harry potter haiku #8

Just when you thought your dreams of a haiku-less existence were finally coming true:

Some dragon smuggling

(Hagrid's a bad influence)

leads to detentions

I solemnly swear that this is the last Hagrid-bashing I'll do for a while.

Forbidden forest

something's killing unicorns

centaur saves Harry

Stay tuned because sometime in the next year I'll finish the first book and move on to Chamber.

i am overcome by my harry potter obsession at inexplicable times

Last night I was minding my own business on Pinterest.  Okay, that's a lie.  The whole point of Pinterest is that you're minding everyone else's business--but mostly people want their Pinterest business minded, so it's not a bad thing to do.  And someone pinned some piece of HP information that drew me to an their entire board of Potter deliciousness.  And then I lost an hour of my life.

Then I got to thinking about Wordle and how I've never made a beautiful wordle thing, and how my office would never be complete until I had a Harry Potter themed Wordle gracing its walls.  So I worked on it and worked on it and worked some more (and lost hours more of my life), and I think if I can get it to print the way that I want, I'll have something spectacular to show for it eventually.  Here's what it's going to look like maybe unless I change it again.

 

(I hope that doesn't publish as tiny as it looks in this composing screen.  Sorry if it is.)

harry potter haiku #7

Faithful readers will recall that I enthusiastically started a series of haiku honoring Harry Potter which I abandoned with a decided lack of enthusiasm when life got to be so life-ish.  I left off when I was still using Sorcerer's Stone as my inspiration, so that's where we are again.

Loose lips sink ships and

Hagrid's always flapping his.

Dude can't keep secrets.

After one tongue-slip,

the gang searches for Flamel

Library fails them.

Let me interrupt the poetry to mention that although Hermione's all a magical genius and stuff, she clearly lacks good research skills.  And I don't just mean the Flamel debacle in book 1.  As my blogging brother pointed out a while back: How in the world could she not have found out about either gillyweed or the bubblehead charm  as underwater breathing options in Goblet?  Are we to believe that the book the fake Moody gave Neville was the only book that mentions gillyweed?  And in Order the bubblehead charm is so well-known and easy to perform that students use it to avoid dungbombs in the corridors, so are we really to expect that it's not in any of the spell books that she reads trying to help Harry?  I love Hermione, but maybe they should have been nicer to Madame Pince.  I guarantee she could have steered them in the right direction.  Librarians are good people.  

Hagrid blabs again

selling out Dumbledore for

an illegal egg.

A baby dragon

that's born in a wooden house

nothing but trouble

Four in a row!  You're on the edge of your seat now, aren't you?  But I'll save the rest for another time.

*****Plagiarizing blogger's note:  I've updated the Hermione as a researcher rant to give proper credit to Shane for his inspiration.  I couldn't handle the pressure of you people thinking that I was smart enough to have figured that out.*****

harry potter haiku #6

Blogger has not been a friend to me lately, but enough of the excuses.

On Halloween night

a troll brings them together

with Hermione.

harry potter haiku #5

Malfoy's bigotry

uncovers Harry's talent

Gryffindor seeker

harry potter haiku #4

I had a a few written ahead of starting this project, but after this one, I'm caught up.  Now's your chance to pray that my writer's block kicks in and ends this series.

Sorting is stressful

if you don't want Slytherin

but the hat listens.

harry potter haiku #3

The saga continues in poetry.  I'm pretty sure this is the least noticed/responded to thing I've ever written, but I'm not going to let your indifference stop me.  Sorry, friends.

On Hogwart's Express

Harry and Ron are besties.

Ron's nose is dirty.

harry potter haiku #2

Yesterday, I shared with you the inspiration behind the new series.  Hope you don't hate it already because it's completing my life.

Hagrid breaks the news
but not 'til he's eleven,
he's the boy who lived.

And another--because I can't wait to share this one--that's my favorite so far:

In Ollivander's

Phoenix feather chooses him

a curious choice.

This could take a while to work out of my system.  Patience, please.

harry potter haiku #1

A few weeks ago at work someone sent me the following in an email:

Fighting Voldemort
from the comfort of this chair
in my library

It changed my world.  How could I never have considered devoting my favorite form of poetry to what is arguably my favorite series of books?  No longer, imaginary readers, no longer will the world have to muddle through a sham of an existence without my contribution to bad Harry Potter poetry.  Today I present the beginning of a new series.  Sometimes I think my long streams of haikus sort of ruin each other.  They're meant to be short, after all.  So for this project, I'll be presenting the haiku one at a time in roughly chronological order.  Today I present a haiku inspired by Sorcerer's Stone.

