Radiant Comics

I was thinking about music this week. I was specifically thinking about listening to music through headphones. I’ve always liked listening to music that way but it’s been years since I’ve listened much through headphones. That’s because I don’t commute on a bus anymore. I rode that bus on and off for a lot of years and because of that I had plenty of time for music.

I was also a bit of a headphone snob. Not that I was a real audiophile but even in the days of portable tape players I would never use the headphones that came with the player. I always bought some nice headphones to listen on. Not great headphones but they usually cost as much as the player itself. Around fifty to eighty dollars if my memory is correct. That was a lot to lay out for a pair of headphones when I was in my late teens to early twenties (late 80s to early 90s) but it was always a much better listening experience that those awful stock headphones that came with every player. Now earbuds come with everything and I can’t stand them either.

These days, when I listen through headphones, they are a pair of Bose over the ear noise reducing ones. They sound nice and are comfortable so I have no complaints about them. I prefer over the ear headphones but I also have a pair of Audio-Technica in-the-ear noise canceling headphones. I almost never use them except when I’m taking the bus into Manhattan and for some reason want to travel really light. But generally the extra weight and bulk of the over-the-ear ones are worth it. The sound is better and it really does significantly reduce the noise of the bus engine.

I’ve always thought that listening through headphones was the best way to get to know music. Especially new music. Most of the time that I listen to music is as I’m doing other things. It’s the sound track that’s happening as I’m drawing, painting, driving, or puttering around in general. With headphones it’s only me and the music. I can hear all of the words and all of the notes. It’s a more personal experience too. The singer is singing right into your ear. But without that commute I hardly ever listen through headphones anymore. And I don’t hear as much new music anymore. Who has the time to just sit and get to know new music? Only the young.

I have revived my headphone listening a little bit lately. As the weather has been gotten nicer I’ve been going out for walks. I like to get out of the house and into the sunshine. Why not it’s Spring? On some of those walks I’ve been listening to music through my headphones. I do have to pay attention to my surroundings and keep up a good walking pace so it’s not exactly like the, “Trapped on a bus with nothing to do and nowhere to go” listening experience of my old commute but it is fun to listen trough headphones again.

All of my music is digital these days. I listen to it through my Harman Kardon computer speakers mostly but I also have a first generation iPod touch for going portable. I’ve written before about making music playlists and for the last couple of years that is how I’ve mostly listened to music. Well, maybe full albums half of the time and my mix playlists the other half but when I go portable it’s all been playlists.

One odd thing is that I’ve had to change up my playlist listening habits as of late. Y’see I’ve made each playlist about an hour and twenty minutes long. That’s about how much music would fit on an old fashioned music CD. It seemed a comfortable length for a playlist and it generally is. They can’t go on forever after all. I’ve made about forty playlists over the years. They take a while to put together so I only make them when I have the time and the mood strikes me.

The odd problem I was having was that most of the time that I was listening to the playlists was when I was driving. And I don’t usually drive for very long. I’m usually not driving anywhere more than half an hour away. Even there and back wouldn’t use up an entire playlist. So I ended up listening to the first half of my playlists. I never heard the end songs. That cut my available music in half. And after a while I got tired of the beginnings of my playlists. So I began starting them in the middle. It was like having a whole new set of playlists to listen to.

All of this has gotten me thinking about getting some new music. I still buy new music but probably not more than a handful of albums a year. I have tons and tons of music I’ve gotten over the years so there is not a reason to seek out new stuff. And the new stuff I get is often the latest releases from old favorites. I’m finding that a lot of my old favorites are getting stale. Or maybe it’s me. Who knows?

Maybe it’s been that I’m feeling a little nostalgic these days but I want to enjoy some new music while listening through headphones like I used to. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable goal but it means that I’ll actually have to seek out some new music. At least some new four minute a song new pop/rock/alt/singer songwriter music.

Now that I think about it I actually have been finding new music over the last couple of years. But it’s all come from one place. 93.9 WNYC at 11:PM has a show called “New Sounds”. It plays all sorts of music I’ve never heard from genres I never knew existed. I actually started listening to the show way back in the early 80s but I hadn’t heard it in years until I started listening again a couple of years ago.

