tiger_spot

I restained my “Don’t be a dumbass” lizard. I bought slightly fancy markers to finish a feather-coloring project. Clearly it is now time for Tiny Art!

Comment with a word of inspiration (and send me your address if I don’t have it) to receive a small:

Drawing
Watercolor
Song
Needlecraft
Sculpture
Collage

or other Art Item, as I feel inspired by your particular word.

What are the most useful references, websites, or bits of information you think a person should know before getting a cat?

I am fully vaccinated, my partner is fully vaccinated, many of our friends are fully vaccinated. We are opening up reaaaaal slowly, because the kids are not vaccinated yet, and won't be until it's looking like probably September. But we the adults had dinner with friends today, and it was super great. We have been doing some pretty normal outdoor stuff -- M had her Girl Scout bridging ceremony from Brownies to Juniors, V has a series of meet-the-incoming-kindergarten-class playdates, we had brunch with the family across the street in their backyard (mostly to meet the dog, who we petsat for this weekend while they were away; that was also super great, as he is a 4-month-old black lab and just the sweetest thing) -- but this was really the first time I've been unmasked indoors with someone other than my dentist in, what, like a year and a half now? A century or two? A million years?

Hugs are real nice.

I was just reading through some past years of my journal, and I found this lovely meme, which I have now updated for the current year:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Turn to page 121.
3. The 2nd sentence is your life in 2021.

"I tried to tell myself that it could be worse, that the world was not a wish-granting factory, that I was living with cancer not dying of it, that I mustn't let it kill me before it kills me, and then I just started muttering stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid over and over again until the sound unhinged from its meaning."

(John Green, The Fault in Our Stars)

O my friends and o whatever future self + posterity looks back on this, I am having some feelings.

I have been having some feelings all day, including the part of the day where Morgan needed a blood draw for some medical testing, had a freakout about it, and wound up with three technicians plus me holding her down. “Gosh, you’re strong,” said one of the strapping young men.

That kept me busy enough that I didn’t watch the inaugural speech live, which is probably for the best given that even from the perspective of several disaster-free hours later I was evaluating the whole thing in terms of “Okay, if what you have said up till now is your last words, what’s the cumulative effect so far?”

I determined that I needed to Art about it if I ever want to sleep, but I couldn’t quite figure out how. Crashing chords? Some sort of poetry? Try out the set of oil pastels I found on our walk the other morning and see if by some miracle that is the right thing?

What is there that will let me express this sense of relief — we’ve made it! the institutions of democracy have prevailed! — and grief for the hundreds of thousands who didn’t make it, the COVID deaths, the friend of friends who killed herself when Trump was elected, everyone in between those points of statistic and anecdote, every precious life stunted and ruined and harmed. How can I steer between the joy that the work can finally begin again, that there are people in power who share my goals and values, who want the best for the country and the people in it, who want to do their jobs and do them well, and the despair at how much of the previous work has been destroyed, turned back, dynamited and used to build a wall where there should be bridges, at the magnitude of the work in front of us, the size of the problems we as a nation, as a people, as a world, are facing.

How can I do it without completely abusing commas?

The correct form of art here is, it turns out, a letter to my representatives, and I think this page of scribbled first draft I have in front of me may be enough to let me sleep even before I go looking up the quotes to put in it and revising the semicolons out and so forth. There may need to be more art later, but this is good art to be starting with.

I think I’m going to be practicing rather a lot of this form of art over the next two years.

Longer than that, if all goes well. God willing and the creek don’t rise, inshallah, etc., cross fingers and knock wood.


So how are you?

I feel like making some Tiny Art! Leave a comment with a word or phrase of inspiration, and your address if I don’t have it, and you will receive a thing! Probably a fairly small thing, definitely made by me. Possible media include but are by no means limited to:
Music
Pen/ink sketches
Colored pencil
Watercolor
Sculpey
Found object collage
Digital photography

(Comments screened in case people are leaving addresses, but happy to unscreen on request.)

Today I got up stupidly early and drove a stupidly long way to come home with a twittering boxful of chickies! They are Goblin (yellow), Gremlin (stripy brown), and Ghost (black and grey) and they are adorable.

Morgan is a little scared of them and wanted gloves to handle them. Tori is super into them; she likes to explain to me what they are doing or what they want. “The chickens say they don’t know it gets dark! They can understand us.”

So far Ghost is the most adventurous and Goblin is the most dominant/aggressive towards the other chicks.

Today Tori and I made cookies with the letter-shaped cookie cutters. We spelled "Tori" and "Morgan", as you'd expect, and then "Trombonesey" and "Clifford" (Tori's imaginary and stuffed dogs, respectively), and then "Eggplant" and "Cabbage" (because Morgan demanded imaginary friend parity).

Trombonesey is my favorite. Tori likes to collect sticks in the park for him to fetch.

We are looking for movies to watch with Morgan (and Tori, but Tori is both brave and not particularly picky). Most of our childhood favorites get rejected on grounds that they sound "too scary", but "scary" is very particularly tied to villains -- monsters don't bother her, inanimate peril (e.g. falling from a height) seems fine, but intelligent villains freak her out.

We just watched Onward, the new Pixar flick, and she liked that. She's enjoyed Ponyo and My Neighbor Totoro. Frozen and Moana are both kind of intense for her; she has seen both movies but refused to see Frozen 2 in the theater because she expected it to be too scary. She saw How to Train Your Dragon somewhere or other and liked it quite a lot.

So what movies are there, preferably animated ones, that don't have villains but do have plots? Things aimed at preschoolers are okay so long as they don't make parents want to defenestrate themselves.

We have already thought of Kiki's Delivery Service and Homeward Bound, but we need more ideas. New movies, old movies, any movies: journey-through-the-wilderness type films would probably go over well if you know good documentaries or historical films about adventurous things (or animated/fictional ones where all the peril is Man vs. Nature). Maybe sports movies? I'm not sure how villainous the traditional opposing team would come off as. Morgan is 7, so she's not into romance as a plot element, but stories about family love (Frozen, Onward) seem to go over very well.

Things I am up to:

* Renovating the chicken coop. Current point: caulking all the tiny gaps in the interior of the coop. This is maddening and smells like cleaning pennies.

* Homeschooling Morgan. This has switched from homeschooling proper to mostly school-provided materials now that the school district has, like, realized it won't be reopening this year and taken actual steps. Unfortunately they are trying to do a lot of things via Zoom, which Morgan is more or less violently allergic to (as versus pre-recorded videos or email or any other possible method of transmitting information) so their steps are not really working as well as my steps were. But there are fewer of them, so M is a bit less stressed, maybe?

* Baking. The other day we made a beautiful braided loaf of challah from a recipe in a children's book. Both kids helped with the kneading. Morgan did the braiding part all herself and was very proud.

* Deciphering 19th-century handwriting. I've been transcribing anti-slavery correspondence for the Boston Public Library. This is more or less fun depending on the specific handwriting in question, but a nice useful thing to do from home. I found them via Zooniverse, which has many other citizen science type projects you can help with.

* Writing postcards. Do you want to be politically involved but hate making phone calls? Me too. So I signed up with Postcards to Voters. The kids helped me decorate the first six or so postcards, so those are adorable and the rest of them are rather staid. But informatively and encouragingly staid! I hope they tip the balance of someone's decision to bother filling out that ballot. Several someones, ideally.