First, a request: I'm looking for someone to help me transcribe the remainder of my interviews for my wedding book. Anyone interested? If so, I'll pay you $1.20 per 1,000 characters, which is the same rate I earn for straight transcription. I did a little number crunching, and this works out to a nice per-hour rate, about $20-22 an hour (depending on your speed).
I have three interviews at this point that need to be transcribed. One clocks in at 1:42:43, another at 1:10:29, and the final interview is 00:48:20 long. If you didn't want to take a whole interview, I could split it and give you part of one. I'm trying to get as much as possible transcribed by September 30, so that I can begin writing my first draft in earnest.
I was trying to do it all myself, but it's simply eating up too much of the time I'd like to spend writing! Let me know if you'd be interested.
I've collected a number of sidewalk chalk drawings, taken with my cell phone while walking my dog in our local neighborhood.
First, a drawing of a house that I collected in June. I've noticed that, since there are many rowhouses in our suburb, the children often draw tall, narrow houses, unlike the squat, two-story houses of rural children.
Also collected in June, the very next day, I found a primitive drawing of a child. Like the house drawing, this appeared on a sidewalk near a day-care center, so I imagine the artist is fairly young.
The next three photos were all taken the same day in late June, just down the street from me. Some older girls, about 9 or 10, were decorating the sidewalks near their houses with carefully drawn and outlined works. The first, a series of hearts, is one of my favorites since it was drawn on a section of sidewalk containing footprints which become almost a part of the drawing. In fact, they've even colored in a couple of them.
I guess you could call this next one pop art.
The third and final drawing by these artists seems to be a stylized compass, although I didn't bother to check if it really pointed North. Given the carefulness with which these girls made these drawings, I wouldn't be surprised if it did. Because they outlined them so thickly, the drawings lasted several weeks.
The final drawing was collected in early July and shows a little girl basking under a smiling sun, near what appears to be two distant palm trees. This drawing seems a perfect coda to the summer.
