little bits of everything

thanksgiving

2009-11-25T14:30:10Z

Whew! Finished NaNoWriMo last preparatory to leaving town to go visit relatives for Thanksgiving in a few hours. (Finished is such a relative term. In this case it means 50k of wordbarf, with more to come.)

But for now, the 3-yo is excited that we get to go on an airplane, and we get to see scads of family we don't see that often. Yay! See you guys in December. If you're American, have a great Thanksgiving. If not, have a great Thursday.

HOLY SHIT, INTERNET!

2009-11-19T22:41:03Z

...We are homeowners!!!

(Or I guess homeowners in waiting? We close in December.)

I am jazzed. And psyched. And gleeful. And so forth.

I have signed my name approximately one billion times.

(Fenced-in backyard! Kitchen bigger than a postage stamp! Not having to deal with the slumlords! Bliss.)

busy november

2009-11-19T00:52:56Z

1. I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year. The result so far is a lot of words, but also a first draft that has exploded on me. Which is fine, but it's going to be interesting trying to make it all fit together.

2. I read "A Memory of Wind", a short story by Rachel Swirsky over on Tor.com, and it has been haunting me sufficiently since then that I thought I'd share it here in case anyone hadn't seen it. It's a retelling of the sacrifice of Iphigenia by Agamemnon. It's lovely.

3. Holy crap, we put an offer on a house today. Eeek! Another couple has an offer on the same house. We should find out tomorrow whether we get it or not. I'm very excited and very nervous. I will be thrilled to move out of the apartment, but I'll miss our upstairs neighbors (my in-laws.)

Whew. Keep your fingers crossed for us.

what we did for halloween

2009-11-06T03:55:32Z

We took our son trick-or-treating, for one thing. This is the first time he's really been old enough to get it, and he got it big time. Between the costume (Thomas the tank engine) and the candy, he was thrilled.

I have always loved Halloween. Part of that is candy, part of that is an inclination to the theatrical and macabre. Last year changed that; my mother-in-law died last year, after a protracted struggle with lung cancer.

So this year, on the anniversary of her death, our family decided to make a picnic lunch and take it to the cemetery. There were eight of us, including my three year old son. We spread out a tarp, because the ground was wet, and put a tablecloth on top of that. We poured champagne, and ate cold chicken, and pasta salad, and corn, and deviled eggs, all next to the grave marker, which says SEARS in big letters.

My son climbed up on the grave marker and started tracing the letters with his fingers. Spotting a learning opportunity, I spelled it our for him as he traced each letter. When he was done, I said, "Do you know whose name that is? That's your last name."

I looked up, and my husband and my brother-in-law were watching me with funny, sort of horrified expressions. I hadn't thought about it; I was just trying to reinforce the alphabet.

But I took my son to a graveyard on Halloween and showed him a tombstone with his name on it.

My mother-in-law would have laughed her head off. It was a really nice picnic.

tee hee

2009-10-27T21:58:06Z

So, Ben and I are going out tonight to celebrate our anniversary. (Seven years! Actually, it was yesterday, but Ben had to work. But I digress.) I put on nice clothes, and, since I had a few minutes, straightened my hair. I almost never do this, because it takes too long & I have better things to do. Anyway, I walked out of the bedroom and asked my three-year-old son, "How does Mommy look?"

"What are you dressed up as?" he asked.

Heh heh. Good question.

laundromat

2009-09-04T15:40:18Z

We recently had lunch with a friend who seems to attract odd happenstance. Some of his stories suggested comics to me. Here's one about laundry.

Someday I may do the one about the waiter and the wine cork. It was awesome.

I'm an aunt!

