Face-less Book

I am taking a wee vacation from teh Facebook this week (although I've already cheated twice).
But this is a good thing because it means I will post more here! (Well, good for ME, anyway.)


Until I gird up my loins to blog about my fabulous family weekend, here's a little graphic about composting:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/what-are-we-composting,17421/

Fine Art de Wuggly

Me, Myself and I ... and Myself, and Me, and I

Dancing With Myself

Tragedy! (Or melodrama, depending on who you're asking)

Swell Season covering Neutral Milk Hotel

One of my favorite bands covering a tune by another favorite band.
Wish I could've found a way to embed the video here, but oh well.


http://www.avclub.com/articles/neutral-milk-hotel,38877/

What's going on here?

I can't tell if they're reenacting The Lady From Shanghai...

... or a Michael Jackson video.

They ain't freaks, they're family!

Next Friday, Brett & I will travel down to Morristown, NJ for my aunt & uncle's 50th wedding anniversary party. They are renewing their vows. It's a pretty special occasion, as my aunt has been fighting stage III aggressive breast cancer the past year & a half and seems to be winning.

My NJ cousins are CRAZY. Every year around Labor Day weekend, they throw a huge family clambake in one of their backyards. They rent cotton candy & popcorn machines, cook an unfathomable amount of food, and build a waterslide.

Now, I don't think they're doing all this for the wedding weekend, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had something similarly over-the-top planned.

Here's some pictures of the last clambake I went to.  Maybe later I'll post the photos of the fudge fight we had in one of our hotel rooms at the last family wedding. (No euphemism- it really was candy fudge.)

Under the tent, looking out at the slide.

Aunt Mary Margaret & cousin Maggie II, with the top of the waterslide in the background.

Looking down the slide into the "pool" at the end.

Yes, the big kids go down the slide too. It's a point of honor.

My name is Jime, you big ball of slime.

Ah, my brother. He is a legend in his own time.


Kevin is one of the most bizarre, direct, good-hearted, weird people I've ever known.

We were born 15 months apart and looked like twins until about age 10.

I did everything early- walked, talked (first word was "owl," was reading by 2 1/2. So my parents didn't think anything of Kevin's delays.  We have a whole series of attempts at getting a picture of the two of us under the Christmas tree because he kept falling over backward into the tree and I wasn't strong enough to hold him upright myself.

By the time our sister, Katie, came along, they knew something wasn't right with Kev.  We spent every weekend going up to Rochester to have specialists look him over.  They tested Katie and me, too, as comparison. It was easily an hour & a half drive, on a bumpy two-lane road (390 hadn't been built yet, for those of you familiar with upstate NY). I got both easily bored and easily carsick, so I couldn't bring a book or do anything to occupy myself except look out the window. We had a used van that could have a slight whiff to it at times, and my parents were on a sugar-free kick, so they gave me Carefree gum. The saccharine in the gum made me almost as sick as the motion did. To distract me from upchucking (and to ward off the following clean-up and potential peristaltic chain reaction), my dad would try to distract me by quizzing me about the music on the radio.  I rock at music trivia, specifically classic rock, thanks to my dad.

They finally determined that the left side of Kevin's brain had been deprived of oxygen during birth and he had suffered damage, resulting in a lowered IQ and loss or reduction in some of the areas the left hemisphere controls. 

We later learned that Kevin also has a screamin' case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, although that has nothing to do with his brain injury.  He has less control over it because of his brain damage, but the OCD was clearly an inherited family gift.

My folks had no idea how to deal with this, and talking with parents of other challenged kids didn't really help, because Kevin is so unique and his situation really different from other kids'.  His disability is slight-- he's in the gray area at the low end of normal on the IQ spectrum. If you watch Forrest Gump when Forrest is first diagnosed, Kevin's score is right about where Forrest's is.  My parents' coping strategy in most situations was to laugh.  When my dad came home from a long day of work and my mom silently led him into our formal dining room to show him the 3-foot-tall hamburger-head people Kevin had drawn all about the room (there were at least a dozen of them) in bright blue permanent Sharpie, he just shook his head and then broke down laughing. They referred to it as Kevin's "Blue Period."

Kev's an interesting case because normally long-term memory resides in the left hemisphere and that should've been knocked out by his damage. But the dude has the creepiest, most accurate long-term memory of anyone I know. He puts elephants to shame. He remembers where you were, what you were wearing, what was going on, what we were eating, who said what. His memories are always verified, so we don't even doubt him anymore.  Short-term memory is another monster. He'll need to have a simple direction repeated several times before it sticks:

"Kev, could you go get my red shirt? It's on the blue chair in my room."
He leaves. He returns.
"The blue shirt?"
"No, the RED shirt. On the blue chair. In my room."
He leaves. He returns.
"In the office?"
"No. In my room. On the blue chair."
He leaves. He returns.
"On the bed?"
"No. On the blue chair."
He leaves. He returns with the red shirt. Success.

