More explanation….

Despite my desires, events have conspired against me. After my wife had her stroke and subsequent brain surgery she came home for recovery. She then went in over Memorial Day time frame for 5 days of Cyberknife brain radiation to wipe out whatever cancer cells might still be lingering. 5 days later (and only two days after she had two skin tumors removed) she suffered a series of grand mal seizures caused by the irritation of the brain, and was hospitalized in intensive care for five days. Since then she has been heavily medicated and recovering from these insults to the brain. In the meantime the melanoma marches on. Our goal is to beat to the finish line whatever is going on inside her body while the brain heals - so that around August 1st she can start a two week hospital stay on a powerful immune system drug called Interleukin-2.

I am documenting more thoroughly this journey on my blog:

cancercabanaboy.blogspot.com

I am going to try to resume posting on the topic for which this one is intended…

Posting

I regret my absence from the tumblr posting scene but hope to resume it now. Besides dealing with my wife’s metastatic melanoma cancer we had to deal with with a nasty effect of it. She had a stroke on May 11th, as a result of a brain tumor bursting. After twelve days in the hospital we are now back home and I am helping her recover, but it’s a ton of work. I am now a cancer patient and stroke victim cabana boy, on top of trying to get the letterpress going. 

I did get a new much lighter laptop suitable for extended hospital stays and rounds of doc visits and waiting rooms and purchased InDesign - and my goal is to learn that really well asap. My younger son, who took hardship leave from college and is planning a gap year has become super interested in letterpress, especially from the design perspective, and as he is home now to be with mom during her cancer battle and stroke recovery I hope to collaborate with him. My older son graduates from college mid-May and is planning to live at home until the Fall of next year before heading off to graduate school in architecture. He has taken two letterpress classes and wants to team up as well. So if the stars and heavens align we will have a family effort on the letterpress business for the next year or so.

Dreary Days

Letterpress effort continues, albeit a bit slow. For one, the weather. People still bundled up - today was 43 degrees and blowing with intermittent rain and grey. I’m also wrapped up in other things, primarily dealing with the logistics around my wife’s next step in the cancer stopping process - a trip to the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda for enrollment in some sort of clinical trial. Maybe the weather will be better back there.

I have received the new fonts but haven’t been able to unwrap them. Maybe tomorrow. I have been studying Illustrator a lot, and took a one hour tutorial with a guru. I believe I can crank something out now to create a photopolymer plate. But likely I will be using my travel time back and forth to Bethesda and the weeks in the hospital to learn it really well, at least as far as all the type stuff goes.

I’m also thinking about a new laptop. Mine’s old (hah - 4 years in technology terms is a lifetime) and it’s running slow. Plus it’s a windows laptop and I’d rather do this on a Mac (I have a Mac desktop in my letterpress studio but most of my creation will not be there). I’m lusting after the Macbook Air…

Fun Day in the Studio

Printed, adjusted, distributed, cleaned, oiled. 

Bought and downloaded Illustrator. 

What is the word equivalent to “ambidextrous” in the physical and digital type realm. I am striving to become “typedextrous”.

Next up: tutorials for Ilustrator.