As many of you know, we’re experiencing some incredible flooding here in Iowa City, though it hasn’t yet become as drastic here as it has in Cedar Rapids or in Des Moines. The University of Iowa has several campus buildings that reside next to the Iowa River and they’ve been evacuating those buildings all week.

This morning Noah & I headed over to the University of Iowa Main Library to help move some of the books that were in Special Collections storage to upper floors. Noah did an incredible amount of moving heavy book carts for over 2 solid hours. Here he is bringing one to me to pass off to the next link in the book brigade.

After we tired of that, we moved back to my office in the Lindquist Center, which is across the street from the Main Library. This was being evacuated, too, so we spent another couple of hours packing up all my computer equipment (and all my toys) and putting them into storage — no one is sure for how long.

I also found out that my house is within the 500 year flood plain, and that this flood may reach those levels over the weekend or early next week. So far, however, the creek that lives across the street from me remains at normal levels.

Here’s hoping there’s no more rain this next week!

A friend of ours opened a nifty shop recently where one can go and do things like rent sewing machines, learn knitting, buy yarn, or get lessons in screen printing. I took Noah in for a screen printing lesson. I’ve never done it, either, but it turns out it’s much easier than the way I remember my mom printing political signs and banners when I was a kid, where she’d have to exactingly cut away film from a screen. We used a photo emulsion technique that made the process go much faster, and cleaner. I didn’t take pictures of the printing session itself, but here’s a progression from drawing to t-shirt:

Noah’s sketch of a boy, a book, and a grouchy cat:

Noah holding up the emulsified screen with the light shining through so you can see the design:

and, the final print as shown on my t-shirt. The finer lines didn’t come through as well, but the cat turned out great, especially the added stripes.

Anyways, it was all great fun, and we’re already plotting a collaboration to do next time.

Noah has arrived for his annual summer visit. A month earlier than usual — which is great because the weather’s nicer, and less sticky. So far.

Today, as is our tradition, we spent his first day in Iowa City at the bookstore, local awesomeness, Prairie Lights. We had high octane and chocolate milk, and Noah read Naruto comics while I read the New York Times.

Noah kept exclaiming how cool the Naruto was, and I had to comment, honestly, “Your Manga is way less depressing than my New York Times.” So maybe I should go back to just reading comics.

This is one in a series of images I took in 2004 and 2005 with a couple of toy cameras I have. Some images are local, and some are from a vacation taken to the Northwest.

Both cameras use medium format film, which is expensive to get index prints of, because an “index” print is essentially separate 4X4 pictures, rather than the usual contact sheet with lots of little thumbnails. Anyway, I have several rolls of these negatives lying around, and after reading about someone else’s method of digitizing them, I decided to give it a try.

Basically, you hold the negative up to a good light and take a photo of the negative with a digital camera, then fiddle around with the image in photoshop. These are the ones that turned out fairly well. I even left them in their plastic sleeves, and while that added some texture, I still got a pretty good idea of what each picture would look like if I were to pay to have it developed for real.

Click on the image above to see the others.

I visited some long-time friends this weekend in MPLS and they took me to my first May Day parade. A 30-some year tradition in south Minneapolis. One of the largest participants/organizers of the parade is the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre.

It was pretty cool. The whole thing took like 3 hours to go past, and while I didn’t have the best vantage point (it’s super crowded — thousands of people crammed into a small area to see this event), I got some pretty good shots of things as they went past.