Guess who napped today?

For almost an hour! These little Gocco guys will be winging their way out to friends and family soon, assuming that someone can see his way clear to napping again tomorrow. Whew.

Trees in two colors

I'm sitting here waiting for the chimney sweep to come and inspect our flue so that maybe we can light a warming fire tonight. It's bitter cold here and windy, desolate and bare really. All the greens and blues in grass and water are greyed out, and the wind has swept the world flat. I'm not a huge fan of this time of year, but the grey light of the short cold days does make for really good photographs of tree silhouettes.

For some reason I'm a little bit obsessed with the shapes of the trees, especially against a background of sky. It could be the elementary school art class where we were taught to draw nothing but (fairly realistic for an eight-year-old, I'll give the teacher that much) trees for weeks on end, but I think that there are few things more beautiful.

The two-color tree silhouette also inspired our Gocco-ed holiday card this year, a take on this photograph. I love how the red ink from the "peace" message sneaks up into the rest of the picture, more or less in certain prints -- it's the same way that I like to think of peace sneaking into my life, more or less on certain days.

Stay warm, friends.

It's the Birthday Pig!

I always have the best of intentions in sending people cards for their birthdays, but since I value the homemade birthday card, *and* I am a huge procrastinator, I never get around to it on time, and end up sending something on the day of their actual factual (is 'actual factual' like 'roti toati', as in slang that's only used in my family?-- anyway, it means on the big day itself-- use it in a sentence? hmm... "During her school years, Greta used to have her birthday party with friends on her half-birthday in January since her actual factual was in July."-- back to what was already a mess of a post) that doesn't get to them until a couple of days after their birthday.

I always hope that people will notice that the card was postmarked on their birthday, but I'm sure they don't.

So, long way around, but here's a new birthday card (one that I will have to tuck in with my mom's gift when I actually get it to her-- hint, her birthday was last month-- I'm terrible). I printed it up on the Gocco, but I messed up the master, so I'll need to photocopy the drawing and try again sometime soon. Until then, it looks better in this kind of far away, kind of noisy image than it does in real life.

Ele-thank You

We had a lovely party last weekend. My brothers came to town for the occasion, and it was so great to see them. Twenty minutes before the guests were to arrive, it was literally 100 degrees outside. Then the rain came. All of the tablecloths that I had laid out were whipped about in violent streams of water, and ended up twisted around table legs. The serving dishes sitting on the covered porch filled rapidly with rain. Twenty minutes into the party time it was still raining and dark as I sat in a rocking chair thinking about what to do if all of the guests cancelled.

And then the rain stopped, and the sky began to clear. My friend Gillian told me later that when she looked up and saw that there was enough blue sky to cut a pair of jeans out of, the party would be saved and the rain would move on.

With the rain gone, guests began to arrive, and the temperature was a beautiful (if wet) 70. The party went off without a hitch. At one point, after it got dark, I looked around the well-lit porch at the friends and family who had joined us, all these people framed by the night, and I felt a little like I was on a boat with these people in the middle of the ocean, travelling to some far-off place. And that felt pretty good.

I made these little elephant cards with the Print Gocco to thank a few special people who helped make the party good-- and I'll have about 15 left over for later use. The best part about using a fairly neutral color for printing, like this dark-ish purple/navy, is that you can complement it with almost any color envelope. Just today I sent out envelopes in purple, pink, green and orange.

Until tomorrow!

Y'all come now!

We try to have a party at the farm each year, an end-of-the-summer barbeque to touch base with all of our friends and neighbors. Last year, somehow, the party slipped away from us, which is why the 'annual' in the invitations is in quotes. But this year we will barbeque!

I wrote an email yesterday to a high school friend who now lives in the area, asking for her address so that I could send an invitation. She wrote back, "yay! a party with a real invitation!"-- that's the way I feel. I love getting mail, and I know everyone else does, too, even if an evite would be easier. (Well, almost everyone else loves real mail. My brother, when he heard that I would be sending an invitation, emailed, "... and by invite, I hope you mean evite - the internet is the wave of the future... get on it." Mostly a joke, T, I know!)

For this invitation I used my Gocco-- so nice just to print, print, print away! I hadn't used the machine in awhile, and I forgot to replace the batteries before burning the screen, so the vertical edges of the image were a little faded. I filled them in with a close-but-not-quite-matching thin Sharpie marker, which I think gives the whole invitation a more arty look when viewed in person. Ditto the Sharpies on filling in the lettering.

And now a nice big stack of grey envelopes is off to the post office-- so satisfying.