It has been almost one year since I unwrapped my Gocco machine for Christmas and last night was my first time putting it to use. I’d constantly think of possible designs to print, but nothing ever seemed good enough and really, I never had a good enough reason to use it. Not until now.

Joe has completed his Masters project on cryptographic hash functions and we are due for a graduation party on the 21st of this month. Usually we wouldn’t bother with invitations, most of our get-togethers are just close friends and relatives. We just call them up and say ‘hey, come over! we have food!’ and that usually does the trick. Now though, a bit classier type of people (by classier I mean, Joe knows them on a professional basis only.) will be on the invite list, so we needed something more official.

I began my search for invitations on Etsy and found some cool silkscreened IBM punch cards. They weren’t really meant to be invitations, but I showed Joe and he suggested we just make our own. I thought ‘ooh! a chance to use my Gocco!’. So 15 minutes later, we had ordered a stack of old IBM punch cards from eBay. Last night Joe finally made me pull out the Gocco and get to work, but I had no idea what I was doing. The Gocco instruction manual wasn’t the greatest help. Thanks to Joe for figuring absolutely everything out, we managed to come up with some pretty cool invitations.

We used a pretty tree design from the classic computer science manual- Donald Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming and an old school typewriter font for the design. We only had three colors to choose from for the Gocco machine, so we stuck with black, which ended up being fine. I like it’s simplicity.

The party is drawing nearer and I’m hoping to get the living room painted, tree up and decorated (along with the rest of the house) before then. On top of that, my grandmother calls today telling me the family is driving up to visit this weekend. Not that I’m not psyched about that, but there goes some precious painting time! Maybe I can enlist my family to be my paint crew?

I know, I keep talking about Earthsea, but I can’t help it. I love the books too much! This is my favorite passage hands down. It’s from The Tombs of Atuan, book two in the series, but the first that I had read. I read this book on the cliffs of Catalina island, overlooking the ocean. I found this book in a box there by the local general store that said in sloppy marker- ‘public library’. This passage becomes more meaningful after reading all of the books. It’s beautiful on its own though. I didn’t think so when I first read it, I mean, I loved the story from the start, but not until a few re-readings of the whole series did I notice how this simple paragraph is reflected throughout the rest of the books. I love the image of the little girl running in a long circle after being called to come home.

Maybe this will entice some of my readers who are mums to take a look at these. Perhaps read them with your children.

Everywhere I go I see a throng of folks reading the Harry Potter books. I even had an english professor a couple years back ask us to call her Minerva after the Hogwart’s Headmistress. All her philosophies revolved around HP. Yes, people have gone mad. I can’t seem to get away from all this Harry Potter love.

In light of this phenomenon, I am going to tell you about my favorite books that involve a young boy attending a school of wizardry. The language is not as frilly as the Harry Potter series and the words carry a lot more underneath the surface. They are for children and adults alike. Lastly, these books were written more than thirty years ago. Yep. Wizard schools aren’t that new of a concept.

The books are the Earthsea cycles written by Ursula K. Le Guin (my favorite author). There are six books in all which revolve mainly around a wizard named Sparrowhawk or a young priestess named Arha. Of course these names aren’t their true names, they are use-names. I’ll let the books reveal their true names, if you ever decide to read them.