When I was in eight grade we got connected with a class of students our age in Ghana or Ethiopia or somewhere. They were learning English and we were their American pen pals.
I know I still have a copy of both letters that I got from mine. I don’t remember her name, seeing as this was over ten years ago but distinctly remember that the paper her letters were on was blue and folded together in a particularly confusing manner. It was folded like I know now that bills or W-2 forms arrive where you have to tear off the sides and split the top before you open it. The paper her letter came on was ridiculously thin and I opened it like one would open a regular letter and ripped it in half. Oops. I taped it back together the best I could and read it carefully.

Our first letters were the regular boring back-and-forth. I sent a few American coins with my letter because they were the only thing I could think to send that might be interesting. I had never experienced any other country and didn’t know what kind of things they had in different parts of the world. I sent the letter to her on this nice arctic animal stationary I had received for my birthday one year. Although, now that I think about it, I wonder how many animals she recognized. Arctic animals are fairly different from their African counterparts.

The next letter I got from her thanked me for the coins, said they were interesting, answered a few more questions and then, to my great horror and discomfort, asked for twenty dollars so she could afford to go to school for the next year.

I was petrified. I didn’t know how to respond. I felt like I had done something wrong by sending the coins but was worried that if I sent the money I would keep getting asked or, worse, mess up the whole pen pal thing and make her classmates jealous and ask as well and mess up the whole program. I was ashamed to tell my parents, although I can’t explain why.
I thought about it.

And I stressed over it.

I steeped in shame and guilt as the months passed. I didn’t want her to think I was mad at her but didn’t know how to say no or if I could say yes without creating a culture of dependency in the communication.

And eventually I never responded.
After about two months I got another letter with a repeat request. This time she asked for ten dollars.

I never responded.

To this day I still feel awful about it and don’t know how I should have responded.

Maybe it’s finally time to ask my parents.

PRINTING SUCKS:

Printers are dastardly and frustrating. It seems like they always manage to, either, fail to reproduce what was pictured on the screen or they print one itty-bitty paragraph per page just because you forgot to check a tiny hidden box buried in the print menu.
Using your printer leaves you feeling guilty and penniless from all the pricey paper you’re using, and, to add insult to injury, the ink is FREAKING EXPENSIVE.
Wonder why ink is priced like it’s some kind of liquid gold? One of the big reasons (apart from the “razor and blades” method of business modeling) is because we’re using archival quality ink. The documents we print out are all being prepared to last for the next 200+ years. The problem is that we don’t actually want everything we print out to last for 200 years. Much of it we don’t want to last until next week.

The usual printing experience goes thusly; you write a paper, print it out, proofread it, make corrections and enter it back in to the computer. You print it out again, proof a second time, making sure that there aren’t any errors and enter it back into the computer. If you’re lucky (and you’re the greatest essay writer of all time), your document is now perfect and you print it out one last time, except that the second you take it off the printer you see a glaring error that you somehow missed on the screen and have to print it AGAIN.
By this time, imagining it was a 5 page document, you’ve printed out 20 pages of slightly embarrassing junk that you hope never sees the light of day and you’ve used up some part of a rainforest in Brazil before lunchtime. If you’re inclined, you recycle those 20 pages and they begin a thousand-mile journey to be ground up, doused in caustic chemicals,  and pressed into a lower quality product that looks just like the crisp bleached-white pages you disposed of, but without the printed text.

Feeling slightly nauseated by this? Don’t worry, it eventually becomes just another bad taste in the back of your throat that you learn to ignore as you print ream after ream of paper directly into the recycling bin.
If only you could remove the ink that you knew you weren’t going to want to keep, and re-use the paper in your own office. What if you could print out the final document on those same pages that you proofed it on? What if you could have that recycling plant in your own office?

(I recognize that in an ideal world we would proofread things on the computer, but sadly, most of us have a great deal of trouble doing that and see errors on physical paper that we would otherwise miss. This isn’t just a problem for the older generations. It’s just as hard for the new technology-immersive-all-digital-all-the-time generation to catch those pesky written errors on a digital surface. Perhaps we will eventually find a medium or screen that overcomes this challenge, but even so I doubt that anything will ever replace paper. I honestly doubt anything will ever even come close to the ease and elegance of a tactilely stimulating piece of paper covered in crisp little words.)

