Thursday, December 29:

In case you're wondering, here's a picture of all the glass (65 lbs.) the nice people at Frantz Art Glass sent me for coming in second in thier bead contest. Mike Frantz says he's planning to have another contest soon. I highly reccommend that everyone enter the next one because the prizes are huge! Holy crap! 65 pounds of glass!

Besides winning gift certificates and such ( for few minor league gingerbread house building contests in the 90's) the only other thing I can remember winning is a loaf of Wonder bread. When I was four years old I was on a Hostess-sponsored television show called "Circus 3". On each show Cowboy Eddie would ask the audience members (all children) to answer a question and the most clever answerer would take away the loaf of bread. On the day I was on the show the question was "What is the coldest thing you've ever touched?" My brother Mike, who was 6, thought he had a lock on the prize when he answered "Freon 2" (a substance used in refrigerator cooling systems). Mike was always the smart one. He was really pissed when my semingly confused answer "The telephone" won. To this day no one, myself included, is sure what I meant by that answer. I may have been speaking of the telephone metaphorically as I have no memory of a phone being physically cold to the touch. Who knows? Who cares? The important thing was that I won the loaf of bread.

Monday, December 26:

Hope everyone made it through Christmas week. I'm still here. I was kinda sick still over the weekend so I ended up laying around watching things like movies and car accidents.

If you've ever complained about shitty weather or how difficult it is to raise children you ought to see the movie "March of the Penguins". Those penguins have quite a time of it and they complain NEVER. Nature obviously wants them dead but hey just keep on plugging along huddling together for warmth and making more baby penguins. Remarkable animals, penguins.

Another remarkable animal I saw this weekend was Robert Mitchum in "Night of the Hunter". Mitchum plays an evil, criminal preacher-type who's got the words "love" and "hate" tattooed on his fingers. You would think that the tattoos would be taken by the towns people as a sign that maybe Mitchum isn't a real preacher but that doesn't happen. For me the high point of the movie occured when Mitchum delivered a sermon-ette about Cain and Able. His hands wrestled eachother as he described a knock down, drag out fight between love and hate. What a showman! The movie also stars Shelley Winters (before she went through the "old machine").

After I went to bed at 2:30am (as if I hadn't seen enough on Christmas Eve) some dumbass in an SUV ploughed into a tiny Ford Focus that was parked right in front of our house. Me and Don watched the drama for an hour out the open bedroom window hoping to see something interesting like the SUV owner failing a field sobriety test. I'm not normally such a rubberneck but between the irate Focus owner, the babbling SUV owner and the tow truck operators who were trying to seperate the two cars I wasn't going to be getting to sleep anytime soon.

Later that day...

Thursday December 22:

This morning I was thumbing through my spam folder restoring emails from folks I know or thought I knew when all of a sudden things in the electronic mailbox started looking all screwy. I closed AOL and when I re-opened it all of my past and present emails were deleted. I'm not sure what happened. So if you sent me an email prior to about 10:30am central time this morning I don't think I had the opportumity to read it. If you believe your message was of dire importance please send it again.

What is it with me and mail anyway?

Thursday, December 15:

Today at Aardvark my and Cindy's hats are off to Stan and Viv (aka: sunonbay) for sending me these great pictures of all of the beads he's bought from me and Cindy over the last year. I am so impressed that he did this I can't even tell you. I've never seen such a great assortment of my stuff in one place before--6 bead stands and most of the alphabet beads! (Of course the pictures I got were bigger than these so you could actually see all that). We love Stan and Viv!

Tuesday, December 14:

Our mailbox is a hole in one of the support posts on our porch. Mail goes in the hole and comes out through a flippy door in the back of the post. I've been meaning to post a picture of our mailpost for a long time because its my favorite part of the house.

When we first moved into the house back in August I used to entertain thoughts about decorating our porch in various strange ways. One thing that I thought would be cool was a scary fish mosaic on the mail post with the slot being the mouth of a big fish. It was a golden idea. To ensure myself that the project was underway I glued two glass eyes to the post.

As time marched on I began to realize that completing this project was going to be harder than I thought--mostly because I'm never home. In mid October I experienced a small burst of mosaic related enthusiasm which resulted in the addition of the pointy teeth. Unfortunately, the decorating urge occured after dark and I couldn't really see what I was doing so the teeth aren't lined up real well.

Here's something about our mail flow that you may not know: 60% of our mail is addressed to the home's previous five residents. Unwanted advertisements make up an additional 30% of our mail. Since I have all of my personal mail delivered to the store the only items I keep an eye out for at the house are our mortgage statement and the gas and electric bill.

Here's something about me you may not know: I expect incompetence from those around me. When I come home and my mail is blowing around because a mail individual tossed it on the porch instead of using the mail post I think nothing of it. I understand that people really don't know or care about what the hell they're doing and that's ok. I don't want most of my mail anyway.

