martinimade

Once upon a time, Lisa and Adrienne worked for the same alternative newsweekly. Now, both spend their respective days mining their creative souls and leading hermit-like lives. And so an idea was hatched. Every week, one would send the other a sketch - either in illustration or word form - and the other would make a companion sketch. The result would be posted on both their blogs every week, just for grins. Even if the result isn't award-worthy, the exercise might make both minds more nimble. Hopefully.

It’s like this, Ida. The creek’s always going to rise. That’s what creeks do. Then they fall again. And rise again. It’s one of them, whatchacallit? Cycles of life, the rising and the falling. Might as well try to stop the sun from setting. Or rising, really. Same thing under a different name. Sun’s always rising somewhere when it falls here. That’s just the hazard of living near creeks. Sometimes you live in them. 

Having said that, Ida, I would suggest you go get your rubber boots and the Wet-Vac. It’s going to be a long night.

Text ©Adrienne Martini; illustration ©Lisa Horstman. Until the end of time. Or something.

* 25 Hard Truths about Publishing

* The mind boggles.

* How Doctors Die. 

* The importance of anecdotes.

* STARMORE!

* My town is a literary borough. Who knew?

* The field's most honest syllabus. (HT Dave*)

* Hurricane Muffin. (Incidently, I have big love for Garden and Gun. It's all of the stuff I love about the SOuth with none of the stuff that keeps me from living in the South.)

It's been a weekend. 

On Saturday, I learned that my much loved grandmother died. No, this is not unexpected, given that she had to be in her 90s*. Still, I am sad. I'll also be making a quick trip to the 'burgh later in the week, which is needed, mind, but is throwing havoc into the schedule.

So I made pale yellow pom-poms**, whose purpose will be revealed later:

Plus, I received a mysterious envelope in the mail:

And in it was this:

Now I just need to find the 124 other people Brenner sent this to so that I can know the whole story...

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* I'm not sure where in her 90s, tho. She seems to have made a point of keeping her age/date of birth a mystery. 

** Held in this uber-blurry photo by child #1 whose school dismissed them early today because of the impending ice storm. It's been a Monday.

"'Unless a person has a lot of psychological tools at her disposal, the mind is not a pleasant place to inhabit,' says [Christopher Germer, a clinical psychology instructor at Harvard Medical School]. 'We have evolved for survival, not happiness, and thus we have a natural tendency to focus on the negative.' When the brain is at rest, he adds, it tends to get busy revealing problems from the past and anticipating problems to come. Once we scanned for predators and poisons; now we fret over the unemployment stats and what our mother-in-law had the nerve to say at dinner."

-- From January 2013's Real Simple story on "What Your Mother Never Taught You."

When I checked the temperature this morning it was -8.* It's cold, is what I'm saying. The kind of cold where you feel like you've been beaten with a sock full of nickels after a minute outside. 

It's supposed to be cold in January in Southern Tier New York. I'm not complaining about it, not really. This is what we must endure so that we have glorious summers and falls. So be it.

Negative 8 is even too cold for the puppy. This outdoors-loving dog can manage about five minutes before she makes a run back for the door. And even that's OK, really, because I don't want to be out there anyway.**

But she's still a puppy. There's all of this excess energy that needs to be burned off somehow. Over the last few days, we've played about 9,000 games of indoor fetch, she's gnawed a hole in the carpet,*** and eaten a latex balloon (uninflated).**** I chase her up and down the stairs as much as I can. And we do this:

If you need me, you know what I'll be doing, which isn't what I need to be doing, just what I have to do to keep the puppy from destroying the house. Spare a thought for me.

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* Fahrenheit. It translates to -22 Celsius. Which is still really freaking cold.

** I also seem to be sort of sick, the sort of ill where I feel just fine for a bit, then like I'm dying from the aches and drippy head, then just fine again. I'm taking this is a sign that I'm fighting it off. No one tell me differently.

*** The carpet is a goner anyway and will be replaced once there is a dog in the house, not a puppy. 

**** Long story but the end result is that I was outside for a half-hour with Lucy waiting for her to throw up. 

Once upon a time, Lisa and Adrienne worked for the same alternative newsweekly. Now, both spend their respective days mining their creative souls and leading hermit-like lives. And so an idea was hatched. Every week, one would send the other a sketch - either in illustration or word form - and the other would make a companion sketch. The result would be posted on both their blogs every week, just for grins. Even if the result isn't award-worthy, the exercise might make both minds more nimble. Hopefully.

This is the longest I’ve lived at the same address. 

We moved every couple of years when I was a kid, from Delaware to Georgia to Chicago to Pittsburgh, all before I started first grade. Then from apartment to house to apartment to apartment to apartment before I graduated from high school. Then college. Then Texas and Tennessee then here. The house on Spruce. Now, the house on Cedar, where we’ve been for long enough that I can’t remember how long we’ve been here.

(My new requirement is that any place I live from this point on must be named after a conifer. One must have standards.)

The upside to moving so much was that stuff never really had a chance to accumulate when you have to pack it every few years. As much as I hate moving, I’m starting to see the upside. Or maybe it’s just time for a few well-contained fires.

