Kate McKinnon

Andrew, looking fierce with an owl T-shirt, after making the most excellent chicken salad, involving roasted cherry tomatoes, pickled red onion, and walnuts. Greg responded by playing the squeezebox, with great feeling, and then he whipped up a batch of chocolate-chocolate chip cookies. 

And yeah, I do have intersecting hot pink and orange walls in my dining room.

I took some great pictures of the elf cottage before it received its occupant. I’ll hunt up the other camera cable and post them.

My guests all begin arriving today. It should be an excellent time. I have a few more days left before the Best Bead Show begins to finish up a variety of small pieces, and perhaps even my new seed bead kit. We’ll see. I’d rather do it right than rush it. I fashioned a new sort of clasp for the piece, so I’m playing with different versions of it. Hopefully it’s a design that people will enjoy using will all sorts of beadwork. I’ve remained frustrated with the limited variety of options for attaching clasps to sewn work. I’m happy to have a breakthrough.

It’s been really cold here lately; ice on the windshield in the morning, but luckily the weather is warming, and the forecast is still for Tucson to be sunny and in the 70s during the shows. Everyone coming from winter deserves the break, and my cats deserve to have the door open. I can’t wait til it’s time to sleep with all of the windows open again.  Soon, summer….

And good luck with all of your criminal charges, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Now if only Norm Coleman would get the final smackdown from the Court, we’d be even further ahead. It was finally pointed out to me that the real reason he’s dragging the Minnesota Senate recount out so far is to make sure that Al Franken is the lowest-ranking Senator on the floor, with the most mundane committee assignments; just the ones left in the bottom of the chip bowl when everyone else has eaten. 

Clearly this is bad for the state of Minnesota, but it’s pretty obvious at this point that Coleman doesn’t care about his constituency as much as he does about power.

I have a feeling that Franken will do just fine despite his late start. I can’t wait to see him on the Senate floor. I remember, after Bush “defeated” Al Gore, and after 9/11, I listened to Al, and Rachel Maddow, and Janeane Garafalo on Air America to try to stay sane. And here we are, finally.

He says that the Republicans are acting like the Borg. And they are. And we don’t really know why; our incredibly popular President is also incredibly competent, and is trying to fix the colossal failures of the past eight years. The Republicans are all Borged out in a wad, refusing to vote with the Dems on principle. Except no one is really sure what that principle is, other than obstructionism.

Last night, Bill asked me “Why are the Republicans doing this; what do they hope to attain?” I told him that I was stumped too. It’s not like they can stop the train, they can only be cows on the line.

I don’t know how this happened; my guests arrive tomorrow, the delightful madness begins. I’m to the point in my seed bead project where I have measured out teaspoonfuls of beads, seeing exactly how many it takes to make how many inches of beadwork; a critical endeavor.

Photos soon!

Everything marches,  crazily, toward the goal.

Because there isn’t anyone hotter than Neil right now, as far as I can tell. I would have embedded the new Coraline trailer of him in his spooky old library, but it’s Flash and WordPress still says a big “no” to Flash. So click on the link above, by all means, and you might find yourself slightly frightened by buttons after all.

But you might enjoy this as well. It’s called Instructions.

Photo by DMathew

Did you know it had a slew of repeated health violations before this recent wave of 500 sick, 8 dead?  Here is a link to a very comprehensive diary on DK, if you can stand it. Mold, roaches, and leaking roofs; sinks used for washing out mops also used to wash utensils, old food gunk covering all of the equipment, and salmonella found previously on the floor of the finished food cold storage locker. Again, there is no hell hot enough to roast these guys.

Can you imagine losing your child to this kind of incompetence? Another wave of product recalls is coming, don’t eat anything with peanut butter in it until they get it all sorted out!

Depending on your job, this might be NSFW. It’s fabulous.

Thanks Michael K, you never let me down.

And Neil decided to fly to NYC to do a bit on the Today show, which was completely lame (not Neil’s fault) and an interview with NPR on Talk of the Nation. Here is a link to the NPR piece.

An artist I’ve long admired, Ingrid Goldbloom, wrote today to say that she enjoyed the Beadwork feature on my work (it’s in the current issue) and that she was a new fan. I first noticed Ingrid’s work in one of the mags, possibly Bead and Button, years ago, when she made a peyote-stiched bra of stainless steel nuts from the hardware store. This is one she did of welded steel. She is interested in working with metal clay. I’d like to be there when she does.

Bra of welded steel, Ingrid Goldbloom