PALIMPSEST PRINTING:

There’s a surprisingly obvious solution to this perpetual printing problem: erasable ink. The issue here is that the solution isn’t that simple. Erasing is a complex process and I doubt that anyone would sit and rub an eraser over every printed page (gently enough that it doesn’t destroy the integrity of the paper) no matter HOW environmentally aware they are. You can’t use chemical baths to erase because that involves so much mess and shipping that it gets costly and counterproductive pretty quickly. Palimpsest ink is a different approach to this problem. Palimpsest ink uses one of the simplest but still most powerful tools that we have: UV rays. Most people don’t realize that we’ve spent thousands of years trying to develop lightfast colors and they still aren’t perfect. UV rays break down things so readily that artists to have to keep work out of sunlight because it fades with such limited exposure. Also, most ‘natural’ dyes are rejected for modern use because they lack the lightfastness of the expensive synthesized colors.

Palimpsest ink is made of a compound that holds up long enough to proof-read something, but disappears (or breaks-down molecularly) under certain circumstances leaving behind a clean sheet of paper. This circumstance, to ensure that a document isn’t accidently erased before the user is ready, is intense UV light. What makes it different from similar ideas is that the paper doesn’t need to be coated in some kind of solvent (a potentially messy and limited process) and can go back to being what is essentially the pure original paper.

The ink won’t be the dark black color that we expect to see come out of our printers, and instead is a shade of green. This color is visible, easy to read, and makes it obvious that something was Palimpsest Printed. Also, the green color has the added symbolism of being an environmentally friendly (or ‘green’) product.

The ink will be available in printer cartridges or refill kits. Colored palimpsest ink is unnecessary because color prints are usually intended to be permanent or work better on a digital surface.

There will be a small machine called the Light Cycle. This is a simple device that exposes the paper, sheet by sheet, to an intense UV light. The bulbs necessary for this light are already on the market for tooth-bleaching, reptile cages, and tanning beds. The user can print their pages, proof them, put them in the Light Cycle and walk away. The machine does the rest. After a few minutes the user returns to find their pages are blank and as good as new. The machine itself is essentially an automatic scanner without all the bits that give it the ability to scan things.

Lastly, there will also be pens available that are filled with the same kind of ink as in the printer. This enables the user to proof their document in pen and not have to worry about it not coming out in the Light Cycle.

HOW DOES IT WORK:

Intense UV light bombards the chemical chains that make up ink with tight wavelengths and smashes them into fragments which quickly bond with oxygen and form new ‘dormant’ molecules that no longer absorb color from light (and therefore the page only reflects white).
This is the same process that leads to fading colors on signs, cars, houses, paintings, and clothes.

The environmental boon to this product is twofold; first, businesses can use significantly less paper, and secondly, the ink itself requires fewer intense chemicals to produce (which also makes it cheaper to manufacture). Normally all dye/ink/etc. production is shaped by the need for lightfast but vibrant pigments. Natural dyes, which are much cheaper to produce than modern micronized pigments, are less lightfast and better for this project. The ink could be advertised as both a ‘green’ and a natural solution to printing. Lake dyes, which are often byproducts of other industries, are notorious for breaking down easily when exposed to intense UV light and will probably be ideal for this project.

The palimpsest ink won’t break down so easily that it can endanger the pages to leave them sitting out on your desk. Many wavelengths of UV light (UVB in particular) don’t make it through glass, so unless left outside in broad daylight for an extended period of continually sunny weather, the palimpsest ink wouldn’t break down before it was put in the Light Cycle.

WAIT WHAT IS IT AGAIN?:

The Palimpsest Printer Ink and Light Cycle is eco-sensitive solution to the environmentally unsustainable and necessary practice of printing. We often take for granted how many resources printing something (and recycling the waste-paper) really uses. This would be a way to use less paper, avoid the energy-expensive recycling system, and save both the atmosphere and the forests. There is a huge market just waiting for this simple way to change how we do business and to help save the world.

This doesn’t exist.

I wish it did.

I don’t have the power to invent this or make any of this happen. I’ve tried for a few years, but am at the point where I am giving up and releasing it to the internet. This would help save the world. It’s an idea I would have loved to have been able to be connected to but there doesn’t seem to be a possibility. If you manage to make this happen, I’d love to be involved/have a little credit for it, which would enable me to actually release other things that I’ve come up with in the same vein over the years.

I recorded this video last year to make sure I had some date associated with the idea, and to give me a time scale to release the notion on the internet. It’s been over a year since then, so I’m freeing it.

Thanks.

