Alec Longstreth

Oakland "Winter Term"

Fri 1/22/2010

Every year at Oberlin, they gave us the entire month of January to work on whatever project we were interested in, whether it was related to our studies or not. Or at least they did when I went there, and I hope they still do, because it was one of my favorite things about that school. This free month was called "Winter Term" and I used it to draw comics, build furniture, make music and do all sorts of other things that I loved to do, things that made me a better person, but that I just couldn't seem to make time for during the hectic hustle and bustle of the school year.

Well, I spent about three weeks in Oakland with Claire this January, and it felt kind of like a Winter Term of olde! I couldn't very well bring my gigantic Basewood pages with me to the west coast, so I was able to finally work on some projects that never get my full attention, but deserve it nonetheless.

I did a ton of scripting on my big "Isle of Elsi" story, which I hope to have all ready to go once Basewood is complete, I worked on the pencils for a 9-page comic set in the same universe for the Elfworld 2 anthology, I even met up with a bunch of bay-area cartoonists one night and just drew in my sketchbook! I wrote some bad poetry, I read some GOOD poetry, plus a small stack of other books that I have been meaning to get to for ages. I also went on a bunch of adventures with Claire!

If a picture is in fact worth a thousand words, then I'll save you about a million words here, and just link you to the Flickr set I uploaded from my time in Oakland. If you don't want to click through the whole thing, here are some of the main points of interest:

• Claire made me the most amazing christmas gift EVER (pictured above!)
• We did some cool self-guided walking tours of San Francisco
• We built some planter boxes for Claire's garden
• We went and played some pinball at the newly expanded Pacific Pinball Museum (OF COURSE)
• Claire took me down to San Jose to see the Winchester Mystery House which was totally nuts!
• Oh, there was also a huge Pinball Exhibit at the San Francisco airport on my way out of town. It even had one of the FIRST pinball machines ever built, from 1880 (?!)

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm back in White River Junction now, and trying to get back into the swing of things. I just had a seriously hectic and busy week, trying to send out my back log of Phase 7 orders, answering a ton of mail and emails, getting ready to do my taxes, and doing a bunch of extra teaching too. We're working on this super intense project at CCS for the next two weeks and the students are working like the badass new gods that they are, so I have to try and keep up!

I better dive back in... I'm not sure what I'll have to share when I resurface, but I'll try to make it something worthwhile!