Who am I?
I write messy code. I'm a slightly creative person living in a city. I enjoy running, reading, going in the woods, and I recently discovered that I actually enjoy cleaning things. Weird, right?
Interests & Hobbies
🍳 Cooking📺 70s movies
🦗 Bugs
🎨 Pixel art
🚶 Exploring
I am currently...
- Feeling:
- Dreaming about: Who knows!
- Listening to: Margot and the Nuclear So and So's
- Reading: War and Peace for the rest of my life, apparently
- Thinking about: How to build a garden full of native plants
- Trying: To be a really good cook
- Watching: Cowboy Bebop
- Particularly interested in: This gosh darn site
- Nervous about: My fig tree being dead
- Laughing at: Short Circuit. Remember that movie? I was obsessed and constantly pretending to be a robot as a kid.
- Hoping: To have a fun day tomorrow
- Drinking: Buffalo sauce
- Wondering: How honest I really need to be on this thing
About this site
The name Press Firmly came about when I worked for a research library. They used these things called call slips. If you wanted to view a box of manuscripts, you would search the website's catalog for the manuscripts you wanted. You would look for the special number uniquely assigned to that box of manuscripts and then write the number, in pencil only, on the call slip which was one of those multiple-carbon-copy affairs. You'd also write as many other details onto the call slip as you possibly could because sometimes finding the box of manuscripts could be tricky and you never knew which little detail would be just what was needed to locate your box.
When you were finished writing you'd hand the call slip over to the librarian,* who would call that hour's page and tell them there's a slip. Then the page would come down from whatever depths of the library they were in and take the slip of paper and take a book cart and go off back into the depths somewhere, hopefully to be seen again within fifteen minutes to bring you your box of manuscripts you had described on the slip.
This is all to say that every call slip had the words "PRESS FIRMLY" written across the top of it to remind researchers to press firmly with their pencils lest the writing on the lower levels of paper be written too lightly for the librarian to read it. I thought it was funny.
*The librarian would keep the top slip for themselves and hand the remaining three to the page to take with them. The page would leave one slip on the shelf where the requested manuscript box once lived so other pages would know the box was in use and not missing. When the page returned with the requested box, one slip would be paired back with the librarian to tell the librarian that the box had been successfully retrieved. The final, bottom slip, which hopefully was legible if the researcher had pressed firmly enough, would be kept with the box and could eventually be kept by the researcher for their own records, if they so desired.
Past layouts
February 20, 2024: Botanical Illuminations
