tiger_spot

Time for Tiny Art

2022-05-23T13:21:06Z

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.

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Reading

2022-05-05T00:19:01Z

Corey has been writing a story for grownups. Obviously we do not want the children reading over their shoulder (that’s my shoulder, it’s full). But V isn’t really reading yet… she is learning sight words in kindergarten and can laboriously sound things out letter by letter. She’ll read/recite a few very simple books she knows, or guess based on the picture & maybe the first letter, but anything remotely complex she refuses to try. So when M locked herself in the bathroom the other morning, as she does, Corey thought they were safe to work on their story in a location that was not fully hardened to people glancing at their screen.

V wandered past.

“Why does that page say No twice?”

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Hey cat people!

2022-04-16T20:15:52Z

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

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California Recall Election

2021-09-13T02:35:08Z

(Ignore this if you don’t live in California)

Hey, so the deadline on those ballots is coming right up! Be sure to get them filled out and mailed / dropped off! ::looks meaningfully at your desk::

This post brought to you by my grandfather, who emailed me personally to remind me to vote in this very important election!

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We Live

2021-06-16T07:37:10Z

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.

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Pokémon Go

2021-05-05T16:41:38Z

So I have started playing Pokémon Go (I am an early adopter, as you can see), and I need friends to send gifts to! Do you play? Would you like to be Poké-friends?

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Libriomancy (2021 edition)

2021-01-21T18:34:24Z

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)

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What it sounds like when I bay for blood

2021-01-21T10:36:02Z

Behind the cut, you may find the main text of the letter I just sent to all my congresscritters, in the order I thought they needed to see it, which is to say starting with Feinstein.

( it's not long )

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On the Inauguration

2021-01-21T08:10:19Z

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?

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A very satisfyingly crafty few days

2021-01-07T23:35:31Z

I shall wait to post pictures of the Tiny Art until it's all arrived at its destinations, but I have been having an excellent time creating things the last few days. I am all done with the requests, but I am not tired of making art. If you want some Tiny Art, back up a post and leave a comment!

Here are some more watercolors I did recently so you have something to look at in the meantime.

Next I want to paint the chickens, but they move around too much for me to sketch from life, so I have been trying to get good photos to work from. The weather has not been tremendously cooperative about good lighting for subtle color variations, but I think I got a few this afternoon that should work.

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Tiny Art

2021-01-04T17:55:35Z

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.)

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Pot Spider

2020-07-08T00:38:26Z

In the time between my putting the pot on the stove and my putting the onions in the pot, a small spider began to construct its web across the top of the pot. It got a bridge line laid down and a couple smaller lines off that, and was industriously doing its thing when I rudely interrupted it and shooed it outside.

I did do all the rest of the dinner prep in between putting the pot on the stove and going to put the onions in, but still! I was using that, no building webs on it!

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Chickies!

2020-06-13T19:11:24Z

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.

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A very short letter-writing campaign for you to join

2020-06-03T18:00:49Z

Fromminoanmiss: Write a note to oppose violence

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Letter Cookies

2020-05-23T05:19:41Z

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.

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Jumping

2020-05-18T19:25:24Z

me: "Let's not jump on the couch where your sister is reading."
V: "I won't distract her. I can jump very quietly. Watch!"

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Animated movies without villians

2020-05-13T06:59:27Z

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.

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Chicken Coop: Renovated!

2020-05-13T02:54:53Z

The chicken coop is done! Long live the chicken coop!

It better live long, because if I have to renovate it again I am tearing it down and redesigning it from the ground up with different materials entirely.

Now if only there were chickens to live in it. I hope it doesn't have to sit empty until next spring.

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I continue doing things

2020-04-30T18:42:52Z

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.

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Stress Baking

2020-03-28T20:42:00Z

I've been baking a lot, as a coping mechanism. Just now I have a batch of these peanut butter chocolate chip cookies in the oven. I got requests for the insanely chocolatey new cookies I baked recently, but those would use up almost all our cocoa powder and I wish to retain my strategic mug cake capabilities. Perhaps after our resupply run, if we decide to go to the big grocery store.

While I was clearing out space in the freezer I made this wonderful gluten free persimmon bread, which vastly exceeded my expectations. I need to figure out what bizarre factor to multiply the recipe by to use exactly at much persimmon pulp as we have left, and what to bake that amount in -- maybe do it as muffins -- if I want to free up any more space for frozen soups, which I have also been making a lot of.

In other news, we cooked from dry beans (rather than canned) for the first time last night. It went... okay. They boiled dry at one point but were rescued quickly. I'm glad I started them very early because they took ages to cook. Dry beans: good emergency food, not the way I am going to switch to doing beans generally.

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Pandemic Blogging

2020-03-20T13:37:11Z

I have mostly not been on Dreamwidth for a year and a half.

But now I am under a shelter in place order, and there are nice safe internet people here! Hello, nice safe internet people. I've missed you.

My big projects right now, in chronological order, are renovating the chicken coop (all the chickens have died; I have new baby chicks on order for April 4 but who knows if I'll actually be able to get them), planning for a new dog this summer (Galen died last February), and rather suddenly homeschooling the kids (we decided early in March to pull them out after the March days off for teacher prep, and the Friday before those days -- the kids' last day in school by our decision -- they announced the schools were closing altogether).

Corey sent up a flag about covid-19 before the media coverage got going, and siderea 's posts about preparation were very helpful, so we are in good shape for staying in. We even got in a last-minute trip to the library so we are well-stocked with new books.

Corey is working from home (Google sent everyone home well before the schools closed), and Amazon is delivering supplies as usual, and life generally is carrying on, though we are all stressed and checking assorted statistical sources on the regular (my poison of choice is the county health department).

I am not sleeping much, but remain in otherwise good health and spirits.

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Cinematic Dreams

2018-12-19T16:05:33Z

I have been having intensely cinematic dreams lately. Last night was an adventure in the style of Indiana Jones or Dr Who involving trains and interdimensional travel, including a dramatic last-minute escape through a museum on the train. Night before that was a horror-comedy in the style of What We Do In the Shadows about a pack of vampires infiltrating a production of Dracula in search of some kind of macguffin.

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One-Word Meme

2018-12-13T03:22:25Z

One-word meme, via redbird

Give me one word and I will tell you something related to that word about myself that I am comfortable sharing publicly.

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Courage (the playlist)

2018-12-12T22:20:55Z

I have several carefully-constructed playlists of songs designed to move me from one mood to another. "Soothing", for instance, takes me from agitated to calm/relaxed, while "Relentlessly Perky" keeps me up and active when I might otherwise get tired or bored.

Yesterday I was listening to my "Courage" playlist on shuffle while I did some yardwork (originally designed to move me from despair to action in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, it turns out to have all kinds of other uses). It gave me alternating Sabaton and Doubleclicks for about ten songs before anything else. Kind of whiplash-y, but does what it says on the tin!

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Book Recommendations Sought

2018-11-29T01:15:11Z

Say, do any of you know good kids' books about fear of being misunderstood or trouble adapting to a new situation? Something along the lines of Elephant and Piggie would be perfect, but anything up to about middle-grade will do. Either non-fiction or a fictional treatment of something like moving to a new school that is very clear about the emotions involved and the coping mechanisms used, with a happy ending.

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