Sun 21 May 2006

Toss Up Jugglefest

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I LOVE juggling festivals. Love, love, LOVE them. This weekend is the Toss Up Jugglefest at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire IL. Yesterday was also the Illinios State Yo-yo Contest as a part of the festival, and I was a judge. In fact, I found out once I arrived that I was head judge. I treid hard to make sure I abused my power. ;)

For me juggling festivals are fun no matter what, although I ususally don’t get much juggling done, and this fest is no exception. I already knew that a bunch of my good juggling and yo-yo friends were going to be here, but I got the added bonus that Crash, Sky, and Luke Wilson are here too!

The yo-yo contest went well, although it always takes longer than I want it to. Today I get to actually do some practicing… or at least I have the option of practicing… I will probably end up hanging out and talking.

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Tue 16 May 2006

Clouds….

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It has now been cloudy for basically a week straight. Today I had to resort to battery power to try to work on my new solar widget. Tomorrow off to the hobby shop to try to get the last part.

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Thu 11 May 2006

Not Today

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Cloudy days are not a good time to try to make something with solar panels.

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Tue 9 May 2006

Making Gizmos

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I am in Chicago for the next few days staying with my friends Harper and Matiss. Tomorrow is day two performing at Math Bowl 2006 down in Chicago Heights, and after that Harper and I are going to go to American Science and Surplus to buy parts to make new gizmos! It’s been too long since I have made anything cool, and my focus at the moment is solar power. I have a new project and I want to make some cool little gadgets that relate to it. With luck I’ll find just the right parts and be able to make a really cute little gizmo. I’ll post more details once I have had a chance to work on it.

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Mon 8 May 2006

Indy Jugglers

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Today I went to the weekly meeting of the Indianapolis Juggling Club for only the second time since I moved to Indy.  My understanding was that the club only met in the summer, and since I am usually working on Sundays in the summer, I was only able to attend once before winter came.  Today I found out that not only did the club meet for most of the winter, and not only did they meet in my neighboorhood, but they actually met in a bulding on my block!  Oh well.  Now I know.

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Fri 5 May 2006

Jay Gilligan

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Jay Gilligan and his buddy Erik Aberg are going to pass through town on their very brief Shoebox Tour on May 26th.  Lenore has been helping me hook up a space for them to perform at Herron School of Art, and the show is going to be incredible.  Now I just have to do some promotion and get people there since school is out, and we won’t be able to count on the students coming.  I’m letting the juggling and yo-yoing communities know about it, and I just made up some leaflets to pass out at the dog park.  We’ll see how it goes, but I sure hope a lot of people come.  Every show is better with a big crowd.

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Wed 3 May 2006

Secret project revealed!

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Although it is still in the beginning stages, the time has come to reveal my new big secret project.

RenewNews.com

It’s a site on renewable energy. The intention is for it to be a community where people can find all of the information that they need about solar, wind power, biodiesel, firewood etc. At some point we are going to run out of oil, and every night the national news has a story on the high price of gas and/or our dependency on oil from around the world. I think the time has finally come when more people than just the hippies and the big-thinkers are interested in renewable energy. We’ll see how it goes.

I’ve been working for the last week getting RenewNews.com installed and working the way I want it to. I have so much more respect for computer people now. It’s really hard to get a lot of this stuff working! I have resources like Harper and Dylan who have more knowledge than I do, and I have access to the inner working of several websites that Harper and I work on together, and it was still hard for me to get this together. I’m working on a graphic for the top, and a few other things, but the site is up and running now. The community aspect will expand as time goes by, but for the moment we will have a few contributors writing articles that people can comment on if they want.

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Mon 1 May 2006

Art Chicago

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At the last minute Lenore and packed up the car, put the dog in the back seat, and headed up to Chicago on Thursday. It had been her plan all along to be there, but there were a whole series of problems with the show this year. The main one being that it appeared to be cancelled on the Monday before it was going to start. Shortly after that it was maybe back on, but they didn’t know where it was going to be. Since they didn’t have a location,

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Wed 26 Apr 2006

Boomeranging can be dangerous

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I apparently got WRECKED throwing boomerangs this weekend.  I threw a toy at the dog park today and discovered that my arm still hurts from throwing the ‘rangs on Saturday.  Sheesh.

I better rest up, cuz I’m itchin’  to go a ‘rangin’ again!

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Mon 24 Apr 2006

It’s a superhero kind of year

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Fortunately for me, one of the Indianapolis yo-yo guys is also a comic book artist. I ordered some custom Duncan Freehand Zero yo-yos (just the sidecaps really) and Rob did the art for me. On one side he drew me as a super-hero, and on the other side as a super-villain. I’m excited about them, and they are supposed to ship on May 1st, so it’s getting close.

I figured that since I’m doing the super-hero thing on the yo-yos, and since I got this domain name this year, I might as well just keep things rolling and have my 2006 trading cards be super-hero themed as well. This will be my fourth trading card, and you can see the others here. My wife Lenore was taking some pictures of me doing a super-hero pose, so that Rob had something to work from, when my dog Vader came and sat next to me. Lenore got some great pix of the two of us, so now, if the drawing goes well, the image on the card will be of me with Vader, each wearing our own cape. I’m pretty excited about it.

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