I’ve returned from a long weekend in Joshua Tree and have been basking in the memories. It was one of my most enjoyable trips to the national park. The weather was in the mid-80° F, a full 10° cooler than in Los Angeles that weekend. Wildflowers were in bloom, some for the first time in years. And the desert creatures! I have been in Southern California for 16 years and had only seen two snakes in that time (a Desert Nightsnake and a Mountain Kingsnake). This last weekend, I saw FOUR Speckled Rattlesnakes and two Glossy Snakes (one alive, one roadkill). I also spotted a Chuckwalla from 40 feet away and spent 20 minutes with my friend photographing the big beautiful lizard, the second largest in the United States. Fourteen friends made it out to the desert, where we camped at Jumbo Rock campground, made hotdogs and s’mores under the starry night, and went on a few hikes in the area. Here’s a video I made of the weekend:
Here’s some of the photos from the trip. See my flickr.com page for more.
I worked my eleventh day in a row today. I wish I could just take a long weekend and head out to the desert or something. Oh yeah - I will be! On Thursday, I’ll be heading out to Joshua Tree National Park with some friends for a 4-day extended weekend! In anticipation of the trip, I put together a panoramic image from photos taken from the top of Ryan Mountain on February 19th, 2006.
I’ve been to JT quite a bit and all of the trips were memorable. The trip in 2006 was one of my favorites. The morning the panoramic shot was taken, I woke up early to try to get photos of the sunrise hitting the Joshua Trees. I walked at a brisk pace for about a mile away from my campsite at Ryan Campground. It was a chilly morning and I was hoping the sun would rise faster to warm up the desert. Then the most amazing thing happened.
It started to snow!
Just as the sun crested over Ryan Mountain, big flakes of snow quietly fell to the ground. It was dead quiet. I looked back at the campsite to see a rock climber standing atop a pile of boulders. In the moment, I almost forgot to take photos. As soon as it started snowing, it had stopped - but not before snapping this shot:
One of the joys that comes along with collecting old guidebooks is the items found within them, or “laid in.” Some refer to the postcards, metro tickets, notes, or dated paper items laid into the book as ephemera, a term I tend to use a lot to define the stuff I find within the covers of my books. But I learned of a more generic term today: flyaways.
Marty Weil over at the Ephemera blog recently asked his readers to submit stories about the coolest flyaways they’ve found in old books they acquired. Since I have the luck of the Irish and valuable objects seem to fall from my old books, I decided to post my findings here on kk.com.
Here’s my top five flyaways:
1. A Satchel Guide to Europe [1909] - The Secret Letter
A book of mine revealed a secret that it had been holding for almost 100 years. In the back of a 1909 edition of A Satchel Guide to Europe, I found a folded letter crammed deep inside the map pocket. It read:
To grandma:
Tom has a big kite.
He can fly it.
Do you see the big pine?
Can you fly a kite?
Do not hate me Ben.
I can kick my hat.
See me?
I am on the gate.
HSECOND
From Frances, Annie, Harris.
2. Lucerne: Lake & Envions [1904]
The inside cover of this guidebook had been signed by the previous owner: Marie Louise Fout from Washington D.C. Three beautiful business cards lay inside the cover - the red is as bright as if it was just pulled from the press. It is most likely that this book was guiding Marie around Lucerne over 100 years ago.
My heart always jumps when I find a pressed flower among the pages of a book. I could possibly be one of the first to see it since it was laid within the pages. I imagine this flower is at least 50 years old. Some of my books have flowers that are over 100 years old - and they still have color!
4. Griffith Observatory Guide [1936]
I’ve come to the conclusion that there hasn’t been a book published on the Griffith Observatory for over 50 years. I found this guidebook, published a year after the observatory opened - on eBay. It came with two surprises: a business-card sized schedule of demonstrations at Griffith Observatory in 1936. The other, a pamphlet created by the City of Los Angeles’ Department of Parks which includes a “tabloid directory of interesting exhibits.” On the back (shown in photo) is a map and transportation options.
I love some of the words and phrases that have expired in LA since 1936, like “autoists,” the telephone number is listed as “Olympia 1191,” and the description of parking as being “adequate” - all definitely gone the way of the Dodo in this city.
5. Muirhead’s Northern Italy [1924] - Museum Admission Tickets
Finally, a sneak peek at retrotravels.net, a personal site that I’ve worked on off and on for almost three years. (Slowly but surely!) This is a design idea for displaying just some of the items found in a 1924 edition of Muirhead’s Northern Italy. The owner of the book at the time, presumably an American, collected the tickets from the museums and galleries he visited. In Florence, he perused the Galleria degli Uffizi (visited May 25, 1925) and the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, (May 27, 1925) commonly known today as the Bargello Palace. After every visit, he threw the admission stub into this book.
