The Hot 100!!!

It's blog post #100!  Time for a little celebration.

Once a year the citizens of Iceland blow up their whole capitol city and rebuild it from the ground up.  It keeps things fresh and exciting.

Those aren't words I'd use to describe my next big task, but it will be a lot more so once I get into it.  That is, I'm cleaning the nerve center of the basement, the storage room where Dylan kept about 5 million books and papers.  I've started a little but there's a lot to dig through.

I've shown a similar pic before.  The room is too small to get a good panorama shot, so I collaged it.  How can such a small room be so intimidating?!

If there's one thing I learned this year, is to recognize when I'm afraid to mess up, then find a way to start anyway.  I got more art done that way. 

Packing Radness

I mailed four boxes of mini comics to the Dylan Williams Collection at OSU last week, and found out a couple days ago that they arrived safely at their destination.  They weighed over 40 pounds each.  That's a person's weight in comics!!  Or four school children.  Anyway, they are at their new home.  It was hard to choose which ones were going.  I have a lot of them still, mostly the ones by close friends or ones I had been collecting for years.  I hope they'll inspire a kid to make his or her first book.

Things Fall Apart

I got a bookcase from a friend when she decided to move to New York, and decided to make room for it in the basement.  Thinking that I would just slide it in next to the large metal shelves that had been there for a decade, I moved a table that had been standing there for almost as long.  It turns out that the table had been holding up the shelves all those years.  Immediately the shelving began to buckle sideways and fall over.  I spent the next hour holding the thing up with one hand and removing everything from it with the other.  Do you know how hard it is to reach over head and move objects that way?  I had built the shelving wrong to begin with, and forgotten all about it.  This is why you need to built things safely and correctly!  It could have been much worse.  It was covered with books and could have fallen on me, causing serious injuries.  I threw almost everything that I knew wouldn't break onto the floor.

A few days later, with the help of friend Sean, I got some heavy-duty plastic shelves to replace the one I ultimately took apart and gave away to my neighbors.  The new shelves were easy to put together, just like Tinker Toys.  Very stable, too.  As it turns out, they are the same kind we got when we moved Sparkplug to its new home-office location.

The white melamine shelf on the right was a gift from my friend Nusha, who moved away recently.  Friends who are moving are a great source of shelving.  They don't have to haul it, you get a fine unit, win-win.