After an all-day workshop on suicide prevention, this happy thrifting find cheered me up 50%. Other 50% will be found someday when I locate its sugar-mate, I hope.

Baby plants become unbearably cute with the addition of “cute ‘spouts, Mama! Baby ‘pants! Yook Mama, gettin’ big!”

There’s almost nothing that is more satisfying than successfully navigating witching hour with an activity so distracting that Miss Hazel Mae hasn’t even noticed that 6:00 has come and gone with not a single ounce of Whine. This particular evening – scraps of felt and wooden beads & buttons, chosen individually and handed to Mama for stringing… 40 minutes straight until she declared it Done…

…which is, of course, perfect.

After more than two years of mothering, this is among my top 5 favorite things: watching her begin to very mindfully, rather than experimentally, make art. The girl is a fan of glitter, big paper, stickers, and the color white.

Perfect for spraypainting. Right now I’m daydreaming about way back in November, because sweet sufferin’ Jesus, is it cold outside today. Sixteen is good for a lot of things (Molly Ringwald and Ryan Adams come to mind), but sixteen degrees? No thank you. I think it was also this cold when I wrestled two tiny tables from the dumpster by my cousin’s old apartment into my car. That was last year. I finally painted them a few weeks ago. Red and robin’s egg blue – boingboingboing!!!

(and then I pilfered some photo frames from my parents’ basement.)

Hazel’s current loves, because why not? This book – every.single.night. This album – she runs to her bedroom to start it over every time it ends. Peanut butter toast. Harvesting ornaments from the Christmas tree for her own use (I found a bunch crammed among a silo full of crayons when I cleaned up her toys last night.) Sparkly pipe cleaners. The Floppinberg family. Snowglobes – she calls them “heavies”, but it comes out “harveys”, so if she’s asking you desperately for a “harvey”, she wants a snowglobe…and she wants it to play music. She has two, and she by far prefers the Morgantown snowglobe that plays Country Roads :) And the current love of her life… the focus of her songs and daydreaming… her hopeful request when she knows she’s about to be allowed to watch a cartoon… her alpha, her omega, her one and only… the one who keeps showing up in thrifted books, the Target dollar bins, Christmas stickers at the grocery store, in the form of awesome chunky chipboard pieces in the scrapbooking aisle at Michael’s…

“Snoopy dog?? Snoopy dog?? Pease Mama, Snoopy dog?? Chayey Bwown???”

Bow-tie-pasta factory: $.36 x 4 sheets of felt
Vintage glass cabinet knobs: excavated from a coffee can in Pa’s workshop (um, what can I make with the other 10? I have lots of ideas…)
Daydreaming & attention to detail: cost of graph paper & beer & hours spent browsing flickr
Backsplash tiles: $.15 x 9 tiles from the ReStore; $.83 x 2 sheets of scrapbooking paper; resin that I already had
Mini-colander that I’ve been unable to find used for months: $6.99 at Marshalls
Actual skills & attention to safety: cost of lunch at Black Bear; patience of a saint

Here’s some stuff I’ve been working on – or at least intending to work on – over the past week:

Bunnies for Hazel. As you can see, I got no further than printing out the free pattern and choosing fabrics before Hazel woke up. I love them but now that they’ve been sitting here for two days I’m starting to think maybe they are too drab… I might dive back into my stash for something more colorful.

Working on stuff for inclusion in April’s Spotted Box, which I agreed to on a whim and am very excited about – I did one in 2008 and kind of flipped out when my own box came in the mail!

The blue & gold blanket, which I only seem to work on when Hazel is teething. It’s always laying around in a heap somewhere, trailing its two balls of yarn, and when I want to work on it I have to hunt down my (gigantic, purple acrylic, very enticing) crochet hook because Hazel has always found and hoarded it away for her own crochet hook needs, which usually involves lots of waving it at the dog. I’ve lost count since January, but I’ve used a huge one pound ball and a half of the gold, and I think I’m on my sixth ball of homespun. I don’t really see an end in sight for this blanket.

And the work of raising little war resisters… I think a group reading of The Butter Battle Book is notable progress :)

i have been trying really hard to learn more about my camera lately, and this week i started working with some photo-editing software. life goal: never take hazel to a photography studio (and use all that not-spent money to pay for outrageously amazing wedding photos if she ever gets married… oh, how the things i want for my daughter are already so different than what i ever wanted for myself… what does this mean???). this will probably also mean that i never actually get around to learning how to actually do these things with film and chemicals and… you know. the real way. i kind of feel like i need to teach myself some color theory stuff all over again.

my eternal subject. someday i fully expect her to rebel against my camera.

