The Locals

 Art work by Allison Strine

In the last few weeks something crazy has started to happen. Local artists have started coming out of the woodwork. Or maybe I've opened myself up to being found. I got an email from a woman named Melissa who is very well known in the ketubah making community. Her work is beautiful and she is the master of search engine optimization. You google any kind of Jewish Gay Interfaith Multicultural Buddhist Polygamist Ketubah and she will have a landing page with some general info and the links to her real website. It's genius.

So she found me on ETSY and she emailed me! And she lives five minutes from me and wants to have coffee! Which we're still trying to plan.  So I emailed her back telling her how flattered I was that she would reach out and how I really admire her work and she wrote back more nice things and soon we're swooning over each other and once we can finally get coffee on the calendar we'll meet and I'll tell you all about how great she is in person. Did I mention she moonlights as a jazz singer?

And then the very same week Marcy from ETSY Chai, the Jewish ETSY team that I'm on, emailed to tell me that she put me in a treasury and would I be interested in meeting because she lives about twenty minutes away. OF COURSE! So we meet and she's adorable and makes wonderful pottery and does a lot of craft shows and we might even do a show together this October and have side by side booths!

But wait, there's more. I went to see a Jackie Greene concert in Santa Cruz last Saturday which was UNBELIEVABLE. My brothers have been obsessed with this guy for years and I finally get it. He's AWESOME. My oldest brother was leaving for Mexico for two months and this was basically his going away party. And while we're hanging around waiting for Jackie to roll my brother introduces me to a girl from his soccer team named Laamie who it turns out reads my blog! And she was so excited to meet me because she's also an artist and has two kids the same ages as mine. But she was so modest and it turns out that she is quickly becoming the next biggest thing in assemblage jewelry and fashion design and recently scored a contract with Anthropologie! Hello!??!

And it also turns out that the woman who is renting my brother's place while he's gone is a big time jewelry designer who lives eight months out of the year in Indonesia sourcing and designing her pieces and the other part apparently living in my brother's house! Go to her website and you'll see a picture of OPRAH wearing her earrings! Then go to her story page and you'll see a picture of her with a giant grin which my brother says is because she's sleeping in his Tempur-Pedic bed. I don't know this girl yet, but she's only one degree away so it's only a matter of time.

And then yesterday I received a beautiful print in the mail from the wonderful Allison Strine whose talent and humor is a daily inspiration to me. I actually reached out to her! Misanthropic me!  So this lovely print arrived yesterday which maybe explains why so many wonderful artists are finding their way to my little corner of the world. I guess my creative slip is showing.

Peace emerges

"Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal."

- Martin Luther King Jr.

The tree in this piece forms the letter shin with its branches, which in Hebrew is the first letter of the word SHALOM and can also symbolize the name of god. It emerges from the chaotic wilderness on earth and lifts toward a peaceful sky. A sky full of promise.

He is especially interested in electricity

Last night I finally sat down to do my son's kindergarten application. We decided to apply to the Jewish Day School in our neighborhood after we took a tour and the woman assured us there is plenty of financial aid. We never planned to send our son to private school but have you heard about California lately? How we have the lowest debt rating of any state in the country? And the worst education? I think we even beat out Mississippi for last place. Our district has a few great schools actually but ours is not one of them. So we're also applying to a great "choice program" (within our district) which has a lottery admission system. I'm a public school girl myself, straight through graduate school and we always said we'd go that route for our kids. But then it's time to sign up and it's actually your kid and not some hypothetical kid and well you kind of want him or her to have a music and arts education and opportunities to learn, I don't know, science.

But we're only applying to this one private school. I considered the Waldorf school in our area after I went there and just about died when I saw their felting studio. I was ready to repeat kindergarten myself. But then I saw their application and the question asking about my birth experience and I was like, great actually but that's none of your effing business. 

This post had a point (Aimee - you should make that a magnet). Right. So I was filling out the application and had to answer some questions about my son - specifically his academic, social and emotional strengths. Here's what I came up with for the first part:

Our son is a very curious, energetic and imaginative little boy. He loves words and was a conversationalist, even on the phone, from an early age. He has an excellent memory and understands concepts like process of elimination and patterning and he asks a lot of annoying questions that I can't answer because I apparently don't know anything is very interested to know how everything works. He is especially obsessed with interested in electricity. But not in a Unibomber kind of way. 

I like to call his latest installation "Plugged In." He found a power strip and plugged it into itself (thus preventing him from plugging it into the wall and blowing himself up). He then went around the house finding every small appliance connecting it to the power strip. And he found a splitter too so he could add more plugs. I'm freezing my ass off as we speak because my heater is part of his creation.

The last part of the questionnaire, in response to "what do you hope your child will get out of our program" or something like that ended with: We hope that our son continues to develop the kind of self-confidence he’ll need to celebrate his quirky wonderful self every day of his life.

Originals

I've decided to put some of my originals up for sale in my ETSY shop. I'm slowly getting them listed but if you sign up for my newsletter (which I send out every 2-3 months) you'll be ready to go snag one before they get shipped off to New Hampshire for the Enormous Tiny Art show next week. Exciting! You'll also find the code to get 20% off anything with a tree in it. And find out why I'm doing such a silly sale.

Sign up here.

Corner View - Holiday

The holidays seem like a hundred years ago now. We celebrated each night of Hanukkah with different friends. The kids lit candles, opened gifts, spun the dreidle, sang songs. Now that they're older we're really enjoying the holiday. Although I think I may have to re-evaluate my gifting strategy for next year and reverse the one present per night policy. My son would wake up every morning and pester me about his gift the entire day. Can he have a hint? First letter? How big? That got old. But it's hard to compete with Christmas. Not that it's a competition. But Christmas never backs off. The commercial part of it anyway. It's always bigger than life. Even during a recession. This year I finally got questions like, why can't we have lights on our house like everyone else? And so it begins. We're not like everyone else. We make our own light. And our own chanukkiah (that's what we call a menorah)! The idea for the rocks covered in tissue paper came from Aimee. By the eighth night it felt like an inferno. And for Christmas we did like all good Jews. We went to the movies while my mom babysat.

To see how holidays were spent around the world, visit Jane and take the tour.