I Read The Water Will Come Because I Wasn't Afraid Enough of Drowning (JK I Am The MOST Afraid of Drowning!)

Found a new-to-us creek access (and soooo many snakes) on the kid's college break!

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I actually read The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet first, and loved it so much that I immediately checked out another of Goodell’s books-and two weeks later, I’m reviewing this one, too!

I don’t love this book, at least not for its writing style. In The Heat Will Kill You First, I feel like Goodell really cracked the pattern of vivid anecdote followed by elucidating science. The anecdotes WERE very vivid, which drew me into the science, which gave me the information, and then off I went to the next chapter. This book still has the science, but the anecdotes are a little less vivid and less interesting, or maybe I’m just less interested and don’t feel as much of a call to action reading about real estate as I was reading about migrant laborers dying in the fields. I don’t really feel sorry for the people who live on a narrow spit of land in Florida and want their shitty gravel road maintained AND I don’t feel sorry for the county government that has to spend all the county’s money yearly rebuilding a road that serves a whopping twenty people. 

Okay, I feel a little sorry for the county that raised its roads and got sued, anyway...

Other times, though, the real estate anecdotes worked. I’ve been interested in the Marshall Islands since my older kid studied it in AP Human Geography. My entrypoint was how cool stick maps are (I’ve since seen a real Marshall Islands stick map in a museum, and it’s just as cool in person!), and that same class also covered how the islands are being affected by global warming, but not in the vivid, anecdotal detail here. Goodell also showed me another unexpected point of connection to the Marshall Islands: many of the people there are leaving for my home state of Arkansas, of all places! I don’t love that for them, since they’re apparently mostly working at the chicken plant there. Fun fact: my high school chemistry teacher would threaten us with future employment at the chicken plant if we weren’t studying hard enough. The chicken plant is the WORST work, and I don’t wish that on anyone, much less people forced to leave paradise due in quite a large part to America’s actions.

On the trail down to the new-to-us creek access, we also found a lovely spot for a portrait!

This would have been a great book to read with my teenager when she was studying AP Environmental Science and AP Human Geography, and it’s also interesting to read it in today’s political landscape, when I can see connections between climate change and the COVID pandemic, Israel’s attempted genocide of the Palestinians, and Russia’s war on the Ukraine. Mostly, though, it makes me want to take a trip to Miami Beach. I’ve never been there, and it doesn’t seem like IT’s going to be there for very much longer, either…

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P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Five Reversible Tote Bags

I wanted to use my obnoxiously large stash of felt to make enough tote bags that we wouldn't ever have to get paper OR plastic at the store ever again.

GOAL ACHIEVED!!!

Since I also wanted to de-stash my felt, I deliberately over-engineered these bags by making them reversible--

--AND I deliberately over-designed them by adding hand-cut felt applique embellishments to one side. Here's the tote that I designed, with my interlocking gear appliques that DO look as cool as I'd hoped they would, but all that changing direction to sew all those gear teeth was a massive pain in the butt:

I wanted the kids to each create a tote design. Syd went super simple with a single cupcake--

--but Will went all out by hand-drawing, hand-cutting, and sewing--

--EVERY SINGLE ASTROLOGICAL SIGN onto her tote bag. How awesome is this bag?!?

 

It's my new favorite thing.

Remember how I used to do craft fairs, back when the kids were tiny? It's been a VERY long time since I've set up at a craft fair, and yet I still had the felt tablecloth I made to use at my booths.

Now that felt tablecloth is a tote bag!

So now I've made a new stash of cloth napkins to replace paper napkins, I ripped an old sheet up into dish cloths to replace paper towels, I've got enough tote bags to hold all of our groceries, and the only thing left on my to-do list is to make some more mop pads for my steam mop.

Technically, the store-bought mop pads aren't disposable, but they ARE all microfiber, which is also terrible for the environment. If you want mop pads made from natural fibers, you pretty much have to make your own.

So if you find me on Facebook busily cutting up my old towels and stitching 2" elastic onto them, that's what I'll be doing!