* Darwin's Neon Balls.

* The Featureless Saint has plenty of stories to tell about orange handprints left on theater walls.

* Lady Edith's dress was my favorite, btw.

* ALAN.

* BRNNR and Greene. 

* "For a few hours, it snowed."

* A list too long.

* My friend Dave, who knows a little bit about developing games, is designing one board game each month of 2013. Go encourage him to finish.

* Rick Reilly on Lance Armstrong. Does anyone else wonder if all of the stuff he put in his body contributed to his testicular cancer? Just me, then? Never mind.

* The 10ish Commandments of Running.

Quickly, quickly, before the children find me.*

Thank you for all of your thoughts and offers for the mitten tree. Please keep spreading the word. 

Also, a few clarifications -- any type of mitten is fine. Knitting is great and so is crochet or sewn or quilted. The only hard and fast requirement is green. My plan is to put the tree up in November of 2013 in Project Anthologies shop window. My hope is that I can also put a few more up in other windows -- but we'll see.**

In case you need one, Red Heart has a fine free basic mitten pattern. I'll link to more as I stumble on them.

In other news, we had our monthly tri-family dinner last night. The theme wound up being pseudo-Mexican, mostly because the Pie Goddess had a freezer full of tamales and I wanted to make this cake:

I can't even tell you how yummy this Magic Chocolate Flan Cake**** was. Worth every dang calorie. It might be my lunch, too. Because we don't need no steeenking nutrition around these parts.

And, now, on with the rest of the day. Woo?

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* They have the day off; I do not. We're about to launch ourselves into a peripatetic day of moving from place to place in which little of import will get done, I suspect, but we will try. You know how it goes.

** I also have a big box of fleece, which I rediscovered after the dog kept nibbling on little tufts of it, that I might drive around various folk to help me make it into green yarn and then mittens.*** But the Fleece Train is still in the planning stages. Holler if you might want in.

*** (with apologies to Clara.)

**** Cook's Country hides the recipe behind a subscription wall. Sorry. But their picture is a lot better than mine. 

The Newtown school massacre -- call it what it is -- is still with me, like it is with so many. A month on, I'm angry and sad and disgusted. 

We need to do something about guns. We need to do something about mental health care. No, I don't know exactly what that is -- but what we have now clearly isn't working. 

And while we thrash through what ought to be done, with the conversation growing increasingly toxic, I do what I seem to do when the national discourse is so fraught and sorrow so fresh, which is knit until I have a better sense of how to move forward.

You may do the same. And for “knit,” feel free to insert the word of your choice, like “golf” or “exercise” or “rant.” We find our own ways to cope.

Shortly after I heard about the Newtown shootings, I saw a picture of a Norwegian tree made entirely of hand-knitted mittens.  

No one can argue against the inherent loveliness of mittens. (They could, of course, because people can argue about anything. But I think we can all agree that the mitten-haters have larger issues.)

The mitten tree gave me a strange kind of hope and, because I don’t respond well to strange hope, it caused a plan to percolate in the back of my head. How cool would it be to line the shop windows in my town with mitten trees? My town could be any town, frankly. It could be Newtown. It could also be your town, if you adjust for scale.

Will mittens save the word? Reform our gun laws? Bring kids back? No. But they might start a conversation. We work with what we have.

I’d like to have help with making the mittens or funding yarn for others to make mittens. I’d like to plant mitten trees in other places, too. After the holidays, the mittens would be donated to local charities. Or, maybe, auctioned off for the Brady Center? I’m still in the planning phases on that part. (I'm also planning a book about mittens and fiber and knitters and sheep - but more will be revealed later.)

Right now, I’m more interested in seeing who I can rope in for the journey. Would you be willing to help me out with a blog post? Or a re-post? Some mittens? Corporate support? Cupcakes? 

Actually, the cupcakes would just be for me. I plan better when there is frosting.

If you're ready to start, here are the details: make your mittens any green you'd like. Make them of a size to fit human -- kid or adult -- hands. Wool would be nice but not required. Knitted would be nice but not required. Send me an email and I'll send you a mailing address. 

Spread this post far and wide. Let's see what happens.

Once upon a time, Lisa and Adrienne worked for the same alternative newsweekly. Now, both spend their respective days mining their creative souls and leading hermit-like lives. And so an idea was hatched. Every week, one would send the other a sketch - either in illustration or word form - and the other would make a companion sketch. The result would be posted on both their blogs every week, just for grins. Even if the result isn't award-worthy, the exercise might make both minds more nimble. Hopefully.

It took several Earth decades but the aliens from planet Xarcon-5 finally figured out the perfect disguise. Most of the target human population studiously ignored Sqetzel when he was wearing his avatar. He -- well, he-ish if you want to be accurate -- could observe his subjects his optical buds’ content. Once the designers put his note-taking stylus and key pad in the faux sinus cavity -- it had been down the back of his avatar’s pants but the looks of disgust from his subjects skewed the data -- Sqetzel’s research capacity soared, winning him the coveted Global Research Medallion three years running. Sadly, Sqetzel is out of the running this year after the incident with the overzealous hand sanitizer on the cross-town route.