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08/14/2006
Radio stations and the inevitable
I'm not sure why this is, but it seems that every time I finally manage to find a radio station I like to listen to, they go and change it.
The first time this happened, there was no warning. I used to like Kool FM here in Ottawa, and one morning, I woke up to the radio, only to hear classic old-fogey rock music and the station calling itself "Bob FM". I seriously spent the entire day thinking they were playing a big joke on their listeners! Unfortunately, it wasn't a joke. They actually did turn into a classic rock station with a silly name overnight. So that was more or less the end of my radio-listening career before I left for BC, because there weren't any other stations that I really liked as much.
I went to BC for a couple of years, and when I got back, a few months ago, I discovered Couleur FM, which mostly plays classical music with few interruptions. They played jazz as well, but only in well-defined blocks that were easily avoided. Today, however, they changed to Couleur FM radio antistress, which means they play a jumble of things all the time - some classical, some jazz, some easy listening, some popular classics... this drives me nuts because I don't like jazz very much, and there's a lot of classics which are before my time that I don't like, and so on, and I can't just turn on Couleur FM and expect a stream of uninterrupted classical music anymore! Doh... I wish they'd go back to the way it was.
What else is happening... my job interview on Friday went well, but I'm not holding my breath. I think they already had someone else in mind before my interview even started. Anyway, I find out tomorrow (hopefully) what the outcome was.
I've been doing a lot of reading lately, trying to reduce the size of my to-read pile, but it's still getting bigger. Seems like the more I read, the more I go to the library and get more books! It's also funny how the strangest things start entering my head. I've never been a huge sci-fi/fantasy fan, but all of a sudden I have this idea to write a fantasy time-travel type novel (the one I started in some boring class in 4th year). So now, I'm currently reading a book by Orson Scott Card on how to write Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels. We'll see what happens with that!
I also just found out about a play writing contest where you write a full-length play about some aspect of science and technology (and obviously, being a play, has to have some relation to people and society, and the arts!). I think it would be pretty cool to try my hand at that, if only I had an idea of a play to write. Actually, I need to learn how to write a play, since last time I tried writing one, I was in elementary school!
Fun times, and so many possibilities!
17:23 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
08/06/2006
Louise, bookbinder extraordinaire
... or not...
It's like this. Mom, an organist, has been organizing her collection of music lately, and the two of us have been stickering them with code numbers and shelving them in the right order. This is mostly done now, but as we went along we found a few books which were in pretty rough shape, so they went into the "book hospital" pile.
Now, I've set up the "book hospital" in the dining room, and it's up to me to fix these books. Trouble is, I don't know much of anything about book repair, restoration, or binding. So, as is typical of me, I've decided to just dive into it and see what happens. ("How hard could it be?!")
I've cut out covers from illustration board to fit most of the books, and I'm quite proud of these. There are two books which are very thin, so their covers are cut from bristol board. I then glued the original covers to the bristol board, and so far, so good. Everything worked like a charm. Everything, that is, until I got to reinforcing the binding on the pages for one of these books. This particular book, printed in 1938, is on very brittle paper and most of the gutter of the pages (i.e., the inner margin edge of the paper on which the binding goes) is so brittle and flaked that it looks like a dog got to it. Obviously there's no way to just re-bind it as it was, so I had the idea that I'd cut narrow strips of paper the same height as these pages and glue them to the original page, thus making a straight line on the binding-side. Furthermore, I thought, if I make the strip wider and fold it in half, then I have folios that I can stitch together into a nice sewn binding. So far, so good, still.
Trouble is, theory is often rosier than reality. These pages are 13 3/8" high, which is taller than the regular 11" paper size. Therefore, I went out and bought an 11" x 14" artist's sketch pad, so that the 14" height could accommodate the 13 3/8" page height on the music. That was fine, right up until I tried to fold these tall, narrow strips in half. At this point, I found out all about the grain of paper... the hard way. Since it turned out I was folding against the grain of the paper, the folds did not quite make a straight edge. The result of this is that one side or the other of the paper will lay flat against a table, but not both at the same time. So unfortunately for mom, the book will never lay quite flat when it's shut. D'oh...
Good thing this is a book that mom got for free and doesn't really care much about! Hopefully as things progress, I'll get better at this whole bookbinding thing. (There are around half a dozen books in the book hospital, waiting for treatment.) Luckily I don't think any of the others need reconstructive gutter surgery. Mostly, copious amounts of acid-free scotch tape and re-sewing the loose bindings should do the trick!
Another thing that's now rattling around dangerously in the back of my mind is a project idea I ran into completely by accident when I was researching on bookbinding. There's a woman in Toronto who is trying to revive the art of cloth books, and I thought that would actually be really cool, to sew and embroider a cloth book with an interesting story, just for the sake of doing it! Of course, I have absolutely no idea how exactly I'd go about doing this, and considering I still haven't finished that cross-stitch I started in grade 10, I may not have the patience or the determination to finish. Still, it would be cool, and definitely a departure from what everyone else is doing. We'll see what happens!
I guess this must be what happens when a book addict tries to follow a self-imposed book-buying moratorium. Can't buy books, so make books!
I'll keep you posted. :-)
16:05 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this