Sold my old stereo to a kid from Loyola tonight. Stopped by Radio Shack before that to look at build-yr-own electrical kits for kids. Nothing great, but I think I’m gonna start with some simple solar cells and FM radio stuff for my first projects. Bought a soldering iron a couple weeks back but have yet to inaugurate it. Bought myself a book entitled “BASIC ELECTRICITY” today for thirteen bucks. Almost five hundred pages. Some kind of Navy manual reprinted. Very dense. Looking forward to immersing myself in it.
Biked this afternoon out to Lake Montebello with my partner from Monument City and acquired geodata and historical documentation for four new monuments: Martin Luther, who overlooks the lake; Mother’s Garden, which is up on the hill; “On the Trail” - up on Clifton Park Golf Course. While there, we managed to get a guided mini-tour by one of the elderly groundskeepers to a hidden home once inhabited by Johns Hopkins, namesake of the fairly prestigious Baltimore university. And I also crawled under a bush to capture the text from the Indian monument. Lake Montebello is actually a lot closer than I thought. It’s probably a case of psychological distance, as opposed to actual distance. Places you don’t go frequently tend to seem farther away.
Speaking of farther away, a friend sent me a job opening at his company. Something about telepresence. A subject which interests me a lot: the ability for people to project their likeness over great distances. Trying to do the same thing with an embedded time element through the Monument City project. Nevermind Time Travel Club. I’m a little bummed that President’s Day has mostly came and went at this point and I wasn’t able to coordinate a successful warning of Abraham Lincoln performance. But now that my fellowship application is all mailed out and off my chest, I’ll be able to redouble my efforts in the coming weeks.
Also came to a monument by the YMCA, where Memorial Stadium used to be. Something fairly new with an electronic bell tower and a replica medieval church labyrinth. Underneath a bench on site was also a notebook attached via thick wire. It contained dedications and statements of intent by people who had visited the place before us. I gather it was a planned element of the monument experience for that location. Will have to look into that in more depth. Gonna start doing point-by-point written narratives for the 45+ monuments we’ve documented so far. I have a strong feeling I’m gonna have to hit up some local libraries and delve into microfiche collections to get to the really good stuff. I also want to track down local monuments which have been moved, or which don’t exist anymore. We have big plans for this project, but are taking it one step at a time. Haven’t biked so much in a while. Been great though. Feel like I’m discovering a whole new city hidden amidst backdrops which had become otherwise invisible through overuse.
- END -
ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
