#wordworking

A few weeks ago I picked up this truckload of old wood someone was giving away.

I pulled a lot of nails, cleaned up the wood, and cut it down to size. Turned out to be a nice stack, though I’m not sure what I’ll use it for yet. The right projects will speak to me at some point.

I am SO FREAKING EXCITED for Trever’s Birthday next weekend.

He doesn’t know it yet, but since he is turning 31, I am buying him 31 birthday presents. (Yes, I know this seems excessive.) (BUT IT’S NOT.)

I’ve been saving giftcards and coupons and discount codes for ever and over the past two months I’ve been slowly purchasing gifts so as not to overwhelm my bank account all at once. After all he’s done to help me and in thanks for the fact that I’m not paying rent at our apartment that we live in until we move in September, I figured this was a grand super-fun-awesome gesture to pay him back.

And guys, I’m getting him the coolest stuff.

Paddle Your Own Canoe by Nick Offerman

8 different cool/beautiful/hilarious cards and Art Prints

Laphroaig Whiskey Chocolate

Build-your-own Moss Terrarium Kit

A Fujifilm Instax Camera (finally!)

Sexual Innuendo Magnetic Poetry for the fridge

New Wayfarers

A BRAND NEW Table Saw (plus sandpaper and tools)

Beard Soap and Oil

And more...

I’m just finishing up the final few awesome manly gifts and trying to figure out how to package/wrap them...  I think this is seriously going to be a birthday to remember. Only ten more days... Can’t WAIT!

Judybats cover of Roky Erickson/13th Floor Elevators. "She Lives (In a Time of Her Own)."

I wonder what Peg is up to these days, you probably didn't ask yourself.

"I took a sabbatical to go on tour with the Judybats," she recalls. As most rock 'n' rollers eventually do, she decided to quit rock 'n' roll. She says she felt "guilty" that she was living a struggling musicians' dream, considering she was pretty sure it wasn't for her.

"It wasn't anything I wanted to do," Peggy admits. "Just having no control over it, not knowing what my future would be. I just tumbled into it. I felt like an interloper." She wanted to work from a recipe. She dropped out of a trendy rock band and returned to school to get her art degree.

But when she did return, something had changed. "It was right when Macs were coming out," she says. "When I'd first studied, it was all still by hand." Working by hand was what she enjoyed about art. "I had only 15 hours left to graduate. But I didn't want to sit at a computer. I couldn't."

Her dilemma was comparable to her sister's, several years earlier. Plan A was disappointing, Plan B was obscure.

Starting with the premise that she wanted to make a living with her hands, there were three things that appealed to her. One was to open a burrito stand. Another was to be a furniture maker. And another, harking back to her childhood kitchen play, was to bake.

"I experimented with some burrito recipes. I took a wood-joining class. I just wanted to do things. I wanted to make something," Peggy says. "But wood-joining didn't bring the immediate gratification I needed. Baking did."