From yesterday’s e-mail— Are you an armenian? I aspire to pass the test one day. Anyone know where I can get a photo of Mt. Ararat?

But for now I guess I’m an odar. What is an odar, anyway?

I met Matt Kirkland at SXSW, and admired the notebook he carried, which he’d made himself from a discarded library book.

We exchanged cards, and a couple weeks later I checked his site and found that he’d opened an online store for library book journals: the novel novel. These blank books all have a story to tell—just check out the covers! You might recognize some of these from elementary school. Matt rebinds them by hand, and they’re super durable, which is good because I still drop things just as often as I did in second grade.

Matt also had a great quote on his site from the SXSW keynote we’d both seen:

“Tomorrow’s frontier is the wreckage of the unsustainable past.” — Bruce Sterling, 2006.

Well, here it is, around day 13-14. It hasn’t made as much progress as it’s supposed to, and I don’t know what those huge bubbles on the surface are, but it doesn’t look moldy in the traditional sense. So I guess that is OK?

Still haven’t tasted it. Sent this photo to the herbalist from whom I bought the starter culture. Awaiting expert opinion.