this is how we do it

Since I have been the biggest slacker this summer, I’m just now putting up the pictures of us from the Northside Fourth of July parade. Honestly I was waiting to see if I could get higher resolution copies of these pictures from the people who took them, but no luck. I apologize for the sub-par quality on them, I had to save Facebook versions which we all know have crap resolution.

In past years we just kind of crashed the parade from our friend Skip’s house since it’s right on the route, and this year was no different! We still are official members, but if you start at the beginning you have to wait in a hot parking lot for an hour before it even starts. This year we wanted to actually do something a little political so our theme was ‘Disaster at Muscle Beach’.

The muscle man that Skip hired was a HUGE hit.

The lovely Sam gettin' all gussied up, taken by Rachel Elliott

Mabel was rockin' my hat hard!

Rachel always makes me look so good!

Maya the hula hoop queen

I love that freakin' dress.

The palest person and the most tan person

Although I look like Vanna White in this one, I was actually tossing candy filled eggs at kids.

Skip and the muscle man

I don't know how David Sorcher made it look like we were all dancing in unison, but it's AMAZING!!

We had a such a fantastic time again this year and can’t wait to do it again next year! <3 Northside!!

art is hard

Sorry I’ve been away so long dear readers, for the moment I’m done with all the big projects I’ve been working on so I will be back much more! No pictures today but I had to share this poem from my brother’s blog, Musings From An Educated Hillbilly Iconoclast. He writes compelling and hilarious articles about everything from the racial implications of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire to the history of Shurons (the glasses Buddy Holly wore), as well as some poetry of his own. There is such a great voice and humor and about his writing that really echoes his personality. This was definitely my favorite poem…

on making art
art is ethereal
it cannot be measured or quantified
you can’t weigh it by the pound
it cannot be stored in a vault
or it dies like a crimson orchid locked in a dark closet
it cannot be caught in a mason jar like a firefly on a warm june evening
it cannot be tamed
sometimes it can’t even have a name
it simply appears one morning like a baby in a basket on your doorstep
a serendipitous apparition
it comes with no instruction manual
and even if it did the manual would be wrong and clumsy
full of typos and punctuation mistakes
it would say ‘insert tab a into slot b’
but there would be no slot b
and maybe tab a would turn out to be a reuben sandwich
making art is like trying to roller skate underwater
mistakes will be made
but they may be indistinguishable from graceful acts of brief genius
and in the end
if every cell in your body is bursting with life
all the while
it makes no difference

u.swap

I can’t believe I failed to mention the clothing swap that Molly and I are putting together! If you live near Cincy please bring yourself, some friends, and some clothes you don’t wear! It’s gonna be amazing!!