There’s something about a nice notebook that gives inspiration to its user. The perfect notebook for me is one where thoughts and ideas seem to flow fluidly and easily onto the page as if the nine sister’s of Zeus themselves have made residence within its covers. Yeah, you could say I’m a bit finicky when it comes to notebooks - but in today’s market, I can be.
For five years, I’ve been using Moleskine journals to sketch out web designs, plan work projects, and chronicle adventures in foreign countries. Handmade in Italy, these little faux leather notebooks are extremely durable.
But move over Moleskine, there’s a new cat in town. Behance has created an elegant notebook that might just shelve my unused Moleskines. Called the Dot Grid book, these graph-like paper spiral notebooks were created by the New York-based company as “an alternative to traditional lines and boxes. The light geometric dot matrix serves as a subtle guide for your notations and sketches.”
After reading about this notebook on The Geniant Blog, I had to get one. Unfortunately, the only place I could find to purchase it - online or otherwise - was directly from Behance, and they were sold out. I checked the site a couple times a week for a month until they became available. Two arrived in the mail a few weeks ago and it was love at first sight. The covers felt like velvet. The paper was sturdy and much larger than I had imagined. One would say that $14 for a 50-page book is fairly expensive, but measuring at 9 inches x 10.5 inches, these notebooks are about twice the size of a large Moleskine. With the spiral spine, I feel I have a lot more freedom to explore the page with my pen whereas it can be difficult to write/draw in the gutter of a Moleskine pocket-sized Plain Notebook.
Of course, Moleskine will always have a place in my heart… and pocket. They have proven their worth on many rugged backpacking trips through deserts and jungles. I don’t see myself ever toting around a Dot Grid on my travels. However, if I think of a website idea or design that I need to jot down or sketch, I’ll be reaching for the Behance’s Dot Grid.
After my first two arrived, I returned to Bahance’s website and ordered four more, just in case they sell out again. (Tip: do a google seach for Behance + coupon before you order.)
I’ve been taking Flash classes at my local college so I can continue a few projects I’ve dabbled in the last few years, like retrotravels.net. Here’s a preloader I made for the site. A preloader is what a user sees while a flash animation is loading. (Don’t expect this one to finish, though. If you see a watch face, then that’s the whole show, folks.)
Since retrotravels.net will allow users to explore old guidebooks from my collection, I want to give the sense that they are going back in time while waiting. Do you think I should add the “percentage complete” or a progress bar underneath the watch face? Let me know in the comments section.
Flickr recently started allowing video posting. I don’t think they’ll replace the juggernaut that is YouTube, but I thought I’d give it a go. Here’s a video I took in May, 2004 in the beautiful country of Montenegro:
One my my favorite photos was taken from the same spot:
I’ve been home sick with bronchitis for the past week. It hit hard and kept me home on the couch like a criminal under house arrest. It gave me a lot of time to contemplate how bacteria could have crippled my lifestyle so quickly and brutally. But now, thanks to a Kiwi friend, I’m suffering from a virus as well.
It all came back so suddenly. One moment I’m just sitting here answering some e-mails, and the next, I’m dreaming of adventures in an archipelago. It all started with an instant message:
“I’m in Vanuata. Doing research in Malekula for three months.“
For a moment, I thought he was making up fictional locales. I’m better than most Americans when it comes to world geography, but Vanuata? Malekula? I really thought he was just randomly pecking at the keyboard.
I met Joe in Nicaragua a couple years ago. We drank hooch with a group of hostelers until we passed out. He kindly kicked me in the ribs at 3am to let me know the hostel wanted me to leave (I was not a paid guest). Only true friends begin relationships this way. We hung out in Granada a few days later and I showed him around Los Angeles when he was on his way back home to New Zealand. We’ve been keeping in touch online ever since.
Which brings us to his current instant message. He tells me he’s about to begin a three-month expedition into the rural communities of Malekula talking to the indigenous people about traditional knowledge and education. Doesn’t that last sentence just bleed excitement and adventure? Thanks to wikipedia, I discover that he’s on an island of the Republic of Vanuata, which is east of Australia in the South Pacific.
Joe’s a biologist, but assisting an ethnobotanist in order to go on this trip. I’m equally jealous as fascinated by his trip. Here’s a photo he just sent me. See if you can pick him out of the crowd:
Thanks to Joe, my travel bug (or virus) is back in full force.