I’ve gotten into “Holy Minimalism”, ambient music, and Philip Glass from that show. I’ve even purchased a few albums after hearing songs or excerpts of the music on “New Sounds”. Except most of the music I find through that show is instrumental. That’s not the kind of music I like headphones for. Headphones are better for for lyrical music. Instrumental stuff is better in the atmosphere.

I have a strange relationship with instrumental music. As much as I love listening to music I have no inborn talent for making it. I don’t even know what musical notes mean. I have no idea what makes an A different from a C. Explain it to me and five minutes latter I’ll have forgotten it. For whatever reason my brain doesn’t grasp that information like it does other information.

As a result I forget instrumental music very easily. If a song has lyrics then I remember it as a matter of course. If a song has no lyrics then each time I hear it is almost like I’m hearing it for the first time. It’s weird. So those instrumental/ambient albums and the like that I’ve gotten over the last few years stay fresh for me. Even if I hear it twenty times it’s not like hearing singer/songwriter stuff that sticks with me because of the words.

Now I think I want some new music with lyrics that I can listen to through headphones as I walk. I have a couple of things on my iTunes wish list but not many. This could take some doing. It may be too hot out for walks by the time I have it all figured out. Oh well, such is life.

I made some cards this week. I don’t mean greeting cards or business cards. I mean baseball style cards but not about baseball. I’ve always had a fascination with cards. Not so much baseball cards but the general idea of trading cards. I like playing cards too. I like regular fifty two card decks plus I like collectable card games like Magic: The Gathering. M:TG is the the one that started it all but most people are probably more familiar with the Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon cards that kids get these days. You buy packs of them, put a deck together, and your deck fights your friend’s deck. Fun stuff.

I like games in general and back in my younger days when I hung around with more gamers we used to buy and play a few different card games. I don’t have a chance to play those games anymore and therefor don’t buy any new cards but occasionally I like to make my own cards. I even made my own set of fortune telling cards a few years ago. I made them not only conceptually but I printed them out and made a physical deck of them. That was quite a project.

Besides the conceptual and artistic work the fortune telling cards were a pain to make because that was before I bought a heat laminator. Instead I was using press-on lamination paper that was prone to not going down correctly or getting air bubbles in it. The paper wasn’t impossible to use but I had to pay attention and sometimes things went wrong even if I did. My success rate with it was probably over 90% but that means I had to redo almost one in every ten cards. That’s a pain in a forty eight card set. Or in an any card set for that matter.

The heat laminator is much easier to use. Turn it on and while it is heating up you place your piece of paper in between two sheet of laminate paper. The sheets are connected at one end so you can’t mess it up. Then feed the paper through the laminator and it heat seals it in a few seconds. No muss, no fuss, no concentrating on getting it right. I should have bought one of those years ago. But I was new to making trading cards then.

The cards I made this week are my “Moment in Time” cards. I developed these some years ago when I was looking for something to do with my street photography. These cards don’t serve any purpose except to sit on my desk an a little easel and make me ponder them. I take one of my street photos of a stranger or strangers on the street and make a baseball type card out of it. On the front is the picture and on the back is the time, date, and place I took the photo plus a couple of sentences giving my speculation about the person. The cards give me something to contemplate when I’m at the drawing table.

I had to streamline my process for making the “Moment in Time” cards this time around. I used to do the image work in Photoshop and the text and layout work in InDesign. That’s how most people would normally do something similar but I found that having to make a separate Photoshop file for each card I wanted to bring into InDesign was too much of a pain. I stopped wanting to make any because of all the drudge work involved. This time around I did the layout and text all in Photoshop and just had to hit print. It was much easier.

I print the cards on double sided matte paper. The printer lines up the backs and the fronts of the cards well. I just have to print the front, flip the paper over, put it into the printer again, and print the back of the card. It’s hardly ever off register. I think I liked my old Epson printer better though. I can’t seem to get the color the way I want it on the Canon I bought last year. I had my last Epson for six years or so, knew it well, and could get good color out of it. The photos I just printed with the Canon came out a little too yellowish for me. Maybe I have to use it more and learn what it can do but that’s a pain.

