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Santa’s going to be bringing some nieces and nephews some cool shizzle this year.
Dude in toyland
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Author Archives: Tom Harold
It’s a party!
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When you invite a bunch of cool musicians over to your house for a party, you end up with a wall of amazing gear like this! The evening sounded as fantastic as this photo is promising. It was great to be involved, and I appreciated being invited.
More art with Jem
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The one on the right is looking pretty sweet by now. This evening we finished up the separate pieces of that project, so there wasn’t a way to switch on and off on it. To give both of us something to do, we decided to start another project and swap between the two. I pulled out a scrap that was sitting around and seemed to be of a size that we could finish the two projects at about the same time. I started the design while Jem colored on the larger piece, then she added her own design work to the smaller one while I traded off and did color on the larger piece. I think Jem did some amazing color work on the smaller one. We’re tossing around different ideas on how we want to use color in the future, and I’ve purchased a few different supplies to help us out on some things later. This just keeps getting more and more interesting.
A *little* different
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Okay, so it’s me driving to work again, but check out the late model Challenger in my side view mirror! Driving something like that to work every day would tend to make life more interesting.
Another log on the fire
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I bought this book for myself today, largely because playing in a band, drawing abstract art with Jem, learning guitar, working on photography, writing novels and short stories, building rolling ball sculpture, and drag racing didn’t occupy my time enough already.
Something’s definitely wrong with me, but it’ll be fun finding out what it is!
Thanks, mom!
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Some of the last of the cake mom made for me. It may not look like much here (and I don’t think the flash helped any), but it’s called Turtle Cake, and it’s actually two layers of cake that sandwich a layer of melted caramel, chocolate, and walnuts (if’n yer a nut sorta person). It’s good stuff, and you don’t even need to put icing on it!
Unbeatable Basics
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I ready this fabulous post somewhere on the web once that said, “If the Army ever issued guitars, they would issue Telecasters.” The point was that the Tele was a simple, durable piece of gear that would endure tons of misuse and abuse and still perform a myriad of duties with aplomb, that it was a very basic item, but it had the capacity to cover a number of duties that could be asked of it.
This here is Fender’s reissue of what the Army might have issued – the ’52 Telecaster. It’s paired up with an amplifier that’s an original of roughly the same vintage, a National amp probably from the late 40s or early 50s. Together this pairing is unbeatable for all kinds of traditional music. Anyone from Bob Wills to Muddy Waters to Jimmy Page could get what they wanted out of this setup. On the night this was taken, this combo did itself proud.
Woody wood wood, Part 2
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Dad is helping me out with some of the bases for a few rolling ball sculptures that I’ll be making. I really wasn’t expecting anything more than for him to cut them to a basic shape and then maybe run some sandpaper over the corners, but he’s already done more than that! He’s the king of woodworking, so naturally he can’t just give them a quick rubdown with 400 grit and call it done. No, these things will have routed edges! Nice, eh? He’s talking about staining them and everything now. They’re going to be pretty awesome!
Of lines and more lines
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Jem and I got another chance to work on the new drawing, and it’s coming along very well. Check out all we’ve added to it since just a few days ago on the 3rd of the month. Jem is doing this new stuff I haven’t seen, and I’m really digging it. My work seems to be almost completely devoid of the squiggle patterns which had dominated some of my previous work. I don’t know what that means, if anything, but it’s kind of scary and cool. Color comes next!
TGIO NaNoWriMo!
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It may not look like a gala event, but spirits were high at the coffee shop where we held our TGIO party following the end of yet another fantastic November for NaNoWriMo. It’s largely a general bag session, although things change from year to year, and apparently sometimes it’s been a bit more formal or dinner-oriented. One thing that is a continuing tradition, regardless of venue, is the reading of Autosummarized Novels.
There’s this function on Microsoft Word called “Autosummary.” What the true purpose for this is I have no idea, but it makes for big fun when combined with a novel of many thousands of words. What you do is, you highlight all your text, then select the function, and you can trim down your 50K-word novel to a summary of most-occurred phrases or sentences of between five hundred lines and ten words. We usually go for about 100 or 200 words. We gather these up and read them out loud, and they all sound rather ridiculous and repetitive and completely nonsensical – which kind of sums up how a lot of us feel while we’re in the middle of writing a novel of 50 thousand words in the time frame of a single month!