"I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up." -C. G. Lichtenberg

Kevin Atkins "Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough." -William Saroyan "Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live; Not where I love, but where I am, I die." -Robert Southwell

Photo of the week: Moon over Mama Mia

What I'm doing here...

• Missing my father and my step-father, who would have been 90 and 80 respectively this year.
  
• Enjoying this slideshow of Lake Michigan from the Northwest Indiana Paddling Association which will give you some idea of what my childhood looked like, from a sailboat on the lake.
  
• Helping Malke Rosenfeld get her websites (www.drumwithyourfeet.com) and www.mathinyourfeet.com running. Her old band Cucanandy is on hiatus, but they still have CD's available at this site.
  
• Waiting for delivery of my new addiction: Ginger Syrup, by The Ginger People
  
• Having a lot of days like those of this photographer: Philip Toledano's "Days with my father"... only it's my mom, and she's also very prone to falling... and she can't write note to herself... or anyone...
  
• Updating my master list of my digital photos of all sorts
  
• Shooting pictures at the 14th Annual Lotus World Music Festival.
  
• Enjoying the Starlite Drive-in theater.
  
• Slowly settling into a new house!
  
• This fellow, Bob Webster has done something like one of my favorite techie/historical/maping fantasies -- he's flown ultralight aircraft over the route of the Lewis and Clark Expedition taking photographs and linking them to the text of journals corresponding to the same places. I really enjoy his monthly "junkmails" (the first link).
  
• Shooting pictures at the 14th Annual Bloomington Early Music Festival (BLEMF).
  
• Enjoying the collaboration of a bunch of local musicians and artists on the Wilderness Plots project. Carrie Newcomer, Tim Grimm, Tom Roznowski, Michael White, Krista Detor, and Scott Russell Sanders perform a show of music and readings, while Jim Krause's renderings of Frank Hohenberger photographs and Mark Blaney's paintings open and close the show. Here's a Myspace page for the show and it plays music when you open it.
  
• Appreciating what Melissa Etheridge and Al Gore are doing to raise awareness about global warming.
  
• Helping out a little with the 13th Annual Soupbowl Benefit.
  
• Cracking up over this video about Kodak going digital (click it, you'll laugh too).
  
• Wow, admiring some of the most beautiful fractal flames I've ever seen.
  
• Voting, hoping, and appreciating YouTube
  
• Working on websites for various places and causes around here: the Art of Mental Health project (happened in December), Anyetsang's Little Tibet restaurant, and the Café et Crepe restaurant on 4th street
  
• Thinking of Maynard Ferguson and high school jazz - Tim, Russ, other band folks -- if you see this, contact me (see below)
  
• Getting behind(er) on photoblogging our recent trip to Oregon
  
• Creating quick websites for a few causes: a memorial celebration of Kalidu Sy, a quick reworking of Nigel North's site, ongoing work on Moira Smiley and my cousin Lacy Atkins' sites
  
• Getting mad that on top of all the other bad things, congress is trying to defund public broadcasting (PBS and NPR) yet again. Please go to TellThemPublicMatters.org!
  
• Repairing damaged RAID arrays. Listen here to the sounds of hard drives failing (remixed as music)
  
• Watching the weather (an MPG video of 2005 weather satellite imagery from NASA)
  
• Flying around the planet on Google Earth. Very cool! Made some screen captures of places I've lived or loved
  
• Thinking wistfully of Agawa Bay Ontario, on Lake Superior
  
• Slowly posting the pictures from the 12th Annual Lotus World Music Festival
  
• Enjoying the thoughtfulness of many of the audio essays on NPR's series This I Believe
  
• Listening to Krista Detor's "Glory". Go, visit, buy her CDs... if you think so. Krista's about to go on tour with Carrie Newcomer, who also has a new CD out. Yay!!
  
• ...speaking of which, right now my two favorite public/listener supported local radio stations are both listanable online: WFIU and WFHB. I think this is great news for Bloomington ex-pats who want to hear old familiar voices and shows!
  
• Hoping you'll go listen to Kevin Kling's great essay on memory and photographs.
  
• Marvelling at how Wirelessly Wired Bloomington is. There's a lot of WiFi around town.
  
• Enjoying Greg Brown's visit.
  
• Playing with maps and photos. I like maps (see below), and there are at least a couple of GPS/photography projects online: WWMX, with a sort of rich but confusing interface (check out my photos there), and GEOSnapper, which I just found and don't know much about. It's cool, digital photo formats like JPG have space in their metadata for GPS coordinates. Some cameras are starting to have GPS builtin or as an option, and the WWMX folks provide tools for mapping photos already taken, either by hand or using GPS track logs. They also provide a rich client, a story editing client, and some other software to enhance the concept.
  
• Finally getting Sam Bartlett's web page running.
  
• Thinking that anyone who doesn't understand how close we are to this reality: will think the linked presentation is funny...
  