After I print the cards, front and back, I laminate them. That’s easy enough with the heat laminator but I still have to keep the dust off of them. That’s the main thing to look out for. Specks of dust or whatever landing on the paper. I quickly brush the card sheet with a non-static photo brush just to make sure they’re clean and then it’s off to the laminator.

Cutting them out is the most laborious task. This is where you can go wrong if you’re not careful. These “Moment in Time” cards are the tall size of trading cards. Baseball cards are 2.5×3.5 inches but the tall size card is 2.5×4.5 inches. I prefer the taller size for these cards so I am able to only get four of them onto an letter sized piece of paper. After they’re laminated I cut all four cards out by hand with an X-Acto knife and a metal straight edge. It takes concentration to cut them right along the seams so I have to be patient and careful.

The last thing I do with these cards is round the corners. That makes them look better. Square corners are amateurish somehow. I think because all decks of playing cards have rounded corners. I bought a corner punch to do this with. It’s a little plastic thing that you stick a corner of the card into, press down, and it cuts the corner off leaving it rounded. I press on the corner punch while holding a small piece of wood in the palm of my hand. This gives me more leverage and stops the plastic piece on top of the punch from cutting into my hand because with just ten cards and four corners each that’s a lot of corners to punch.

I’ve made other cards and printed them out, like the cards I made to promote this site, but I’ve also made cards that never got printed out into actual physical objects. Making a physical card is often the hardest part of the task for me. Or maybe it’s the least creative part and that’s why it’s hard for me. So sometimes I come up with ideas for card sets and make them up in Photoshop. Since there is no real reason for them to exist I don’t bother making actual cards. It’s just something I like to do. This week I made some real ones though. And it’s always a little more fun to see an actual physical card but I’ll probably continue to make mostly virtual ones.

I want a cookie. That’s my battle cry for tonight. I don’t have a cookie and I’m not going into battle to get one but having a battle cry just sounds like a cool thing to have. And I like cookies. Why not? They’re good. Cookies are the one dessert I like over all others. Besides straight up chocolate that is but chocolate is it’s own thing. It’s used in desserts but I don’t consider it a dessert category. Maybe “Chocolates” is a dessert category because calling it by the plural means that you’ve done something fancy with chocolate and made it into something. But the singular is just a food substance.

When I say cookies are my favorite dessert that means I like them better than cake, ice cream, candies, or whatever other sugar filled sweet thing you will offer me. I don’t eat many desserts so cookies are usually the only ones I have. I mostly have fruit as a snack. I always have bananas, apples, and pears around the house. I try to eat right. I know full well that if I have ice cream and cake around the house I’ll eat them. So I don’t buy them. I don’t miss them either because I have no cravings for ice cream or cake. Cookies I have cravings for so that’s what I’ll buy if I want a dessert.

I usually don’t keep cookies in the house. Sometimes I do but not always. I used to always keep cookies in the house but then I ate too many of them. My waistline did not appreciate that as I grew older. And I was never really a big eater so I don’t need them around. I’ll go and get some cookies now and again.

I do keep chocolate around the house all the time. I normally get a bag of Ghiradelli 60% cocoa chips and a bag of Ghiradelli milk chocolate chips. Not only is this the cheapest way to get chocolate, the equivalent amount in a bar is two or three times the price, but it allows me to have small amounts of chocolate. Chocolate isn’t something I think of as a snack but something I want a taste of. If I were to buy a big chocolate bar I would eat the whole thing even if I really wanted a few chips worth of chocolate. My chocolate portion is four chips. That’s all I need to get a taste. If I want more than that I’ll have more, and I often do, but it’s never as much as, say, a whole Snickers bar.

I actually eat less calories when I have chocolate. I’ve found that if I don’t have chocolate around and I want a taste of chocolate I’ll end up eating a lot more calories worth of random stuff because I wasn’t satisfied. It’s weird but chocolate helps me watch what I eat.

So most of the cookies that I really like have chocolate in then. Sure, I enjoy sugar cookies, snicker-doodles, short bread cookies, and the like but I don’t ever buy those ones. I’ll have them if I’m out somewhere and I am offered them but I’ll always go for the cookies with chocolate in them first.

Linden’s chocolate chip cookies are cookies that I like and get every now and then. They are the ones that people around these parts are familiar with from the high school cafeteria. They come three to a pack, are dry and crumbly, and taste real good. I sometimes walk to the local 7-11, which is the only store around here that has them, and buy a couple of packs. If I open a pack I know I’m going to eat all three cookies so I only open one pack a day at most. Gotta maintain cookie discipline.

The other type of cookie I get these days is the store baked kind. Both of our local supermarkets sell them and they come twenty four to a box. I get the chocolate chip cookies or the chocolate cookies. They’re fresh baked and go stale in a few days and this was causing me a problem. Not really a problem but I was eating too many of them in too short a time. I don’t like to have more than two or three cookies a day and that’s not everyday. I found myself eating them when I wasn’t even hungry and I felt like I was in a race against time to eat them all before they went stale. That’s no way to enjoy a cookie or to eat in general.

My solution to this strange little problem was to put the store baked cookies into the freezer. Now when I buy a box of them I stick it into the freezer and take out a couple of cookies to eat during that particular day. I’m no longer in a race with the cookies going stale. That’s good because I have no interest in racing cookies because winning is losing.

I used to get a lot of store bought cookies. The various Keebler and Chips Ahoy varieties but never the regular chocolate chips. The regular Chips Ahoy and such cookies are not very good but the dark chocolate and peanut butter cup varieties are. Those were my cookies of choice years ago because there were lots of flavors and they didn’t go stale in two days. I’ll still get them on rare occasions but, for the most part, I’ve lost my taste for them.

I can remember getting Pepperidge Farm cookies back in college. They were always a favorite and available in the school store. There weren’t a lot of things in that store so they were often my snack of choice. Milanos and Mint Milanos mostly. It wasn’t until I was out of college that Pepperidge Farm came up with my now favorite variety of theirs: Nantucket Cookies. They have big chunks of dark chocolate in them. I can’t remember the last time I had a Pepperidge Farm cookie but they were often my go-to cookie throughout the 1990s. They have always been on the expensive side so I never got them too often but they were always good.

One final cookie that I’ve had lately for the first time in a while is the Chinese cookie. I have no idea why it is called that but it’s a big cookie, about the size of a small plate, that is marbleized light and dark batter with a big dollop of chocolate in the middle. These are really good but must contain about a half a day’s worth of calories. They’re a once in a while cookie. A long while.

It’s been a long winter because I’m all out of things to do. Or maybe I haven’t done enough things? That must be what I mean. It’s tough to get out and do things in winter because there is all that cold going on outside. Not to mention a lot of snow this particular winter. Sure I got outside and rode my bike but I’ve written plenty about that and I have nothing new to say right now about bike riding.

I’ve also written about all the new art supplies I’ve bought over this winter. I’ve chronicled the story of magic markers catching my attention and me buying some new markers little by little until I had a couple of big sets of them. Yeah, markers are fun. I told you all about my quest to develop a finished marker technique. I think I fulfilled that quest. But there was no pot of gold at the end of it. Just the satisfaction of making some nice drawings. A pot of gold sure would be nice for a change.

I think those are the only two things I’ve been doing all winter. Cycling and working. I’d tell you all about the graphics work I do for a living but it’s dull. I make products look pretty for people and that’s about all there is too it. Well, there is more to it than that but it’s all shop talk.

I am ready for a nice day so I can head down to Bryant Park in Manhattan. That’s a good “Get out of the house” excursion that I always enjoy. I haven’t finished more than a handful of the street photos that I took last year in NYC. By finished I mean turn them into something other than an untouched digital file. I expected to make more finished works from them after it got too cold out to take pictures outside but somehow I never did. I was probably too into the markers to mess with the photos. I made a couple of photos early on and a couple late but that was it. I’ll have to dig into them some other time.

