How, exactly, is it halfway through November already?  Yeee-ikes.

At least Thanksgiving will be low-key around here- no gluten eating people to try to impress, just my kids and me.  I think we’ll dig out the Christmas decorations and the Sufjan Stevens CD set and do it up right.

Meanwhile, my hands are flying through some new projects.  I’m making work for our upcoming mafia show- Holiday Heap, some projects for Sage’s birthday (seven years old, my lands!), and of course, the ever-lengthening list of handmade Christmas gifts.  How is it that I can never learn to shorten that one?  Nope, too easy.  We have very limited funds around here, but (thankfully) plenty of fiber.  That means a lot of all-nighters for little ole me.

Now, where’s that 4:30 pm coffee I was making?

Sage, in a borrowed store-bought Indian princess costume, and Zander in a homemade dragon costume…

Acrylics + pumpkin + six year old =

Happy Birthday to me!  Yesterday!

I gave myself a pretty major present:

It’s Orion, and I’ve been carrying around the drawing, and even drawing it on my arm in sharpie to test it out, for 13 years.

I thought it was high time to take the plunge.  Orion is kind of like a compass to me, in literal ways (as in, it’s easier to find than any other constellation, and if you follow the lines, you can easily find other major constellations), and more ethereal ones (I always would gaze at it when driving back to college from the town where I grew up, and it would keep me awake.  I also can’t usually see it in the city, so it sort of reminds me of home, too).  I also love that there have been more stories from more ancient cultures that explain this constellation- and they’re all so different!  There is an aboriginal explanation that talks about fishing for forbidden fish, and the fishermen and their canoe being part of the picture.

Tonight at dinner, Sage was asking me all about it.  She said, “that’s a cool tattoo, mom, what is it a picture of?”  I explained that it was stars in the sky, and that people a long time ago used to make up stories about the shapes they could see in the stars.  I showed her Orion’s belt, and she said, “no, that’s the necklace.”

If you look at it this way, you can see Sage’s bird:

And the belt, in this case, is the bird’s necklace.

I love this kid.

Forest hike idea shamelessly stolen from Mr. Agar Pony.

Happy day of labor! Or really, I suppose, happy day of rest from your labors? I’m doing some of my favorite kind of work today, in the kitchen, turning that bounty below into sauce. I am proud to report that while some of that lovely produce came from the csa, and the flat of tomatoes came from a generous neighbor of my mom, two of the peppers were grown in my backyard! I think while I run the sauce through the food mill to get rid of all the skins and seeds, I’ll listen to the cd I got as a present in the mail the other day from my friend Jennie Wayne- it’s so lovely, in a very Americana way- she’s on myspace and YouTube- just search on her name. You can buy her EP, if you have musical tastes of the highest pedigree, l have no doubt that you will, you can shoot me an email and I’ll fill you in. Sauce time!

Originally, I posted this on the mafia blog, but I love it so, I wanted to stick it in over here as well.

Image from The Small Object

I might be alone here, but I suspect I am not. Sometimes I lay awake at night thinking about the problems facing our environment, and how our pervasive consumerism contributes to them. It’s so difficult to balance the corporate nature of running a business (even a tiny indie craft business) with the strong desire to fix what is broken in our money-driven system.

One thing I love more that anything is when I visit one of my favorite blogs, and the writer has expressed my exact thoughts much better than I could have done. That’s what’s happened with this post, on the Small Object Steno Pad blog. I’m sure many of you have read this, but I wanted to share it and add my voice to the many who are commiserating with Sarah’s feelings about homemade, handmade, vs. giant faceless corporation made.

Thanks, Sarah, for making amazing things, and for getting into my head and articulating so well how I feel about these things… big high five to you.

At half-price burger night…

Sage- first grade, Zander- kindergarten!