Photo Wrapping!

This Christmas I came up with a method of wrapping presents that made me happy. It couldn't possibly be something entirely new, but I've never seen anyone do it. I don't feel like searching the internet for the people who did it first; I'm just gonna write it up!

I was wrapping a final round of presents and I didn't have enough paper or labels. I realized I had a color printer. And lots of great photos of the people we were giving gifts to. So all I had to do was print pictures of a gift's recipient on several sheets of 8.5" by 11" paper, fold and tape the sheets together to cover the key portions of the present, ensure that the face got central position on the packaging, and voila: no need for a label! For extra effect, use pictures the gift's recipient has never seen.

Depending on the size of the gift, you may have to use other bits of contact paper to hide portions of the gift. I feel like this style of 'wrapping' is more about providing the moment of opening-discovery, not trying to wrap the present tightly as if it was being probed by a 7 year-old.

This is a photo of the top of a present to my wife Lisa, two prints used on the top, taped together, featuring the moment we saw that the angel wing mural in northern Oahu had been rendered in the colors of the dress Lisa was wearing!

Birthday Games

When I was a kid, my family used April Fools Day as the reference point to track my end-of-March birthday. Last year, in sunnier times, I had a big birthday party, something I usually avoid. To make it sing, our friends Elise & Aaron let us use their big-enough-for-a-big-party-house. Of course Elise went one step further: she arranged a birthday piñata, stuffed with something for everyone: Kinder eggs, fruit snacks, gluten-free cookies; chocolate truffles, dinosaurs, and so on. You can see the birthday piñata below. Elise went to the internet to find a picture of me to hit, so of course she ended up with my blog's Diabolic Tutor face, minus the tutor. 

I love this Harlequinade of a photo that Lisa took while the teenager-most-likely-to-slay-the-pinata was taking his second turn. A great ending to a wonderful party.

Earlier in the party we played a game I can share. It's a human bingo game, meant to be played when you're lucky enough to be able to gather a large number of friends who don't all know each other. Lisa brought it into our lives from working in environmental education and we've used it for several big parties, including the intermission at our wedding. 

The hosts make a bingo card ahead of time with items oriented towards people they expect to see at the party. If you've got kids attending, you make sure to include a number of questions that kids will be likely to qualify for, because kids turn out to be highly active participants, buzzing between circles of adults and helping make all new introductions. 

As the card says, you're looking for signatures from party-goers who can say "Yes, I did that," and each person can only sign your card once, so you gotta mingle. Some people play super-competitively until they've scored a bingo, others fill the card. Choose the right categories and you ensure you're going to hear interesting stories. 

Here's the card from last year's game . . . .

13 Years of Color!

It's time to pull on this blog's starter cord. For the fun of it and because a couple people were asking, I'm restarting by rerunning the first blog post I made on LiveJournal, back in 2008. Yes, my thirteenth anniversary of color is tomorrow. I'm grateful every day.

Untitled, by Eric Eschenbach

    Until 2006 I was colorblind. Show me a sunset and I saw shades of green. Hand me a pink shirt and I was sure it was grey. Before my first date with Lisa, my future wife, I gave her my address and described my house as the gray house on the corner. The only gray house on a corner anywhere in the neighborhood belonged to the local drug dealers, which she realized when they opened the door and called inside to see if there was a ‘Rob’ sprawled somewhere in the haze. Lisa said “Uh, sorry, I’ve got the wrong house,” backed up and found me in the blue house on the corner.

    On February 8, 2006, I sat at home typing Dreamblade notes on my laptop computer while Lisa went to hear a National Geographic lecture with her mom. As usual, I had Windows Media Player humming along playing music. I liked having the Alchemy visualizer twirling colors around at the side of the screen while I worked. Suddenly the screen flashed orangecrimsonpinkpurplescarletblueviolet. I’d always thought of the program as a mix of flashing yellows and blues and some greens. Had the visualizer changed? No, it was the same program I always used. But these were actual colors! I sat and watched the full spectrum twisting for almost an hour.

    I knew that I had a conclusive color vision test hanging on the wall across the living room from me. The day before I’d had my nose pressed to a landscape painting by Lisa’s brother, trying to see the pink in the sky that she said was her favorite part. I hadn’t been able to see anything except some dark streaks. I pointed to them and said, “Is this the pink?” but Lisa just shook her head, saying that I might as well not try.

    When I dared to set the computer aside and approach the landscape, I was ecstatic to find that the sky wasn’t just a blue and gray wash. There was the pink. And those dark streaks I’d noticed the day before? They were beautiful orange.

    Lisa came home and found me sitting in a pile of all our art and photo books, spread out on the floor, looking at colors and details I’d never seen. I was bawling. I was overwhelmed by the reality that this was how everyone else saw the world all the time. Lisa had to talk me into going to sleep, I was worried that I was going to wake up and it would all be gone.

    Two [[13!]] years later, I still have color vision. I don’t have a medically verified explanation for how I regained colors, but with a prompt from a neurologist friend of Lee Moyer’s, I have put together a good guess. No one ever accused me of being colorblind until I was in fourth grade. I don’t remember having any trouble recognizing colors when I was younger and I didn’t have any trouble recognizing them when my color vision came back. But when I was in third grade I ran into a metal pole at a full downhill sprint. It was a serious head injury and it left me with symptoms that bothered me into my thirties. Those symptoms have all gradually gotten better or gone away. My guess is that I also lost the world’s colors to that metal pole.

    After decades, something has reconnected. My mind has agreed to show me colors again.

    I’m happy.

13th Age Glorantha: Delicious (to Trolls)

Of the little things I like about our 13th Age Glorantha book, one of the silliest is how pages 347 and 348 look like they've been eaten by moths. It’s the o Darkness section of our runic geography chapter. o Darkness is the rune of the trolls, and trolls a) eat anything; and b) herd giant insects. So it always makes me happy that pages devoted to troll territories look like they’ve been nibbled by bugs!

But did I say this was silly? It’s not really. It’s the kind of thing Greg Stafford planned when he envisioned Glorantha’s runes. It’s more cosmic than it is accident.