Six Months Ago: December Favorites: The British Navy, Suicidal Misanthropes, and Drawing with Waffles

One Year Ago: June Favorites: Good Omens and Good Dragons

Two Years Ago: How to Make a Wood Burned Leather Bookmark

Three Years Ago: Greece with Kids: The Acropolis, Falafel, and Feral Cats

Four Years Ago: Homeschool Field Trip: The Tulip Trestle Beam Bridge

Five Years Ago: Compound Sentences against Humanity

Six Years Ago: Magnetism and Electricity Self-Directed School

Seven Years Ago: New Haven, Connecticut, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Eight Years Ago: At Turtle Park

Nine Years Ago: A Horse and Pony Obstacle Course

Ten Years Ago: Drawing Dinosaurs

Eleven Years Ago: Rain on My Parade (Again)

Twelve Years Ago: America the Delicious

Work Plans for the Week of November 3, 2014: Back to Work

The kids had a fabulous time on their vacation to California! Their grandparents took them to museums, and beaches, and tide pools, and LegoLand! In fact, their vacation was so educational (they're full of facts about tar pits now, and King Tut, and model trains), that I feel perfectly justified in giving them the first two days of this week off to unpack and get back into the groove.

I also signed Will up for a Minecraft Homeschool class whose orientation technically started last week, so she'll be having some extra time on the computer to complete her orientation lesson and get used to their map before she starts the class in earnest on Wednesday.

Playdates and classes and volunteer work will get the kids back into the swing of the school schedule, and we'll start our school week on Wednesday.

WEDNESDAY: I actually don't remember where the children have left off in their Math Mammoth curricula (gasp, I know!), so I'll have to get them to show me. It's somewhere in the time telling unit for Syd and the endless division unit for Will, though, so I'm not too lost.

Will is beginning her Minecraft Homeschool class on this day, and I'm not yet sure how much time it will take, so I've given it just the one school slot this week. Syd will be reading a biography of Florence Nightengale, as part of the kids' Girl Scout First Aid badge for both Brownies and Juniors--we're studying first aid through the lens of its professionals, since there are so many interesting people to learn about who work in the areas of medicine and civic safety.

Mostly on this day, though, there will be loads of clubs and classes! The kids are taking a class on wildcraft and medicinal herbs as part of our Girl Scout Co-op, they'll be attending their monthly online Magic Tree House Club meeting, and also attending their monthly LEGO Club meeting--their creations from the club meeting are displayed in the public library children's department all month, and this is thrilling for them.

THURSDAY: I've neglected music for a long, long time, but back when I was teaching it regularly, Syd loved the Hoffman Academy online piano lessons so much that I bought the written work that goes with it, and I'll be using it with both kids.

Song School Spanish will bring more Spanish vocabulary into our lives!

The kids (and I! I don't love ice skating, but I hate sitting on my butt more) have an ice skating date with our homeschool group on this afternoon, and we're also going to attend the dress rehearsal of the play "Pride and Prejudice" on this evening. I'm not sure if they'll actually like the graphic novel version enough to read it through, but I've also got an excellent infographic of the plot that they can look at, just so they know what's going on in the play.

FRIDAY: The AMC 8 problems that I'll be showing the kids today are one that requires a knowledge of mean and median (I'll have to show them that, as well, as they haven't encountered it before), and one that makes clever use of Pascal's triangle. The kids HAVE done Pascal's triangles before, so that one should be easy enough--more time to learn about mean and median!

Another option for math on this day is for the kids to re-enroll in their favorite math class, which is back to a time and day that we can make! I'd forgotten about that when I made these lesson plans, so I suppose I'll just present both options to the kids and see which they'd prefer.

Gee... I wonder?

The kids will also have to show me where we are in First Language Lessons. I was pleased to hear that during their plane ride, playing Mad Libs with the little guy sitting next to them, my kids "taught" him the parts of speech. I imagine that most of this involved a child reciting by rote, in monotone, definitions like "an adverb describes a verb, adjective, or other adverb" with little understanding of what she was saying, but still--it beats not having a definition for adverbs at all!

The kids might be interested in a more extensive unit on endangered and extinct animals, or this might be a one-off, but nevertheless, I know that Will loves origami, so when I came across this little lesson and origami passenger pigeon project, I immediately figured out a way to work it into the schedule.

I've also got the kids writing thank-you notes to the firefighters who led our fire station field trip; I'll ask the kids to include the new information that they learned on the trip, so it'll be a good culmination activity, as well. I've got some photos to print for them, and the kids will bake them some healthy muffins, and then we'll bring it all by to them on the weekend!

