The Glowing Edge

  • busy day

    Items the Maker created today:

    1. Automatic Waver (pictured, giving a kind of “live long and prospmuuuhhhh” wave).
    2. Carved Ivory Soap boat, with sail (also pictured).
    3. Snowperson — no head, melted before photo could be made.
    4. Nifty nametags for everyone’s chair at supper; ripped off by brothers before supper.
    5. Scary masks made out of paper grocery bags; one with a mohawk, affixed with tape.

    Items the Maker destroyed today:

    1. My Remington 1875 blow-dryer, which gave faithful service for many years before it was forced to repeatedly inflate a rubber glove. After it burned out, an alternate approach (see image) was conceived. Necessity is the mother of additional expense.

  • How Lucky Numbers Get Changed


    The Maker recently brought me this piece of paper, and waited expectantly for me to invite him to tell the story behind it. So here it is, in his words:

    I was collecting those can tops, the little tabs. [Ice] was too, and he said, no I’m having a collection and you can’t have any of them. He doesn’t like me “copying” him. I was asking him to give me a lot.

    He said, “You can just have a little bit.”
    And I said, “Like three maybe?”
    He said, “Yeah.”
    I said, “Why, ’cause it’s my lucky number?”

    I wanted a lot, so I changed my lucky number to a high number, so now it’s six.

    I like my new lucky number cause it’s a good number and usually people get chicken pox when they’re six, usually, and I guess that’s why it’s a good number.

    When I’m seven, I don’t know.

  • panic in the house

    Shouted into the house by my six-year-old, from the garage:
    “Can somebody get me some scissors? Something strong enough to cut tires with?”

  • runner Lisa vs. bad Lisa

    (not as entertaining as Spy vs. Spy…)

    Runner Lisa: Wow, I’ve run nearly half a mile. Sure is cold outside.
    Bad Lisa: Too cold to run. Hurts to breathe.
    Runner Lisa: It doesn’t hurt to breathe, you wimp!
    Bad Lisa: Ok, maybe not, but you have to pee.
    Runner Lisa: I peed before I started running.
    Bad Lisa: You could stop and pee again.
    Runner Lisa: If I stop, I won’t want to come back out here.
    Bad Lisa: You could run tomorrow.
    Runner Lisa: Here comes that nasty hill.
    Bad Lisa: Really want to pee.
    Runner Lisa: I know, I can WALK up it.
    Bad Lisa: If you’re not going to run, what’s the point?
    Runner Lisa: At least I’m off my butt for a while.
    Bad Lisa: Yeah, well, you can’t exactly brag about WALKING up this puny hill.
    Runner Lisa: I’ll run again in a minute.
    Bad Lisa: Lance Armstrong would never say that.
    Runner Lisa: No, he’s on a bike.
    Bad Lisa: He’s a real athlete. You’re a pretender.
    Runner Lisa: This doesn’t feel like pretending to me.

  • eleven favorite things by color: burnt umber and gold with pink

    soy cappuccino with an extra shot of espresso
    the smell of a wood shop
    Moet et Chandon Blanc de Noirs champagne
    cat tongues
    memories of White Shoulders perfume by Evyan
    mud bank beneath the rope swing over the KY river
    Ghiradelli
    gold foil memory stars
    mice ears
    MacLeod’s maple sugar cotton candy at the state fair
    Burt’s Bees bay rum cologne

    click on the “favorite things / elevenses by color” tag below for more lists…

  • robinella rules

    This is who’s playing on the soundtrack of my life this week.

    I wish I could say I knew this fabulous singer and her band. We both went to the same college — but then, so do about 25,000 other people every year. iTunes categorizes her disks alternately as “pop” and “country” but I’m not sure that’s at all helpful. Her band’s work shows jazz, blues, and folk rhythms, and the gospel influences are there as well. Her voice is creamy, lyrical, and makes the songs feel effortless.

    I actually encountered Robinella on Harp magazine’s November 2006 Dualtone release where she does a great cover of Melanie Safka’s “Brand New Key,” also known as The Rollerskate Song, which I somehow missed as I was growing up. The other Robinella song on the Dualtone disk is the supergroovy “All I’ve Given,” and after I heard it, I went online for more. I listened to “I Fall in Love As Much As I Can,” and immediately thought of Katherine Whalen’s sultry swinging with the Squirrel Nut Zippers, another group I adored (and mourned as they went through their troubled years — although they may be on the comeback trail for 2007).

    And there’s plenty more first-rate tunes where those came from. Robinella delivers the goods.

  • the constant battle for supremacy

    The Ice: I got the Shonen Jump’s Rurouni Kenshin numbers 15, 16 and 17 today at the library.
    The First (sensing opportunity): Hey! I had those on hold; they must have come in for ME.
    I: No, I got them; I just finished number 14.
    F: No, they are for ME. You only read that other series.
    I: Nunh-uh! I’m reading THIS series!
    F: Well I’m reading them now.
    I: You can’t read them, I got them at the library!
    F: Well, they were on hold fore me, not you! So, you’re not reading them.
    I: Yes I am.
    F: No you’re not.
    I: You can’t read all of them at the same time, anyway.
    F: Yes I can.
    I: How can you read more than one book at a time?
    F: Because they’re my books.

