I've started a introduction to printmaking class at the Indianapolis Arts Center. I used to take classes there when I was a kid (and when it was known as the Art League).  But we've only had two classes so far, but I made two proofs last week. I've narrowed my design for this week down to one of two.  I'll post some soon.

I've finished posting the images from the NIN/JA concert on May 30th, but I've still got to write my thoughts and impressions from the show.  I am enjoying the Street Sweeper Social Club album that has been released since I saw them open that show up...

I think Facebook has completely jumped the shark.  It's too bad that it's only just now that two good friends finally joined.  But I think Twitter is even better than people think...  I just hope it isn't ruined as it tries to monetize.

In terms of Iran, this is the kind of thing necessary for the seeds of democracy.  It's a show that they have a desire for self determination, not the toppling of governments and democracy being installed.  It doesn't work that way.

I'm very disillusioned right now with everything political on all sides here in the US, especially in terms of the pundits and all of Washington.  Mostly because of two areas: health care and foreign policy.  I don't think they get it, or care to so long as they have to maintain the status quo.

I got a new t-shirt recently that features a great quote from a great movie: "the only winning move is not to play".

So last saturday was a big day.  We got up and motored up to West Lafayette for a Mid-Century Home Tour before heading back to hit the NIN/JA concert back here in Indy.

But first, there's the first image.  Don't mean to rub it into one of my more loyal readers, but it was good.  It's only something that happens every few years, but a drive-up root beer stand is such a nice piece of Americana...  This is a newer one that has popped up since my time in West Lafayette at Purdue.  And this would have been pretty close to where I lived.  Too bad...

The Mid-Century Architecture tour was put on by two Indiana organizations centering around Historic Preservation - an issue near and dear to our hearts.  That and we've been fostering a love for Mid-Century Modern for the past many years.  It was a pretty good tour, but it's transportation system was not well done, and photography policy should have been part of the literature leading up to it.  I may or may not blog about this specific tour.  I'm leaning towards not because none of the photos really came out as I hoped.

We made a few stops on the way back to Indy, and the NIN/JA show was very great that I'll dedicate a full blog to soon.  A few quick things:

• Trent is even more awesome than usual for allowing cameras
• Street Sweeper Social Club is really, really good live (the recordings I've heard don't really do them justice)
• The NIN set was great, but I'm increasingly sad that he's claiming it's going to be the last tour
• Jane's Addiction was a little disappointing...  But not completely...

I do have a set of photos on Flickr for the images I took just that day (here's a link to the set)...  I have something like 7-8 gb of images from that day...  Mostly in RAW format, so it's not like I have thousands of images...  just hundreds.  At first pass, I think I have at least 20 images I'll post over time.

I've been falling off the social media map these last two weeks...  Partially because I've been keeping myself pretty busy this week at work, but also because I did a lot of blogging last month...

I didn't quite get to posting every single day, but I did average way more than one a day...

So I do have a nice post coming up on satuday about photography, but not much else has sprung to mind.  I've been doing a decent amount of graphics here and there, and my favorite thing was learning gradient brushes in Illustrator the other day...  It's how I was able to make the image here...  It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be, but now I know...  And knowing is half the battle...

But otherwise things are good.  Took a day trip to St. Louis last week.  And I'm about to go pick up some things to bust out the grill for the first time of the year.

So this morning I got moving into work a little earlier than usual.  On the way in, I noticed a small difference in the skyline, but nothing to make me think twice.  When I rolled up to the building, the local traffic update on NPR came up and recommended different routes of travel to IUPUI / the canal area thanks to a fire.

I looked up and sure enough, there was that fire.  The difference that I kind of noticed on the way in was the large plume of smoke that didn't really catch on because it was still pretty dark.  The only think I can think of was that I thought it was just exhaust from the power plant...

But anyway, I went up to the office and grabbed my camera, another lens, and my tripod before beginning the walk down.

I was not dressed for the cold.

It was a 3-Alarm fire in an apartment building that was under construction...  Yeah...  It sounds like there the possibility of fishiness, but who knows just yet.

I saw at least three ladder trucks and another 6+ fire trucks.  Lots of EMS...  I could walk right up to the fire trucks, but not within 200 yards of the actual fire.

On the long, cold walk back I got to thinking about it.  Are fires like this a little bit of an economic stimulus in themselves?  Sure, the insurance companies have to pay out...  But it keeps attention and funding to emergency services...  Demo / cleaning crews...  Repair crews...  Construction crews...  All faster than a shovel ready project looking for stimulus money.

