Monday, January 07, 2013

RESOLUTIONS 2013 / 07



07: And here now is the infamous, never-seen-before FAILED CRANE! It was meant to be a FLAPPING CRANE, a fancier version of the familiar origami crane and the book's author, Robert J. Lang, warns the reader that it's a "somewhat difficult" model.

No kidding!

So I'll just have to try a bit harder and perhaps use a 10-inch square, like he suggests. It was quite amusing to produce a failure. It was going all right to begin with, but at one point, there was clearly a coloured patch in the instruction drawing that was NOT showing up on my model. A little while later, that same coloured patch appeared in the wrong location on my model and meanwhile the anticipated "five-point square" (yes, it can't REALLY be a square) that was supposed to develop in the middle, collapsed in a squishy mess. You can sort of see the mess, at the centre of the tangle of folds in the picture.

So! Onward. Today's resolution is ... okay, I have a list of resolutions and today's was going to be a more time-consuming one than I can manage, what with the Failed Crane in  my recent past. So today's is going to be: Send More Snail-mail! The idea is, I should aim to send at least one piece of mail BY POST to someone, every day. I have LOTS of post-cards, so that's what I plan to do. I've not done that yet but it's only 11 a.m. I have time.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi .... great to get your daily origami promise! looking forward to the time that perhaps you will invent new ones too! best wishes for the daZe ahead!
gt

Manjula Padmanabhan said...

gt -- thanks for you message! But at my current rate of struggle (with models) I think I may require an extra life-time before I'll be inventing any new ones ...

Anonymous said...

"send one piece of snailmail BY POST to someone, every day." - the worst thing is not the writing, but to bring/carry/walk/drive it to the postbox.
Me, I would write every day and send all of them once a week.
I admire your resolutions! But maybe the walking = sport is the aim of the exercise???

Wish you lots of fun! Biatti (trying anonymous)

Manjula Padmanabhan said...

Biatti! Thank you for your message!! I am delighted to see that "Anonymous" works for you.

As for the postal exercise, first a confession: while I am in New Delhi, I have a Postal Assistant in the form of FRANCIS. He passes by the post box on his way to and from the house, so ... as long as I have stamps with me, I can use his kind services to do the posting!

But when I am in Newport, I have an incentive to go out to the post-box!! As you know, I design my own stamps (because the US Post Office permits ordinary people to "customize" stamps. They have no philatelic value, but they are completely valid as postage) so ... sending a letter/card is for me, in the US, a kind of delight: because it gives me such pleasure to see my own tiny artworks on the envelope. Also, the post box is less than five minutes away from my apartment.

On the other hand, the main reason I do NOT send out real-mail is that I am always losing the addresses of friends to whom I want to send something. I mean, I often THINK I have the address, but then I look in my address book and it's NOT THERE. So then I get discouraged and send e-mail instead.

So the resolution is really all about being organized.

And getting a little exercise too is good!