in other news, i have wanted this fondue pot for exactly one month tomorrow. i’ve had no less than three dreams involving my ownership of this fondue pot. i don’t know if i will ever use it, but it will sit in my kitchen and look really awesome. i have made enough money from etsy this month to pay for it. if it is still there tomorrow i’m buying it. if not, it wasn’t meant to be, and there are pages and pages of vintage kitchen deliciousness waiting to be perused in search of gems like this one. since a move home (read: into more livable space) is probable this year, i am going to very slowly and very selectively let myself start collecting things i’ve never had room for. kitchen porn. better storage for all of my craft supplies. frames for all of the photos i want to put on the walls that we do not have.

i’m also working on hazel’s room, which i think i’ve mentioned. purchased at the dollar store recently: five wooden birdhouses and three big metal ladybugs with coathooks attached, all to spread out on plastic in my parents’ yard when it’s warm, armed with spraypaint.

music tomorrow and sunday. whee!

listening: phyllis boyens
reading: musicophilia

RIP, blog entries back to November. I probably won’t miss you.

So there was some kind of catastrophe with the servers that our websites are on this weekend and nothing from the past few months could be restored. This doesn’t concern me too much – I tried to fix the links that had been added/deleted in that time, and at some point I will add the little “what I’m listening to” box back into the sidebar. Mikey lost a whole bunch of stuff, and his email and all of his band pages are on those servers, too. Oops. If I cared about eternally preserving these entries I would write them in a notebook, not put them on the interwebs.

Anyway, not a lot happened in my absence. I made some new things and listed them for sale in my shop. Some necklaces a few days ago (the housewife is my favorite) and some more fun plastic earrings this afternoon (more beads in the mail today!):

I’ve also been making lots of stuff for Danielle’s show and trying to figure out how to display what. Maggie made TEN bags and fifty cards and is getting those in the mail, which I can’t WAIT to see. I’ll be way more confident with MAGGIE’S goods on my table! I’ve been getting stuff from Etsy-ers left and right, and Etsy as a whole is sending me some promotional stuff from their press team. So far the people coming the furthest to this show are from Wisconsin and South Carolina. Not FROM those places… they’re WV boys… you know what I mean. I’m really excited / sad / nervous / excited / sad / nervous.

It snowed a whole bunch and Paisley LOVES it. Photos under the cut of frozen campus (I forget which one… they all run together. I know it’s not Mikey’s) and of her playing. I found a remote corner with big drifts and no people/streets so I could take off her leash and let her run. At first she freaked out and pressed herself against my legs, scared of her new freedom and the weird fluffy white stuff. Then she RAN… it was the most adorable clumsiness I have ever witnessed. She kept falling and grunting and rolling and flailing around. By the time we got home she was soaked and shivering and still wanting more.

What else. My tonsils are swollen. I probably shouldn’t have them… this happens every year. I’ve watched six episodes of season two of LOST in the past few days, and finally caught last Wednesday’s episode online just before they removed it from the site for copyright infringement. It’s on at seven again this week, and sometimes I have to work until seven or after. I think this means that I will finally have to learn how to program a vcr to tape something for me. I’ve never in my life had something worth taping. I need to talk to someone on the phone. Last night I called Meggan & Angie, who weren’t home, my parents’ house, which was busy, and Jess, who was out somewhere (but Dustin was watching Lost - I’m so proud!). I gave up and watched Lost, too.

I got most of our taxes done today and Mikey has to do his fafsa tonight. Bills are paid, letters are waiting to be mailed out, the floor is swept. I love getting things DONE. I hate my JOB. It keeps me from getting things DONE.

The dog and the laundry still need washed. Eh.

Ok, photos. Then eating cereal and then boiling old vinyl records. Nothing good, I promise.

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This afternoon Mikey and I listened to his Christmas album twice while I made seven new necklaces and he read. I am now in the mood for Christmas. I’m mentally willing my pumpkin spice candle to burn faster so that I can replace it with pine, cinnamon, peppermint vanilla…

(Etsy is down for the weekend to update to version 2, but hopefully these will all be listed later this evening or tomorrow.)

Getting better. My spine hurts from bending over my table for three hours. Part of that three hours involved sorting through my childhood stamp collection that I brought from home… I have tons of stamps and 1920s / 1930s postmarks set aside to use as soon as I get more glass. The little ones are double sided, made from fabric scraps. And another baby playing card. I have two decks of those, if anyone has a lucky card that they want to wear around their neck. I need to hunt through photo frames at the dollarama to find some with thin glass that I can cut up, and I need a big spool of solder SOON. The little coil that came with my kit is rapidly dwindling.

Last night Mikey and I were supposed to play games with Colin & Cheryl, who I work with, but plans fell through midafternoon. We ended up drinking a bottle of wine by ourselves and playing with voice recognition software… where you dictate into a microphone and the computer transcribes it to text. It was the most hysterical thing ever, and my abs still hurt from laughing.

