On Sunday, Emma and I took Evie to Storm King, about 30 miles south of us. It’s a 500+ acre sculpture park, most of the sculptures being on a massive scale, with hundreds of yards between them.

Emma climbed the hill to stand next to one of the sculptures for scale.

Evie surveyed the sights (and rang a bell) from her backpack.

Among our favorites were an easy chair and setee made entirely of U.S. coins—the setee of nickels, and the chair of Kennedy half-dollars. Emma points out a British coin that somehow made it into the mix (and happened to be the only coin that hadn’t tarnished.)

Knowing that we’d be snowed in all weekend (and that I’d need to do something other than play Scrabulous on the laptop), I decided to make some DIY holiday cards using block printing techniques.

I started with linoleum, which I’d worked with in an art class decades ago. Just as I remembered, the linoleum was hard to work with; I ended up spending more time stanching blood than making any real progress. I bandaged my hands and headed back to the art supply store, where I was directed toward something called Speedy Cut. I’d read online that Speedy Cut was prone to crumbling, but I did not find this to be the case at all.

I had a design concept in mind, which I created by compositing three photos of Emma, Baci and me, tracing them with the Bezier tool in Illustrator, then adding some simple pine trees on the sides.

Using the side of a soft pencil, I covered the opposite side of the design sheet in graphite. By flipping the paper onto the Speedy Cut (graphite down, design up) and tracing the outline on the front, the design was transferred. I then cut out the negative space so that the positive areas stood in relief. I did this with both the X-acto knife and slotted linoleum cutting tool.

It was then a matter of inking up the ink plate, rolling ink onto the design template, placing a card face down on the inked template, and giving it a good going-over. I found that the back of a wooden spoon worked better than the side of my hand.
I also found (only at the very end, of course) that adding additional colors sloppily yields excellent results.

It had been a long time since I’d done anything arts-and-craftsy. My sketchbooks and charcoals are in the depths of our basement (near the box of obsolete AC adapters and wires that I keep for some occasion that has never arisen). In any case, I’d forgotten how all-consuming a process like this can be, in the best of ways. It felt great to spend a few hours away from the laptop, doing something analog for a change.

My foray back into the analog world wasn’t all pleasurable, however. The cards now needed to be written and addressed, wherein I learned that I now get writer’s cramp when hand-writing anything longer than eight words.

We headed down to NYC yesterday for the day to attend our good friends’ baby shower. Being that we had a couple hours to kill beforehand, we stopped off at MOMA, like all good tourists.

We started out in the outside garden, where Richard Serra’s latest installation stands in huge, rusted slabs of iron that twist around the outdoor space.

We then stopped inside to see the immense wall full of political comics drawn on-site by Dan Perjovschi. The scale and sheer number of brilliant little political statements were amazing.

Here’s one of many poignant little scenes:

After MOMA we saw a man on the street flying the tiniest kite in history. It actually worked great!

I was so excited about the kite that my camera accidentally went off four or five times on this random corner. (Yawn.)

We’re loving visiting NYC as tourists. The last time I felt like a tourist in New York was when my mom brought my sister and me for a weekend visit when I was nine, in 1980. I distinctly remember riding the packed elevator to the top of the Empire State Building, which was memorable for being the first time I smelled someone else’s B.O. I’m almost positive it was this very tall, skinny guy with a pompadour and a white tank top. I’ve thought of that moment on numerous crowded subway rides since.

In any case, it was a little strange feeling totally dislodged from the city for the first time. It doesn’t feel like it’s ours anymore, but that wasn’t as awful a feeling as I’d expected.

That said, we’re about as far outside of a major city as I’d ever care to be. And I’m very happy that the closest city to us is still New York. (No, Albany doesn’t count.)