It's been raining a lot.

As in, last year the majority of Texas was in a drought, and now Texas is flooding everywhere. Craziness.

I was in Fort Worth this past weekend, which was Memorial Day weekend, as it was my last long weekend of the summer. (Thankfully, I didn't get stormed on while traveling either way.)

Since I will be taking classes and working the rest of the summer, I won't have any wiggle room on either side of Saturday/Sunday, which makes half a day of travelling on either end a bit more than desired (for one night of being outside of Lubbock).

Regardless, I had fun this past weekend. I drove across Texas after work on Thursday, and got to see some of my favorite people over the weekend. Highlights of the week include having brunch at Gloria's with my sister (they have fantastic $1 mimosas during brunch time), and spending all of Monday with Stephen (hanging out with friends and then watching a couple movies with just us).

I enjoy living in Lubbock, being independent, and doing the whole classes and internship thing. But it can be pretty lonely when family and friends are all several hours away (and when my Lubbock friends leave for the summer but I'm stay behind so I can graduate on time, which is still a semester longer than the original plan).

Anyhow, it rained previously while I was in Lubbock, it rained in Fort Worth when I was there this weekend, and is now raining when I am back in Lubbock. The strange thing was that it flooded in both places. Now, Lubbock will sometimes flood when it barely drizzles, but DFW usually has pretty good drainage systems. It seems there was just too much water to handle this go around. There have been floods, accidents, and deaths; it is bad (as an update, in case you haven't looked outside or read/heard any news in the past week or two).

The intern window (that I sit next to) starting leaking during this storm. Two shirts and a giant roll of paper towels later, and the storm started clearing up.

It's great to have rain, but it would be nice if things evened out now. No more massive rain/hail/tornado systems making me want to skip driving to or from campus. That would be helpful.

So, yes, this is a short blog. I'm sure I have lots of interesting things to say, but nothing is coming to mind, so here you go.


Needing to buy a bigger umbrella,

The Purple Writer

Texas Tech English has a letterpress studio.

Although Texas Tech is more focused on its STEM programs (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), there are a wide variety of other great programs here. For instance, the English department.

Now, the English department does not get a lot of money to maintain itself, because its graduates generally don't go on to make millions of dollars in oil/gas/whatnot. There are a lot of changes and improvements which just can't be afforded, but it does the best that it can, and even has a really cool room which holds the letterpress studio, also known as the TTU Letterpress Lab.

Several English professors have donated quite a bit of their own time and money to bring about the existence of this letterpress studio. There are a few different beautiful presses, including a simple tabletop proof press, a tabletop platen, and a handpress.

In the fall, I had applied to join the Letterpress Lab apprenticeship program, in which I could have worked my way up from a "printer's devil" to an actual printer and be able to print things and work in the press on my own. However, it turns out that I was a semester or two too late, as the program was going through several changes and the apprenticeship is no longer an option. Graduate students get to take a letterpress class, which I'm pretty jealous of, although there are talks of having an undergraduate class in the future (probably after I graduate, of course).

Anyhow, several really cool documents have been printed by hand in the TTU Letterpress Lab. Some of the coolest are broadsides of poetry. These are one-sided, single-page prints which are usually quite unique and beautiful.

These are a couple of the ones I've collected.The three on the left are poems by poets which were brought in to speak for the English department: Mary Szybist, Jeffrey Harrison, and Robin Becker. (We studied books by Mary Szybist and Robin Becker for the capstone poetry course I took last Fall, and it was really great to be able to meet them, hear them read, get books signed, and then get these broadsides as an extra souvenir.)

Last week, the English department paired with the Tech Book History Club (which I'm technically a part of but I haven't been able to make it to more than one meeting all year) to hold an open house for the letterpress studio. This was a chance for people to come and experience the awesomeness of hand printing that normally wouldn't have that opportunity.

We got little blocks of linoleum to print with. We came up with designs that we wanted, and carved out the white space on the linoleum. Then we went into the letterpress studio and printed with our blocks, using a small, tabletop proof press.  Here you can see the prints that I designed and made.

The block was put down and secured in place, had ink rolled over its top several times, had paper placed on top, had extra filler paper placed on top of that, and then a roller was dragged across the top of the whole thing, to transfer the ink from the block onto the paper.

The whole process was pretty simple and fun. I'm going to keep looking for a way around the graduate-students only rule, but for now I have these two pretty little prints to look at.

Thinking happy thoughts while recovering from my post-finals sickness,

The Purple Writer

This past weekend was pretty great.

First off, I know I've been slacking with my blog again. However, finals are finally here so I can take a breath, have some fun, and write posts again.

It's really the month before finals that are hard, what with so many projects, papers, and presentations that generally add up to form the majority of the grades in all my classes. I only have one final that is worth more than about 10% of my overall grade, so I can relax, having secured my overall grades in my classes (unless I was to actually fail a final, which isn't a concern this semester, at least).

But that's boring. Let's get back to my cool weekend of geekiness.

As you may guess from that poster, I started the weekend early on Thursday, with the midnight premiere of Avengers: Age of Ultron. It was a fun movie. Not as good as the first Avengers, but it set up several of the upcoming Marvel movies, which was important. I won't give any spoilers, of course, because not everyone was able to find time to watch it this weekend, but I would definitely be willing to go see it again.

On Friday, I watched the third and fourth episode of the current GOT season (and finally painted the new side mirror for my car, so it wouldn't look super strange when attached).

While doing this, I did some deeper cleaning and straightening in my room. It gets to be a mess toward the end of the semester, and I'm going to start moving my stuff to my future residence in a couple weeks, so organization will definitely help with that.

I also made my second kahlua chocolate bundt cake! (Somehow it still turned out well after I left it in the oven for an extra half hour).





Saturday, I hung out with some cool, geeky people.
I got free comics (for Free Comic Book Day, of course), bought the Civil War graphic novel (issues #1-7), and enjoyed the atmosphere of general nerdiness that can be found at comic book stores (especially when there's a table outside raising money for the  Lubbock-Con).

I watched the animated Flashpoint Paradox movie, which was the starting point for DC's New 52 comics. How had I not heard that story before? Well, I'm not sure, but I've seen the movie now, so we're all good.

I finally bought a Beatles record (I've been wanting one for a while, but didn't want to pay shipping or risk a warped album), as well as an Imagine Dragons record. Barnes & Noble is carrying record albums, which is pretty awesome, but a bit expensive, of course.

Then, on Sunday, I hosted a Star Wars marathon!

We started with episode 3, because people didn't have enough time to watch all six episodes, and made Star Wars gingerbread and sugar cookies.

I don't want to give away all of our secrets, but it was pretty awesome, so maybe you can try to be invited to my Star Wars party next year, if you're lucky enough to be my friend and in Lubbock on the first weekend in May.






So, in summary, I have not fallen off the face of the planet, I had a fun weekend before finals (which you are welcome to be jealous of), and I'm planning to be a little more consistent now, but we'll see how that goes (again). I have a couple weeks between the end of this spring semester and the beginning of the first summer session, during which time I plan to be working and moving and reading comics and writing posts.

Off to prep for my mock press conference in PR Writing tomorrow,
The Purple Writer