Average Speed: 343.5 mi/h

ridemap.jpgSince moving to Santa Fe, I’ve used Google’s map feature a lot. But it hasn’t been particularly helpful for figuring out where to ride my bike… While there’s a “biking directions” switch, showing bike lanes as well as roads that are only open to pedestrians and bikes, it doesn’t show elevation. There are a lot of hills here in Santa Fe, very few bike lanes, and some roads have shoulders and some don’t. There are several bike groups that have weekly rides, and I’ve joined them a few times, which has helped me figure out where to ride on my own. I’ve also used my android phone to help me — there’s an app called MyTracks that uses GPS to plot my route as I’m pedaling. It tallies mileage and that all important elevation (of course after the fact, after I’ve sweated up some very steep hill). Although the other day it went haywire and decided I’d started my 1 hour ride from the middle of the ocean, east of Greenland, and ended up near Winnamucca, Nevada, with a very impressive max speed of 817mph (see map above).
After that ride, I found BikeRouteToaster. It let me easily draw a route and then estimates the time it would take me to bike it, shows the elevation profile of the route and best of all creates a “cue sheet” — listing streets, turns and mileage between turns. No info about shoulders and road conditions, I guess I’ll have to figure that out on my own.
I’ll continue to explore (and struggle with) ways of making maps and directions. But I also wanted to mention mapplers, a project to build an atlas of hand-drawn maps, and use the Google maps interface to navigate them. They only have one at the moment (Brisbane Australia), but check them out here.

Calendar Progress

calpreview.jpgSeveral times over the past couple of months, I’ve played around with Japanese paper marbling (suminagashi) with my friend Suzanne. She likes to work very big — making covers for large journals — but I thought working small and incorporating my haiku would work well for me. I’ve begun experimenting with some of my colored Japanese paper (mostly a large stash of Moriki, made from Kozo). Here’s one of my tries to the left — I started with yellow paper, printed my evolving calendar design first, and then marbled. My plan was to do an all-letterpress calendar, as I’ve done in the past, but now I’m thinking I may do some months with letterpress designs and some incorporating other methods, like suminagashi.

An American Time Capsule

BroadsideTo celebrate America’s Independence Day, my friend Richard sent me a link to the Library of Congress’ online image repository, Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera. The intro to the site says

The Printed Ephemera collection at the Library of Congress is a rich repository of Americana. In total, the collection comprises 28,000 primary-source items dating from the seventeenth century to the present and encompasses key events and eras in American history. An American Time Capsule, the online presentation of the Printed Ephemera collection, comprises 17,000 of the 28,000 physical items. . . While the broadside format represents the bulk of the collection, there are a significant number of leaflets and some pamphlets. Rich in variety, the collection includes proclamations, advertisements, blank forms, programs, election tickets, catalogs, clippings, timetables, and menus.

I found the best way to start looking at the collection is by genre. The breadth of subject matter is really wide — from poetry to advertisements to reward posters like the one to the left.