Given my low expectations of people around me doing thier jobs correctly and the sporatic nature of our mail delivery I was not surprised when November's mortgage statement went missing. What did surprise me was when Don came into the store yesterday with a massive armload of mail that had been held at the post office since Oct. 22. Apparently one or more mail individuals refused to deliver mail to us since the teeth went onto the post. The note (the very first note we've seen since Oct.22, might I add) accompanying the giant mail pile read "MAIL IS STILL HOLDING AT THE POST OFFICE UNTIL MAILBOX DECORATIONS ARE TAKEN DOWN." Could they not have told us this a little fucking sooner?

There was at least one mail individual who continued to do his or her job in spite of the scary glass teeth (which, despite thier appearance, do not endanger the mail person in any way). Hats off to them for doing thier job.

Monday, December 12:

Last Saturday night at about 2am I saw a tiny spider dangling from a web on the ceiling of my porch. It was like 8 degrees outside! Other people saw it too so you know this isn't just another instance of me imagining bugs all over the place.

In other miraculous news...I WON SECOND PLACE IN THE FRANTZ BEAD CONTEST!!!! I can hardly believe my luck. I also can hardly believe that the only photo of the winning bead that I have is the one up there where he's dancing with banana man and holding a hot dog on a fork.

Friday December 9:

I couldn't sleep last night so I had a few drinks and wrote a haiku:

Strong sausage smell,

Where are you coming from?

Behind the couch?

Underneath the haiku is a little drawing of a couch with stink lines eminating from it. Its funny because its true. Its also not funny because its true.

Tuesday, December 6:

Still nothing happening here. I bet if I left the studio or turned on the television I'd see something interesting but that would require effort. Besides, it is scary cold outside now. If you have a hedgehog inside a plastic box you don't need a television to tell you that.

Wednesday November 29:

Whoop-de-do! I got a bead into the Trajectories exhibit at the Arizona Bead Museum! Thanks, jury members! My existence could use a little validating right about now.

Monday November 28:

On Saturday we celebrated the 30th birthday of our pal and fellow Lost School member Brad. Since we knew there would be extra folks in the house Brad brought along an extra large canvas and two boxes of oil pastels for the traditional collective birthday drawing. The canvas, which consisted of a 2'x6' board with a 1.5'x5' piece of canvas nailed to it, started out in the kitchen but migrated to the living room by 3am. When I went to bed at 4am Brad and Sean were still working away, mostly repairing things that happen when 10 people contribute to a drawing. I woke up the following afternoon to find the entire 6'x2' board and my living room floor almost completely covered in oil pastels. The drawing was a success though--I think it ended up being a row of 6 faces (3 of them shown) with nicely blended colors and stuff in the background. Clearly drawn by drunk people but more importantly, drunk people with an understanding of color. So hats off to everyone who contributed especially Brad and Sean who somehow managed to get oil pastel to cover plywood that had patches of paint on it. Hats off also to Woolite Oxy-Clean carpet cleaner.

Friday, November 25:

You would think that on this busiest shopping day of the year I would have better things to do in my store than taking pictures of Marty-Mart the hedgehog gnawing on a turkey bone. I don't.

Tuesday November 22:

Here's a fun holiday craft project for you. 1)Go out and buy one of those singing/dancing Douglas Fir trees. 2) Disconnect the speaker inside the tree so it can't sing anymore. Be careful when you cut the wire because you still want the tree's eyes to blink and it's mouth to move. 3) Fashion hands and arms out of wire and pipe cleaners and attatch them to the tree. 4) Fashion a row of teeth out of craft foam and glue them in place. There! Now you have a cool tree.

On any given holiday season I have a stand of three to five of these mute trees in my store window. They face outside so that when people walk by the window they trip the tree's sensing device and the trees spring to life. The tree's eyes light up and they bounce up and down and thier toothy maws flap wordlessly. It scares the hell out of people! It's really fun to sit in the back of the shop and hear a whoop of surprise from someone who just wanted to get a closer look at the prisms hanging in the window. I love my scary trees.

Speaking of scary trees, I and my pal Cindy Palmer made a set of beads on the theme of the scary tree. Its up there in the picture section. It includes a pissed off tree focal, a hapless star that's just happy to be "up", a freaked out gingerbread man, a goofy candy cane, a mitten that's up to something and an ornament that looks like it may have just soiled itself. It comes with a really nice display stand. Oh yeah, there's also a frog on a present pendant included. That wasn't really part of the set--he just got hooked on there when the tree went on his rampage.

Monday, November 21:

Isn't this logo delicious? It came from a box of pork shoulders packaged by the Hormel Company. That means that not only did the people at Hormel see and approve this American flag pig design, they also thought it would be a good idea to put it on thier products. Isn't that funny?

Sunday, November 20:

Check out the rock star toilet paper holder Don made. Functional art! Don, the husband,installs micro brewery systems for a living and welds stuff--useful stuff--out of stainless steel scrap.He's made three of these holders even though we only have two bathrooms. This one is my favorite. We've got another one that has the holder mounted on top of a big bouncy spring. The swaying roll of t.p. indicates the wind speed as the gusts blow up through the hole in our bathroom floor. That was an unexpected bonus.

