I know. I suck at blogging now. I was just telling my brother-in-law that I think it has to do with the fact that most of what I’d be prone to writing about wouldn’t be things I’d want to engage random people with. But now that I’ve said it, I can disagree with myself. So stay tuned.

In the meantime, I’ll say that we had a great birthday weekend for she who insists on calling herself “SuperManGirl”. We also had lots of cousins up to visit overnight and spent Sunday with them at the Point Defiance Zoo up Tacoma-ways.

Took lots of pictures. You can see that one of her brothers had already defaced her birthday greeting in typical fashion. She’d be mad if she could read. And you don’t want to cross SuperManGirl.

For the last six years or so the normal dawn routine is to wake from dreamless sleep, or occasionally wake knowing that I probably dreamed about something but have no idea what. Once in a long while I might have a name in my grasp when I opened my eyes, but it is like smoke in a net. H, on the other hand, usually goes on all sorts of adventures. No fair!

Till this week. Three nights in a row I woke up remembering all the details, for what may be the first time in many years. The only thing I can link it to is that I started taking Omega-3 capsules the day prior to the first night. I did a search and found this site and other people are reporting the same phenomenon.

The first night I dreamed I was in a house infested with zombies, but I was having a pretty good time. I guess that’s because Shaun of the Dead is the only zombie film I’ve ever seen.

This holiday weekend the kids have Friday and Monday off, so my wonderful in-laws took them Thursday night and gave us a three day vacation. We decided to stay home and put monies we would have had to use on lodging toward eating well and enjoying being home. We ate well today and caught a matinee of Jumper, which was a lively but substanceless film.

Last night, we watched one of the best films I’ve seen in a very long time, After the Wedding. It starts off a little slow, and you think you can see the whole plot coming, but you are completely wrong. The film upsets convention in some great ways, and the ultimate resolution of the film was very very satisfying. Try not to read too much about it before seeing it. I like the Netflix blurb, because it didn’t really give anything away. The filmmaking style was also very interesting; handheld cameras most of the time, a lot of CLOSE-ups on faces, and an interesting way of showing memories. I’ve been thinking about the characters all day.

One of the authors I like reading is Ron Hansen, and recently one of his novels was made into the film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. I saw the film last week with my brother-in-law, and it was great. You can tell the film was based on a thoughtful novel, and a lot of the dialogue in the film is straight from the text. It’s a brooding, quiet and tense film, punctuated occasionally by violence, but mainly marked by being so constantly near to it. The film deals with the charisma of the outlaw, isolation, and the natures of celebrity and fear. It also struck me as likely being more true-to-life than most westerns, and the starkness of the landscape in the film lent a significant presence that was bigger than most of the actors.

Part of the true-to-lifeness had to do with how similar the film’s criminal culture seemed to more contemporary gang life, not the glorified one, but the one we get to see in some better films. The in-fighting, the social isolation, the long periods of relative inaction, the brotherhood that can end at a moment’s notice. It actually made me think a bit of the film Brick, which I also enjoyed. So check this film out if you are up for it. It’s a better movie than 3:10 to Yuma (if there are more important things than action scenes), and the brutality is low-key enough to tolerate, nothing like I expect The Proposition to be. And plus, Nick Cave is in this film as a cowboy minstrel, and you don’t want to miss that, right?

I actually took some time out this week to read a book. Normally I’m trying to squeeze in an audio-book here and there, but since Wendell Berry’s books never make it to Audible.com, I decided to read my copy of Hannah Coulter, which I’ve been wanting to do for a couple of years now. I’m just about finished, and it’s golden. It is the fictional autobiography of a woman growing up and spending her days in her community. She loses her first husband to WW II, and remarries a few years later. She has three children. The book is a meditation on what community means, what love encompasses, and the weight of grief. There are many sharply beautiful paragraphs, and I haven’t wanted to read it too quickly: I don’t want it to end.

Lastly, we’ve been listening to Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma. A fascinating book about the food industry, farming and national agriculture. It’s told as an exploration, in journalistic narrative style, including interviews with different farmers and players in the agriculture industry/lifestyle. Read it or listen to it. You’ll never think about food in the same way. I should note that the book is not a jeremiad or a tedious case against bad practices. It really is an exploration with a narrator you can trust, in pursuit of answers and willing to listen to a lot of different voices. The light he shines is strong and bright.

It was about almost two years ago that I covered graphic novels/memoirs in this space, and I said I’d return with a rundown on some of the favorites that we’ve had for/with the kids. Well, here they are:

Mouse Guard - This is one of the few comics that we’ve bought as they were released, although it would still have made sense, wear-wise, to have waited for the bound edition. The initial story arc took place in six issues. It’s a brooding RedWall-esque fantasy featuring several mice, part of an elite guard force, who must uncover a treachery that may destroy their kingdom. The art is detailed and stylistic and the tone is always serious. I love the art, and while the plot-line is fairly simple and the story over fairly quickly, it’s still a captivating ride.