2009-08-30T04:37:31Z

My sister has produced an adorable offspring! Tonight, I drink to nephews.

the haunting, page 13

2009-08-28T20:42:04Z

page twelve

...and that's the end! Goodbye, Cat and Ghost. May you have many exciting adventures.

the haunting, page 12

2009-08-27T21:50:57Z

page eleven

page thirteen

the haunting, page 11

2009-08-26T14:15:34Z

page ten

page twelve

the haunting, page 10

2009-08-25T15:33:27Z

page nine

page eleven

the haunting, page 9

2009-08-24T17:06:03Z

page eight

page ten

the haunting, page 8

2009-08-23T15:32:24Z

page seven

page nine

the haunting, page 7

2009-08-22T17:04:47Z

page six

page eight

the haunting, page 6

2009-08-21T16:39:25Z

page five

page seven

miscommunications

2009-08-21T14:59:20Z

(So playschool just started up again, after a summer hiatus. During that time, the tiny human moved up to the 3 and 4 yo class, or as we've been calling it, Big Boy School. I almost always dropped him off in the morning last year.)

A conversation in my house, 7 a.m., this, the second day of playschool:

Tiny Human: I want Daddy to drive me to school today.

Me: Daddy can't drive you today. I'm going to drive you.

TH: But I don't want you to drive. I cry when you drive me.

Me: You don't have to cry when I drive. You can choose to be happy that I'm driving you.

TH: But I don't want to go to little boy school.

Me: Oh! You're too big for little boy school. You're going to big boy school even if I drive you.

TH: Yay!!

the haunting, page 5

2009-08-20T19:17:05Z

page four

the haunting, page 4

2009-08-19T13:06:02Z

page three

page five

the haunting, page 3

2009-08-18T20:46:11Z

page two
page four

the haunting , page 2

2009-08-17T18:36:37Z

page one
page three

the haunting, page 1

2009-08-16T16:44:11Z

title page

page two

the haunting

2009-08-16T16:37:23Z

It hasn't all been slap chopping and History Channel around here. Back in art school, one of the exercises we used to do was a page-a-day (or panel-a-day) comic. I recently purchased an extremely small Moleskine notebook, and it seemed like the perfect vehicle for one of these comics.

Part of the fun of these comics is not knowing how they end ahead of time. So! Tiny comics:

page one

Flygirl, by Sherri L Smith

2009-07-31T02:05:39Z

This isn't so much a review, since I just this second finished reading this book, but just a reaction of wow. Flygirl, by Sherri Smith, follows Ida Mae Jones' struggle to join the Women Airforce Service Pilots -- a task made more difficult because to do so, she will have to pass for white.

The airplane neepery is convincing without being too jargon-y for the layperson, and the picture of wartime society feels absolutely real, but it is the characters that leave me wishing the book were still going. The women that tried out to be WASP must have been something special, and Flygirl really gets that across.

The complications of Ida's situation are presented in a straightforward fashion, but the situation itself grows increasingly complex, and the stakes for Ida get higher, both in the WASP and at home. I don't know whether Smith plans a sequel or not, but the characters could certainly support one (my fingers are crossed that one is in the works.)

I have a feeling I will be recommending this book a lot.

doodled while watching the history channel

2009-07-28T22:11:29Z

slap! chop!

2009-07-25T01:28:12Z

I bought a Slap Chop. I walked into the drugstore, innocently in search of shampoo, and there it was. If you watch much tv, you've probably seen the ads for it. The Slap Chop itself isn't something I'd ordinarily see and think I needed (so little one sees on infomercials is), BUT the infomercial itself is hilarious. (As others have noted.) At any rate, it was worth a few chuckles when I brought it home.

So, how does this impulse buy stack up? It's not built for the ages, but for $9.99, I wasn't expecting all that much. And if you want your vegetables evenly cut, you will do far better to bust out your chef's knife, which will have the added benefit of being approximately fifty-four billion times easier to clean. However, for recipes where the veg need not be the same size (pizza sauce comes to mind, as does the salsa the infomercial mentions), the Slap Chop does make things faster.

Its highest and best purpose is mincing garlic. With a knife, this is fiddly and gets one's fingers sticky. With the Slap Chop, it's a matter of seconds and your hands are still clean -- although I'd peel the garlic first, despite what Vince tries to tell you about onions and garlic not needing to be peeled. All in all, it works much better than my last purchase from the as-seen-on-tv aisle, the ShamWow, which, sadly, shammed, but did not wow. Thanks a lot, Vince.