The eraser carvers' mailing list has discovered a web site www.eboard.com that lets you create your own bulletin board with a few clicks. It's incredibly easy to do; it takes longer to read the user agreement for the site than to set up your own bulletin board with notes, pictures, and maybe a little forum page. It does have advertising; it's very limited in design possibilities; and I'm looking at it with a cable modem so I can't tell how long it takes to navigate with a 28.8 modem. At any rate, after several emails went along the mailing list with individual URLs the group decided it wanted one web page with all the eBoard URLs in one place. I volunteered to put it together, and you can now look at my page of eraser carver eBoard URLs (including of course mine).
eBoards will never replace individual web pages, but they're kind of handy for quick postings, and wonderful for people who don't want to set up whole web sites.
I printed another stage of my reduction block of the Lake Sevan church today. Now there are four colors, and I want to do one more. There's some attrition in the cards as I make a few registration errors, get ink on background areas that aren't cut away deeply enough, and smudge things. I'm mostly pleased with the good cards, but I can see things I would do differently if I redid the piece. Which is good. If I couldn't see room for improvement in my second reduction block I'd have to worry about having any objectivity at all. What? Quit talking and show us? OK, but it's 27 K:
We walked around Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. There were ducks in the distance, but not so many species close to the causeway as we used to see years ago. We saw mallards, black ducks, Canada geese, pintail, gadwall, and green winged teal. We got a glimpse of an osprey as we got to the refuge. The highlight was three snipe walking along a mud flat among dried lotus seed pods and leaves. We've rarely seen snipe before, and these were amazingly cooperative. They were very close to us and out in the open, easy to recognize with sharp tan and brown patterning on the back and bills almost as long as their bodies.
We stopped at Maplewood Farm on the way back. We pulled off route 2A, part of the Minuteman national historic park, into a little gravel parking area in front of a big white barn, and picked up pumpkins and gourds, along with apples and cider from a few towns west of there. Not everything they sell is local; for heaven's sake, pomegranates don't grow in the Northeast; but even so, it's nice to be able to buy vegetables out there instead of in a supermarket.
There were only about six groups of kids here for halloween. We've never been able to predict how much candy we need to have. I had a jack-o-lantern out on the lawn, too, with a candle going all evening.
I've been playing with cascading style sheets and javascript lately. I think it's time to make this site a little spiffier, but that will take a little download time. Stay tuned and be prepared to let me know if it slows down too much. I'm getting a little less sensitive to that because of the cable modem.
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