Gear was Doug Tennapel’s first comic book, and it was out of print for quite a while. The art is interesting, and I read that Tennapel did it with a Japanese caligraphy brush. It was recently rereleased in color.

The story is about a land in which cats, dogs, insects and perhaps other races run their own competing cities and use giant mechanized guardians to protect themselves and attack neighboring cities. In this story, the cats of Newton lose their only guardian to entropy and send a small posse (our main characters) out to capture another guardian robot to protect their town. The story is simultaneously silly, serious, and deeply engaging. One of the characters dies early in the story, and is dead for keeps. That sets the tone for the danger of the world. But that death has real repercussions in relationships and events throughout the story, which makes it a story in which things matter and death isn’t merely collateral damage in the adventures of invincible heroes. The boys have a few favorite sections that they like to read out loud over and over again, with drama. Here’s their number one:

The Fog Mound - This nice hardbound book is a combination of prose and cartoon art. It takes place in a post-holocaust world in which animals have become sentient and are picking up the peices. Thelonius, the chipmunk main character, is carried from the woods to a city in a flood and from there departs on some adventures involving the hidden city of Fog Mound. The story is great, although the dialogue is a bit flat. Drawings are good too. I like it because it forces my kids to switch back and forth between prose narrative and pictoral narrative. The story is a cliff-hanger of sorts that solves some mysteries but opens up others. It’s the first of a series of books titled Travels of Thelonius, and we got the second one, Faradawn for our kids for Christmas.

Hero-Bear & Land of Sokmunster - are both creative and earnest tales by Mike Kunkel. Solidly G-rated but quite inventive, the art is “sketchy” and the stories cater to the pre-adolescent in a way that makes these books slightly less enjoyable for adults than some of the other books I’m describing in this space. In Hero-Bear, the main character is given a magic stuffed animal that helps him deal with the tough things in his grade-school existence. In Sokmunster, the main character finds himself in the land where lost objects end up and has to prove his responsibility and courage by going on a quest to save a “sok” princess. My kids liked both books. Unfortunately, Sokmunster seems to only be available in hardback, and the binding is fairly cheap, so the pages began to fall out within the first couple of weeks that we owned it.

Bone is an epic adventure by Jeff Smith. It sells as more than a dozen episodes or as one fat 500+ page bomb of fun. The storyline follows several well-conceived, sometimes zany characters through a terrific and intricate plot, culminating in a massive fortress siege and an eventual standoff between forces of good and evil. There’s a lot of humor sprinkled throughout, as well as pathos and suspense. I think my only reservation is some strange fantasy spirituality that manifests itself in a dreamworld. That’s kind of on the freak-edge, and I didn’t understand it enough myself to be able to explain it to E. Which means it was kind of cool too, since mystery is cool. The book was originally released in installments, and is now being rereleased in individual color installments. Maybe in a couple of years we’ll be able to buy the 500-page color version. Stupid rat creatures!

Lions, Tigers and Bears - this series is on par with Hero-Bear in its inability to entertain adults: again, an insecure child is given several stuffed predator cats that come to life and protect him against monsters in his closet and under his bed. Sort of a cross between Winnie the Pooh and Monsters, Inc. The art is not particularly stunning, but it is polished and in vibrant color. It’s got more action than Hero-Bear and less meaningful dialogue besides the continual reassurance that one needn’t be afraid when ones jungle cats are around. Significantly, the child is in deep trouble if the monsters come and the pet-guardians aren’t around. Not sure what lesson that’s supposed to impart. Lots of battles and musing about when the next battle will happen and being glad a battle is over. My younger son rereads it occasionally, but I don’t really enjoy reading it to him.

Owly is a series of books about the adventures of a friendly owl. I would say that it’s actually more about the relationships that the owl makes, and how they develop. What’s unique about Owly is that there are no words in this comic. All communication between characters is done with pictograms, which makes it pretty great to read with a pre-literate child. That being said, the stories are generous to the reader, and there’s a well-developed story in each book with a range of situations and emotions that the characters experience.

Daisy Kutter is a graphic novel by Kazu Kibuishi, the same guy that gathered together the work for the Flight anthologies. This book follows Daisy, an ex-trainrobber who’s trying to go straight, as she puts up with the boredom of a normal job, works out her romantic relationship with the sheriff, and takes up the offer of a wealthy man who wants her to test the security on his bank train. The plot isn’t that original, although the usual protagonist in this sort of story is a male, but the art is good, and the other fun is that this is a steam-punk story, sort of like in the show Wild Wild West, in which you mix sci-fi robots and six-shooters in an unpredictable west in which Victorian science is on steroids.