SATURDAY: Again, our weekend is ridiculously busy. Syd still has ballet twice on Saturdays--once for her class, and a second hour-long rehearsal for The Nutcracker in the afternoons--and Will is beginning her own two-hour rehearsals on Saturdays this week--she's preparing for an aerial silks performance! After Syd's afternoon rehearsal, we'll be driving up to Battle Ground, Indiana, for an evening program at Wolf Park (howling with the wolves!) and a visit to the battle ground and Prophetstown. I am a MAJOR Tecumseh fangirl, and I am SUPER excited. The kids don't know a ton about Tecumseh--it's just a sad period of history, you know?--but we've got The Story of the World chapters on him to listen to on the way there, and then I'll flesh the story out more for them as we walk around.

Sunday brings chess club for Will, maybe a hike for all of us (we've been working on cleaning up the giant 1960s-era dump at the very back of our woods, sigh), and plenty of time for board games, books, and play.

And probably more howling. I think that Wolf Park program is going to be FUN!

The Wind at Work, Paper Airplanes, and Remote Controlled Helicopters

Guess who's 46" tall, plays with toy ponies all day, and will be walking the runway in the 2013 Trashion/Refashion Show?

It's Sydney!!!

Syd is super-stoked, already working on her runway routine, and will absolutely throw a fit when I tell her that I will NOT permit her to wear the clear acrylic stripper heels that I wouldn't let her wear last year, either. I tell you, what's wrong with a nice pair of cherry red Converse high tops?

The down-side of the big news is that one of the dress rehearsals overlaps our homeschool Science Fair, so Syd chose to withdraw her entry, and Matt and I will be playing man-on-man this month--him at the Science Fair with Willow, me at the fashion show dress rehearsal with Sydney.

It turns out, though, that Willow is REALLY interested in her topic, flight, and without another kid's project to focus on, we've been able to double-down on a pretty epic unit study with her. Wind and air temperature, as you may know, are integral to flight, so along with paper airplanes, the remote-controlled helicopter, lots of science encyclopedias, and attempting to figure out what on earth to use to sculpt a kid-sized set of wings,  Willow and I have been working through some applicable experiments in our copy of The Wind at Work, given to Will by the publisher. 

The first experiment in the book is great science on a lot of levels, and Willow picked up a surprising number of new skills doing it. The experiment basically asks you to compare the temperatures of three different elements several times a day over a period of days. This required Willow to learn how to create a chart to record these temperatures--

--to think through how to set up an experiment properly--

--to be responsible for collecting data at specific times, no matter the weather--

--to learn how to read thermometers--

--to record information in a consistent manner (with legible handwriting!)--

--to read that chart for its information--

--and to create a line graph, using a ruler and different colored pencils to record the information on it:

Surprisingly, this last task was the one that Willow balked at. I don't know--perhaps the amount of information to record looked daunting, or she didn't quite understand the purpose of copying it in a different way, or the temperatures all looked similar enough that she didn't see the value in the extra work?

After I persuaded her to actually begin, however, she was immersed in the graph-building almost immediately, and when she finished, it was clear that the line graph presented the temperatures in a much more readable manner, with patterns and trends easily evident: 

And then Willow, who is at heart a reader, couldn't get enough of it. She noticed where temperatures dropped and where they rose, she noticed what elements held a steadier temperature and what elements frequently fluctuated, what element stayed closer to air temperature and what element held the previous day's warmth.

This particular experiment is a build-up to studying global wind patterns, but it also makes just a really cool stand-alone experiment. I've already promised Willow that we can repeat it again in the summer (as opposed to the snow, sigh), and that we can add more elements to compare--gravel, I believe she suggested, and our compost heap, which will lead to an entirely new series of science inquiries, I'm guessing.

As I told Willow, this is real science that she's doing, the stuff of real scientists. "Probably nobody but you," I said, "compared the temperatures of different elements on these exact days in our exact town this week. If anybody ever wants to know that specific information, they're going to have to ask you."

At that, my scientist beamed.

The Great Backyard Camping Adventure

No, we didn't rough it. If we had just a tent and an air mattress and some blankets, then we might have roughed it. But when we also have an extension cord and a power strip...well...

I read magazines by the light of a desk lamp that I brought outside and plugged in:
The girls played I Spy Fantasy on the computer:
Matt dropped by and brought us pizza, and stayed to watch a movie--

--although later he left. Wuss.

