The RHA Report Project

It began with rooting around one winter afternoon last year in search of my trove of bank statements, hoping I’d turn up a checkbook cover to replace the tattered one I’d been using. But then I dug a little deeper because I also felt sure I had a copy of the first deposit slip for my savings account, started at First Citizens Bank in Buies Creek in 1972. Because the closure of that branch had at that time recently been announced, somewhere along the way I thought I’d probably put up some social media post about it, and I like digitizing things when I get a chance as another approach to long-term storage.

But a random box adjacent to my exploration had items that caught my eye: bound copies of the Final Report I wrote in 1989, summarizing the issues and events and philosophy from my year as president of the Residence Hall Association at UNC-Chapel Hill. I brought a copy out of the attic and sat down to read it and got all interested in it again...and dug into other saved files and looked into the current activities of RHA at UNC via their social media. Then I came across a mention from the UNC alumni magazine that the University Archivist had asked that graduates with student organization records share them with the Wilson Library Special Documents Collection.

In the quiet and still-dark of late winter last year, that set me onto a six-week project that wrapped up just as March was coming to an end and spring had at last emerged. I retyped the report (no saved digital version could be located and I probably couldn’t access it anyway after 35 years of advances in technology!). This let me fix a limited number of syntax and word choice issues but also I found myself with more to say, so I added footnotes for clarification, context, or editorializing, and then I also wrote up additional thoughts and included them as a new Appendix.

I pulled out my trove of saved files from the filing cabinet and discovered it’s actually not hard to use my multifunction copier/printer to sheetfeed documents for scanning. Now everything from my term has been digitized.

For somebody who felt like he got to be on the front end of website creation and management in the mid-1990s—and whose skills were not bad at that time—but who long ago got left behind by the enormous advances in coding and stylesheets and scripts, it’s always a delightful but foolish errand to reignite those pursuits. Long ago, I should have gotten a professional website for myself, for instance. But now there is not only a printed version of the updated report; a fully-developed web version of it, with all the supporting material and archived documents, is published for those who are interested enough to dig into it.

A significant shortcoming of my meager web design efforts is that the overall site is not great on a mobile device—I still have a long way to go with responsive design so that the layout adapts to small tall screen sizes. For now, it is pretty decent on a desktop, and that’s where I’ve left it. The original and printed versions were submitted to the Special Collections archivist at UNC-Chapel Hill and they have also archived the digital records.

A digitized report, scanned pdfs of all those documents, and a hunger to re-explore website design? A perfect storm for evening pursuits and whiling away weekend hours for about six weeks when the long end of winter slowly unfolded.

The Birthday Cards Project

If I know your birthday, and I have your address, there is a fair chance that you will find yourself on the receiving end of some birthday card I've lovingly (or giddily) photoshopped and MS Worded into being. In the quiet of the year's end and before work had started up in earnest, that's the project I set my sights on: trying to work up birthday cards for 2025 for the folks on my long-maintained list.

Now, as is my particular bent, here comes the backstory. On some visit to an office supply store like Staples or Office Depot on a long-ago work trip, I chanced to grab a box of Avery notecards suitable for inkjet printers. I thought it'd be a nice way to easily produce some basic Roediger House notecards, using the original pen-and-ink graphic that came to me at the time of the house purchase. I also experimented with using instead some photo I'd snapped as part of daily life, like that shot of Sumner by the fireside, comfy in my old man's chair.

Over time, I began playing a bit with the lay-out and design, every once in a while crafting a special card from an idea that popped into my head. Then I started making an occasional birthday or thank-you card, especially once it seems that manufactured greeting cards had gotten much more expensive than I liked. I toyed with a different format and printable cards, for post cards, as well.

Maybe there are many who still embrace the tradition of holiday cards each December, with their curated address lists hastily updated near year's end; I still love that endeavor and have wanted to maintain the practice. Handwritten correspondence, or dropping in out of the blue, and especially taking note of the birthdays of good and special people all seem to be fading customs, or they've been supplanted by social media and electronic communication and the ease of a text message adorned, perhaps, with some emoji or meme or jumpy gif. I still like the idea of a birthday card.

Other holidays sometimes get swept up into my mania, so perhaps you were in my sights when I made Easter, July Fourth, or Halloween cards to send out. I'm also not above executing other random ideas into cards, whether it's because I found it amusing or to note some significant event or to send love or hugs or encouragement.

Although I have stocked up on those nice perforated Avery notecard sets for printing, I also realized a much more affordable route for my grand schemes was simply buying reams of white cardstock and the "invitation"-sized envelopes that fit them perfectly once cut and folded. As long as I keep my excellent color inkjet printer well-supplied, I guess this card-creation indulgence might continue for the forseeable future.