After this image whetted my curiosity, I had to try out this photomerge thing for myself. I happened to have a set of photos I took of Roger Williams Memorial Park for research during one of my studio projects, and so I plugged them in to see what came out. Pretty cool!

Click on the image to see a larger version. This is still one third the size of the original, actually, because it creates a layer for each image that its trying to stitch together. I can only see a couple of really obvious places where the image doesn't match up, but otherwise I think it came out really well!
(This image captures pretty much all there is of the park - its one of the smallest national parks in the country! It marks the spot where Roger Williams made his first settlement, as well as the location of the freshwater spring that supported the community.)

When I left my apartment last night to head to studio, it was sunny and clear. But by the time I had driven the two miles into downtown, this is what the weather looked like:

It was bizarre how fast it came in, and how violent it all looked even when you could still see clear skies on the edges of downtown. Many a reference was made to the end of Ghostbusters as we all craned our necks to see out the studio windows.

My friend Marcos made this panoramic image with photomerge in cs3:

Despite being completely mired in schoolwork this past semester, I somehow managed to start two small flats of seeds and keep them alive until they turned into cute little herbs! I think it had something to do with running to Home Depot every two days for supplies for this project, and I just kept walking past the seed starting supplies. Whats a girl to do?

I started basil, dill, and mint. The dill isn't doing so hot, but the basil is rocking out. I'm very lucky to have three huge south-facing windows, which might have something to do with it. I've been giving away seedlings to fellow classmates, but of course keeping the best ones for my kitchen. :)

The title of this blog post comes from a recent conversation with my mom, where I was talking about my blogging prospects now that my lovely, trusty old camera has lost the will to focus properly. In response, the mailman delivered a tiny package wrapped in brown paper, containing one of my family's spare point-and-shoot cameras for me to borrow for the summer. Hooray! Thanks, mom. :)

And, as a reward, I am posting a long overdue photo of my new (to me) dining table, and the primary reason I drove 1,900 miles across the country in the dead of winter earlier this year:

Its rarely that clean on the table, but I made a special effort to clear it off for this photo. Currently I am sitting in the back right chair, with my laptop and a cup of coffee, with the windows open. Its the best spot to work!

The table comes from my grandmother, who bought it back in the day and has kept it in storage ever since moving to Dallas. I am so glad they didn't sell it, because its quite possibly my favorite thing in my whole apartment!

Its barely June, and I am sitting in studio already, taking advantage of the air conditioning. Why? because its 97 degrees outside, and my apartment doesn't have a/c. While I get ample cross-breeze at home, that just doesn't cut it when the temperature gets into the 90s. I used my studio in this way last summer, but that didn't start until mid to late August, and then only in the evenings after work. To have it get this hot, this early, is unusual. Cross your fingers for rain!

Otherwise, I am enjoying spending my summer here in the Prov. I have a huge pile of books waiting for me to read, and for the first time in my life I am in a reading club! We're meeting every three weeks during the summer, and have a great list of both design-related reading as well as fun stuff. Here's what's on the schedule so far:

Air Guitar // Dave Hickey
A Box of Matches // Nicholson Baker
Looking Closer, Volume 5 // Beirut, Drenttel, Heller
At The Same Time (Essays & Speeches) // Susan Sontag
Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing that One Sees // Weschler
Learning from Las Vegas // Venturi, Scott, Brown
Within The Context of No Context // George W.S. Trow
Shaping Things // Bruce Sterling
Invisible Cities // Calvino
The Crying of Lot 49 // Thomas Pynchon

We probably won't get through all of them, but its nice to have them collected for those little snippets of free time. You know, during thesis year. Ha. :)

So even with the ridiculously easy goal of posting once a day for the rest of May, I didn't actually post every day. For shame. But its the summer now, and I (theoretically) have time to do stuff like put up some of my favorite stuff from this last semester.

The first thing I will show is related to my earlier How to Make Rubber Molds post, and is quite possibly one of my all-time favorite final reviews ever. These are pictures from the final review of the second in a series of two graduate studios I took last year. We spent the last three weeks building physical objects, and at the end it was decided that we needed an installation to truly showcase all of this tactile work. So a few people commandeered (sp?) the small conference room at the end of our studio and got to work.

The room was anchored by this scene, which is a complete re-creation of my friend Hannah's bedroom to showcase her final project: two pillows placed side-by-side on the bed, with the phrases "When I don't sleep I can't work," and "When I don't work I can't sleep" cross stitched on either one:

It was such an appropriate message for the often compulsively creative and driven nature of the students here, and placing it in the manufactured serenity of a bedroom with these two vibrating messages on top was very effective. The room actually became a makeshift bedroom as thesis presentations loomed closer, and it wasn't uncommon for me to get to studio in the mornings and find someone napping on the bed!

Also in the installation room was a corner dedicated to a collaborative group calling itself Sustain Me, which was dedicated to producing gentle acts of public intervention that educated people about environmental issues. They produced a stop-motion animation about coral reefs using all of these hand-sewn "creatures" and then re-created the installation for the final review.

Mary's awesome "cross-stitched" tape lettering on the fence on the empty lot next to our studio. The building that used to be here burned down the year before I came to school here, and it supposedly housed a very cool diner.

Huy's huge cardboard letters and luscious photographs of them in abandoned buildings.

Melissa's "us" made out of garbage collected from a local lake.

There are zillions more I could show because it was a really cool set of projects! Many thanks to Mary, who put a bunch of the pics from the final review on flickr.