• Tuning up my ears to hear Monkey Puzzle in their 3rd reunion concert, "MP3", June 25, at the Buskirk-Chumley.
  
• Taking pictures at the Bloomington Early Music Festival.
  
• Watching The Cicadas come out. (Here's a time-lapse of the transition from larva to adult.
  
• Here are some more references on Brood X, the 17 year Cicadas: College of Mt St Joseph Cicada site, the Great Lakes Cicada page (plays Cicada sound when you open it), a U of Kentucky site on the Cicada Killer wasp, and here are a bunch of Cicada recipes. Here's the website of the IU Cicada Project, theory on why 13 and 17 years, and finally, a spoof site about deadly cicadas.
  
• Worrying a bit about the ecological cost of a computer.
  
• Editing video for Carrie Newcomer, my favorite singer/songwriter.
  
• Getting very tired of corruption in state and federal politics. I suggest that we all take a read at these information gathering sources: The Center for Public Integrity, The Institute on Money in State Politics, OpenSecrets.org, and the IRS's tracking site for 527 filings for political organizations.
  
• Taking pictures (what else?!) for the 10th annual Lotus World Music Festival. Photos from previous years are up in some locations around town thanks to Rich Remsberg, Levi Thomas, and especially Tom Stio.
  
• Settling into our new (1930) house.
  
• Thinking back on our conference trip to Martinique.
  
• Shooting pictures at, and enjoying the 10th Annual Bloomington Early Music Festival.
  
• Celebrating the finishing of Kelly's Dissertation and PhD!
  
• Janiece Jaffe our local jazz diva has her own website now.
  
• In awe at The Claw.
  
• Listening to Spring -- the early days of the season were warm, in the 60s and 70s and in the front and back yard I thought I was hearing mice or worms or snakes or something, but I looked and looked, and couldn't see anything (besides, there were too many noises to be any of those in my back yard, given that I don't live in Washington DC). I finally figured out what it was -- it's plants pushing their way through the leaves! The leaves are dry and crackly, but the soil is moist, and the plants are moving the leaves around as they pop out! I've been told you can hear corn and bamboo grow on sunny hot days after rain, but I've never heard spring flowers grow before. You can sort of see how fast some plants grow, looking at these ferns on April 16, 17, and 18
  
• Shooting pictures at the Lotus Blossoms World Music Festival.
  
• Being warmed inside and... well, inside by the performance of friends and neighbors, a mid-Winter Welcome Table. This will stand out as one of the best performances of the year, I'm sure.
  
• Enjoying the wealth of local folk talent we have at the WFHB fundraising concert, Acoustic Hrvest.
  
• Doing a little web maintenance on local musician's sites, like Carrie Newcomer and Grey Larsen, Nils Fredland, Fiddle 'n Feet, Malke Rosenfeld and Cucanandy, Moira Smiley and Anima Fortis, and Sam Bartlett. Hoping to bring you Erica Rubis, Abby Ladin, and The Monks, soon.
  
• Drowning in spam! This week I've received 189 spam messages, 10 viruses, 15 hoax virus warnings, three messages spoofed as if to come from my own account, and three 419 scams. Thanks guys.
  
• Admiring pictures done for an ecological purpose: photos of the entire coast of California
  
• Seeing Carrie Newcomer and Tim Grimm perform at the Buskirk-Chumley
  
• Hiking and swimming on North Manitou Island and visiting Sleeping Bear and Interlochen
  
• Trying to stay cool... well at least trying to keep my computer cool, for which a found a great tool -- the "Just Cooler Twin Turbo TT-900" 5.25" drive bay cooling fan -- it is almost silent and moves huge volumes of air through your computer case (the link is a Google search for it)
  
• Playing with a couple new toys: a Boreal Designs Saguenay sea kayak and a Greenspeed GTO recumbent tricycle
  
• Parading -- July 4 parade in Bloomington
  
• Paddling -- testing kayaks at the JL Waters Monday Night Paddle at Lake Lemon
  
• Paddling where we normally would be pedalling
  
• Enjoying our two kittens (believe it or not, they're the same age)
  
• Working to create a Bloomington Area Recumbent Riders club
  
• Following the Adventures of Dan -- my former housemate Dan works on Scripps Oceanographic Institute research ships in the Pacific, and sends us messages about life at sea.
  
• Trying to figure out how to reduce our energy use a lot. Here's a fantastic site with huge amounts of helpful information and links: http://www.energyideas.org.
  
• Dreaming of flight... everyone remembers Larry Walters, right? Well, the concept of Cluster Ballooning is, er, taking off.
  
• Riding on two new recumbents, a Bike Friday brand recumbent called Bike Sat-R-Day (laid back, eh), and one of the last of the Trek R200s. The SatRDay folds into a suitcase!
  
• Shooting thousands of pictures at the 8th annual Lotus World Music Festival.
  