I am keeping this in mind as a think about my potential future trip to go explore the insect farming in places like thailand. I have found that, although I can take decent photographs, it requires a lot of my attention to document everything and most of the time I am trying to communicate or understand a complex situation orrrrr I am chasing down some critter which doesn’t go well with an expensive camera in hand. It’s usually more important that I pay attention to staying upright or not hurting the creature than avoiding damaging the camera.

But even THIS POST is boring without pictures.

Here. This should help.

Here's some geoducks from when I was at a weird grocery in NY back in 2008.

Tah dah! Interesting!

Man. I need to hook up with some wildlife photographer. One of the hardcore ones. Someone who will be willing to help me document some of the amazing things that I see.
I WANT TO GO DO FIELD STUFF NOW. I need to go stand in a river and look at bugs. I need wildlife! But alas, I have the homeworks.

Step 1: sit a reasonable distance from printer to be subtle (apparently as if hunting it),download printer app thing, find printer number, realize it is actually on the printer, walk over and read printer number, attempt to print… fail.

Step 2: Observe use of computer on site in printing, go up and read computer, reason that money must be put on the buckID to print, try to figure out how to put money on buck ID. Sit. Observe.
Step 3: Notice a machine people are accessing on other side of floor. Observe them swiping the buck ID and then inserting money to the machine. Excellent!
Hope that buck ID isn’t too old for this, attempt machine, obey diagram of where to swipe the ID. Swipe. Swipe.. swipeswipeswipe. Double check to make sure that you are holding the card the same direction as the diagram tells you to. Swipeswipeswipeswipeswipe. Shake card. Slow swipe. Be informed that the card is backwards by the person behind you who has watched all this. Insert money… upside-down. Pretend it was on purpose. Laugh heartily. Remember you’re in a library. Laugh quietly.

Step 3:…
Step 4……tiredoftypingthis

Step 5: YAY! Printed! Wait… this is in color. I specifically wanted double sided. Whyy.

Step 6: Staple paper. Stapler broken. Rip Paper. Flail dejectedly. Give Up.

So, I got one while I was at work one day. It was all fabulous. I work nearby and don’t like to use disposables so I trot gleefully (this is a rare indulgence for me) to the restaurant with my handy (cute) ceramic bowl in an extremely determined good mood (as I almost always get laughed at for my green-ness and refuse to let it get me down).

This relatively cute blond kid (probably a junior in HS) gives the bowl a curious look and has me order*.He smirks while I explain and proceeds to jovially confer with his coworkers while I sign the receipt.

This is okay. I’m used to it. I’m a warrior for my cause. A lone nerd on a battlefield (unlikely) covered in disposables and fallen comrades (lies) for the cause. A hero for the plankton (as if) and advocate for justice (you have got to be kidding me).

Right.

So…

Burger transaction achievement: completed!

Hunger bar: depleted!

So I wait for my food, pretending to play a game on my phone but listening to them as they joke about me and infer my life choices. My name is called, I smile cheerily and say “thank you”.

Trot trot trot. Back to the store. Food time, right?

Wrong. My spidey sense goes off. Something is amiss. I inspect the foodstuffs with a critical eye. HARK! Is this meat¹ I see here?! D’awww. Maaaaaan, he got my order wrong. I forgive him. He was distracted. But how can I be certain. I taste the tiniest corner and- EURGH. AWFUL. Blech blech blech icky icky gross washingmymouthoutnow. I am sad at my sammich. A coworker (who has been sitting beside me the whole time helping me determine the legume-ness of the burger) suggests that I go back and tell them. I hesitate but she insists that it’s the right thing to do.

I sigh and grumble, but soon enough I find myself clip-clopping my way back across the wastelands of parking lots with my sammich and my ceramic bowl and re-enter their lovely place of business.

I stand in line as the cashier eyes me carefully while taking other orders. No doubt he is thinking that I am a problem customer. That I am so uptight and anal retentive that I am here to be critical and greedy.

At long last I am front of the line. I apologetically hand him the bowl with the burger and put on my best cute-big-eyes-innocent look. “I think you guys accidentally gave me a non-vegetarian burger”. He apologizes profusely and is significantly less annoyed at me than he clearly expected to be. He offers to fix it and I acquiesce and sit down to wait on the handy-dandy chair next to the pick-up counter and fiddle² with my phone.

“Uh, miss?” He leans over the counter at me.

“Yes?” I intentionally exude sweetness.

“This is the black bean burger,” he politely states. I freeze, unable to figure out a way of ‘solving’ the situation. My brain quits working.

