Not Inspiration, but Ornamentation

You've probably heard about the inspiration wire--a wire, with clips, near your creative space, upon which you can hang small objects that inspire you. I'm pretty sure SouleMama thought of it first, but feel free to disagree.

I don't personally right this minute really find myself in need of more inspiration, since I spend all day and a lot of the night running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to bring to fruition some of the ideas I've already got, thank you very much, but I do like the idea of a wire.

With clips.

Near your couch.

Upon which you can hang small objects that look pretty.

My invention? The ornament wire:

After much fussing and feuding (Why does the man with the hammer feel that he can offer suggestions? He is clearly there solely to wield the hammer), Matt tacked about eleven feet of jewelry chain (bought on clearance at Joann's months ago) into swag-shapes on the underside of the living room bookshelves. I attached some little clips on hooks (Where, oh where, can I find more clips on hooks?) to some of the links, clipped up some of my Valentines, and--festive!
I'm pretty excited about how we can change the ornaments out whenever we want, and I especially like the swagged chain instead of strung wire, because I think the swags will add more vertical dimension and hooking a clip through an individual chain link will keep my things exactly where I want them.

In other news, I have been so weirdly stressed and twitchy all day. I blame it on Matt, obviously--last night my coughing (I have a nasty cold) was keeping both of us awake, so Matt offered me some medicine. I had just a terrible night's sleep after that--waking up every hour, exhausted but unable to get back to sleep, antsy dreams whenever I did doze--and as I was telling Matt this, he's all, "Hmmm...what color were the pills I gave you last night? Cause the green ones are Nyquil, but the blue ones might be non-drowsy Sudafed."

Thanks, dear.

Untitled, by Julie Finn

So you know that I write, and you know that I have written. And you know that I claim that what I write is much better than what I have written...

Well, another example couldn't hurt.

I have in my possession a childhood treasure that escaped childhood with me, a miracle that can't be said for the Daffy Duck comics, the Sweet Valley High books, or the majority of the Transformers or the Barbie accessories: I have a big, fat, yellow notebook, something that I carried around with me sometime in between the ages of seven and nine, something in which I used to write stories.

Not short stories. No, not short. The story I am going to share with you is nearly 30 painstakingly printed pages long, margins carefully aligned, parts of words occasionally re-written thanks to the miracle of Wite-Out (do you have a bottle of Wite-Out in your house right now? Two points if you do).

We'll do the first two pages tonight, and then see where we go from there. Remember, I was likely between the ages of seven and nine when I wrote this, so you're in, obviously, for a treat.

I present to you:

Untitled, by Julie Finn

One day my cat, Snowball, my dog, Bandit, and I were walking. We saw a dirty, stray dog on the road. She was sick and hungry. I carried her home. I put her on a bunch of pillows in my room and called her Belle. That gave me an idea. With Snowball, Bandit, and Belle's help, we would start a home for animals. Snowball went out to look for poor animals while Bandit helped me build a garden. He carried my hammer while I measured the ground. Then he held the poles with his teeth while I hammered them into the earth. I made a very large cage with wood, chicken wire, and an old door. Then Bandit went along rows digging holes while I followed planting seeds and filling the holes up. I planted carrots, corn, wheat, catnip, parsley, and a tree. Inside, Belle was getting ready for visitors. I had pillows in piles all over my room. Snowball and Bandit slept on my bed. It was a good thing nobody ever came in my room. I even had pillows in my closet. It wasn't long before Snowball came home. She was carrying a bruised kitten in her mouth. I suspected he had been beaten. Since he was so little, he got a baby blanket under my bed and was named Mickey. He got well quickly. After a few days, I started a baby nursery under my bed. There were puppies, kittens, mice, birds, snakes, and other things in cozy cages. In my closet were the very bad cases. Belle even brought home two chickens with broken wings. The snakes seemed to especially like scrambled eggs. All the animals I had I turned into vegetarians except for Mickey, Belle, Snowball, and Bandit. This was to save money. I always found two or three vegetables they really liked and soon I could hold a piece of meat under......their noses and they wouldn't care. But every animal got a piece of meat every other week for health reasons. But one day while Chow, an old poodle, was digging in the backyard he disappeared. I was watching from the window and thought I saw him fall in his hole. I ran to where he was. There was Chow barking. He had dug into some natural caverns and fell in. There were branches leading everywhere. I called Scraps, the bloodhound. He held a rope in his teeth while I climbed down it to get Chow. When I got back up, I screamed "Sooooooooooeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyy!!!!" This called every one of my animals within hearing to me. Soon there was a crowd around me. I set everyone in groups to explore the different branches of the caves. I was in a group with Choc, a St. Bernard whom I rode, Q, a one-eyed monkey, Snowball, Cree, a white mouse, and Lye, a carrier pigeon, who was almost extinct. Every group had a dog, cat, mouse, monkey, and bird in it. McKinley stayed to guard the hole outside since she was an old mouse with arthritis. Mickey was with her to protect her so I wasn't worried. We set off. It was dark so Lye flew ahead with a light flashlight. Soon, though, he turned it off and I saw why. The rocks were luminous. Cree crawled out and put a sample of them in his little mousepack. We walked along in the eerie glow. Then all of a sudden Snowball jumped back. The small passage had widened out into a large cavern. I told Snowball, "Scan!" which means go out and explore. I got off Choc and waited expectantly. Soon, Snow-...

