Yeah, I just did that.

I broke my blog, and it is showing up all goofy on anything but IE (which is weird and kind of backwards to the usual case) and I don’t know which part I messed with to weird it out.

I’m going for professional help. Luckily I just happened to have married the Professional Help and I can threaten to withhold food until he figures it out for me. Well no, I can’t, he does the grocery shopping. I guess I could just ask him nicely for his help.

Hang in there. We’ll get it back from goofy-looking to spectacular once more, but not tonight. For now, I am going to go to bed and dream of smashing my computer with a Louisville slugger. Or of taking web design courses so my ignorance doesn’t demolish another innocent website.

“Baximan”
A touching tribute to Greg North by Colin, posted on his Blog, End of the Dock. 

He held on much longer than anyone would have predicted, those of us that would have thought him weak. How could a fragile body sustain itself for long? But it wasn’t about his body, not now. Now it was about his inner strength alone. Not necessarily the will to live, but the will to keep on and keep fighting, probably because that was all he had done during his life. He wasn’t born a fighter, no one is, but he became one, fiercely denying the loss of his physical supports one by one until finally science won out over heart.

He was stronger than me, and I see it more clearly now. Let no one say he was weak. His lungs weren’t as strong as mine and his heartbeat was weaker, but this weekend I realized that was never the source of his strength anyways. It’s a lot deeper, a lot harder to define and we may never know the true measure of it until the final hours when we are faced with the biggest choice to let go or hang on. A lifetime of fighting made him the strongest man I have ever met.

“Well, that’s a weird combination. Benedryl and paintbrushes.”

And as she stood there, looking at me, without putting my items in my bag, I realized she was looking for some sort of explanation as to why I would need these two items together. I sort of didn’t know what to say. Did she think I had some weird plan involving antihistamines and synthetic-bristle brushes? Is Benedryl and paintbrushes a suspicious-enough combination that she believed I was plotting something sinister?

So, she stood there. And I stood there. And everyone in the line behind me stood there, as she stared at me.

“Um, yeah” I replied, half-joking, “I’m… allergic to paintbrushes.”

She nodded, dropped them both into a bag and handed it to me with my receipt. Am I missing something here? Does anyone know why she was so weirded out by the combination that she would not hand over the goods until I made up a story to explain them? I mean, that’s one of the reasons you GO to Wal-mart; you can buy diapers, a car battery and bread all in one store. I wonder if there are any other forbidden cash-register pairings…

Poppytalk – Mining Mintd

You can read the whole post here, and then head off to my Mintd shop to get one for yourself . Thanks to Simone Walsh for pointing out the write-up to me.

Monochromatic fruit.

Oh, and I didn’t arrange the things on the fridge to line up geometrically like that for the picture, I actually put stuff on my fridge that way.

1 & 4  Magnets I have recently made. It is mildly interesting that with all the magnets I make I am not actually using any of them on my fridge. I just store them there as they are waiting to be sold and I use tape to stick stuff on. But the magnet population on my fridge is in a state of constant flux as new sets are made, sold and replaced, so it is just easier to use tape then the round up replacements to hold our treasures when I sell one of them.

2 & 3. Sixth & Elm promotional postcards that I designed and the Sixth & Elm Magnet Mini Calendar.  No place like home to get in as many shameless plugs as you can.

5. Chicken Note: “Don’t open the freezer or a chicken will fly out”…. this wasn’t a joke. Adam likes to do this thing where he stuffs the cupboards or freezers in a clever way so things will fall on you if you open them. His sisters said he had been perfecting his technique in this long before I met him. This note was in regards to a chicken he had propped against the freezer door. I tried to shove it in fully but couldn’t and we were having party, so i put the warning on the door. Didn’t work though. Everybody kept opening the door to see what I meant and then gasping in surprise as a frozen chicken fell into their arms. Well, I warned them. The sign was never removed, even though the chicken eventually was. It was yummy.

6. A family picture of our cousins Amanda, Kaitlyn, Melissa, Courtney and their Mom and Dad, Janice and Gary. 4 of THE COOLEST girls you will ever meet. 

7. SARAH & LYDIA!! Sarah is my best girlfriend and the first of us to venture into the world of marriage and motherhood. Her and Bill have three beautiful kids (who probably have perfect pitch) Thomas, Hannah and Lydia and is waiting patiently for me to join the club so we can get back on similar schedules.

8. Hannah – Baby number 2 for Sarah and Bill and Godchild #1 for me!!! I love Hannah – She is like a little pixie. I keep expecting little fairy wings to pop out of her jumper.

9 Thomas – Baby number 1 for Sarah and Bill and the best older brother ever.

10.”What goes in your green bin?” magnet. It is part of the new composting program set up in Peel Region where organics are picked up once a week and composted.

11. A birthday card from Baba. Man, I miss her. I wish she had the Internet. And the lottery ticket inside won me five dollars, that I promptly lost buying another lottery ticket that did not win.

12. A signed picture from the mouse and his lady. Oh yeah. It’s the real deal, too. It says “To Chantelle & Bruce (that’s Adam’s actual first name but he has been called Adam, his middle name, since birth)… Love Mickey Mouse, Love Minnie Mouse.” And he actually does his “y’s” like the Disney logo. Adam took me to Disney for the VERY FIRST TIME on our Honeymoon and this picture was inside a card left in our hotel room on the resort.

13. This was a perfectly ordinary grocery list that morphed into something else as guests kept adding to it when we aren’t looking. It reads:

Green Apples
Pears
Magic Beans
Fairy Dust
A rock shaped like
Chuki ……..(Our Cat)
Eggs
Alligators
Kitty Litter
Lemon Juice
1 Grandson or Granddaughter ………..(Three guesses who added THAT one)
Jam
Quills & Ink
Potatoes
Firebolt
Purple People Eaters (4)

So that’s it. If you post a picture of your fridge leave a comment here so I can go and check it out.

It’s like being a vegetarian fur-trader.

I have always had an affinity for trees. The form, the shade, the silent sentinel characteristic. I sit under them, climb them, photograph them. I did my thesis on Dendroanalysis, the chemical composition of tree rings, but my fascination started long before that with the trees I grew up around. The Charlie Brown maple in the front yard, the green, leafy maples that held the cardinals, the 40-foot evergreen that Terry and Robert D scaled fearlessly to string Christmas lights(well, not fearlessly, Terry was shaking the whole time, but determined to reach the top for her nieces, Tia and I), The tall line of pines that swallowed our Nerf foam boomerangs at an alarming rate. When the deer near the house were scraping the bark off the Charlie Brown tree, a cloth-paper strip was wound around the tree like a giant bandage and I remember stroking the wrapped trunk, wondering if it was going to get better and whether or not trees had doctors.

But, almost in defiance of my weakness for trees, my hands and eyes are also drawn to the products of trees, namely books and good, solid works of wood. I love having a score of books in our home library on every subject imaginable. I love running my hand across an table of aged, scraped oak. I love carpentry and woodburning and especially like shaping the wood with hand tools. I guess since I find trees so comforting it is natural that I would feel the same for its products, but I still can’t help but think of it as loving a tree carcass, though.

These two items are the first two in a new series of tree sculptures I will be working on. I often use leaves or tree images in my work, but this is the first time I have worked to reproduce a full tree, in miniature. I am very pleased with the way they turned out and can’t wait to think of the newest medium to make the next sculpture. Stay tuned for more…