I did start a Tumblr image blog this winter. That’s a new social networking/image site. A person can post his or her favorite pictures and share them with friends and strangers and easily re-blog other pictures that catch their eye. I’m not sure what the point of the whole thing is for me but I’m having a little fun with it. It did and does take some time to format things to be viewed. I just can’t stick things up willy-nilly. I don’t think many people I don’t know see my stuff up there because it’s hard to compete with all the people posting naked pictures. Naked continues to be popular.

I was cooking a lot in the crock pot all winter. I got tired of wondering what I was going to have for diner so I’d cook up enough to last me four or five days worth of diner. I don’t mind eating the same thing many nights in a row as long as it’s good. I made chili. One with chicken and one with beef. I also made a ground turkey casserole type thing. That and stew. Once again one with chicken and one with beef. I mention the meats but most of these dishes were 90% vegetables. I’d take two big onions, two pounds of potatoes, three Cuban peppers (cheaper that green peppers), a couple of heads of broccoli, garlic, oregano, basil, and throw it in the crock pot with the meat. Let it cook all day and it is done by diner.

I only had one computer disaster this winter. My whole system got taken down. I got it in my head to look at how to learn to program for the iPad so I got Apple’s Xcode 4 program and tried to install it. It crashed my system in the middle of the install and I had no choice but to force quit. It didn’t and I had to do a hard restart. Upon restart it booted up from my secondary hard drive. The system on my primary hard drive was totally gone. It was a goo thing that I had started using the backup program Time Machine a few weeks before. It took about fourteen hours to restore my hard drive but it did the job. Then, being a glutton for punishment I tried to install Xcode 4 a second time. The same thing happened. I guess I’m not learning Xcode 4.

I did manage to stave off having to buy a new drafting chair right away. I managed to “Fix” my broken one. I use the word “Fix” loosely. It’s been a horrible and crappy chair that has been breaking piece by piece since I bought it but it was the plastic ring that holds the pneumatic tube inside the metal cylinder that was the latest thing to break. Without that ring the chair would tip from side to side when it was at its full height. And I almost always sit at it at its full height it wasn’t safe. That is until I shoved some wooden shims between the two tubes. Now it doesn’t spin but it doesn’t teeter from side to side either. I can sit on it while I search for a new one. I don’t want to buy one sight unseen via the internet again so that will get me out of the house.

Do you know what is a good indication that I don’t get outside much in the winter anymore? I no longer have a good pair of boots. I haven’t had one in years. I have a crappy pair of boots that I wear outside in the winter but who want to be outside for long in a crappy pair of boots? I used to have at least one good pair of boots at any give time. Now it’s just shoes. I’m guessing the transition came when, in my late thirties, I finally owned a car. Before then I walked more places so a good pair of winter boots was a necessity in the winter. No I’m a car person like all the rest. You don’t need warm shoes and a warm coat if you have a warm car.

That and I’ve found it harder and harder to find a good pair of books that fit me. I have short and wide feet and boots have gotten narrower over my lifetime. Before I gave up the search I used to go to six to ten shoe store to try on boots in order to get a pair that fit. It was annoying and no fun. That probably coincided with my getting a car and I stopped ever shopping for boots. I’ve been buying the same brand of shoes for fifteen years now and that’s all I wear. They’re excellent shoes but not for going out in the winter for any period of time.

I’m guessing I’m like everyone else anyway. As kids we all used to love to go out and play in the snow. We barely even noticed it was cold. Then, in our youths, we go outside because who wants to sit around the house? There are places to go and people to see. But as we get older there seems to be less reason to leave the comforts of home during a hostile winter. Except for a bike ride of course.

It’s a beautiful day for a bike ride. Sixty three degrees Fahrenheit and sunny. I wore long sweatpants, a t-shirt, a jersey, and a windbreaker. That may have been one layer too many but I was comfortable. It’s only the middle of March and I know to beware the weather in the ides of March so I wasn’t going out in only a t-shirt just yet. Things can get cold quickly in late winter.

I had a weird experience with things getting cold quickly already this winter. It was one of the only warm days back in February. I think it was in the mid fifties and sunny. Since I had been riding a lot this winter when the temperature was in the mid twenties the mid fifties was like summertime. Except it was a little windy.