“oh…” I stare, brain still refusing to work. The entire staff stares at me, resembling nothing so much as a herd of ungulates stopping their regular life to stare at the biologist sneaking through the grass.

“I am SO sorry,” I manage to squeeze out.

“It’s cold now. We could remake it if you’d like.”

“No, don’t worry about it. I’m sorry for bothering you.” I’m still traumatized. I’m not good at social situations. “That’s what I get for having one of my friends try it to be sure, hah.”

WHAT?

WHAT DID I JUST SAY?

THERE IS SMIRKING. I SEE SMIRKING. OH GOD I SAID SOMETHING.

Oh god. That something was incredibly stupid. That didn’t even make sense. What kind of excuse is that?!

One or two of the cooks snicker. I offer one final apology and flee.

I finally get back to have my lunch and it is cold by that point. Ew. I totally should have had him remake it.

Final Notes:

• There are correct ways for me to have responded to this situation. I should have laughed at myself with them and gotten over it. Unfortunately I panicked.
• I’m pretty sure it tasted the way it did because it was just a surface taste. They make it on the same grill and that meat taste that I so dislike probably just came from residue left from other sammiches they made for regular people.
• Black bean burgers are gross when they’re cold.
• I totally haven’t been back since them and somewhat intend to never go again. Ultimately it’s probably better for my health and my wallet.

*As a side note: I am notoriously bad at ordering food**.

¹ Having not had a real meat burger in long enough am apparently incapable of recognizing what one looks like without intense amounts of scrutiny.

² Although I am certain that there probably is an app with which to literally fiddle with my phone, I was not using one. I was playing scramble with friends.

**I always get the same thing at restaurants so that I don’t have to go through the panicked awkwardness I feel when put under that kind of scrutiny. I KNOW it is supposed to be a transaction of words, a communicative interlude wherein I don’t need to come up with anything to say except for my order but I nearly always panic. It’s made worse when it’s somewhere like GB where I have to phrase my decision according to a protocol based on a menu above the register and someone is waiting for my order in suspense. The words come out with the shuffling grace of a one-footed penguin on ice (backwards, upside-down, and unstoppably).

I would like a native iphone appthing that uses the camera where if I am on google maps looking at something on my COMPUTER screen, I can take a picture of it and replicate it on my phone. This will work for directions, small documents, webpages, etc. I am SO tired of emailing things to myself as a method of linking to whatever I am looking at. It’s really dreary. I have to do this a lot, too. Today, for example, I was trying to get to a library on campus (I don’t care which library it is, I just want somewhere comfy to sit where I can get some work done until my next class) and looked it up on my computer. Sadly, I have the memory capacity of a small ham sandwich and promptly forget the name of the library when I reach the outdoors and get distracted and overwhelmed by all the people and everything. I want to look down at my lovely GPS in google maps on my iphone and KNOW that I’m not walking in to-

REALTIME INTERRUPTION: Dammit. I totally forgot my water bottle in my last class. I knew that was going to happen. Now I have to go try to find it and get it back. Waaaaaterrrrr. Sadface.

- in to a dorm or someones house or a sorority/surgical hall where everyone is wearing pink/scrubs except for me and I feel awkward and horribly out of place.

Also, if I am in a building without reception my phone should cache it until I get reception again.

A friend of mine, Michelle, from the glass studio had a problem. She was scared of spiders. Luckily for me I had, apparently, already earned a reputation as some kind of fearless-warrior-arthropod-whisperer and she asked if I could help her with an assignment that was based on facing her fears. We needed to find a tarantula. Seeing as I hadn’t too many contacts with tarantulas available I tried my best to find one but ultimately failed. We eventually had to go and get one at a pet store (not the best solution ever, I admit, but without this I wouldn’t be the lover of them that I am now) and picked up a 4-5″ Grammostola rosea that I promptly named wobbles. The guy working there was terrified of the tarantula and while guiding it into a small container with the lid he closed it on Wobbles’ foot. This was upsetting. The worker didn’t notice. We took action.
“DUDE.”
“Huh?”
“LOOK!” (Insert emphatic pointing here)
“Huh?”
“RIGHT THERE.” We pointedly pointed out.
“wot?”
“YOU CLOSED IT ON HER FOOT!”
“Oh… Youuuu want me to fix that?”
“…..”
“…”
“YES!!!” (There were actually that many exclamation points when it happened. I swear.)