• Learning a little about Quebecoise culture and life in Montreal.
  
• Driving around Lake Michigan, including Door County, the Keweenau Peninsula, and Interlochen, among other places.
  
• Going to the Farmers Market on Saturdays, yay!.
  
• Shooting camp pictures, at the performances of Malcolm Dalglish's Ooolation! music and dance camp.
  
• Shooting concert pictures, at the Bloomington Early Music Festival.
  
• Sadly attending Terra's farewell concert, May 11, 2001.
  
• also sadly attending Vida's farewell concert, April 26, 2001.
  
• Attending Kelly's commencement, from IU. IU has now put the commencement ceremony videos on the web!
  
• Enjoying watching people test ride my tandem recumbent trike at our Earthday 2001, as celebrated in Bloomington.
  
• Watching how the weather has affected our Spring.
  
• Enjoying our cat's antics. Don't tell Rob...
  
• Taking literally thousands of pictures with a digital camera and scanning old slides and pictures. I've been over-documenting my life this year, so pretty much all the viewable significant events can be seen on this linked page. Here are some of my favorite, recent, or at least most frequent subjects:
  
  • A Cappella music including Terra, the young women's group coached by Moira Smiley, Monkey Puzzle, who sang at 7pm on Saturday January 13th, at the First United Methodist Church. (Here, tentatively, are some pictures and music from the show.) Also Malcolm Dalglish's Ooolation camp, Acappellooza 2000 and Vida
  • A photo archiving project at Interlochen Arts Academy and National Music Camp.
  • Irish music at Borders on 1st, 3rd (and if there is one, 5th) Fridays.
  • The Bloomington Farmers Market on Saturdays from April through October.
  • The 7th Annual Lotus World Music Festival, and several related concerts: Frifot from Sweden, Carrie Newcomer and Vance Gilbert, and many others.
  • The 6th Annual Lotus Festival.
  • The Bloomington Early Music Festival 2000. BLEMF 2001 is coming up in May
  
  
• Riding my Greenspeed tandem recumbent trike, my TerraTrike, and my Linear Recumbent bicycles.
  

• Thinking about politics, economics, lifestyle, and the environment.
  
• Travelling! Here are many photos from our trips to Boston over Thanksgiving and Vermont, Quebec, and Interlochen in August. Here are some other trips and wilderness trips.
  
• Listening to friends... Uh oh! Men really do hear differently than women!
  
• Gathering information on freshwater jellyfish, which we have in Yellowood Lake in Indiana
  
• Struggling with various household problems. It is perhaps ironic that the Thumbnailer software I use to make these picture web pages is by a company called Smaller Animals.
  
• Singing! Here are some Village Harmony Youth camp performance pictures from July 2000 in Vermont, and also pictures from the Village Harmony Adult Camp (first session 2000). And here's the VH Adult Camp 1999 I attended.
  I also play tuba in my spare spare time. Long ago I was a performance major in the IU School of Music.
  

• Looking at maps... Here's a new project, "World Wind" from NASA. Here's something nifty: topographic map of Bloomington, from www.topozone.com. And even cooler is this version on Microsoft's TerraServer -- you can see it as a map, satellite photos, or a relief map. Ooo, look ma, I can see our house from here! And here's my hometown (hint: scroll up one click to see why it was a great place to grow up...). And here's a customizable view of aerial photographs of Bloomington. If you're travelling in Indiana, it can be handy to look at the INDOT map of construction projects which might get in your way. Here's a satellite image of Interlochen Arts Academy, another favorite place of mine.
  
• I've finally gotten slides and pictures from my 1986 exhange program in China digitized and webified.
  

• Working at the IU Student Loan Administration department, in the Poplars building, doing LAN Administration, tech support, database support, etc. Here are some recipes from our recent food fest.
  

• Cleaning up this damned old home page! Here's some stuff I've moved and rearranged.
  

• Looking for lost friends... (Are you on my list?)
  

Things that have had a big influence on me

• Music -- both the practice and performance and the people, and going to Interlochen and to the Village Harmony camp, and the 1981 North Carolina School for the Arts (NCSA) summer orchestra tour of Europe
  
• Spending a semester in China
  
• going to Indiana University
  
• wilderness trips, especially canoe trips with my uncle, to Quetico, the Missinaibi River, the Churchill River
  
• travelling around England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland
  
• marriage and divorce, and serious relationships
  
• deaths of friends and family (here's a brief mention of my old friend Kert Fox who died 20 years ago this Fall)
  
• Here's a little bio of me, with some repetition of the above...
  

Go see the french movie Amelie!

• Maybe the best movie I've ever seen. The web snippets don't at all do it justice -- they're brilliant if you've seen the movie, and the site is really well done, but you'll have to take my word that it's a must-see.

Perhaps you were looking for these other Kevin Atkins's?

My Amazon wish list

last updated May 6, 2009