Tonight, the dinner conch blew early and I headed down the hill at dusk. As I neared a tree right on the path, a strange sight beheld me: a tiny grey bird fluttered out of the tree to the ground. We stopped about 10', eyeing each other.

It was a 5" tall Screech Owl, loaded down with a very fat rodent, nearly the same size as the owl. No wonder it couldn't fly! The tiny bird looked up at me for about 15 seconds, obviously trying to decide whether or not to abandon the hard-won meal. And then it flew off to a tree and watched me walk down the hill. I have never seen such a tiny owl at such close range for such a long time.

After dinner, I returned to the loom for an hour, noticing that the rodent was no longer lying in the path. (I didn't think it would be...) When I stopped weaving and took off my hearing protection, I could hear hundreds of frogs and the insistent hooting of a screech owl very nearby. We hear them all the time, but never so insistent. If I had to guess, I'd say it was celebrating or, maybe, sending an invitation to share dinner.

By the way, I thought it might be interesting to share the amount of thread I use for weft. Here are three of four heavy boxes of thread. It's about enough for 3 weeks of weaving.


And this is the setup I use to ply the thread as I wind it onto bobbins. Here, 5 threads are passed through the cone of a thin thread which wraps around them as it unspools. This binder thread helps make sure that they don't come unplied as they leave the bobbin at high speed. This little trick prevents little loops from forming in the cloth. It was taught to me by my friend, Tien, whose blog you can read HERE.

What a gorgeous day! It's traditional to take three days to "land" after traveling, but I don't have that luxury right now. There's just so much on my plate, but that's how I like it.

Yesterday, however, I couldn't resist taking the afternoon off to wander around in a t-shirt in the sun. This has been an extremely mild winter for the most part, and it has fooled even the plants into thinking that it's over. We need to hurry if we're going to get our fruit trees pruned before they wake up. Ordinarily, we'd have almost another month.


Piwacket was so excited by the flowers that he used fresh violets in the richest and most delicious dessert we've had in a long time. It was a pear and lemon Creme Brûlée. Here's how rich it was: this photo was taken after we had all finished eating. It looks like we'll have leftovers tomorrow!


Today begins a big push to finish the bolt of black cloth so I can weave my own before the show in April. It's going to be tight.

It's been a wild few days as we travelled back from San Francisco and settled into life on the land. I promised to get our organization's internal newsletter, The RadDish, converted to an email-distributed PDF format. This was a huge task, requiring about 20 hours of work on the formatting/internals, another 20 hours on the content, and 5 hours figuring out the database and mailing list distribution.

My goal with this project is to uphold and enhance the spirit of cooperation and empowerment in the organization right now. Our members can review minutes of January's meetings and see agendas for February's meetings. Most committees are open to all members, and it's our hope that people will jump in and help with the ambitious project goals we've set for 2010.

If you are an active Nomenus member and would like to update your membership to receive the new digital RadDish, please send me an email (blossom@blossommerz.com) and I'll forward you the form. For now, we need a signed paper form, but the Communications Team may make it easier in the future.

Today, the rains have subsided and given way to beautiful sunshine. It's warm and very, very wet. I went down to the swimming hole to check the creek level and found that our mushroom-laden alder tree fell across the creek in the rain.



And, on a wildlife note, last night we heard a mountain lion killing a deer just a few feet from my back door. It was a prolonged, blood-curdling jumble of deer screams, lion screams and struggling. I got up this morning to find lots of muddy skid marks and overturned leaves.

Life sure is different out here in the country!

During Great Circle, several people asked me to show them how I was doing the magical things they saw coming from my phone. While the meeting progressed, I used a bunch of apps to do a variety of tasks:
- Edited online proposal documents that others could review
- Added items to agendas for later meetings
- Edited and distributed a new org chart to clarify a proposal
- Shared quirky photos of our meeting, including a panorama
- Enhanced remote participation with announcements of upcoming agenda items

For online document creation and editing, I use NoteMaster and Google Docs. This app allows for remote editing, and has been my saving grace in developing the artist in residence program proposal. When I wake up with an idea or some new concept comes up during another meeting, I just jot a note into the document to flesh out later. When it was time to propose it, I sent out read-only links to the document and hit the floor.


As the board meeting progressed, many items arose that need to be handled in lower committees. When this happened I pulled up Bento, a general purpose database program from the makers of Filemaker. In there, I've created a database for meeting agendas. I just add the item to the appropriate committee's agenda and it'll be waiting for me when the meeting comes.


To help demonstrate the place of an Artist In Residence within the greater community, I developed an org chart using InstaViz. As the Great Circle created more committees, I was able to edit the chart and share it with others. I printed a PDF for my presentation and shared an image on the Twitter stream for remote participants.


With so many people in one room, the only way to give a good feel for the scene was to share a panorama, created with AutoStitch. I shot three photos to make this montage.


And finally, I used Tweetie to interface with Twitter and keep in touch with remote participants. Every agenda item was announced as it came up, and the results announced afterward. This was our first time doing that, and I'll bet we will find other interesting things to do with this technology in the future.

The Tweetie interface allowed me to view only the traffic that had the #GreatCircle hashtag, ignoring all of my regular Twitter traffic.


All-in-all, this Great Circle went off very well, with almost seamless interaction between the main circle in San Francisco, a satellite circle in Wolf Creek, and several callers for specific agenda items, including our first international participant from Guatemala. We are learning to harness technology to enhance the experience. Let's see what tomorrow brings!