in her "new" jacket, Kaity realized how much it looked like a bathrobe. And it really did. I laughed so hard that neither of us had seen the resemblance before. I guess we have some blind spots of our own.

-Dylan

#201

Hello, runners.
Here’s the art…


Our son just ran in the 30th annual Prefontaine Memorial Race down in Coos Bay. He said he felt like he was finishing last until he looked back and saw hundreds of people behind him. He came home, fell onto the couch, and took a postfontaine nap that ended up lasting until morning. So I guess technically it wasn’t a nap. He did get a cool shirt for running in the race. Here’s a picture of it…


Apparently they used Christopher Walken as a stand in for the shirt’s graphic. Every time I see it I think “more cowbell.”
I mentioned last week that I’ll be heading out of town soon with my daughter to check out some colleges. That trip is next week, so you might not hear from me until I get back. I don’t have a laptop to take with me, so I may end up scribbling next week’s newsletter on an air sickness bag. Or I may find a computer in a library somewhere and write from there. I’m really not one to take pictures and document events, but I have this idea for a video that shows our trip from start to finish. I want to edit together a string of one second video clips from each location of my daughter giving the double thumbs up and her best Fonzie “Aaay!” I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get her onboard with the idea, but it’s certainly dumb enough for me.

-Dylan

#200!!!

It’s my 200th newsletter!
I’m celebrating today by mowing the lawn and by paying my quarterly state taxes!
You can celebrate by following the link below to our art…and you can come help me rake the lawn if you want to.


Time is passing quickly. When I started these newsletters, our daughter was just a middle schooler. Now I find myself booking flights to go check out colleges with her. In less than two weeks, we’ll be in Minnesota looking at Carleton College, then it’s on to Massachusetts to visit Hampshire College. I’m hoping they have scholarships for children of hobos, because I plan on packing for the trip in my normal transient fashion…hard boiled eggs in a sock and plenty of cans of tuna fish. I grew up in the suburbs, so where I got these habits, I don’t know.
So Jo will soon be pulling the cart without the horse, since she won’t be coming on this trip. I wish she were coming with us though. She’s better at meetings and such. I’m better at driving, navigating, and carrying heavy luggage… but I usually let her do the talking. We’re a team… kind of like Master Blaster from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. If I could carry her on my shoulders everywhere to speak for me, I would.

-Dylan

“Master Blaster runs Bartertown.”

#199

Hiya.
Here’s what we made for you…


I never take pictures other than the ones of our art. I don’t even have batteries in my camera, just an AC adapter to plug it into the wall, which my daughter finds hilarious. It may as well be a steam powered camera in her eyes. So one of the nice things about our friend, Matt, living here in town now is that he takes pictures everywhere he goes like a tourist. Here’s one he took of me and my son on a hike up above the Salmon River.


It looks like we’re near a cliff’s edge, but it’s a gentle slope down in front of us. There are, however, plenty of places to fall to your death, if that’s your sort of thing. One of the things that I love about the Oregon coast is that all of the dangerous spots haven’t been gated off the way they have in the Orlando area where I grew up. I like it when it’s left up to me just how reckless I want to be.
Lately I’ve been pressing my luck as an invisible cyclist at night. I guess I didn’t realized that my bike’s headlight had grown quite dim, and was really of little use on these dark streets near the beach. I surprised some deer and a family of raccoons as I let loose down a hill in the pitch black at speeds that made my eyes dry up. But don’t worry on my account. I promise to be more careful…someday.

-Dylan