 On Four Privet Drive
the cupboard under the stairs,
lives Harry Potter.

You feel your life changing already, don't ya?  Stay tuned for more.  I've got a few in the hopper of which I am excessively proud.

be impressed by this

I know no one wants to hear any more about my dumb phone and how I ruined it (and cost myself a bunch of money in the process) anymore, so instead I'm going to blog about a recent success that should impress the pants off you, imaginary readers.  For the sake of others, please don't read this in public.  I don't want to be responsible for your pants flying off and freaking anyone out.

I had to put my plarn mat project on hold recently to take care of a more time-sensitive crafty project.  My friend Mo is having a baby sometime soon and the Peeps threw her a baby shower last weekend.  Here's how cute it was:

There were some good eats too, and pregnant Mo is fairly precious (but her baby bump and the cheesy bacon bites are not the impressive thing).  Peep Amy made the perfect, perfect cake.

Peep Amy has a cake-decorating blog that she updates very sporadically.  Apparently working full-time and raising two of the sweetest boys in the world and creating the most amazing cakes doesn't leave her much time to write about them.  I'll forgive her if she'll continue to make me cakes occasionally.  The cake, while magnificent, is not the titular impressive thing.

 Here are the peep girls at the shower with Luke hiding his face but no Calla because she was having kind of a hard life right then.  This cute but poorly lit picture doesn't really have anything to do with the thing that's going to impress you, but I like us and we're cute, so I wanted to include it.

Technically these next few photos aren't the thing that's going to impress you either, but I do think these two delights are impressively cute.  I love them.

 I know it looks like she's just about to stand up and take off, but this is actually her method of not crawling.  She gets up like this and plants her bottom in whatever new direction she's trying to move.  It's awkward but effective.

I took roughly four thousand pictures of the tweeps on this afternoon, but in a surprising number of them, the more mobile Calla is blocking Luke. 

This face is hilarious.  She has a very skeptical brow sometimes.  And has been previously discussed on the blog, the Clintster would make a pretty, pretty girl.

So we're getting to the impressive thing just any second now:  My brilliant bit of creativity factors into the shower in the gift-opening.  Back in the fall, I made the tweeps wee striped hats since they were going to be cold-weather babies.  This baby is due in late-May and won't be requiring much in the way of warm head coverings, so I had sort of written off the idea of a knitted gift, until this book came into my life:

I was charmed by all the cuteness but intimidated by the intricacies of the patterns.  But since there were several animal projects that fit right into Mo's decorative scheme, and because I occasionally get confident (over-confident?) in my own ability to accomplish things, I ultimately decided to tackle a project for a lion that reverses to an elephant.  (Spoiler alert:  I don't think this is the last we'll see of projects from this adorable book.)

Like the irresponsible blogger/crafter I am, I didn't take pictures documenting the project, but here's what the finished project looks like:

 the lion side

 the elephant side

 the back views

 I know it's not polite, but if you look up the elephant's skirt, here's what you see:  a wadded-up lion.

 And if you look up the lion's skirt, the scrunched elephant.

 The bottoms of the heads are stitched together for some stability, so it can't be a two-headed beast, so this is the only way you can see both animals at once.

So that's how my most recent knitting turned out.  I'm just the tiniest bit proud of it, but since I learned this week not to have so much pride in my own accomplishments, I'm not going to make any promises that the little liophant won't fall apart tomorrow, but I do hope that it'll last for the next four weeks or so until the Raspberry is born.

some craftiness of late

Last week I had to come up with an after-school craft idea.  We'd just had a fairly substantial snow fall that some frigid temperatures kept around for much longer than we normally experience, so snow was on the brain.  A quick Google of snowflake paper crafts yielded a spectacularly lovely, deceptively simple project that was extremely well-received. 

Nice, huh?  I'm not going to show you the process, but if you want to make this stunning project, here's where I learned it.

The snowflakes became wildly popular around the library.  That happens here fairly often.  We get quite enamored of various crafty things from time to time.  A few weeks ago we got a new book in with loads of tubey crafts.  We've been making tubular crafts with empty toilet paper rolls for ages, but there were several fresh ideas in the book about which we were quite excited.  Then one day, Lisa realized that all of the columns throughout the library were giant tubeys waiting to happen, so we talked about how exciting it would be to do that.  Sometimes we hype ourselves up about things like that and then we don't have the time or inclination to make them happen, so I wasn't completely certain it would happen.  Pardon my skepticism.