We got the spider and picked up everthing else we needed to take care of a tarantula. I wish now that we complained about that guy’s behavior. It wasn’t appropriate but I didn’t feel certain enough of everything to be comfortable calling him out on it. If it happened to me now, I would.
Once we got back to the car and prepared to head back to the studio I turned to Michelle:
“Iiinnnnn the interest of full disclosure I’ve neveractuallydonethisbefore.”
“WHAT?!” She slammed on the brakes. (I assume this was for dramatic effect because the car hadn’t been turned on yet.)
“Well, in my defense, I didn’t ever say that I had specific tarantula experience, and I’m determined to do it.”
“Oh god, oh god. You have no idea what you’re doing!”
“I’ve read a lot about it! There’s a certain point where you just have to do something and I think this is it. Don’t worry about it. I’ll take responsibility for anything and will make sure you don’t get hurt.” I felt fairly confident about this. As long as I am presented with a situation I can usually do whatever needs to be done to accomplish it.
“It’s not ME that I’m worried about being injured…”

We did the video shoot. Getting over a phobia is challenging and there may have been tears (not mine). But at the end of the day Michelle held a tarantula and our friend Charlie did a great job with filming. Everything went reasonably well. We all learned a good lesson about urticating hairs and when to stop poking a tarantula.
In a slightly joking manner as we were cleaning up and figuring out what to do with Wobbles I asked Charlie if he wanted a pet spider. He surprised me with his answer.

Wobbles still lives with Charlie and is rather cranky, but I fully intend to handle her more now that I have a better understanding of tarantulas.

When Charlie was on tour I got to be the official caretaker of Wobbles. She completely charmed me (and my mother!) and I had a feeling that I might want one down the line.

Continued in Part III

“IT’S A TRAP!!!!” it said as it plummeted downward.

I was alarmed until I saw it stop in mid-air with a sort of plink* motion. I watched as it paused for a moment, suspended above the ground, as if waiting for me to pursue it in my vicious mammalian manner. I held my breath (carbon dioxide is something that comes from large mammal/predator mouths and I didn’t want him to think I was one of those) and waited. The little Salticid looked back up at me and, apparently convinced that it was a false alarm, skittered back up the string to the unknown territory that was my finger.
I fell a little bit in love with jumping spiders that day.
And fell even more in love the next day.
And the next spider.
Until I met my first tarantula.
(TO BE CONTINUED)

* I wouldn’t ask me what a plink motion is, exactly, because I don’t know how else to explain it. If it were to make a sound it would have been plink. Plink, for the uninitiated, clearly is the sound it makes when you pluck a thread that has been pulled taught. Plink plink plink.

I am away.

I am staying on an island in Lake Erie.

I spent a day fleeing violent projectile cormorant puke on an abandoned island.

Best. Day. Ever.

I collected so many things! There’s a particularly rank dead baby Great Blue Heron sitting outside by a tree in a tray of alcohol. I keep hoping that it will magically take care of itself, but this wish has not been fulfilled.

I have field journals to do.

I have been identifying things. There are a great many beetles and bugs that I have carefully pinned and preparing to be labeled.

All my bits itch. The worse the bit, the more it itches.

I do mischievous things that make people smile, but sadly always manage to get in trouble for them. It was worth it, though.

Excel makes everything on my computer run more slowly.

UPDATE: THIS WAS FROM JULY 9th. I apparently never clicked post. Hmm.

No. I REALLY love vultures.

This actually took way too much effort. I worked VERY hard to have the accurate font from the original poster. I recognize that I'm the only one who can possibly notice, but it matters. I couldn't stand seeing how wrong the C and M looked on the similar fonts.

How cool is that

I was going to show you this gorgeous postcard from sueshane.com that I have, but sadly she only allows the worlds tiniest previews on her site and I’m too lazy to take it out of its frame and scan it. (Someone should tell her that she’s more likely to sell cards if people can actually see them…)

So… Turkey Vultures are awesome. They lack something called a syrinx so they only make endearing grunting and hissing sounds. They hunt by SMELL! This is awesome, by the way, because very few birds do this.

I feel like Turkey Vultures are really easy to think of as modern dinosaurs with that cherry naked head.

They pee on their legs to kill the bacteria from the carrion.

EDIT: So that picture above I apparently forgot to link to its original source. That’s what I get for not directly linking from it and using up their bandwidth. I feel rather bad about that. It’s from Samuel Blanc at http://www.sblanc.com and the site is worth taking a look at as this is, obviously, a nice image. Ooops.
 

KAY. THX WIKIPEDIA