We Have a New Birdfeeder

...with anti-squirrel technology.

(Still can't stop the damn raccoon, though.)

New post coming up later. ^_^ 少々お待ち下さい〜

Door Into Summer

It's the first day of summer, so says I. Here's proof:

A baby cardinal, perched on the roof of my (very dirty) car.

As you can tell by the closeup, he didn't even flinch when I put the camera right in his little face. Close inspection revealed that there was no nest in the tree overhead. There were, however, a mated pair of two very noisy adult cardinals perched on the mailbox. I put two and two together and decided this little guy wasn't a gravity case, but rather right in the middle of flight training. It doesn't take more than a couple of hours for most songbirds of this size to test their wings out of the nest, so actually coming across the event is pretty lucky.

Sure enough, as soon as I backed off, the adults give us a low fly-by, and the kid flaps his cute little butt right off the car and 20 feet through the air, into the yard for a 3-point landing.

Welcome to the neighborhood, little guy. Feeder's out back, refill is on Sundays.

Have a good summer!

Rimon!

...means both "grenade" and "pomegranate" in Hebrew. Grenade means "pomegranate" in French. That's where we get the word "grenadine" from.

On an entirely unrelated note, here's a new pattern.

I wouldn't have made it, but Tuti asked so very nicely. ^_^

Edit: Rimon-yad is the more specific reference to a grenade, meaning "hand-pomegranate." Thanks, Tuti!

Memorial Day

I'm watching the tributes on CNN whenever they come back from a commercial break. Almost everyone who speaks about a lost soldier is young, under thirty years old. Some are hardly twenty.

Most of them are mothers, and they have their children with them on screen, sitting in their laps or holding their hands. Some of them were born after their fathers had left for Iraq. Some of them were born after their fathers had died.

Sometimes they let the kids talk about their soldier parent, but it's obvious that they don't know what to say. "We're proud of daddy, aren't we?" The children nod, then seem to duck away from the camera. It doesn't make sense to talk about this to people on television. Not at their age.

***

I used to enjoy Memorial Day. Marching with the parade, seeing everyone's grandfathers and grandmothers, many in uniform, collected in one place and passing along their memories. They told us comedic stories about their shipmates and wingmen, shared their most frightening adventures, and solemnly remembered all their friends who died in the fight, or who had slipped away since then.

At the end of the parade route, after the 21 gun salute, all the veterans would salute the flag in the cemetery. That sight made me feel so proud and grateful, I would always cry.

***

Back to the tributes on television, now an older woman is speaking. She is 64 years old; a grandmother looking after her daughter's two children while their mother went to serve. The children call their grandmother "Nana."

Nana's daughter died in Baghdad.

Nana will be 80 by the time the first of her two grandchildren children reaches 18.

I'm trying very hard to feel proud and grateful while I'm crying, but it won't come this time.

This time I'm just crying.

One More Papercut

Short post -- I said I'd put up the pattern for this one, so here it is. Two fish under the crown.

Spies For The Moon is the best band ever.

Where's Ku?

Ku is still alive, but perhaps not well, as she fuddles around the house and tries to make the most of her design portfolio. She has multiple things "in the pipe," so to speak, in the way of tutorials. She just hasn't cleaned them up yet.

In the meantime, as proof of her living status, here are some thingies Ku has made over the past few months and forgotten to post previously.

A pufferfish! (or fugu, ふぐ)

...who is on his way to a friend, and...



...this ugly little fellow, who is supposed to be an owl.


It makes more sense when you can see his back. I think.

In any case, if you'd like to make your own fishie, the pattern came from this lovely book. It's out of print, but you might be able to find a copy in your library system, or request it on interlibrary loan. Most of the designs are very good in my opinion. Simple, clean, and cute.

The owl, meanwhile, is a work in progress and has no pattern... yet.

*Ku goes back to fuddling*

Back Again

I’m still here. Just been getting stuff done in real life at the expense of internet time.

Thanks for your patience. Here, have a new craft!

Papercutting (in Japanese, kirie for composed images and kirigami for geometric patterns) has been in my sphere for about as long as origami. If you've ever folded up a coffee filter and cut a paper snowflake out of it, then it's part of your world, too.

I’m still not very pro at it, but I enjoy playing around with simple one-fold images. It’s good for practice with the blade. If you’d like a few patterns to cut, you can click on the images above to download a few I randomly chipped out these past couple weeks.

切りましょう〜

Background images come from sxc.hu, which is awesome.