Barnaby Bathes

He had some loose furs after he was sewn, so he had to take a bath. He still has quite a lot of loose furs, to be honest, but there's plenty of bathing time left before he goes on stage/film.



He's named for my childhood bff cat Barney Anne Foster-Stiltsken, to whom he bears a striking resemblance. I changed his name to Barnaby because he's a boy and Barney is clearly a girl cat's name. Barney was named after Barney the Bear when I was like two or however old I was when I decided to start talking. An example of Barney the Bear's work:

Barnaby A. Stiltsken

A cat in progress.

I wish you non-seasonal happiness

We didn't go out for New Year's Eve. I have a somewhat irrational hatred for this "holiday" as it is so terribly arbitrary. Maybe it's just because I'm constantly making resolutions that aren't year-based. Or because I think it's just an excuse to get drunk, and if you want to get drunk why do you have to wait until December 31st anyway? Or maybe it's just that my heart is three sizes too small.

But I love Christmas. See:


Yesterday we sent 31 variously-sized pieces of mail, including some New Years Cards which I felt it necessary to make instead of printing more Christmas cards after Christmas was over. I'll post a photo after the packages start to arrive. There was a terrible line after us when we left the Post Office. Channing said "that was really fun, but it would be more fun if someone mailed us back." Which some people sometimes do, and it is indeed very fun.

One of the packages was this tiny baby hat, which is not completed in this photo:

It's for a tiny baby, so it didn't fit on my head once it was done. But I think I may have made it far too big, so it might not fit her until she's five or something. I've never made a hat for a human before, so it would have been easier if I'd had her to try it on instead of using an approximately baby-head-sized mixing bowl.

I stuffed my giraffe.


And I had this amusing holiday dream, but it's taking 1000 hours to upload, so you can just look at my youtube channel in a while if you want to hear me talking about Jimmy Durante kittens. (Update: it finished! )

Maybe we will paint the living room sometime in the next four days. We are finishing up the "small" home improvement projects now, so maybe we'll have leftover energy for moving on to the main project. Maybe tomorrow would be better.

Cold season

The pilot light on our heater is out. I just called the electric company and the soonest someone can come to turn it on is Friday, which is four cold days from now. But there's another thing that happens when it gets cold outside, besides getting cold inside. That's right, it's Christmastime!

I love Christmastime! I know commercialism is terrible and all that, but I really like making cookies and seeing snowmen and making cards and eating feasts. I'm not really a huge fan of presents. I hate surprises, and I like giving things to people when I want to, not because I feel obligated to do it. And I really don't want any more stuff. So I asked for boring stuff, like a kitchen knife and books for my upcoming classes, which will be nice to have, but not too exciting to play with on Christmas morn. Luckily there will be a tiny baby (not Jesus) to play with. And ice skating, if there is an ice skating place in Memphis.

We went to the Oakland Christmas Parade, which was really good. So good that we're still talking about it a week later. There were karate kids breaking boards, jump-ropers, tap-dancing Christmas trees, little kids dressed like presents, Taz riding in a convertible, and huge balloons of various cartoon characters which had to be dramatically lowered to clear the tree corridor that was just beyond our curb-seats. Gregg has lots of good pictures of the action, including one of the devastating effects of my Santa fever. Best parade ever!

We decorated the miniature city instead of decorating the whole apartment, because miniature decorations are so much easier! Plus a reindeer lives there, so it seemed like an obvious choice. Of course it's all exactly to scale. Maybe if we weren't going out of town for actual Christmas I'd want to decorate more. I don't know. I think I'd be more excited about it if anyone besides me and Channing were likely to see the decorations. We still haven't exactly "decorated" our apartment for daily use, so we're probably not ready for seasonal decorations anyway. Taking them down and storing them seems like a hassle, too. We might actually get around to painting our hideous living room over Channing's vacation, so that's another good reason not to decorate.

We did invest in some white LED icicle lights, but those are more for mood lighting than for seasonal decor. We rearranged our bedroom, so our bed is wedged into the closet that used to hold a murphy bed. It makes for a magical forest-tent-like sleeping experience and opens up a lot of space in the bedroom. Or it will once we find places for all of the stuff we took out of the closet. Finishing stuff is hard. Also, our closet has fake stained glass windows. There's something really nice about sleeping in a little cubby nook thing, especially when it has fake stained glass windows.


Channing made Christmas pizza today, with pomegranates and spinach and pears for toppings. It tasted a lot like regular pie. And we had hot cocoa with it because it's really cold in here.

I made elaborate Christmas cards, which we addressed last night. So I guess I won't post a picture of one just in case they get mailed at some point and one is coming to you in the mail. You'll just have to wait. Soon I'm going to make some Christmas cookies. I guess I should make a whole lot so we never run out.

A cat with the tail of a beaver! And more!

I made most of a giraffe for the Golden Retriever movie. He's very tall, but not so very fat. Giraffes aren't really fat, but this one should definitely be a bit fatter. I ran out of stuffing.

Here is his inside-out neck, when I was pinning the mane(?) in:

Here is his cute inside-out body:

I realize that you can't actually tell what anything is. I'll post a right-side-out picture when I finish stuffing him.