For a story in this genre, I actually like Doug TenNapel’s Iron West better, but this was a fun read, and I like to follow what this artist is doing.

And lastly, we always enjoy the Tintin and Asterix & Obelix comics. I picked up the Korean version of the French Asterix and Obelix film a couple of years ago, and the boys still watch it every month or so. Funny, because since it’s in French, they pronounce the names from the book differently than I do.

I finally concluded my video course production this month, and a few days later it went live at TrainSignal’s site. They are marketing it along with an interview they did with me. I’ve enjoyed working with them.

It was hard work, but it felt good to create something like this. Much the same as writing a book, as far as the process went, although once you’ve finished a video, you can’t really add to it, only subtract, so in that sense it’s different than writing. To make up for that, each video went longer than I’d originally projected they’d be. A 35-minute topic turned into 60, a d 50-minute topic into 70. And that’s how it should be, as the goal was to give whatever I had: and this is not a magazine, encumbered by word-count.

When am I gonna write my sci-fi novel? At this point, when a publisher approaches me and offers to pay me to…

Here’s the belated update that many have asked for. I wrote this up the day after the event:

H stayed up all night last night making a whole new line of things, a set of cloth bead necklaces that are pretty awesome. H’s parents took the kids overnight, so we (well, I) got up this morning, got our lamps, tables and electrical ready and then went to the Capitol Theater to set up for the Duck the Malls event. We ended up laying a couple of folding tables over several rows of seats and setting up our table.

I think we had more stock than any of the other 40-50 vendors, who were selling everything from woodens swords to cool lamps made out of plates and hubcaps to large felted mermaids. In any case, we filled our table with display, and laid it all out on green silk. I was pretty beautiful, and our table was constantly busy for the next five hours. We sold less than a third of our stock and ended up covering all our costs for everything (materials, etc) and making an extra couple of hundred bucks. Now anything we sell will be profit. A couple of store owners asked if they could carry H’s work, which is cool.

Update:
H’s stuff is in a couple of stores and things are selling here and there, but we haven’t done much else with that besides buy some interesting materials on eBay.

Several of you have asked for more information, and for prices. Rather than directly answering that question, I’ll say that we’re working on an Etsy site, which will including pricing and ordering information. Hopefully that will be online in the next week or two. Thanks for all your support!

Saying that H is busy with something is like saying that the bee is buzzing. This time the scope of her industry is beyond friends and family–she’s selling wares in a local alt venue downtown. There’s a yearly “Duck the Malls” bazaar put on by area artists/crafters and hosted by the Olympia Film Society, and the old theater gets turned into a bit of a marketplace for a few hours.

H has been in “make” mode for a month or so now and has about 300 assorted jewelry objects she’s fashioned. We uploaded pictures to her website last night, so you can check them out if you want. We’re still trying to figure out pricing ranges.

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Talk nerdy to me: I built the site with WordPress and used Picasaweb to hold the pictures, pulling an RSS feed from Picasaweb to populate the pages. The problem is that I haven’t figured out how to exclude the meta-data from the feed, so it’s not as clean as I’d like. I could edit the CSS to make the text invisible, but I’d really like to even disable the embedded hyperlinks on the pictures so that it wasn’t so easy to accidentally wind up on the Picasaweb site. Advice welcome.

We set Saturday aside to celebrate the new season and church year, and it was the first day of snow here this year. We borrowed my in-laws’ diesel truck and went out to a tree farm with a saw and found a good tree to bring home. Gusts of wind and snow made things alternately exciting and miserable, depending on whom you were asking, the boys or the girl. As you leave the property, the proprietors look in the back of the truck and charge you depending on which type of tree you took, not the size. Fraizers, blue spruce, nobles, douglas, sequoias, grands and whites.

After that we went home and put a little feast and party together for the kids, decorated the tree and the house while listening to Sufjan, and then watched a couple of episodes of Little Men with them. Nice evening. The next night we did stories and candles for the actual Advent celebration.

So this evening I was talking to A about holidays and asked him if he knew what Hanukkah is. He said he knew but that he’d forgotten. Hrmm… I’d like that to be more memorable. “But Dad! I DO know about Kwanzaa! Let me sing you a whole song.” So he proceeded to sing a song about Kwanzaa. I don’t really know what it meant, since most of the words were in Swahili.

Later this evening I was talking to H and I was telling her about that, and I thought “What the heck IS Kwanzaa, really?” I’ve always had an ambibenevolent feeling toward it. So I decided to look it up on Wikipedia so that I could dialogue more with A about it.

And right now it’s about the funniest, saddest joke I’ve heard in a while. Make me laugh. Make me cry. Say “Kwanzaa!”