Fast forward to today, imaginary readers, when we arrived at work just ahead of more forecasted snow.  Lisa declared it a snow day and decided that we were going to make that first giant tubey dream come true by building a snowman.  She put Susan to work making more of the 3D snowflakes, and we started planning our attack.  The column (which got painted this particularly violent shade of yellow this summer during our part of the remodel) started out like this:

After some measuring and wrapping we had our base up.

Next we added this:

And then this:

times seven or eight, which made this:

You're feeling it now, aren't ya?

Next came his scarf.  Yes, that is real fleece.  No flimsy, flappy paper scarf for our snowman.
The hat brim was my first true test.  After a fair amount of measuring and equations and fashioning a compass out of a pencil and yarn, I achieved moderate success.

The band and flower cover up some of the less attractive bits of construction and give him a jaunty flair.  Right?

Next came his arms . . .

 . . . and mittens . . .

. . . and buttons.  Because what self-respecting snowman doesn't have buttons?

And then he was complete--and precious I might add.

And then to make his winter wonderland complete, we added the snowflakes:

Couldn't you just die from the cuteness?

And this is what he looks like to the itty-bitties who'll come up and pat him and rip his arms and buttons off in the next few weeks.  It'll take a slightly taller kid to take care of the nose, but I feel fairly confident that it'll come off a few times too.  The good news is the dedicated craftsmanship that went into the project should insure that anything that is ripped off will not actually tear away the "snow" underneath.

For the record, it did snow for the middle part of the day, going from early mist/rain/sleet to great, fat, gorgeous flakes to dense flurries of tiny flakes.  But in the downtown area it just never stuck and my hopes of getting to close early (like the city offices and schools and everywhere else) melted along with all those snowflakes.  Such is life, I suppose. 

At least I have a long-lasting, all-weather snowman to show for it.

100 haikus (but not really)

Today's poems mark

my centennial blog post.

Let's celebrate me!

 Faithful fans have hit

almost fourteen thousand times

in less than ten months.

Lots of time wasted

on my rambling. Thank you for

stroking my ego.

 No more numbers talk.

Statistics aren't poetry 

though I love them so.

You keep coming back

even when I don't post much
because you love me.

You are good for me.

I need this validation--

whiny narcissist.

I'd hoped to make this
 post one hundred syllables
but I had more words.

I did consider
a hundred lines instead, but
can't divide by three.

A hundred haikus
seems beyond my skills which are
considerable.

But I will forge on
and see how many it takes
'til I've had enough.

I like the sound of
my own voice (or typing hands).
This could be a while.

Topics covered here

seem varied for your pleasure;

but in truth, for mine.

Christmas music to

abandoned project 4:4

to boring diaries,

the open letters
that led to my short-lived brush
with internet fame,

tv obsessions
to vacations with the fam
to crafty projects

to blogging soulmates,
the famous FHDM--
we're getting married.

I cry when I write

my five favorite things in

random birthday posts,

probably because
I devote valuable space
to another soul.

I haven't mentioned
my chocolate-covered pretzel
love lately.  My bad.

They're still my main squeeze,
but they haven't been on sale
since last December.

A little known fact:
I think I'm more interesting
than I truly am.

Maybe you'd learned that
in our time together here.
You're humoring me?


Now here's a shout-out
to some special faithful fans
who keep me going.

To cousin, scholar,
theologian, number one
blog fan, a thank you.

You've been telling me
to write more for years, and I
am glad I listened.

To my sweet moma,
who thinks everything I do
is perfect, thank you.

Because of your faith,
I'm the over-confident
braggart writing here.

For my siblings three
and the in-laws too, a thanks
for laughing with me,

for cheering me on,
and giving me the Handful.
They photograph well.

And to the Handful,
Pointer, Bird, Ring, Pinkie, Thumb,
thanks for being cute.

I know you don't read
the blog--and you still should not.
 I might use bad words.

And to the Popster,
who I once accused of not
reading my blog, thanks.

I'm touched that I rate
with Netflix watch it now and
your other dot coms.

For Rob-Bob, thank you
for pithy comments that make
my favorite lists.

To peeps like Hailey,
Mo and Beck and Martha too
your presence pleases.

Maybe other peeps
read the blog too, but they don't
leave me comments.

So, Peeps, if you are
among my faithful readers
I thank you as well.

To Cory the page,
who thinks I'm hilarious
in person or print,

I appreciate
your laughter though I know that
it is very cheap.

For Lacey who does not
comment but reads avidly,
you should drop a line.

To Bill, who comments
as himself now instead of
some celebrity,

thanks for stopping that.
Now learn to spell opinion.
Google will thank you.

And to Jess, who reads
on her phone and makes no comment
but talks to me live,

you listen to me
when I need a sounding board
and keep me writing.