Of course I'm not advocating arson, because last thing I'd do is advocate setting fires to stimulate the economy and stick it to the insurance companies...  It's just sad that my mind takes that kind of track these days.

I’m not sure where my fear came from. It may have been from watching the LA Riots as a kid. Maybe just observing the fear permeate everything in the aftermath of Oklahoma City and 9/11. Some of it I can trace back to studying sociology and the history of modern examples of such things happening. It’s the complete absence of civil behavior that results in the infringement of inherent human rights with no basis for doing so.

It’s just one of those things that I hope people have enough wits about themselves to keep their heads in the face of adversity, and it may be pessimism but don’t think most can overcome groupthink. It seems that there are too many little pockets of society that continue to thrive based on the notion of perpetuating fear within the populace.

But now I’m on the edge of getting into specifics, and I could go on for thousands of words in examples and analysis when it’s completely unnecessary in this forum. It’s just a small window into one of the few things that really scares me. I’ve never met an anarchist who really understood what it would really mean.

I'll have to label the year as my year of hope. Some of that is because of the obvious reason of presidential politics, but I had a lot of other hope building itself up. What happens to that hope in '09 is a big question mark. Let's just say that I'm ending the year with a heaping lump of pessimism for many reasons.

With that whole 20/20 hindsight thing, I would have done things differently. But that's moot. I'll just say that I certainly learned a lot over the past year that should prove to be handy information in the future.

I didn't see as many movies as usual, or get into as much new music as usual. I think it's because I put fourth a lot of my spare attention to other things.

Highlights of the year for me... Mom and Wayne tying the knot in Maine. Moving. Short trips to Cincinnati and Chicago. Starting my own business venture. The Foo Birthday. Learning HDR photography. That's about all that comes to mind immediately.

I hope anyone and everyone had as good year as possible.  Cheers.

Without giving much away, it's a fictionalized account of the death and rebirth of society by Stephen King. The catalyst is a plague of epic proportions with a healthy undertone of good vs. evil throughout the whole thing.

Anyway, the first part is simply about the plague. How it gets loose, spreads, and ultimately destroys society. So partway through part one, my wife asks "Do you think this kind of thing will happen in our lifetime?"

That's a tough one. But my initial answer was that the plague scares me less, and is not as likely as some sort of breakdown in the social fabric. It kind of links back to the whole anarchy thing.

Through the years, I've known a few self-proclaimed anarchists. For the longest while I thought it was just their own self proclamation of being counter culture. But through the course of discussion they continued to stick by their desire for their understanding of anarchy.

Once I really put thought into it, the whole notion of anarchy really seemed less and less appealing even in the basic counter culture sense of the meaning. To have anarchy, there has to be a complete disregard for all social norms. That means no driving on the right side of the road. No paying taxes. No ownership of property. No right or wrong. Nothing to hold any primal urge at bay. No social programs. Nothing to stop anyone from parking in the middle of a busy street.

Anarchy would mean the stagnation of progress. Basic features of industrialized life would become things of the past. Utilities and technology all take a very high level of organization and maintenance that a system of anarchy simply couldn't afford.

So back to the initial question, do I think it's possible? Of course. But I hope the social order that has been created and maintained is in itself a safeguard against such things as a plague. It'll be a scary thing if it does happen.  I hope not.

It's pretty interesting.  Sure, I've had jobs before with the whole quitting / 2-weeks notice, but none for a job I've held this long.  There are some great people I'm going to miss, but the absence of a few key people is going to allow me to grow professionally as well as be able to remain sane throughout the course of any period of time at work.

Oh well.  On that note, I'm about to have my last lunch here...  And an exit interview soon thereafter.

Work has been increasingly strange in many aspects. There have been two departures changing how things usually got done. This along with getting slammed the past two weeks. DVD... Kiosk... Web video...11 posters... and some odds and ends thrown in for good measure. Sometimes frustrating, sometimes gratifying, but more stressful than I'm used to.  Oh well... I've been told that's just the way most careers are no matter where you are.

It's also right smack in the midst of the mid-summer birthday and barbecue season, which is fun - but weekends have a tendency to fly by...

I'm looking forward to the little jaunt out to Maine in August. It's our first time back since the wedding.

I've been keeping up on news, but nothing has really grabbed me to go beyond a twitter post.

Then there was Batman this past weekend.  Boy, it is a good one.  I'm not sure it lived up to my total expectations (which were too high probably), but it sure was by far the best comic-based movie I've seen. I think it's because the story was more mature in its themes and development, but still very much true to what we want out of a comic movie.

But it's not as big of a deal unless you're here or part of the regional beer distribution system.

