I want to wish everyone celebrating a Merry Christmas. My plans for this holiday aren’t quite going as I’d hoped. I’m really wishing to wake up tomorrow morning and open presents under a pretty Christmas tree, but we had to take down the ornaments and haul our tree out to the trash bin today after discovering the ants that we had been battling for control over the house this past month (and thought we’d won) had moved from our bathroom and office to our Christmas tree. They made themselves right at home in our tree stand (plenty of drinking water there you see). I think the ants may have won. We’ve tried everything. We don’t leave a speck of food out (strangely they haven’t touched our kitchen), we’ve tried Terro traps and vacuuming them up and squashing them and finally a ‘non poison’ spray. Nothing deters these guys! I can handle a few ants here and there, but they seem to really want to build a nest in here. It’s bizarre.

So tomorrow we’ll have a Christmas with no tree. I know, not the end of the world by any means, but I really liked our tree! I’m glad I snapped some pictures a fews days back so I have something to show you.

Anyways, a few thousand ants can’t ruin my Christmas! I still get to spend it with Joe and the presents! I still get the presents! Hah!

Merry Christmas!

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?