I know there are more
(thanks, Google Analytics)
who read in silence.

Thank you for coming,

imaginary readers,

blogging for you thrills.

Here's to hundreds more!
I'll keep having opinions
if you'll keep reading.

*****Insecure blogger's
question:  Did I go too far?
Are haikus played out?

This blogger hopes not,
or I've just ruined it all.
Tell me I'm funny.*****

I have done my best
to remind you of the great
moments on the blog.

If I omitted
one of your favorite bits,
please chime in below.

 More talk about me
in the comment section here:
icing on the cake!

For those who don't count,
I made it to fifty-three
including this one.

idle hands 2

Back in April (in what I've come to recognize as the hey-day of this blog o' mine) I shared with my imaginary readers my little name-tag making hobby.  I've been meaning to do an updated post with some of the tags I've done since.  Since Shane got his iPhone, I've been relying on him to document the process, but I discovered as I was gathering all the pictures that pictures that look good enough on a smallish phone screen can be a blurry mess in a blog.  But I'm not going to let a little thing like annoyingly bad photography keep me from blogging all my hard work.

In the last post, I showed you the nametags I'd done for Shane up to that point which related to his ESPN Streak for the Cash journey, and I later told you that he had officially won that contest for the month and $100,000.  For several weeks there, Shane's windfall was a hot topic around here, and it found its way into subsequent nametags for a couple of weeks.  Some tags just celebrated the money aspect of the victory.

But I also had fun playing off the name of the contest:

Fans of Ray Stevens will understand what this tag is referencing (I hope).  My favorite part is the censor bar.  I have no idea how to draw stick figure privates.  Plus I was in church.
Jess's nametags even got in on the action for one week:

 I also attempted to draw Scrooge McDuck for him one week, but apparently I can't draw ducks.  It was a tough lesson to learn.  I don't want to talk about it anymore.  During that same time period, I did a few different movie/character referencing tags that had nothing to do with winning contests.

 Please tell me you've seen Shane.  Please.

 Church Josh  (who shouldn't be confused with brother Joshua) dressed up as Charlie Brown a couple of years ago for Halloween, and it was a brilliant bit of costuming.  I like to reference it often.  Josh also works at a boxing gym, so I've drawn his name on boxing gloves multiple times, but when it came time to tie him to a boxing movie, I chose my favorite: Gladiator.  No, not that one.

The week I did some of the movie ones, I was about to leave on my DC vacation, and Jess was whining about being on her own for the week, so she got this movie nod.

More painful than discovering that I couldn't draw Scrooge, I found out that I could no longer easily draw Mickey Mouse, and I used to draw him all the time.  Here's the blurry attempt anyway:

One night as I was searching for inspiration, it occurred to me that everyone sitting on our row was from a different state (except for Shane and me, of course), so I decided that poorly drawn personalized license plates were called for.

  I have no idea what the Connecticut license plate actually looks like, but I'm pretty sure it's nicer than this.

At least some West Virginia plates have this general style, but slightly better craftsmanship.

 As usual Shane got my best effort.

Of course, I know what the Arkansas plate looks like, but I was running out of time by this point.  Jess wasn't there that night, but I might have had to draw the line at a Texas plate anyway.

One night I asked for theme ideas before church started, and Josh wanted me to do the Old West.  When I didn't cartwheel over that idea, his next suggestion was the War of 1812, and comparatively the Old West started looking better.  Victoria wanted bling though, so she got this one.

So I took on various concepts from the Old West for everyone else:

Tumbleweeds and desert for Josh.

 

A Sheriff's badge for Shane (I used $ for his S for a few months).

No one got this one, but it's supposed to be a coyote howling at the moon.  I think the moon looks like a bowling ball, and everyone things the coyote is a cat, and lots of folks commented on the rain, which is actually just supposed to designate the night-time sky.  The red pen didn't help either.

And I got the easy one and definitely the best offering from this theme.

One evening I did a few animals for folks, including my favorite nametag of all time:

I love everything about this frog and his tongue and those fly letters.  It ranks as one of the best concepts I've ever had, and it's definitely the best execution.  I'm never above bragging, but I also usually am quick to find flaws in work I've done here, but there are no flaws here in this blogger's opinion.  It's the pinnacle of my nametag work.  I should have stopped here.

But I didn't.  The same night as the best. frog. ever.  I also drew some fishies which turned out just all right.

And on another night entirely, when I wasn't doing animals otherwise, I did a caterpillar for Lacey.

Some Sunday morning after the original animal day, I revisited the theme.