The results of reciting the nicene creed, with my favorite parts emphasized:

We believe in one god the father of the almighty maker of the governor
of all that is seen and unseen
they believe in one lord Jesus Christ the only son of god
eternally got no father
got from the light from late true got from true god

they got not made one and being with the father
through them all things are made

for us and for hours outpatient he came down from heaven
he was born on the right
he was conceived by the power of the holy spirit
and one of the virgin Mary and became a man
for our sake and was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered item was buried.
On the third day heroes again in fulfillment of the scriptures.

He ascended to heaven and it’s even at the right into the father.
He will come again in Florida judge living in the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the holy spirit the lord the giver of life
for the proceeds from the father and son that of other in Sunday’s worshiping glorified
He is booked into the profits
We believe in one wholly catholic and apps dollar charge
We not shown that isn’t for the forgiveness of sense.
We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world’s common.

A man and.

I might not make it through mass this evening with a straight face.

Listening: Gillian Welch

Today it:
1.) was the ugly-not-refreshing kind of rainy, dark at 4:30 p.m.
and I:
2.) had the day off so I
3.) made some necklaces while I listened to Nick Drake
which is:
4.) the best / worst music for this kind of day.

Ace is mine. The rest are for sale on Etsy, even though they are still less than smooth-edged.

On Sunday my dad bought an old rifle – “you know, the cowboy kind” – and later at home sat in his rocking chair and loaded three shells into it while my mom talked on the phone. When she passed the phone off to him, she started examining the gun – not checking the action and unaware of what he’d been doing – aimed at the ceiling, and fired a round through the roof. My dad retells the story last night on the phone, gasping for air, laughing hysterically, as if delightfully unaware of his own mortality.

Arms are for hugging, kids.

and all the friends that you once knew are left behind
they kept you safe and so secure
amongst the books and
all the records of your lifetime
what will happen in the morning
when the world it gets so crowded that you can’t
look out the window in the morning?

Oh also, last night I had a dream that I ran into Ian Keplinger in a barn at a fair and one of his arms had been medically or otherwise amputated. I had to stop for a moment and think, “did he have this arm the last time I saw him? Would I look stupid if I asked what happened because I should know because he’s been this way for awhile and I’ve just forgotten?”…… I hate feeling stupid in dreams. Especially over something so obvious as Ian having his left arm or not having his left arm the last time I saw him. So in the dream I started thinking about the real-life last time I hung out with him, and I remembered that it was the night that Doug, Chad, and Ian found a bunch of half-inch wooden dowel rods in Mikey’s room as we moved him out, and then spent a good half an hour beating each other with them in the kitchen. I was finally forced to take them away (in real life) when Chad and Doug backed Ian into a corner and he was begging for mercy. I decided, in the dream, that Ian could not have dowel-rod-sword-fought two other grown men with only one arm, so he must have had both, and so I should ask him what happened. But then I woke up. When I woke up I thought about the dream and remembered my first memory of Ian (and Stefan)… they were in a barn stall at the fair, chillin’ with one of their grandpa’s hogs.

How’d a memory from 20 years ago and a memory from two years ago fuse themselves with the weird book I’m reading (involving teleportation and not making it back home with all of your molecules intact and thus having a weird deformity or missing limb) and make it into last night’s dream? I want to be a neurologist.

I made a few snap pouches and Etsy will not let me log in to my shop – they appear to be having some server difficulties. Hopefully it will be fixed by the end of the evening and then they will be for sale. (Sorry cowpokes, the horse one is not.)

The flower one is also not deformed… I don’t know why it looks like that in the photo.

More new things @ stick in the mud.

There is a cat or child or some creature upstairs that plays with a pingpong ball at all hours of the day. When I hear it bouncing quietly along the floor, I feel so sorry for whoever lives downstairs from us and has to hear our holy terrors ripping around all night long and slamming into things and jumping onto their ball track from an elevated surface and skidding four feet across the floor. The walls here are very thick, the floor/ceiling is not.  Sorry, downstairs.

Canadian thanksgiving is next Monday, and my grandma sent us a card (I hope everyone has grandmas like this). I’m going to make her homemade noodles (sans chicken broth) for dinner, becuase the Maxwells have NEVER had homemade noodles. I kept trying to explain the concept of a homemade noodle… and Drew just stares at me…. “what, like pasta?”. I told Erin this today, because I’m still in disbelief…. “WHAT?! that’s a SIN!”. It is, m’dear. Lucky for them, salvation lies in ME. Anyone else out there never had homemade noodles or even heard of them? I’m so ethnocentric. Not that Drew & Kathy are of a different ethnicity than I am… unless being from Phoenix counts.