    Dad: You BOTH can read the books; it’s not necessary to argue about this. You can BOTH read them! Sheesh (not his actual exclamation)!

    (Whispered, from the kitchen)

    F: They’re my books and you can’t read them!
    I: Yes I can.
    F: No you can’t!

    (repeat from line two above)

  • marshmallow butt


    My most embarrassing moment occurred the year I was thirteen, a time of near-lethal potential for MEM’s for girls. I like to call this moment, which is now recorded for all the world to appreciate, The Marshmallow Butt Incident.

    In the 70’s, quad roller skating was the hotness. I was one of those kids in the leotards and short skirts, practicing spins in the middle of the rink. I was at the rink multiple days every week, taking private and group lessons, practicing and competing. My mother spent untold hours knitting, reading, and chatting with other skate moms on the lime, orange, and purple shag-carpeted benches while I worked with my coach or dance partner, practiced figures, jumps and spins, or raced.

    My coach, a former Olympic freestyle competitor, was the first person I ever heard use the word “butt” in a public setting. He would tell us to hold our butts in, or to arch our backs so that our butts stuck out, that sort of thing; I was amazed and mildly scandalized by this. Today it wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow, of course.

    Anyway, my best event was speed. During one type of team speed drill, it was our custom to receive a push-off into our leg of a race. You get going ahead of a teammate, merge into their lane to take over, and as they come up behind you at full speed, they give you a push on the…butt…and you’re into the lap. You can see where this is going.

    When my club was doing this drill for the first time, I was right there in position with perfect timing, waiting for the girl behind me to give me the send-off that would let me know she was out and I was in the race. All happened as planned, except that after my, uh, butt-shove, she cried out in a Shout Heard Round the World, “Oh, yuuuck! Your butt is like a marshmallow!”

    My teammates guffawed, the skate moms tittered, and all the known universe, I’m SURE OF IT, looked at my BUTT in speculation and hilarity. It never occurred to me that I might have hardened my butt in order to give my teammate a, uh, sturdier launching pad. Before the Shout Heard Round the World had finished echoing I was a horrified, flushed red blur. I never skated so fast in my life. I was unstoppable, I was rocket-fueled. I guess I hoped to outrace my mortification. This was possibly why speed became my best event.

    So for me, the MEM had a good outcome: blazing speed. But it could have gone bad, you know. I might have become a serious wicked roller derby girl (Anna Mosity or Hell Mary) so that nobody would be able to call ME a marshmallow butt without being on the receiving end of some profoundly nasty rink rash. Yeah.

    That would be me in the red mini; that butt couldn’t possibly be construed as marshmallow-y.

  • my mama didn’t dance and my daddy didn’t rock and roll

    The albums in my house when I was growing up were:

    1. West Side Story (1961 soundtrack with Natalie Wood)
    2. South Pacific (1958 soundtrack with Mitzi Gaynor)
    3. Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf
    4. Leonard Bernstein’s Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris (by Gershwin)

    Um, that’s it.

    And what’s amazing is that we had this monster “hi-fi” piece of furniture with which to play my mom and dad’s, uh, four albums. The hi-fi was essentially a sideboard-looking cabinet with a turntable inside. You lifted the top and balanced your album on the metal spindle inside, and settled the swing arm over the album to hold it in place. Push the button, and the album drops onto the spinning plate, and the needle arm lifts and floats over to settle on the disk. Scratchy sounds come out, then the Sharks and the Jets are ready to rumble. Really loud, if you crank the volume when your parents aren’t home.

    SO. Since I grew up in the era of Beatlemania, how is it that my parents, who were about 20 when it hit, completely failed to provide a Beatles album for me to hear? For that matter, how is it that I grew up at the same time and in the same city with Lisa Marie Presley, and never had an Elvis album? Or a BB King album? How did this happen?

    Once I confronted my parents with this astonishing oversight in my education. Their (lame but accurate) excuse: We were busy.

    Sigh. Ok, ok, it’s true. When I was growing up, my mother was teaching full-time, and my dad was working for his father-in-law in the dry-cleaning business, and later selling tools, trying to pay the mortgage on our middle-class suburban domicile with it’s orange shag carpet and green vinyl couch. Oh, and the hi-fi.

    And that’s why I had to wait until I was old enough to walk to the mall near my neighborhood, and loiter for hours in the Camelot Music until I was finally able to decide on and pony up for my very first album: an Eagles LP: Hotel California. Followed by Queen’s Greatest Hits. (The Beatles, Elvis, and B.B. King came later.)

    And that doesn’t count my shameful secret: I was given both of the first two Shaun Cassidy albums for birthday presents in elementary school. Played ’em on the hi-fi, too.

  • eleven favorite things by color: titanium white with a touch of yellow-green

    giant sheets of paper with a deckled edge
    baby yellow belly sliders
    succulents and moss
    fold-up Chinese take-out boxes with wire handles
    Sung dynasty celadon glaze
    extra-virgin olive oil
    troll hair
    glow sticks
    a freshly-gessoed canvas
    rhinestones
    Hermes “Jardin sur le Nil”

    click on the “favorite things / elevenses by color” label below for more lists…