Bonnie's FTP directory

Earlier today (8/31/97) I was fancying up the graphics on some of Sam's web pages, and suddenly remembered that Bonnie had a graphics-and-fonts ftp directory of her own, that I had never looked at except to once download an "alphabet train" font she'd mentioned (we both liked novelty fonts). So I checked my mail archives and found a few messages from Bonnie mentioning her ftp site, for example:

From: Bonnie Bedford
To: home-ed@world.std.com
Date: Sun, 4 Aug 96 14:14 PDT
Subject: (home-ed) Psst..hey you..wanna font?

This talk of learning to read reminded me that my kids made great strides while using the keyboard, which reminded me that I may never have mentioned that I have hundreds of shareware and freeware fonts on my ftp site. There aren't any descriptions, but if you feel adventurous - go ahead and download all you'd like.

ftp://ftp.islandnet.com/bedford/fonts

Bonnie
bedford@islandnet.com * http://www.islandnet.com/~bedford/bonnie.html

And here are excerpts from two March 6 1997 messages:

Hee hee - I used to have hundreds of backgrounds - now I think I'm down to about a hundred. I dumped most of them when I started designing pages with plain backgrounds. i particularly like the photgraphic looking ones. I have a ton of web art and clip art and fonts at ftp://ftp.islandnet.com/bedford/ but I don't think I've put the backgounds up yet. I'll do that now so you can just go there and take your pick. I'll put them up grouped by colour. Or color for you 'mericans.

I've put all my backgrounds on my ftp site.
ftp://ftp.islandnet.com/bedford/web_art.

the notebook ones are in the web_art/backgrounds/strip section. silver and silver2 are cool.

So what was I waiting for? Off to Bonnie's ftp site! And after an Islandnet welcome message, up popped the list of folders in Bonnie's root ftp directory: backgrounds, christmas_clipart, clipart, fonts, halloween_clipart, mop, and web_art. Waitaminnit -- "mop"? mop??? What could that possibly be? Suddenly I had a rush of excitement and anticipation as ghosts of all the children's mystery stories I'd ever read to Sam started rushing through my head -- could this "mop" directory possibly, um, uh, contain, uh, well, you know, uh ... any secret messages? I knew this was a silly thought but I still felt excited.

Onward and downward it was! I clicked on mop and found that what it contained were the folders "sat" and "zik". Yes, yes! More mysterious folders possibly containing ... possibly containing ... awww, shoot, so much for that idea -- "sat" is empty, and as for "zik" -- looks like that's where most of the novelty fonts wound up somehow.

And so with those mysteries de-mystery-ized :-(, it was off for an enjoyable tour of Bonnie's web-graphics folders. It was very much like what I'd been doing earlier today when I'd been poking around looking for just the right balls and castle clip art and so on, and also so evocative of many happy web-page-making days gone by for both of us. So many days I've followed the search engines and links from (to quote from One fish two fish red fish blue fish) near to far, from here to there, far past the point of any logical conclusion, just enjoying the hunt for the perfect background, coming up with design ideas, having an internal running dialog with other people and what they've done on their pages, maybe sitting there with Arthur on my lap or eating a bowl of ice cream or whatever, and knowing that Bonnie was basically doing the same and that she really loved the whole process of making web pages.

Looking through all the backgrounds and clipart, recognizing some of it from Bonnie's pages and some of it from elsewhere, picturing Bonnie working on her pages, thinking about what she might have been looking for or planning when she sought out and decided to save one thing or another, well, who knows ... maybe there were some secret messages here for me to figure out, in a small evocative slice-of-life sense anyway. On one of my other pages I wrote about looking for Bonnie's messages with DejaNews, but this was more like a PresqueNews -- like there was some pattern or series of steps here that I was maybe almost catching a glimpse of sometimes.

Along with the Dr. Seuss, snatches of the Wizard of Oz movie script are running through my mind (my little Arthur loves people to read him an illustrated book of the script that we have), in particular the line "if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard, because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with." Which may sound like a very strange line to use in reference to searching around on the net, but what you have to understand is that my computer desk is right at one of the sliding glass doors that leads to our back yard -- when I'm sitting here the back yard and the net are equally right at hand, literally at my fingertips and therefore palpably very much part of my environment.

Several years ago I wanted to make a fake summer-camp shirt as a joke present for someone, and was searching all over the place for that standard camp-shirt font where every letter looks like it's made of logs. I hit all the ftp archives, I posted messages on the font newsgroups, I corresponded with someone who had created a Mac log font, I tried in vain to convert it to a Windows version (for some reason my font-conversion programs just wouldn't work on that font), etc. Arrgh!!! Well, when I was going through Bonnie's FTP directories, what do you think I finally found just sitting there waiting for me? Yep. So for that and everything else I will say: