Art by Fuzzy

Pottery, Photography, Design - Brandon "Fuzzy" Schwartz

Life is Change: New Job

For the first time in 11 years I will not be driving to Ligonier to start a new school year in August. This makes me sad. I have been at Ligonier Elementary/West Noble Primary for 10 years plus a year at West Noble Elementary in the middle of that decade. The people there are amazing and it is a great place to work. I made a lot of friends and I’ll miss being part of that team.

Now I will be working at Jefferson Elementary, part of the Middlebury Community Schools. This makes me happy. Mostly happy to have a good job. My wife worked at Jefferson for a number of years until she decided to stay home with our kids. There are a lot of great people there as well.

jefferson elementary

jefferson elementary via google maps

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Shirt Designs: Track & Field 2010

The 2010 WN Middle School track team had an amazing season finishing 9-0 in dual meets, champions of the Westview Invitational, and….. LLC Conference Champions!!!!  I would like to think it was all because of the shirt design….  Or maybe it was the fantastic coaching staff?  Okay, in reality we had a really great group of 8th grade athletes to lead the way to an undefeated season.

Here is an early shirt design which was created in Adobe Illustrator CS4:

2010 Track Shirt Design

2010 Track Shirt Design

Here are photos of the actual shirts:

Team Shirt 2010

Team Shirt 2010

Conference Champions Shirt

Conference Champions Shirt

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The boys voted for yellow team shirts but the design looks even better on gray.

Back From a 2 Month Hiatus

Well, it’s been almost 2 months since I’ve even looked at my website.  I’ve had some news items to share but apparently not enough time to share them.  Not a lot has happened in the studio since my last update but plenty has been happening in the “real world”.  Track season came and went.  My team finished 7-2 on the season and we ended up 4th at the conference meet.  I finished my class at IUSB.  I finished my duties as a Reading Recovery teacher for the year and completed all my paperwork.  I began another season of grass mowing and other yard work.  I spent some time on the Internet studying fantasy baseball stats and getting used to Firefox.  I finished the yearbook at school and worked on the Black Lab website and finished a few minor graphic design jobs.  Now I have to finish my required technology days before summer break officially begins.  Then I’ll have to take another class at IUSB.  In the near future I hope to get back into the clay studio on a regular basis.  Today I worked on my trimming chuck.  Tomorrow I hope to finish it and get some clay ready to throw.

Now I’m sitting here at the old computer that I’ve pieced together.  It started as my original college computer (2000 AD) so it’s far from top-of-the-line.  I added some RAM, bought an LCD monitor and laser mouse while browsing garage sales and bought another Linksys USB adapter from ebay.  I decided Windows ME wasn’t what I wanted so I installed Ubuntu 8.10 and even got it onto the wireless network here at home (mostly by pure luck?).  Now I can surf the net while my wife is “doing research” which looks suspiciously similar to finding coupons on the Internet.  Ubuntu has run smoothly so far considering the ancientness of my machine but I haven’t exactly been editing video or playing the latest video game.  I plan to get a little more experience with Ubuntu and the world of Linux and the universe of Open Source software this summer.  First step: figuring out how to use my printer without unplugging it from the main computer and plugging it in here.  Second step: downloading and installing some of the 304 updates that the little red arrow says are available.  I better get busy…

October already?

West Noble 2008_xc_shirt_design

West Noble 2008_xc_shirt_design

Well, it’s been almost 2 months since my last entry….  But it seems like it’s only been about 3 days.  The first few months of school have raced by.  I’m teaching Reading Recovery half the day and working in the computer lab the other half.  We have been testing in the lab for most of the year so far which isn’t very exciting but it keeps me busy.  I’m coaching the 5th grade Cross Country team again.  In fact I was called upon to design the shirts for the middle school runners.  Actually they wanted me to use a design that they found so it was more copying than designing.  But it looks pretty good to me.

I’m also taking a class at IUSB towards my reading certificate.  On the weekends I catch up on my sleep, watch football, and work on pictures – sometimes all at the same time….  So basically this post is just a post to explain why I haven’t posted any new posts for a while.  But soon I hope to put up some stuff that I’ve been working on.   Stay tuned, Christmas Break isn’t too far off….

Summer Break at last

Technically I still have a few days to work in the computer lab. But I’m not going in this week due to some transportation issues and a wedding. My wife is using my car this week because her car’s back struts are shot. Tomorrow I will be heading to Michigan to get ready for my brother’s wedding on Friday. So the last few days have been like a preview to my summer vacation.
The school year wrapped up without too much excitement. So now I have a full year of Reading Recovery under my belt. I will probably do it again next year unless they decide we want to replace RR with a different program. Then I guess I’ll get to learn something new…. We finished the track season on a strong note, taking 2nd place at the conference meet.
track

After working next week I’ll get ready to shoot the wedding in Indianapolis. I hope to spend a lot of time working with clay this summer and not a lot of time mowing the grass. My wife and I might take a trip somewhere but we haven’t decided where. I also plan to update the rest of the site. I’ve been studying the art of CSS so I can eventually get rid of tables… but maybe I’ll get to that next summer….