A couple of things creep me out about my childhood prose: 1) I had a better understanding of comma usage than most of my students do, but I didn't know about paragraph breaks? 2) Exactly how much time did I spend alone in my childhood reading books that were too big for me, thinking eerily pretentious thoughts, and not getting any exercise or learning how to appropriately socialize with my peer group?

I'm thinking a lot of time.

The Handmade Valentine Sweat Shoppe Continues

Along with mopping the floor, and baking veggie eggrolls, and doing yet ANOTHER cardio workout with
(Maya is so proud of my commitment this week that she added Desert Sanctuary AND the Latin soundtrack to my workout options), and writing my book, and trying to figure out how to make a cloth grocery sack that looks and behaves exactly like a paper grocery sack, the girls and I spent a while mellowing out making Valentines.

Big girls made Valentines:Small girls made Valentines: And, of course, Momma made an entire sweat shoppe full of Valentines. Out of all my comic book Valentines--Iron Man, X-Men, G.I. Joe, Spiderman, etc.--my favorite, by far, is Wonder Woman:

I tell you what, that lady's got class. Am I right or am I right?

I also like the comic book Valentines on Chris' Invincible Super-Blog. And my book? On every single page, I mention at least two of the following three things: comic books, romance novels, and dinosaurs.

Have I got talent or what?

Charcoal Pudding Tastes Like Charcoal, not Pudding

So yesterday morning I drank coffee, I made peanut butter cookies with the girls, I did my cardio workout with YourselfFitness, I worked on my Valentines while the girls drew some dinosaurs for a book list we're putting together, I wrote, I fixed lunch for the girls (salad, swiss cheese, and faux bologna in a pita), I went to tell them lunch was ready, and I found them both crouched in the hallway, having scaled the linen closet shelves and defeated the child-proof cap, downing an entire bottle of store-brand children's Tylenol.

Dr. Schechter said call National Poison Control. National Poison Control said call Indiana Poison Control. Indiana Poison Control ran some numbers for me (while Willow, who tends to get a little overwrought, ran hysterically weeping from room to room, on each pass shrieking out a new lie to me about how much Tylenol she had consumed--"I only drank one and Sydney drank six!" "I drank six, too!"), and decided that even if Willow had drank the entire bottle of Tylenol, she was still at a non-toxic level, but Sydney?

Sydney and I were taking a little trip to the emergency room.

But of course, since being a stay-at-home mom means that even an emergency is filled with chores of mind-numbing suckage, I first had to call Matt to come get Willow, get both girls dressed (face washed? clean shirt? Cause I seriously might get a visit from Social Services this time), call my bestest mom friend to ask her to pick up Willow after preschool, move Willow's car seat to the other car, take down the two stuffed dinosaurs (T. Rex and pteranodon, in case you're keeping count) that I'd hidden away for the girls' birthdays and give them to them to stave off future hysterics, grab the backpack of car toys, and remind Matt no fewer than 18 times to sign the form in the office giving someone else permission to pick up Willow after school.

Compared to that, the ER was a little relaxing, frankly. If you want service, you really should walk in holding the hand of a cute little red-cheeked, bright-eyed girl in a teddy bear coat and say, "Poison Control sent us." Because you get all kinds of service then.

You get to eat charcoal pudding and drink (non-organic!) milk off and on for four hours:

You get to play with floam and magnet games and color in your sister's(!) coloring book that Momma grabbed my mistake (which said sister actually had the nerve to give me crap about this morning and I'm all, "Lady? You don't even want to start that with me"):And you even get teddy bears! Well, the first teddy bear is free. The second one, however, you must pay for in blood:

To recap, if you keep over-the-counter medicine (children's Tylenol is a crock anyway, partly because accidental overdose is so common (ahem) and I basically only kept it to give Willow a taste as a placebo whenever she gets hysterical because she feels sick (she's gets a little overwrought, remember?)), it's a good idea to make a mental/physical note whenever you dispense it of how much is left in the bottle--that's important to know. It's also a good idea to always know a ballpark number of how much your kid weighs.

