Oops. I guess I gave it to someone else. I suppose you’ll just have to settle for a piece of Awakening, Part 11.

Back soon <3

I do however manage to tweet from time to time, as it seems to be a little more free form and quicker than sitting down and writing out a blog post. @bluevulpine

This year, I took a position at a summer camp as their business manager. While I have been looking at business management/education as a potential field of interest in my return to college, I’ve so far not taken much in the line of actual business management. Even so, I was offered the position - with little idea of what exactly I’d be doing aside from a basic explanation over the phone during the interview.

We’ve just finished our fourth week of scouts in camp. I now have a far better handle on what I’m doing - the first week, I was in the office nearly every night until 2am trying to make sure I had things right. Not quite so late, now… Generally 10pm or so. Still, it’s generally a 12-14 hour day in the office. I have Wednesday night and most of Saturday off, but my mental state is depleted enough by these points that I can’t concentrate on anything in fine detail.

As such, I haven’t gotten any more writing done. At this point I expect I won’t have anything new until August.

Sorry for the delay, but thanks for sticking around.

For my Desktop Publishing final project, among other requirements, I needed to create a ‘menu or program.’ I wound up making a wedding program for a nice couple I know. The tentative date for the wedding is sometime in 2048. I’ll get photos of the printed version, as the PDF in this case just doesn’t show off how nice the end result turned out. (Although, I admit, I made a rookie mistake on it.)

Spring has sprung here at the lake; the ice went off about a week ago and nearly carried off our dock, deck, and my propane grill. So, I went wading in 34ºF water (with rubber waders, thankfully, but it was still cold) and tied ropes to everything before it could escape too far into the lake to save. No worries—the next day, the wind shifted, and pushed the dock back to the shoreline retaining wall… and right on through it.

In the meantime, we had so much moisture stored in the snowpack that everything’s running over. There was (and in some places still is) flooding all over the state. Mother’s house in the city a few hours away decided this would be an excellent year to leak water into the basement. It’s on a hill, so it’s not from a river or anything. No broken pipes either, and no backing up from the sewer; no, Nature just decided to open a natural spring up underneath the concrete floor of the basement and it’s leeching in as fast as she can suck it out. She’s removed something on par of 500-600 gallons of water in the last week, 8 gallons at a time, using a shopvac. I wish Mr. Mike Holmes did stateside work.

The barge still isn’t on the lake, sadly; with the water content of the ground as it is, we can’t get a trailer to where it’s parked so we can load it. We’ve now had a couple of sunny days over the weekend, and I’m hopeful (but only just) that we might make some progress on Monday toward that goal.

I imagine a library atop a remote mountain that collects the essential information needed to re-learn practical knowledge essential to civilization. This depot, open to anyone who journeys there, is the cultural equivalent of the Svalbard seed bank, a vault on the Arctic Circle that holds frozen seeds of crop plants from around the world. The utilitarian documents in this vault would be the seeds of culture, able to sprout again if needed. It would be the Library of Utility, and it would serve as civilization’s backup.

Between tutoring a young gentleman in the Intro to Computers class and juggling other assignments and projects, I’ve had some time to do editing on the next chapter of Awakening. Sadly, however, it’s not -quite- done. If I manage to knock out this week’s projects early, I should be able to give it a spitshine and get it up by Friday.

In the meantime, here’s some examples of the things I’ve worked on this spring.

First off, and the most recent: one of three graduation posters, printed on a 24” wide-format designjet printer. An instructor’s youngest son is about to be the first in the family to graduate high school. (The rest were home schooled.) I couldn’t find purple and white balloon clipart (school colors) so I had to draw them myself; same with the flying pig wearing a graduation cap. Google image search found no results for pigs flying with a graduation cap on. Some aviator hats, but no grad caps.

Additionally, she needed a sign to tell people where to find the reception.

You’ve seen the blue fox-thing already; you might have missed the smaller logo-sized version that I’m considering working into a new site layout.

This poster is one you’ve probably seen in other styles before; I recall seeing it on a tee-shirt. Figuring out how to replicate it was interesting, however it’s not well optimized and as a result has a much larger file size (PDF 5mb, original 250MB). I should create some other versions, like ‘peach’ and ‘apple’ and ‘chicken pot.’

The 32nd of March! It’s a beautiful day in North Dakota…

What? It’s not the 32nd? I suppose that means it’s actually April the First. Which, coincidentally, means I’ve got an extra-special surprise for you: two surprises! Yes! And that’s not even one of them! So you actually get THREE! Unless that is one of them, in which case… Uh… Does that make it four? Is it surprising I can’t count? (Does that statement make it five…?)

Hm. While I break out an abacus to figure out exactly how many surprises are in this post (is it surprising that I do actually possess an abacus? Let me add that to the tally), allow me to explain what’s going on today. If you already know what’s going on, you’ll find what you’re looking for a little bit further down the page.

This year, I have for you the results an April First weblit swap event — akin to the artistic swaps we see webcomic artists doing with their strips, where a guest artist pens something with their characters/universe/sandbox/Etch-a-Sketch, and the normal artist does something for someone else in the same fashion, and so on and so forth in a big, cozy circle. I’m not sure how I fell into this, precisely; I do remember something about the event briefly on Twitter, and I might have sent someone a Direct Message about it. Suddenly (and, for what it’s worth, using ‘suddenly’ is not a good way to relate suspense), suddenly, I find these strange names and webpages in my inbox and I’ve got no idea what’s going on. Yet, somehow, it all worked out!

The marvelous short gem I have the privilege of sharing with you today (which I will in fact share in a couple more paragraphs’ time) comes to us by way of Allan Michaels, the author of An Empire at War. I put together a short piece for Robert Rodgers, the author of Arcadia Snips and the Steamwork Consortium as well as The Last Skull. My piece for Robert falls into Arcadia’s universe — and that universe, perhaps, may contain our very own universe!

And so we come to the links:

Here’s Allan’s contribution to Terra Fabula.

You can find the piece I did for Robert at the Arcadia Snips site.

The list of all the swaps today is over at the Webfiction Guide.

Still here? Great! Because here’s another surprise!

Our regular reader, Typhoon, also donated a piece — not knowing that the above exchange was taking place. I don’t want to make him wait a full year for another April 1 to come along, so I’m also adding that to the collection today! His piece is a look ahead to what-could-be in the years beyond Paradigm Shift’s time. I debated leaving it exactly as contributed, but after some careful consideration I took the liberty of doing some small structural edits as English isn’t his first language. Here’s Typhoon’s contribution.

Next semester is when I plan to take Vector Graphics (the Illustrator course) but I figured — I bought CS5 Design Premium with the new laptop (go go student discounts), I might as well give it a try.

Using this page on mozilla links as a visual reference, I muddled through the program and produced this in the course of about… 8 hours:

I’m not an artist, and it shows, but for a first-ever attempt I’m pretty proud of myself.