Wednesday November 16:

I found a name tag on the inside of my coat today that said "Hello! My name is: Platypus Noodler". The find triggered a vague memory of making name tags for people at Lost School last Saturday night. I remember making one for Bob Foster (our leader) that said "Hello! My Name is: Volcano Of Reverie". Everything else is kinda fuzzy.

Well,all of a sudden its winter here now. It caught me unawares. Last night you could see your breath in the bathroom at the shop.(We had to have the window open while we were torching.)The thermometer on the toilet seat said it was 50 degrees but the wind coming in through the the window made it feel much, much colder. I thought I would be smart and carry a big piece of styrofoam insulation to work with me so I could segregate the bathroom from the computer area. Unfortunately it was very gusty this morning and the insulation acted like a firm, pink sail in the wind. Had I been blown into traffic on East Johnson St. I could have been killed. I had no control over the speed or direction of my gait. What a treat for everyone who got to see that.

So me and Cindy made a new collaborative auction thing. It's based on things that you would see in or near the ocean. Actually, it's more like things Cindy saw in or near the ocean when she went to Florida last summer. I was at the ocean once but all I saw were sand fleas, tourists and naked old people. Not good bead material! The auction comes with one of the new little bead holders. I think we're listing it tommorrow.

Sunday, November 13:

My "applause" sign finally arrived! Man, I really needed one of these! Now I can make people clap. I'm keeping this one in my studio area at the house. (The studio area at the house doubles as the set of a pretend talk show on the weekends. Someday I'll tell you more about that inside joke run amok...)

Thursday November 10:

I DID IT! Now my banana stands up just like the one in the cartoon! Once again the universe has rewarded me for dinking around on a silly and seemingly pointless project. The stand was really easy to make. I intend to make more of these (stands, not bananas) and sell them on ebay along with the mask beads. You guys have to provide your own guns and easter bonnets.

Wednesday, November 9:

It took me two tries but I finally nailed that banana from the Don Hertzfeldt movie. Now I can rest.

Later that day....

I can't stop thinking about that little cartoon banana. Even though he was only on the screen for a few seconds he was really the best part of that short. The ending was really good too. The rest of it was pretty strange even by my standards. (Spike and Mike "Twisted" strange--If you like that you'll like the banana movie). Too bad the banana couldn't have his own show. I'm going to go try to attatch little wire arms and legs to my banana now so he can stand up on my desk. God, I'm bored.

Monday, November 7:

Over the weekend I was exposed to the animated short films of Don Hertzfeldt. Genius! The above pictures came from "Rejected".It was one of the lowest budgeted films that ever won an Academy Award. You should go buy the dvd now. I made a banana with eyes bead today in honor of Mr. Hertzfeldt. I'll show it to you when its out of the kiln.

Wednesday, November 2:

Halloween weekend came and went. No documented beatings of cartoon characters, no fires, serious injuries or property damage. Cost to the city: $350,000.00 (around $20,000/hour) for extra security. That's a lot of cake.

I had to kill a mouse with a shovel on Halloween. Actually, it wasn't a shovel it was an ice-chopper--kind of similar to a hoe. I like "shovel" better. Anyways, after making beads all day I went home and found a mouse stuck to one of those sticky traps we have all around the giant hole in our bathroom floor. He was very much alive.(Don is out of town and he usually does all the mice killing--I don't know where he keeps his "tools"). I didn't know what to do so I grabbed ice, juice and vodka and went back to the store to tell Cindy. Cindy offered moral support, had a drink and then had to go home. I had two drinks, borrowed the store's ice chopper, walked back to the house and did what I had to do. Now my blood lust cannot be sated.

Sunday, October 23:

Madison held a zombie parade on State Street yesterday...so that was new. I think it was supposed to counter some of the Homecoming festivities going on this weekend. Some of the parade filtered past the shop in the afternoon--probably on thier way to the liquor store. At first I thought Judgement Day had come. The customers in the shop weren't paying any attention to the zombies at all so I figured I was the only one seeing them. Then a guy with a green face stood in front of my window and yelled "BRAAAAAAINNNS!" A lady I was talking to said "Oh that's the zombie parade. I read about it in the paper." What a relief!

Wednesday, October 19:

Well, fall is here. Crap! One of my big plans for the blog page this summer was to post a week by week pictoral of the removal of a wart from my leg using only duct tape. Together we could have watched my wart magically disappear. Wouldn't that have been fun? Have you ever heard of people using duct tape to remove warts? Well they do--I'm not making this up. It's the same principal as Compound W strips--stick a strip on your wart, peel it off and put a new one on every 24 hours. Duct tape used in this particular application strikes me as being very resourceful indeed. We'll have something to look foreward to next summer when I'm wearing shorts again and my wart is back in my reality.

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