The odd thing was that even though it wasn’t a cold wind sometimes it became that. There were still a couple to three feet of snow on the ground so sometimes I was riding right next to a lot of snow. When the wind came across the snow it would chill the air. If the wind came from the road it was warm again. That was a strange ride.

Today’s ride was pretty well wind free. Except for the wind of riding itself. The roads were rough though. I was back on my summer route out on the main streets rather than the neighborhood ones and there were some substantial pot holes. Some had been fixed with “Cold Patch” and that can cause problems on its own. Cold patch is the stuff they throw into potholes cold. It is a temporary fix and has a lot of loose gravel and asphalt chunks that come with it. All that loose stone can make for some rough riding. I’m extra careful when I see cold patch.

It must have been a nice day out there today because they had the road crews out using some “Hot Patch”. At least I think that’s what it’s called I know that cold patch is called cold patch but I’ve never seen hot patch referenced. Either way there were guys with a big truck and hot tar and asphalt sealing up cracks in the road. I only mention this because I got to one part of my ride and started running over some freshly patched cracks. I was hoping it wouldn’t gum up my bike and it didn’t. But it was unnerving. In a small way.

This week I got my first flat tire in a month and a half or so. I walked out to ride on Wednesday and my back tire was flat. It’s always the back tire. That’s where a person’s weight sits. I fixed it of course. What’s weird was that I couldn’t bring myself to use one of my new tubes. I bought two new tubes after my last flat but I still had an old one with many patches on it. I put the old one in. It still holds air and was fine but I don’t know why I didn’t use a new one. I still wanted to have two new tubes and not one new tube. The quirks of the human mind are odd. Either way the tire works.

I think I know when I got the flat but it was a slow leak so I’m not sure. On the Tuesday I was out riding and on one of the final turns towards home I my back tire felt funny. When a bike’s tire pressure is low and you go around a sharp turn at high speed the tire can buckle and turn. It then pops back into place as the bike straightens. I thought I felt that happen a little but I looked down at the tire and it looked to be holding its air. I wrote of the buckling feeling as a slip on the thick paint of road lines. That happens sometimes and can feel similar. The next day as I saw the flat I figured the tire really did buckle. It must have gotten punctured just before that.

It’s interesting riding this late in the winter because I can see more than when the trees have their leaves in the summer. Most of the time my eyes are on the road but occasionally my line of sight goes left or right towards the many houses. But with the leaves gone I can see many more houses. I saw a whole neighborhood that I hadn’t noticed before. Its road ran parallel to the one I was on and it was a half mile away. I could never see if the trees had their leaves. The everyday things we don’t know are there.

When I’m out on my bike is the only time I can tell that the streams are running high around here. They’re only small streams but with all the rain and snow melt in early March they became raging rivers. It’s a thing to hear the water, that I barely notice all year, roaring by like the force of nature it is.

My favorite part of my ride is near a little stream and a reservoir. As a matter of fact it’s called Reservoir Road. What’s neat about it is that its a good sized downhill that immediately becomes a good sized uphill. Going up a hill can be tedious but in this case I have so much momentum that I zoom up most of the hill. I think it’s the fastest I’ve ever gone uphill. There is also a nice curve in the middle. That’s fun but I have to be careful. It’s easy to get out of control on that bend.

One part of that Reservoir Road run that rarely happens right is the approach. I come down a big hill, cross a busy road, and then I’m at Reservoir Road. Except to cross the busy street I need the traffic light with me. It rarely is. The light is only green for about ten seconds. It’s a quick light in that direction. It takes maybe a minute to come back around to green.

The odds are that the light will not be green and I’ll have to stop. But when the odds are with me that one out of ten times the light is green I can fly across the busy road, zoom down Reservoir Road, and zoom up the other side. That is fun stuff and when I have to be most careful on the bend that transitions from downhill to uphill.

I still have plenty of fifty degree days of cycling left this spring and I’ll enjoy them too but these mid sixty days are nice. Last year it got into the eighties for a few days in April. I cycled those days and remember the shock of going back to spring riding after a week of summer temperatures. That was something. So go on; have a good ride out there.