Butterfly wings were the only thing I could think of that were big enough for all those letters in Victoria's name.  Her long name can be quite challenging.

A turtle for Lacey--which worked out nicely because Lacey apparently loves turtles.  Now I know.

I don't know why this pig is so angry.  Maybe it knows $hane wants to eat him.
I was running out of animals I could actually sort of draw when I decided I could attempt one last one for Jess:

It turned out to be one of my favorites.
And because I loved Shane's frog so much, I wanted to recreate it for me this time, but I drew the frog's head even more exaggeratedly large than the last time, so I had to adjust.

There might have been one more from the Sunday morning set, but I can't find any evidence of it photographically, but that night, I continued the animal theme.

 For the record, it's supposed to be a cub, not a grown-up bear.

 A single fish this time, though I don't know why I decided to make him sort of plaid.

I love monkeys, but I don't know that I've ever tried to draw one before.  Maybe I should practice.  I was running out of animals and time, so I went against every principle that I profess to have and drew a cat for Lacey.

 Elephants are one of my favorite animals, and my love of elephant feet was the basis of a post-zoo trip nametag that I showed you last time, so I mistakenly assumed that I could draw elephants.  I can't.

For those of you who weren't in Arkansas this summer, it was hot here.  Really dang hot.  As I sat melting in church trying to recover from walking across the surface of the sun (at 8:15 a.m., mind you) to get into the building, all I could think about was summer.  I tried to stay positive with this sort of fun summer-themed tag for me:

But then I was struck with the best concept in nametag design ever.  Remember this guy who sorta started it all?

Meet chapter 2:

I was working from memory, so I actually got some of the hats and accessories out of order, but it still ranks as the best idea I've ever had.  Now the two live together in Shane's Bible forever.

The week of Amanda's birthday, she got a special birthday tag:

And because Shane's birthday was on a Saturday, Sunday was Rob's actual birthday (and because we had celebrated Rob's on Shane's birthday the day before), I had to poke a little fun with his birthday nametag.  Pardon the blur.

For the record, $hane and Lacey have the most representation here not because I do my cutest work for them (or at least not on purpose).  But they save all the good ones I've ever made them (and a few of the bad ones), so they even if I forgot to take a picture that night, I can get documentation from them later, where other folks just peel my hard work off and throw it away--sometimes even before we go to dinner.  Ouch.

Here's the best nametag I've ever made for Josh (who has a serious aversion to going to restaurants that aren't in west Little Rock, as he deems them too far away).

It makes up with cleverness what it lacks in artistic merit or cartographical accuracy.  For those that don't know, this is a very sketchy map of Little Rock that places Josh safely in west Little Rock protected by I430 from anything that might be too far away.

And here's a hodgepodge of non-themed tags that I've collected from my biggest fans:

Allegedly I think this was a bible rather than just some ordinary book.

This is the one I did for Easter for Lacey--I didn't know she still had it until we helped her move in July.

I somehow thought I was going to think of how to do flowers in the shape of all the letters, but I had to give up on the ones in the middle.  The flowery Y is my favorite.

Lacey hates fruit, and I'm a mean friend.  But the tag is still cute.
Sometime early in our life with the Daily Bible, Lacey asked me to do a nametag for her that she could put on her Bible for easy identification.  I couldn't settle on one style, so I gave her options.  She used them all, I think.

Shane is mildly obsessed with Words with Friends right now, so I attempted to honor that, but I think I got some of the point values wrong.  And I definitely had a harder time than I should have making the tiles uniform in size.

I think I mentioned in one of the vacation diary posts that Shane had recently repainted his bathroom.  I did this tag the night he came to church with blue and yellow hands.

I mentioned last time that I occasionally run out of time before I get a chance to make a tag for myself.  One week when everyone else had gotten some pretty elaborate and time-consuming ones, I made this one for myself.  It reminded me of an ever-so-lame nod to M.C. Escher.

During Beckypalooza, I did this nametag for myself and a visitor nametag for Beck.

And one day when I was short on time but long on conceit, I did this one.  (I think it was the day I made the streak tag for Shane and the gold digger tag for Jess, and I was quite impressed with my wit.)

I know there have been a few other worthy offerings that disappeared without being recorded, but last Sunday night (the only grown-up church service I sat through the entire month thanks to nursery and family in town and backpain), I made sort of matching tags for Shane and me, but I only have a picture of mine.

I have retired from the nametag business.  I'm officially out of ideas, and the pressure to go bigger and better every week has exhausted me.  It's not fun anymore.

But it has certainly been pleasant to stroll down memory lane with you, imaginary readers, and relive some of my finest moments in nametag drawing.  Thanks for playing along.