The Handwriting on the Wall

I am a letter writer. I find it relaxing and a better way to air my thoughts (and grievances) than in emails. Yes, emails are good ways to communicate, but there is nothing like the act of actually writing things to help sort your thoughts. For a long time, I could not even read myContinue reading “The Handwriting on the Wall”

Love, Karen

There is a number of years between my oldest sister, Karen, and myself. In fact, I don’t even remember her living with us much other than here and there between different life events. She tended to move around a lot and travel a lot which most people, and I guess particularly women, did not doContinue reading “Love, Karen”

What’s In a Name??

As I have written about in the past, I currently work in an herbarium. For a very long time, I mounted botanical specimens. Now we are pretty caught up on that and I am delving into other tasks that surround collections. One of the things I work on fairly regularly is looking up current taxonomy.Continue reading “What’s In a Name??”

Local names

An occasional series on local culture I spend a lot of time in the Baltimore area and recently I heard some commentary on WYPR (NPR Baltimore) regarding telephone culture of the past. My ears perked up because this was something I wrote about on my last Local Post which you can find here. The commentatorContinue reading “Local names”

Story Time with Mom

Not long ago, I was thinking about a short story my friend Claudia wrote about a train ride she took to see her son in Pittsburgh. The reason I was thinking about this story is because I remember reading it to my mother on a visit to her when she was living with my sister.Continue reading “Story Time with Mom”

Reduction Linocut Step by Step

Many years ago on a former blog I had a tutorial on how to do a reduction linocut. A reduction linocut, said to have been invented by Pablo Picasso as a means to economizing on linoleum, is when you use only one block to make a color print instead of the traditional one block perContinue reading “Reduction Linocut Step by Step”