Vacation; or, We Attack the Pacific Northwest

N.B.: I’m stealing the format of this post from Tammy, because it’s a great way to do this quickly given that we took about 4,000 pictures.
We drove from Pocatello to Port Townsend, WA (1,700 miles) to visit Grammy and Grandpa for 2 weeks (the kids staying an extra third week). We hadn’t been to Washington [...]

Southern California, May 2009

The kids and I took our annual pilgrimage to see grandparents at the end of May. Then this year the trip came hard on the heels of SillyBilly’s kindergarten graduation, and Anthropapa did not come with us (saving his vacation time for an even bigger trip we’re taking in a few weeks, out to Seattle [...]

Today’s Art History Lesson

Have you ever had the experience of seeing a piece of artwork for the first time and being completely blown away by it?
This morning I was reading my daily email of NY Times headlines, and a travel article about Roman ruins in the south of France caught my eye. I skimmed the article and then [...]

Inherited Bookishness

Warning: book-related geekery ahead!
Today SillyBilly and I had a book-lovin’ afternoon. First we watched this video of a modern book bindery that a fellow EFA member mentioned on our group discussion board (double click to open this one):

This contrasted nicely with another video we watched a few months ago, on hot [...]

Snippets of Life

Can you tell I finally charged the camera batteries?
A few weeks ago we went over to ISU for some fresh air and exercise in the quad. It was one of those bright blue winter days.
These trees are perfect for little kids to climb. They’d been off-limits for a few months while a new patio area [...]

Who Does She Think She Is?

Heidi over at there is grace recently posted about this wonderful documentary about the struggles women have in modern society in balancing their need for artistic creativity and the demands of motherhood.
I haven’t seen the film yet, but something in the trailer caught my attention: people on the street were asked if they could name [...]

When Good Ideas Go Bad

Have you heard of the PROTECT Act of 2003? This is a complicated piece of legislation that intends to prevent child abuse.
I think we can all get behind that general concept, right?
But . . . there’s a problem, specifically with the sections about child pornography.
In general, the intention was that child pornography, particularly on the [...]

When Crafters Get Riled Up

I get a daily email from Craftzine.com’s blog with all kinds of crafty goodness. Today’s edition contained something of a bombshell:
Earrings made from squirrel feet.
Normally very few people put comments on these posts, but this one has received over 50 comments so far. Some people are mightily offended, some people are so offended that they [...]

Saturday Steiner

So, I spent the morning doing wet-on-wet painting with a roomful of other Waldorf mamas at Melisa’s house. It was so great to meet people on this path, learning as we go. We nibbled yummy snacks, did some beautiful paintings (Sorry, I left my camera at home and left the wet paintings there! Photos next [...]

A Late Realization

A few weeks ago I was reading a book about Albrecht Dürer, one of the most prominent German artists of the Northern Renaissance. I came upon this painting, his self-portrait at age twenty-eight.
I had seen this many times before, but for some reason it totally stopped me this time.
I noticed the fingers, entwined in the [...]