1. A bunch of people gathered at Watauga Lake last week to celebrate my best gal pal’s birthday, and it was so fun and beautiful that I didn’t even get mad when somebody’s dog tried to pee on the belongings I’d left (so carelessly) on the ground.

2. While we were there at the lake, some guy referred to John Mellencamp as John Menstrual-cramp, a phrase that ended up turning our conversation into a strange game of Telephone.

3. I’m excited to see fireworks this year, because this’ll be the last time we see them in our tiny town. It’s always an adventure to find out where to see fireworks where you live. We’ll be living at the beach next year for the Fourth, which already sounds super promising.

4. Chris and I have been watching episodes of Frasier for weeks now, and they are all more hilarious than I’d remembered. They’re all on YouTube, so they load super fast. Also on YouTube: Married With Children.

5. Now that I’ve packed up most of my belongings, I realize I’m not as much of a packrat as I used to be… and it feels great.

Chris and I have been busy packing for our upcoming move to the Virginia coast, so I haven’t really had the time to think about my website. I keep interrupting myself to do other things, like organize my shoes and stuff yarn skeins into boxes—anything to get through the process. My computer appears to be experiencing its own setbacks, too, with this happening every so often:

Letters disappear, randomly, from dialog boxes and menus. I’ve always considered it a glitch with the system font, but last time even the text inside Firefox started disappearing. Has this happened to anybody else? Ever? When it happens to me, I “repair permissions” on my Mac through the Disk Utility. I think of it like “defragging” on a Windows machine, even though they’re dissimilar in the way that repairing permissions takes a couple minutes and defragging takes, like, two days. Anyway, when my letters disappear, I repair permissions and then I restart my laptop. I only have OS 10.3.9 so maybe that’s where the issue is centralized, but I’m not upgrading until I get a new computer. I don’t upgrade well: I still have a second-era iPod that’s heavy as a brick.

So naturally, I’m very nervous about moving.

1. Mosaics.

2. Diaries.

3. The word “waterfowl.”

4. Telephone conversations on sitcoms, where they split the screen.

5. Pencil sharpeners that you crank.

1. Gummi bears.

2. Ladybugs.

3. Lanterns.

4. Charley Harper’s animals.

5. Eric Carle’s animals.

Triscuits have a distinct pattern that appears woven at first. Yet if you look more closely, the wheat strands aren’t criss-crossed at all, just layered on top of each other in a parallel fashion and crimped for texture. Biting into a Triscuit against the grain creates crumbs; biting with the grain creates none.

There are things I wish I could do better. One of them is blowing my hair out with a round brush, and another is gardening, because I think I might have over-pruned and killed the lavender plant I’ve only had for eight months. A more serious thing I wish I could do better is appreciate myself. I know, gross, but it takes a near lifetime to figure out, doesn’t it? First you’re in school and you’re receiving grades and joining cliques; then you’re out in the world and you’re trying to find a mate and a career. Everybody else around you is somebody who is not you, and sometimes their lives seem better because of that fact. It can be hard to deal with sometimes, this stupid envy.

But outsides are no match for insides, and besides, I’m having a pretty good time right now. I’ve earned lots of things I’ve spent my life preparing for, including a husband who is totally, eerily awesome. I’ve even been styling my hair differently—foregoing the blowdrying because it’s too hot to do in summer.

So, yes. I’m still hangin’ in there.

1. An alarm clock that works.

2. A laptop battery that lasts.

3. All-black cats that have just one tiny white mark. (Preferably on a toe.)

4. Terrible Yellow Eyes, an ongoing collection of works inspired by Where The Wild Things Are.

5. Toile. (There’s another pattern idea.)

It seems I update so infrequently that WordPress chooses to log me out of my weblog account every week. I’m unable to come up with much in the way of an interesting story (I like to think of my longer posts as interesting stories) because I’ve been sorta busy. Not super busy; only sorta.

I just finished some illustrations for a new client (YAY), which I’ll post soon. I’ve also been working on new ideas for myself, liiike: patterns! I figured out how to make a clean pattern repeat, so that’s what I’m excited about right now. My first pattern is going to be beavers building dams, because duh. Here’s one of the little guys:

Now it’s time to go and listen to the thunder and rain again. When it storms it’s like I’m under a spell.

1. Stickers that come in rolls. When I was younger I had a roll of underwater-themed Lisa Frank stickers, and it seemed so decadent.

2. Silverware drawers.

3. When long paragraphs end.

4. When I share a strange thought with a friend and that person not only understands what I’m saying, but agrees with me.

5. The way my seasonal allergies have been nearly nonexistent this year.

1. Chris and I have started running together.

2. We’re usually just hikers, but lately we’ve been trying to step it up.

3. Chris can of course run for what seems like forever.

4. I myself can run for, like, a few minutes.

5. But I’ve never been a runner (even though my 6th grade gym teacher said I did the best hurdle-jump) so it’s all only progress.