One of my favorite Kevin stories involves his name. He's officially Paul Kevin Barnes, Jr. "Little Paul" did not work. "Junior?" Not a chance. My parents settled on "Kevin" but he didn't like it because we have a cousin Kevin and it could get confusing.  So Kev decided to change his name to Jimmy. But he spelled it phonetically so it became Jim-E. He went through a brief phase where he would only answer to JimE, but it proved hard to keep up. He did, however, sign birthday cards for several years as "JIME." (Kevin frequently writes in all caps.) One friend of the family saw this and pronounced it "Jime" rhyming with "mime" which cracked us up and resulted in much chanting of "What's the time, Jime, you big ball of slime." In recent years, just to get a rise out of people, Kevin's become fond of telling people that he's just met that our father wanted to name him "Shit Head" when he was born.

Another time, many years later, we were out at a bar in our hometown and this smarmy guy my sister used to date came up to say hi. He chummily put his arm around Kevin who threw it off immediately and yelled, "Get your damn hands off me! I don't know where they've been!"

And I've written about Wilson and Stacy here before.

My very favorite story has to be his prozac overdose. Don't get all up at arms, he only took one or two more than he was supposed to (and he was on a lot so it was really a drip in the bucket) but it got him worried when he realized he'd taken the wrong dose. I was at Brett's apartment at the time, and my mom called to tell me, then kept calling to give me the play-by-play. I eventually came over to see for myself. He was giddy, guffawing and giggling and writing notes on his Dallas Cowboys stationery. He wrote me two notes to take over to Brett: 1. "Do you have any pickles?" and 2. "Doin' the bacon."  No explanation. I took them back to Brett, after shaking Kevin's hand and telling him to take care of himself, which made him explode in laughter.  When I called my mom to check back in a few hours later, she said he'd crashed off his happy-high and spent the rest of the night sitting "indian-style" on his bed crying. The "indian-style" part was very important, she said. Disclaimer: he was perfectly fine the next day, just a little sheepish, so a lot of it could have been acting.

There are many more Kevin stories and Kevin-isms that I will post here later, as well as embarrassing photos.

BAMF Art Blog Bunch Summer Show

Some of the members of the BAMF Art Blog Bunch have gotten together and entered this online show. Please have a look at our work!


Kasey Baker

My thoughts: I have so many thoughts. This is the Summer show and this is my Summer entry. As I said last show I plan on doing a painting for each of the seasons. This is just the Summertime feel for me. Vacations, getting away and being in your own little world. 

I don't have etsy or anywhere else I sell things.  If you want to buy things from me you'll have to contact me by email or facebook.  

I have a blog which is the most important thing that exists on the internet today. You might be reading this on it. Kudos, you. You make good decisions. 

Here's some other things I've done in a facebook photo album. 

Gary Rith

(vase by Gary Rith)
When you have a show, you want to showcase something amazing, and this is actually a humble little vase, BUT I had been fiddling with my glazes and wound up with this wild and bright TURQUOISE last week, which I used here with the frogs. Frogs and bright turquoise are quite summery! I will be tempted to use turquoise on everything. In additon, this vase, as humble as it is, has an unusual origin. 4 years ago in October I had my first ever open studio on Columbus Day weekend. My first EVER web customer CM came down from Toronto and Allison and Trevor came from across the street, along with dozens of other people. Allison was HUGELY pregnant and gave birth a day or 2 later. Allison's mom came to visit my studio with her grandaughter last week and this is the vase I made, and I was able to joke that the last time (nearly 4 years ago) Roxy was in my studio, she was just a big bump in her mama's belly....
You can email me directly about purchases garyrith@yahoo.com or purchase this vase or something like it at my online etsy gallery and look at what I am up to every day on my daily blog.

Steve Gallow

Summer Time is a time of relaxation and adventure.  My family likes to travel to different parts of the world to see new things.  As a photographer, this is a great time to find new subjects to photograph.  I enjoy photographing the typical tourist shots in new ways that haven't been seen before.  I hope that you will enjoy the few photos that I selected as part of the BAMF Art Blog Bunch's Summer Art Show.  See them here on my Smugmug Site.  Stevo

George and Maureen Johnson
Here is George's entry in the Art Blog Show. He loves to make unusual bottles with sculpted stoppers. He works with glazes called saturated, in this case saturated black. It has a sort of soft metallic look to it. The bottle is wheel thrown, the base is hand built (but attached), the stopper is hand sculpted to resemble wrapped wire. The bottom of the stopper is glazed with a textured glaze. It is made out of stoneware. The size of the bottle is 8 1/4" tall including stopper. If you are interested in purchasing this bottle the price is $40.00 plus shipping. You can email me at mjohnson100@wi.rr.com
Here is my entry for the Art Show. This is what is called a "Gourd Pitcher". As you know I have a great love for ancient styles, but love to put a modern twist to them in regards to the glaze choices. It is wheel thrown, stoneware. The pitcher has a pulled handle with a sort of gourd vine curl at the end. I fired this piece to cone 5 with a 15 minute soak. The reason I fired it that way is because I like the results on the reactive glaze in juxtaposition to the solid green color. I didn't want them to run together. The pitcher is 9 3/4" Tall, the cups are 3" in diameter and appx. 2 1/2" tall.

The price is $50.00 plus shipping for the complete set. I do not sell online, so you can email me at mjohnson100@wi.rr.com if you are interested in purchasing it.

Kerry Barnes
This is always how it starts out, isn't it?  A perfect, tranquil day and then... chaos! Danger! Adventure!

Available as a framed, matted print up to 11"x14".
Please email me for details and prices.