If your kid is an idiot and drinks your Tylenol, Poison Control needs those numbers, as well as how much is left undrunk (I used a measuring cup), to do their math. If they send you to the emergency room, you'll have to wait there for four hours, guaranteed, before they can do the blood-draw, since that's apparently the length of time it takes for Tylenol to peak in the bloodstream. You'll also have to feed your kid chocolate pudding spiked with charcoal and non-organic milk. They warned me that kids sometimes vomit up the charcoal, but Syd has a stomach of iron.

So the arbitrary number of Tylenol toxicity in the bloodstream is 100. Syd was a 30, so we got to go home (I tell this to Matt, and he's all, "I wonder what the number for normal is?" I'm all, "Well, dear, since it's a measure of how much Tylenol is in your bloodstream, I'm thinking that the number for normal is, you know, ZERO.") In retrospect, I imagine he meant what is the number for one normal dose, and that is 7.

But of course, I don't only have the sucky chores of a stay-at-home mom to do--hanging out in the ER for five hours, organizing pre-school pick-ups--but also the sucky chores of a working woman, so Syd and I got home just in time for me to upload a couple of handouts to my class Web site, print out some sign-up sheets, change my shirt and brush my teeth, call my mom friend and organize a Willow transer (in a Village Pantry parking lot, on the way to the other kid's violin lesson), and get back in the car and over to my class so that one kid can come up to me crying because she accidentally erased the final version of her paper and only has the rough draft to hand in, and one kid can ask if he can handwrite his Works Cited page because he forgot to do it before, and one kid can ask, "Are we getting out early today?" and then huff grumpily back to his seat when I say, "Um...no."

Because if you want to annoy your instructor, you should make sure she's just spent five hours in the emergency room with her small child, and then you should ask her some whiny question trying to get out of learning and be mad when she informs you that no, come hell or high water, there will be learning done tonight.

At least I got that one thing accomplished.

The Book Begins Thusly

Let's see...today I drank hot chocolate with my girls, I did an upper body workout with that bitch from YourselfFitness----I caught up on Battlestar Galactica while working on some more comic book Valentines, I made the girls' room all spic-and-span----I held office hours and the hands of many students as they bravely (or not) voyage their way through their first paper; I admitted that my cell phone, three times washed, has died and must be replaced by another; I gave my camera into the hands of one beautiful daughter so that she could capture with her own photographic eye the sublime beauty of another daughter-- --and, friends, I began my book:
It's a how-to and a manifesto treating upon lifelong learning as it applies to the family: essentially, the desire to learn and engage with our world is a lifestyle that we can model for our children and participate in with them. I'm interested in exploring not just ways in which we can offer our children enrichment in traditional (and non-traditional) academic areas, but also how we, ourselves can still learn in these areas with our children, and can enjoy learning.

The hands-on, DIY ethic is integral to this process, as is our responsibility to our community and our environment. I plan to include lots of projects, activities, and tutorials, lots of ideas for engaging in these areas within our larger communities, and an overarching premise of self-sufficiency and sustainability.

And, if possible, I plan to make it sound a little more entertaining than what you just read--I'm saving all the witty remarks for the book itself, apparently.

Now, friends...any advice on obtaining a literary agent?

Do You Know Your Joe?

I had a peaceful time today to work on some Valentines that we'll be sending out to friends and family (Christmas newsletter? Hokey. Valentine's newsletter? Fresh and original!). To make these Valentines I'm using some old comic books that Matt finally admitted I could have from his childhood collection. I think this set will be smaller and much simpler than the last set of Valentines I sent out, just because the comics are so cool in themselves that adding too much stuff would just kill it. Here, for instance, are some close-ups of my Valentines in progress. Can you tell what comic book each is from?

1) Spider-man 2) Wonder Woman 3) G.I. Joe 4) Captain America 5) Iron Man 6) X-Men

More interesting, perhaps, might be to try to figure out why I chose each particular image to be a part of a Valentine--usually a very obscure sexual reference that probably only I will find funny.

P.S. Check out the treasury that I'm featured in on etsy! Treasuries are only up for a limited time, so peek sooner rather than later.

The Concert Outfit and the Concert

The concert outfit: Pelvis pendant by sushipot; skulls tank top by Torrid; crocheted shirt from Goodwill (I very carefully cut it away from an old-lady cream-colored pink shell that it was supposed to lie over, because, come on--if you're going to wear a black crocheted top, you're going to wear it over bare skin. Duh.); jeans from Goodwill (awesome, ass-hugging jeans that I hemmed yesterday morning with bias tape made from the cut-away part of the jeans); vegan blue boots from Vegetarian Shoes.

The concert: The music was hot, tight, and just right
some guy made a pass at Molly (twice!)
and I got into a fight.

In other words, it was perfect.