I still haven't finished the beaver puppet, because I don't have any suitable brown fabric for his body. Mr. Tusks' body is not very beaveresque, but here he is, delighted to model a fine beaver's tail. 

Clearly I need to make a trip to the fabric store very very soon. 

Thanksgiving was really good. I was nervous about being in charge of the meal, but it turned out fine. I think it was easier than I expected in part because we've been cooking meals from real ingredients so much more often lately. When I was growing up, cooking things that didn't come from packages pretty much only happened on holidays, which probably made it even more stressful for my mom when those days came around and she felt like she had to not only cook, but cook something extra-special.

We didn't have tiny pies, just a regular-sized one. Tiny pies are all the rage around here ever since I figured out you can make pies in a muffin pan. I meant to make them as portable lunchbox desserts, but both times I've made them we've eaten all the pies too fast for any of them to make it into a lunchbox. As you can see, I didn't even have the strength to take one photo before I ate two pies. I was a bit disappointed that we didn't have time to make them for Thanksgiving, because I thought Channing's mommy would have quite liked them. But the next day they went to Chinatown, where they saw tiny pies for sale in a bakery. 85 cents a pie! What a deal! 

I'm looking forward to Christmas. We're going to Memphis for a few days. My mom already spent an entire day putting lights on the Christmas tree. I get to see my niece again (she'll be 3 months old on Christmas) and this time she'll probably be dressed like an elf instead of a pumpkin. I'm dragging Channing to The Nutcracker (which I'm pretty sure he's going to like) and I'll probably make him watch at least five Christmas movies with me. And hopefully at some point I'll get to go ice skating in my holiday elf cape. And we get to make gingerbread cookies! And wear mittens! I'm going to make Mr. Tusks wear mittens! Wooden mittens, so he can't scratch me. And read the Christmas stories, which are banned during the rest of the year! And giftwrapping! I love wrapping presents. And Christmas cards! Sighhhhh. Christmas is so great. 

gettin' into scrapes

The title is actually a pun, and this post is probably really boring because it's about scraping paint, not about mischief and injuries. 

After a few months of being disgusted by the paint either peeling or chipping off of or layered globbily onto various surfaces in our apartment,  I finally started scraping. The more I scrape the more I want to scrape. Not because it's fun, but because it really looks terrible. I don't understand these people who did all of this painting. None of them ever thought of stripping the old paint, they just covered it up. I understand when you're moving you don't want to do all that hard stuff, but the cumulative effect is ridiculous. There are between nine and twelve layers of paint on the cabinets in the dining nook. There are a few colors in there, which I understand might not be to everyone's liking, but mostly it's just layers and layers of white. I'm scraping down to turquoise because the layer on top of the turquoise isn't really sticking to it. And I like turquoise well enough. To make matters worse, the people who did this painting didn't understand the concept of not painting hinges and clasps. A lot of our cabinets don't close all the way, so hopefully my scraping will solve that problem. Too bad it's not enamel paint. I would like to have some fordite in my rock collection. I would like to make the wood actually look like wood again, but I doubt that I'm going to have that much patience for scraping. 

But here's a part about injuries after all, as a reward for reading this far: I got a paint chip in my eye tonight and it hurt a lot. Channing fished it out with a q-tip, which hurt more. Channing broke his arm a week ago in an altercation with a bear. I was going to make him a leafy green mitten and paint his cast like a tree trunk, but it turns out he doesn't have to wear a cast because the break is so close to the elbow that if he didn't move his arm his elbow would fuse itself together. Which is kind of cool. And I'm glad he can do the dishes and take showers. But a tree arm would have been cool, too. So if you happen to break your arm, get a brown cast and I will make you a leafy green mitten for your fingers. I wouldn't suggest breaking your arm on purpose just so you can have a tree arm, because a broken arm seems to hurt a lot.  

Beaver Background Update

They are done! Almost. I just have to adjust the length when I get the actual song from my dear friend Keith. Here is a preview dam:

And they're stop-motion backgrounds, so there are 300 more just like that but slightly different. Exciting, huh? Also, logs. Whatever. 

Next step is Beaver Puppet! I don't have any idea how to make a beaver puppet, which means this is the kind of project that I want to do most. I like the ones with thinking. 

I'm tired. 

I spent almost three hours going grocery shopping today. Most of that was getting to and from the store, and most of that was because I decided to walk two miles to the train instead of waiting for the bus. Too bad the store I like is in San Francisco. Usually I don't make the trek, I just suck it up and go to the store where Channing got called stupid by the cashier for buying organic toothpaste. But today I had nothing to do, so I spent all day going to the store to get bulk spices and loose tea. Also, we got our CSA box yesterday so I've been planning menus to use all the foods that I don't usually eat. This is partly why we joined the CSA, so we would be forced to break out of our ruts of getting the same vegetables every time we went shopping. This week's box had broccoli, broccoli raab, bok choi, salad mix, onions, pomegranate, butternut squash, and tokyo turnips. Our plan worked, because the only things in there that we would usually buy are onions and pomegranates. I would get broccoli, but someone who I live with and eat with at nearly every meal refuses to eat it without making gagging faces. Unfortunately it turns out that this plan is also a lot of work what with the finding recipes and shopping for extra ingredients and cooking the food and everything. I guess it's worth it, but sometimes it seems like I spend more energy making the food than I get from eating the food.