And for hours after the girls fell asleep, I hung out and read magazines and watched more Netflix, snuggled under our nice, big electric blanket, set to its hottest setting.

Ooh, but I didn't get enough sleep, because Willow snores, and my back hurts this morning, because the air mattress wasn't pumped up firm enough. That's probably roughing it, right?

Um, right?

Our New Babies

Blueberry picking was hot work this morning:
At the u-pick blueberry patch, this one lady fainted and they actually had to call out the volunteer ambulance service. Unless I am just about dead, I NEVER give you permission to call the ambulance for me--Matt once paid something like $2,000 for a ten-minute ambulance ride across town to go get his forehead stitched up after he fainted and whacked his head on a table one time. And they didn't even run the siren for him.

We only ended up with about five pounds of blueberries this time (it only seems like a trifle when compared to the 13+ pounds of berries we left with last week), but the girls did leave the berry patch with a few other very precious things in tow:Tadpoles! Or, as Sydney refers to them, our new baby froggies. Notice their state-of-the-art habitat, please. Also notice that we'll be eating solely out of the pantry and freezer this coming week (thank goodness it's stocked with blueberries!), since I walked into the pet store thinking I'd need a little glass bowl and some fish food, and walked out with a 2.5 gallon aquarium, a set of four aquatic plants, two different colors of aquarium gravel (I have two little girls, you know), and a package of actual tadpole food. Seriously, there are tadpoles right on the front of the package.

So the babies are swimming in style right now, with their $26.14 worth of merchandise and their chlorine-free creek water from the creek a couple of blocks over.

But just look at their little faces: Aren't they adorable?

Look at Me and How Awesomely Famous I Am!

Y'all know how I am so cutting edge in the eco revolution, right? So I often watch Zaproot, which hosts these little news-show clips of breaking news on the enviromental front--they're nice because they usually report positive environmental acts or encourage people in concrete positive environmental acts they themselves can take, etc.--I'm really not so much into downer news because then I feel all bummed and powerless, so I like their method. Matt hates all their quick cuts, by the way, but I'm all, "Dear, it's supposed to be edgy. That's what kids like these days."

Well, imagine my surprise while watching the latest Zaproot to see...well, me!

Keep an eye out at around 51 seconds into the video, and you'll see a screenshot of my Crafting a Green World post about writing my reps to protest the CPSIA:


Ah, fame. I have become so powerful that my mere image can now be used as shorthand for what I represent.

So Easy, Even Small Children Can Do It!

Look at my little urchin--CLEANING THE RUG! Our rug always needs cleaning, but after an "incident" this morning (I'll spare you the horrifying details, except to tell you that it involved Sydney and a diaper, and I almost barfed), the rug NEEDED cleaning. I've probably mentioned before that I am obsessed with --I use some recipe from that book every day, I swear--so this afternoon I made up the Carpet Cleaner recipe (subsituting baking soda for washing soda--washing soda cleans better, but is a little too caustic for our house) and started scrubbing. Willow, seeing me up to something that doesn't immediately look like drudgery, is immediately all, "I want to help!" Help away, kiddo!

It's just about my favorite aspect of natural cleaning, particularly making your own cleaners--the kids can actually productively use them to help me clean, and since I know exactly what's in the cleaners and that they cost about a penny to make, I know that they're not harming themselves or the house or wasting money when they begin to clean a little, um, boisterously. Sydney likes to take the spray bottle of vinegar and tea tree oil, for instance, and spray, well, everything--walls, tabletops, couch, cat, floor.

When she does that, I think, "Oh, good! The baby's cleaning."

A Clean Floor

Something I should admit: my house is filthy. Like, really filthy, can't walk on the floor without stepping on stuff filthy, filthy as in barely sanitary, filthy as in I'm always sort of vaguely fearing the sudden, unexpected visit of a social worker who would step in the doorway, take a look at the filthy living room, and snatch my babies away to foster care filthy. Sure, I want to clean, and sure, I do clean, every single day, but mostly I do other stuff--play with the girls, read books to the girls, do art projects with the girls, grade papers and create lesson plans, sew, read, garden with the girls, eat delicious things, goof around on the internet--you know, stuff.

