I thought it might be fun to work with a group of people from Quo Vadis Blog and see if we could develop our own ghost story – either a page or two of writing each, a sketch, a collage–whatever writing or artwork we want to create to tell our part of the story.  We would pass the notebook along and create as we go.  The last person would write the ending.

Please send me an email (karen@exaclair.com) if you might be interested in participating.  The goal is to have fun, work on a collaborative project together, and publish our Ghost Story on Quo Vadis Blog when it is done.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Nash Dinoland is a family-owned and run museum and archaeological site. They opened in 1939.  The wife of the owner is over 90. She was kind enough to keep the museum open a little past closing time so I could go out to the quarry in the woods to see the ancient tracks in the stone. The museum features plaster of paris representations of dinosaurs and of course, dinosaur tracks.

Here is a description of the discovery of the dinosaur tracks:

“In 1802, a young farm boy by the name of Pliny Moody was plowing a field in South Hadley, Massachusetts.  He unearthed a stone slab that had strange markings on it that looked a lot like large bird tracks.  He took the slab to the educated people of his day, who were mostly christian clergy, to get their opinion on what they were. They declared them to be the tracks of Noah’s raven. (Noah, when he was on the biblical ark, sent out a raven that never returned to the ark.) It was thought that the raven finally touched down in South Hadley and left its tracks in the mud. This is what the tracks were thought to be until the 1830′s.”

Since I had already eaten my chocolate bunny   Lori gave me another treat for Easter – my own dinosaur track!  I have checked, and looked and pondered, and I think it might be from a coelophysis or a close relative.  The track is estimate to be 185-200 million years old.  I traced the track with my fingers and crossed the distance in time to when this dinosaur track was made.  Since the track was pretty clear, I don’t think the dinosaur was running, just walking in the mud, looking around – much like me.

Anyone else been to Nash Dinoland or a museum like it?

Well, this is appropriate timing… I’ve been reading Janet Malcolm’s excellent book about Sylvia Plath, The Silent Woman, and a day after I blogged about handwritten fonts, I reached a passage where Malcolm describes a pack of letters from Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, to the poet and biographer Anne Stevenson:

As I looked at the pages of dense, single-spaced typing, punctuated by x-ings-out and penned-in corrections, I had a nostalgic feeling. The clotted, irregular, unrepentantly messy pages brought back the letters we used to write one another in the 1950s and ’60s on our manual Olivettis and Smith Coronas, so different from the marmoreally cool and smooth letters young people write one another today on their Macintoshes and IBMs.

These days, I guess we’re just syntactically messy.

We never had a set of Encyclopedia Britannicas in our house growing up, but I certainly used the books in school, and I continue to think of them fondly. By the time I was in college, Encyclopedia Britannica had been put online, and in those pre-Wikipedia days, I accessed it through our university’s ethernet connection. In grad school, my research needs took me beyond encyclopedias, and I haven’t used or thought of Britannica in at least the last eight years.

Today, of course, comes the news that Encyclopedia Britannica is ceasing production of its print edition. It’s kind of a funny milestone, thought I’m still surprised and impressed that the print volumes lasted as long as they did.

Did you ever own, or do you still own, a set of Encyclopedia Britannica?

Laurie’s recent review of the Executive reminds me of a subject that came up in our recent survey, and that I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while… the international telephone codes that are listed in the reference sections of our planners.

As you might guess, they’re a holdover from the pre-Internet era, when that information wasn’t a Google search away and Skype had not been invented. Laurie says she still uses hers; I never have, but the data geek in me would still be somewhat sad to see them go. Uzbekistan is 10 hours ahead of us? Nepal and India 10 and a half?

As a bonus bit of trivia, I found myself wondering what “correspondent’s number” referred to in the Regional Area Code column. Nothing too mysterious, it turns out — simply that that country doesn’t have regional codes, so you should just go ahead and dial your correspondent’s number after dialing the country code.

Do you use the telephone access code chart?

I was flipping through this month’s issue of Scientific American when I noticed the following complaint:

Has not the curse of steel pens swept over the land until decent handwriting is almost unknown? Do not ninety-nine persons in a hundred use steel pens, and has more than one out of the ninety-nine the effrontery to say he can write with them? Lord Palmerston was quite right — the handwriting of this generation is abominable; and as new improvements in steel pens go on, that of the next will be worse.

It appeared in a section that reprints excerpts from old issues, and bore the publication date of March 1862. Plus ça change, eh? One wonders what the writer would have thought about the effects of tablet styluses…

I am constantly amazed at the amount of stuff in my home, which seems to accumulate independently of my periodic efforts to cull and toss. The other day, I rediscovered these world map bookplates; if I remember right, I got them as a stocking stuffer a couple years ago.

Handsome as they are, I’ve never actually put them to use. Perhaps it’s a question of habit. In college, I wrote my name onto the inside covers of my books. Now that I’m more settled and my books are less likely to go missing, I don’t even do that. I love looking at old bookplates (here’s a great bookplate blog I discovered thanks to one of Karen’s posts), but somehow I’m just not ready to continue the tradition.

Do you use bookplates?

Karen recently forwarded me a copy of an old promotional brochure with some more information about Dr. FG Beltrami, the founder of Quo Vadis and inventor of the Agenda planner with its one-week-on-two-pages layout.

Up till now, the only other thing I knew about Dr. Beltrami is that he practiced medicine in France and created his first planner by stamping a grid onto the pages of a notebook. Thanks to the brochure, I learned he was in charge of a dental school and hospital — no wonder he was interested in time management!

His outlook was also surprisingly modern:

Too much to do, and too little time to do it. It seems like that is what work, and modern life in general, is all about. That is why we have to fight back, and regain a sense of control.

As a doctor, I have a pragmatic outlook on people. We are all just simply… people. We all tend to do what is easy rather than what is more difficult.

I believe in taking simple steps to accomplish what is truly important.

Not so far from today’s world, is it?

Meet my new favorite office supply: a strange, spongy rubber thumb cap I found at a client’s office. It’s covered in little raised dots and has a few air holes on one side, perhaps so you don’t overheat. At any rate, the intended use seems to be for flipping through stacks of paper or leafing through a book and preventing the pages from sticking together. I gather the official name is a thimblette.

Frankly, it’s nothing that a licked finger couldn’t also accomplish, but it’s a fun object to idly squish and squeeze and play around with, and it doesn’t take up much space in my drawer.

Have you ever used one?

The New York Times magazine ran a great story this weekend about papermaker Timothy Barrett, whose hand-crafted pages have been used to mend historical documents from manuscripts to musical scores. There’s lots to think about here, but first and foremost:

Barrett’s work has been driven by the notion that good materials, worked by hand, transmit their power in ways that the products of less painstaking manufacture can’t. “I have to believe that the eye and the hand take it all in, even when we’re not aware of it,” he said. There’s a poignancy to his work, given that paper’s long role as the repository of cultural memory and accomplishment is being usurped by swift technological change.

The piece is well-worth reading, as is the online slideshow that shows Barrett at work.