Someday I will put here a title

Little girl teaching her cats how to draw a flower 

*baby voice* “… and if you have any questions, just ask me! And now… yeah. And now you draw the roots. You draw them all twisted up! Got it? A flower? Now draw it. Did you get it, Luis Roberto? Did you get it, Jurandir? Look. Did you get it? That’s how you draw a flower.”

The Sonoran desert, Arizona

#wouldn't roll my eyes or check my phone or get bored or nothing. I'd just listen to that little dork & smile & encourage them & let them explain how their favorite gameboy games worked. i was the kind of kid my adult self would find annoying & uninteresting but like...most of the actual adults in my childhood felt that way too. including my dang parents. and ya know sometimes they showed it. a lot of times without realizing it. and that messes a kid up

if you don't make an effort kids will recognize your disinterest and lack of attention. kids deserve to have caregivers who show interest and engagement, even when it's over stuff that adults find boring. especially then maybe. your kid doesn't have to be fun or interesting or easy or well behaved to deserve positive attention. they deserve positive attention because they are YOUR KID. if love is unconditional then DISPLAYS of LOVE and AFFECTION must also be unconditional--not something that must be earned

like, can we PLEASE bring some activism to the idea of walkable cities, abolishing HOA's, abolishing grass lawns, making cities less road-centric, rewilding certain urban areas, etc. ?? It's a legitimately cool and important thing that will determine the future of many countries.

Our deck table had been showing its age already when the wind caught the umbrella and cracked it. I wanted to replace it with a mosaic table because I’d been enjoying that art form recently. But I couldn’t get one the size I wanted so I got creative.

I spent a few weeks looking for tile and figuring out a very loose design concept. I started by picking a limited set of tile shapes and a color palette.

Once the tiles arrived I had a piece of particle board cut to size for the base and I experimented with different motifs until I settled on a selection of floral shapes that gave me plenty of variety to fill space without locking me into one repeating pattern.

And then I was off! I basically doodled my way around the table, attaching tiles with Weld Bond (I went through 4 full bottles!) and rocking out to the K-Pop Demon Hunters soundtrack.

Once the florals were done it was time for the background…

Over 3,800 1cm glass tiles make up the not-design part of the design. It went pretty quickly though because I just had to fill the space, leaving room for grout.

Once I had the tile done, my husband assisted with disassembly and reassembly. We used the legs off the original table for this one (waste not).

One huge bucket of black grout later…

She is finished.

When the turquoise dwarf gecko became a focus of the illegal pet trade, it's estimated that over 15% of the wild population was removed in just five years.

Scientists worked to get the species designated as critically endangered and then to get it CITES protection to ban international trade. During that same time, captive breeding helped to stem the demand for wild-caught geckos and their price dropped from over $1,000 a gecko to less than $50.

vimes did not resign from his post in protest, observe the rest of the watch resign from their posts in protest, recruit them into a militia, sail to the country they were at war with, and attempt to arrest two different armies for disturbing the peace so you could sit here and call him a drama queen, as though drama was some myffic quality bestowed by an accident of birth and not the inherent right of every creatively petty and histrionic citizen of ankh-morpork 

I used to rent rooms with exactly 1 electric outlet.

Yall know what my existence is like?

I want any Americans here to think about the civil war. Reconstruction. Juneteenth. Hell even just inner cities in the 1990s.

Any period where things actually looked like things might be looking better for black people in America

What was it that inevitably followed those nice periods?

Oh yeah.

VIOLENT WHITE SUPREMACY

Very fucking recently I talked to a company who seemed like they were gonna be able to OVERHAUL how my business DID FUCKING BUSINESS

They were gonna get me higher quality books

They were gonna work faster, for cheaper, and it was all gonna be fucking AUTOMATED so that ALL I HAVE TO DO IS FOCUS ON THE WRITING

And it would be great for my authors too. The people signed under me, under the Queen Mihai brand name. They'd get all the same benefits without needing to do the wheeling and dealing I did.

For once I felt like a REAL business woman.

Until

I got to the fucking decision maker.

And then I might as well have been speaking Klingon.

They didn't know what the fuck I was talking about. They didn't offer ANY services like I was describing. And really if I wasn't already DEEPLY tied to the major brick and mortar bookstores, there's no way they could really do business with me AT ALL.

Let me tell you. I FUCKING ASKED.

I asked every person in every part of the chain just how legit all this was and they were EXCITED to get the ball rolling.

"You're safe. I healed you."

A comforting voice. Bouba looked. A skinny witch, all angles, smiled at her.

"Kiki?"

"Long time no see. When did you get so hard?"