But part of being committed to an environmental ethic is a commitment to not filth up your living space. How different is filthing up my own house to filthing up highway medians, or the oceans, or the atmosphere? It reflects and teaches my children an irresponsible attitude to one's living environment, and to one's possessions. Although it might not seem so, an environmental ethic should be very concerned with stuff--we should be mindful of our possessions as one of the many aspects of mindful living. We should, obviously, have few things, but those things that we do have should be really important to us. When something is important to us we keep it rather than disposing of it for a new or "better" something, and when something is important to us we take care of it, keeping it nice and in good repair so that we don't have to dispose of it and purchase new stuff.

So this morning I got disgusted with myself and my house and decided to make a change. In the morning, I took "before" photos of one filthy part of my home, and made a vow to straighten it, organize it, and clean it before bedtime. And so I give to you.....my study floor and the things it contains:

• Pizza Express cup
• construction paper
• crayons
• Legos
• miniature bead path
• lid for Tupperware container that's supposed to hold crayons
• two books that show diagrams of the insides of stuff
• paint pens
• collage materials (ie. stuff)
• foam letters and letter cut-outs
• basket that's supposed to hold miniature racecars
• pipe cleaners

• cat
• stickers
• more construction paper
• more crayons
• Sydney's artwork of fingerpainting on construction paper
• wool leftover from Fatty Stegasaurus creation
• fleece blanket leftover from dino quilt creation
• another Tupperware lid, this time for colored pencils
• Ziploc bag of collage materials
• Ziploc bag of stickers
• cloth book of color recognition in French
• Willow's artwork of stickers on construction paper
• book cover separated from book in previous photo
• record bowl
• matching dinosaurs game piece
• more construction paper
• filing box holding computer equipment
• more Legos
• Longman's grammar
• scooter
• dinosaur
• top of a racecar storage box
• stacking tower pieces
• purse for dress-up
• cropped edges trimmed from photos
  
• wrapping paper from purchased hook-and-latch kit
• fleece blanket trimmed from dino quilt
• more construction paper
• miniature race cars
• library books
• My Pretty Pony from my childhood, now Willow's
• romance novels leftover from a freshman comp class project
• bottle of vinegar used for cleaning the glass in soldered pendants

I'm actually surprised to see that hardly any of this filth is actually mine. Hmm. So I worked away at the floor off and on all day, in between reading books and playing with the girls and going to the library for storytime and drawing on construction paper and making it into fans with the girls and telling each other "April Fools" and gardening out in the cold and working out at the YMCA and making dinner and eating dinner, and here's what I finally have:

Glorious. Mind you, the actual floor itself still looks like crap, partly because the previous owners had a really pissy dog or something and also didn't put down tarps when they painted the walls white and partly because the girls and I use the floor as our work surface for all sorts of projects and I'd just rather refinish the thing in ten years than harp at them over spilling paint or glue or being momentarily careless with markers or scissors--I'll get into my manifesto about children's art in today's society some other time.

And here's what happened literally five minutes after I'd finally finished:

Willow's rubber ball bounced under their art cubbies and Matt and the girls began scraping everything out from under the cubbies onto the floor in search of it. Just after this photo was taken, Matt turned to me and said, "You forgot to clean under this," and I replied something that is unprintable and is largely why Willow is able to swear so impressively, although I usually blame that on Matt's dad, a former Navy sailor. But then while I sat across the room and muttered to myself some things about husbands, Matt and the girls picked up all that stuff and put it away, which he certainly wouldn't have bothered to do if the floor had been otherwise covered in stuff, and later when Willow emptied all the crayons out of her big crayon box looking for chalk she put all the crayons back, another thing she definitely wouldn't have done if the floor had been filthy. Thus encouraged, tomorrow I tackle the livingroom table.

Fabric Findings

Although I work primarily from recycled materials, I do sometimes like to pad out my pieced quilt tops with new fabric--it's especially useful when I'm working a quilt to a theme, such as Batman or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and I'm having trouble finding enough T-shirts to piece an entire top, but it's also valuable in expanding or highlighting a theme, for instance with the dinosaur T-shirt quilt that I'm making the girls, which will consist of large dinosaur T-shirt squares surrounded by frames made of a large variety of printed dinosaur fabric (I hope). To date, I buy fabric almost exclusively from the local Joann's store, but I've got several online fabric store crushes:


Bugfabric.com has the best thematic collections: dinosaurs is obviously my favorite (particularly this one--awesome!), but they also have space/monsters, and lots of penguins and monkeys and dolphins and robots all mixed into the other categories.


eQuilter.com's dinosaur selection is a little more cutesy, but they still have a good selection of "realistic"-looking prints. This one's pretty funky, and I like these big ones, but Willow would quibble that meat-eating and plant-eating dinosaurs never walked around that close together!


