This Wicked Witch of the East bookmark is cute. You might remember not too long ago, someone also had come up with a doorstop of the same concept
Tag crafts
Getting In Touch With My Feminine Side
Not only does this help me with my inner woman, it also helps me with my inner geek. This post at a crafters’ forum features a cross-stitch sampler anyone can make that includes a bit of modernity that actually can come in handy: displaying your home wireless network’s SSID and WEP encryption key. Now your houseguests who arrive with their laptops will feel right at home logging onto your network. This is actually useful enough that I would consider suggesting it to some of my LOL’s as a way to help them keep this information at hand. Just one carp, dearie: everybody should be using WPA2 instad of WEP for their encryption.
Tina Fey’s new book, Bossypants, is out and getting good reviews. Blogger Melody Godfred took a few minutes to transcribe part of the book, “A Mother’s Prayer For Her Child”, which speaks to the existential dread felt by mothers (and fathers) about their daughters’ futures:
May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers.
While we’re talking books, Salon’s Laura Miller reviewed a new book by author Wendy McClure called “The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of ‘Little House on the Prairie’”. McClure set out to “let her calico sunbonnet freak flag fly” by visiting some of the real-life places where Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family lived. As you know, we hold Laura close to our hearts in this home, so I can empathize with her fandom, even if I was not a sunbonnet-wearing little girl in the 1970s. The book sounds like fun for anyone who is a “Little House” aficionado.
This video of comedian Julia Sweeney telling the tale of finding herself unexpectedly having to explain sex to her eight-year-old daughter made the rounds online a couple of weeks ago. It’s longish (about 10 minutes), but sweet and funny and exactly as uncomfortable as one might expect:
This is a conversation that won’t have to happen this way for us, because Bridget and I have always been pretty straight with Charlotte about the anatomical elements of her own body. She’s known about her own uterus and eggs and stuff like that for a long time. She’s also had at least a vague idea of “sex” (in the sense of “this is how two people make a baby”) for several years, though without some of the embellishments. And a steady diet of tween TV has given her enough of the boyfriend-girlfriend story. Now that the three of us stand on the cliff’s edge of beginning puberty, there will be the need to expand the conversation a little, but it shouldn’t ever have to play out like Julia Sweeney and the frogs.
Even though I like to think of myself as being far less unwilling to engage with aspects of femininity than most of the men I know, the hard reality for me is that this next phase of Charlotte’s growing up involves a cleaving between us as father and daughter. I can sympathize but I don’t have any real insight or perspective into the details of becoming a woman. It is simply part of her life I cannot share. I very sincerely wish that the trust and openness we’ve always had about everything else will help to minimize the separation, but it will always be there. The Tina Fey poem wishes for “a rough patch between twelve and seventeen” for a daughter to find that path deliberately but slowly, instead of the torment of teenager-hood; I can’t even begin to guess at the depth of the angst that those years might deliver upon a girl child, I can only start trying to find a way to watch from a distance.
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Pencil Pushing
Maybe things would have turned out differently on Tuesday if they’d had these in the ballot booths.
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SO Not Lovin’ It
Yes, that is EXACTLY what it looks like.
Thanks, Jane, but I’m trying to cut down on snacks.
Almost forgot this one: McDonald’s coffee machine full of maggots has been cleaned
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Yipwon Studio
My brother Tim has been doing South Pacific-influenced carving for a couple of years and has gotten quite good at making pendants and other small art objects, working mainly in bone, wood, and a couple of unusual materials like walrus bone, sea cow bone, and even abalone. For some time I have been saying that he should put them on Etsy.com and start selling a few, and now he has.
Each object is unique, and I imagine that as he makes others they’ll appear on that page. We’ve seen stuff like this at craft fairs selling for a lot more than what he’s charging, and his work is really very good. I hope it works out as well for him as I have thought it would.
He also makes a mean tiki pole, but I think those are strictly custom orders.
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Over, Around And Through
Charlotte learned to tie her shoes a couple of weeks ago. She’s doing a few weeks of occupational therapy to help her improve her fine motor skills so that her handwriting won’t stand in the way of her progress in school, and at the first session the therapist showed Charlotte how to tie shoelaces using a completely different method than the way I learned (and probably you did too, if you’re over 30). She was beside herself with pride to be able to do it, especially when I told her that I couldn’t tie my own shoes until I was ten or eleven. Charlotte’s motor development issues were inherited from me, though they’re a lot less pronounced than mine were at that age, and it appears she will benefit greatly from the OT sessions. Such things did not exist in my childhood, and so I simply lived with being unable to do some tasks that required a lot of coordination, or came to them much later than most people. Ask me sometime about learning to drive.
I bring this up because I read this article in Orion Magazine this morning, and it made me think for a minute. The article is coming from a different angle, namely the argument that many small but useful skills are lost to two or three generations of Americans because we have engineered our daily lives to avoid the tasks to the point that we are too dependent on the conveniences. Anyone who saw the movie “Wall-E” last summer knows what I am talking about.
There’s some measure of the “things were better in the good old days when *I* was a kid” in this, and it’s amusingly interesting to note that the sentiment so readily reaches across the supposed liberal-conservative divide. But there is also a nugget of truth in there that while there are some skills, crafts, arts, and trades that truly become obsolete due to the march of progress, there are others that have been transformed into hobby status or are indeed in danger of being forgotten which still might serve people well. That argument particularly resonates with the current zeitgeist that says we’re headed back to harder times and that many of us might find we won’t be able to have so many conveniences in short order. You might remember this article from Popular Mechanics that made the round online when it first appeared: 25 Skills Every Man Should Know. Practically nothing on the list is a skill that is in danger of obsolescence, and it’s impossible to argue the usefulness of any one of them, although not everything on this list pertains to everyone’s way of life. The list also isn’t anywhere near exhaustive, because I can easily think up just as many other skills to add to the list that are just as worthwhile, but it definitely speaks to the breadth of mundane competence.
Personally, I am not too concerned that most people don’t know how to butcher hogs or build log cabins or candle eggs just because Grandma did when she was a girl, and if tying laces is less and less of a requirement to be able to put ones shoes on in the morning, then don’t fret that elementary schools don’t teach it as a part of the daily curriculum. But I do agree with the sentiment to the extent that skills like cooking, basic sewing, gardening, minor repair work, and so on are geuinely important fallback skills that any person in our society should acquire. Like the Popular Mechanics list demonstrates, some might be more pertinent for you or me than others, but they can’t be allowed to drift out of common knowledge or practice entirely.
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Is It You Baby, Or Just A Brilliant Disguise?
As you’re planning your next bank caper, you might want to rethink that whole pantyhose-on-the-head disguise and go with one of these — an Icelandic knitted hat that has the beard and mustache built right in!
(Knitted Viking helmet sold separately)
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Sorry, No Triple Letter Score For YOU
My friends at The Big Red House Forum and I have been entertaining ourselves for the last few months playing a variation of the board game “Scrabble” that I devised. They’re very good at the game, so I have to keep ratcheting up the difficulty level to keep it challenging. This week we added Triple Word and Triple Letter scoring bonuses, and it has everybody working a little harder to make sure they’re getting every possible point.
So, I just had to post this link to this craft blogger who makes rings out of old Scrabble tiles. (via) She also makes these Scrabble tile knitting markers
Comments:
You forgot to add the part that Karan is stupid.
Posted by Karan [URL] on 07/19/07