I’m mostly vegetarian, but even so, I don’t believe in stealing peoples’ meat, so I made a little sign for Emily to hang on her fridge. She got it in the mail today.

If anyone else out there has problems with meat thievery, you are welcome to print this out for personal use.

I colored this one with markers this morning, stuck a stamp on the back, and sent it off as a happy little postal message.  :)

Here’s what I found:

It was $7, and all of the parts (including the ink) were still in the box.  Most of the letters were unused.  I already have a little stamper thing with my address, but I thought this would be fun to use to print up tiny stories or poems.

Here’s a haiku I wrote as a test:

I feel like there’s something old-timey (as in pre-internet, haha) and wonderful about this!  Setting the letters in place is time-consuming, but I love how it turned out.

Maybe we’re all surrounded by invisible clouds of love all the time. I hope so.

A split second later, I felt a horrible crunch under my foot and realized I had stepped on a snail. (It was so squished I had to look closely to even recognize bits of shell.)  My neighborhood is full of cute snails, and I love seeing them around.  Whenever I see one on the sidewalk, I pick it up and move it to a safer place.

Two days later I am still thinking about that snail, so I made a little painting in his honor.

If you share your neighborhood with snails, please be careful where you step.  If you see a snail in a busy area (like a sidewalk, street, or driveway), please pick it up — carefully — and move it somewhere less trafficked.

p.s. I’m not a huge fan of jelly beans, but I might eat them if they are red or orange or yellow or lime or coconut.

I feel like this painting is what happens when I’m a bit overwhelmed by creative thoughts and curiosity about brains, since there’s SO much scientists still don’t understand about how our brains work.

It reminds me a bit of the robot painting I made a few months ago about creative energy. I feel like they both feel a bit too bright in a slightly frazzled way.  I wonder if that’s how my subconscious feels about creativity? Like it seems too intense sometimes? Or maybe I’m overthinking things and I was just in the mood to use a wild pattern and bright colors.

Last night, I decided to have a glass of wine and make a painting. I didn’t have any idea what I was going to paint, but this is what came out. It just kind of fell out of my head onto the paper. I mean, I still had to do the work of making it, but it was like my head knew what to do, and I didn’t have to think much about choosing colors or moving the brush.

The little robot with butterfly wings feels sort of symbolic. Maybe my subconscious is trying to tell me something, but I’m not sure what. Maybe it’s a “fake it till you make it” kind of thing, or maybe it’s about self-image or self-confidence (does the robot believe he is a butterfly?), or maybe it’s just a robot who reeeally wanted to be able to fly and now he can.

Sometimes when I tell my dog I love him, it feels like there’s a giant physical blob of love (like a love cloud) that flows from my heart and goes all around him.  It feels like it has real substance, like I could reach out — with just my love — and hug him.

That got me thinking… if we could see love, really see it in the air between people, it’d probably be weird looking…maybe even scary. Crushes would be impossible to hide, because everyone’s deepest attachments would be right out in the open, wrapping their favorite people in soft blankety clouds.

p.s. In the painting, it also kind of looks like the girl robot has long hair that’s wrapping around the boy robot. Not what I was going for, but kind of funny in its own way.