I didn't go to the race, but I did enjoy its re-broadcast from 8 to midnight later that day (it's blacked out locally). Otherwise, it was the usual new home / homeowner stuff and the fact that I got to enjoy a visit from my mother for a few days over the weekend.

Now as I'm at work doing my usual waiting for specific content from others, my mind is racing about the number of things I could waste time blogging on. I could write many pages on the election... Recent POV's in the environment / fuel debate here in the US... How disappointing Indiana Jones 4 was... Some recent pondering on past friends because of running into them, seeing them online, or not being able to find them no matter what I did... Basically over thinking things on my spare time in manners that wouldn't constitute a blog that anyone would read or care about anyway. Yeah! let the pessimism shine through...

But oh well. It's just a Tuesday that feels much worse than any Monday.

The move is complete, but the unpacking is going to continue for a long, long time. The new place feels good, but not 100% like home just yet.  Most of it is the whole unpacking thing.  I can work at it for hours, but at the end it doesn't even seem like I'm making a dent in the progress.

Work is busy as hell, and I'm in the midst of a very nasty project. I'm waiting for the light at the end of the tunnel, but it's not even visible. Most days, I come home with so little creativity that my mind feels like mush. It especially pains me when I get ideas at work for creative endeavors that I can't develop during work hours, but I'm drained by the time I get home.

Poor me, eh?  Not really. It'll pass.  I'm pretty happy with the way things are headed, I'm just not in the best place in the midst of it all.

I have been doing my best to do more frequent, micro updates via twitter (which is available on the blog).

So as of right now, I'm back at work. It feels like Monday. Then again, don't get me started on work. There should be some general aptitude test to make certain people unable to make decisions or produce things for online distribution if they don't have a certain level of understanding.

But anyway. I set up a twitter account this morning. The feed on the right side of my blog pages, just below the calendar.  If you don't know, Twitter is a micro-blogging site (some even consider it a social network).  It's like a macro version of an instant messaging program.  Of course, I don't have anyone following me...  But I'm using it basically to do small, little posts that will appear here.  I'm just trying to keep things a little more up to date.

The deal is that my grandfather died last week, and this bus was chartered to take many of us down to the funeral in Anderson, SC.

So while it's not the most happy of situations, it is the weirdest manner of travel that I have yet to experience.  Not only am I so far removed from the driving experience, but there's 14 family members in close proximity for two 10-hour stretches in a weekend.

It's pretty disorienting on more than a few levels.  It's almost like a casino in that there are no clocks, similar lighting all the time, and noise all around.

Right now we're headed back to Indianapolis.  It's almost midnight - and we've been on the road since 3 pm.  I have yet to sleep on the bus on this trip or the trip down...  So I'm beginning to feel more than a little fried.  I was already frazzled from both work and the moving preparations, but this will add a whole new dimension to this week.

So please excuse the possible lack of posts this next week or two.  I'm going to try, but I have no idea what will come around this week.

And I almost forgot to mention that my hotel room had what appeared to be four cracks from shotgun buckshot.

My mind was still waking up and trying to decode the weirdness at the same time. "Huh?"

She whispered it again. I'm still not catching it. Why is she whispering anyway? I hear the noises all around us, but I'm not putting things together. I repeat my last one syllable question.

"The house is shaking." I knew it before she said it, but we were both still quite in the fog. And like that it was over.

I was hoping both of us would go back to sleep, but a few moments later she finally declared that it was an earthquake.

It was 5:37 (5:41 according to the oversized and intentionally 3 minutes fast clock) and it has been given a preliminary magnitude of 5.4 and lasted for only about 5 seconds. I stared at the shadows for a few minutes of waiting for an aftershock, sirens, or the neighbor's dog barking. Nothing came, we went back to sleep.

Upon waking up and turning on the news, ALL local media was completely and utterly in love with the fact that there was this "natural disaster" for them to sensationalize. All the anchors, remote teams, weathermen, and the traffic people were more than happy to share their stories of where they were when it went down. They were preempting the national news broadcasts for this.

Isn't it interesting that truckers at a truck stop in their cabs with the engine idling didn't feel the quake? Or that there's no damage reported 2-hours later except to one building in Louisville... The traffic guy was working on graphics and wondering why his desk was shaking... The weather man just wondered why there was a sudden influx of emails and calls to the station... One of the anchor's husband and kids didn't even know anything happened! Riveting...

I couldn't make this up if I tried... Oh wait. I could - because it's too boring to be called news.

Maybe that's why they call us Naptown... I know that all news is sensationalized, but local news seems to be so bad anymore. I'll go further - local news is a joke. But Helio Castroneves is joining the team during the month of May!