This Japanese dino print from one of my favorite etsy shops, sweetflavor, is my favorite of all, I think. The dinosaurs are iconic but also really kid-like.


I've been thinking I could make my Fatty Stegosauruses a little more high-end and pretty eco-friendly by upgrading the batting to something organic or greener. So far I like the idea of this fiberfill from Mountain Mist--it's made out of...corn?

Know more? Share!

More New Findings

Here's what I've been looking at this week while nursing Sydney, sitting in the back of the room during storytime at the library, or hiding in the bedroom during my 20-minute off-duty time when Matt gets home from work:

Threads is pretty much entirely over my head, but since I'm only really just becoming interested in sewing or altering clothes for myself--I sew quilts, things for the house, and clothes for the girls all the time, but subsist, myself, in thrift store clothes in which fit isn't always my main priority--I read it anyway, in search of a place to begin. A peasant top, perhaps?

I have a button machine that makes 1" buttons--I bought it because there's a terrific profit in buttons, since they're quick and easy to make and popular to sell--but I just as often make buttons to give as gifts or for Willow to wear or to put on my own backpack. I use a 1" hole punch to take button graphics out of magazines, picturebooks, or vintage papers, but being inspired by badbuttons.com, I'm trying to convince my partner, who is a grapic designer, to make me some awesome original designs.

by Tsia Carson, is a terrific DIY book that introduced a load of new projects to my to-do list: Kool Aid Yarn, Recycled Yarn, Bag o' Bags, Knit Hammock, Shrink Plastic Necklace, Button Cuff, Embroidered Screen Door, Rice Table, whew! Her pattern for T-shirt panties could very well be the trick I need to improve my own pattern, which for some reason results in panties that keep getting more granny-like every time I make them. She also has this terrific Web site, SuperNaturale, which has tutorials and showcases of designers and projects focused around a frugal and sustainable craft ethic. A lot of this stuff, obviously then, makes use of recycled materials.

Another encyclopedia-like book, and this one is vast, is The Crafter Culture Handbookby Amy Spencer. It has about a billion projects, many of them made from repurposed materials, and not just the obligatory refashioned T-shirts and button jewelry but also Chinese lanterns from colanders, brooches made from teeny fabric scraps, the pillowcase dress, and so on.

Know more? Share!

The Recycled Craft Ethic (A Manifesto)

I've thought a lot about this: why I create, and what I create with. I create to be powerful, to make for myself in my own way what companies would want me to purchase. I create to have beauty in my life, to make my environment and that of my partner and our daughters beautiful. I create to show love, to share my creativity and give my time to friends and family. I create to calm myself, to be with myself or with my daughters in relaxation and enjoyment. I create to challenge my intellect, to work out problems very different from my academic and home lives. Or really, I just create because I like to.

What I create with, however, is also very important. I'm unwilling to buy new materials with which to work, because my family doesn't have the money to spend for them and because we have a practice in which we do not buy new goods unless necessary. I'm also concerned about consumerism, commercialism, wastefulness, and the environment, and I want to teach my daughters to also be careful and wise here.

And so I create with things that others before me have used. I create with ephemera, such as board game pieces, or trash, such as plastic grocery bags, or damaged goods, such as holey T-shirts and felted wool sweaters. I find it rewarding to create and to live up to an ethic that is useful and good.

So serious! This doesn't reveal at all that what I really do is make dinosaur T-shirt quilts for my daughters, and Ozzy Osbourne T-shirt panties for myself, and necklaces out of Scrabble tiles; that I flit from project to project, the infinite variety of second-hand goods enabling my attention deficit; that my house is utterly filthy because I'd rather string beads with the girls than pick up the stepped-on jelly sandwich, that when my eldest daughter, Willow, asked why we were going to Joann's and I replied, "To buy a zipper," she chided, "No, Momma. We need to make that."

How would one go about making a zipper by hand?