tips

How to Give Away Stuff on the Curb

Giving away stuff on the curb seems like a no-brainer. If you’re giving stuff away, that means it’s free, and who doesn’t love free stuff? If you’re putting it on the curb, there isn’t far to go. Just throw it out there and you’re done. The junk is gone, out of your life forever. Unless it’s not. And it sits there in a heap, looking trashier and trashier as the days go by with it…

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art design projects

Slow Art: Corvid Bag

I completed another slow art piece this past week. Years and years ago I was inspired by the Ojibwe bandolier bags in my museum’s collection to make a bag that was roughly the same shape, featuring a large square pouch and wide shoulder strap. The feature of bandolier bags that makes them so incredibly beautiful is the bead applique, which covers practically the entire pouch and strap. This makes for a very heavy bag, but…

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observations reading

Two Books Provide a Snapshot of an INFJ

There are two books by my bedside that I’ve been reading over the past few weeks. It didn’t dawn on me until this morning that my reading of these two books at the same time, the fact that I would check them both out with their juxtaposition between intuition and logical data, actually provides a perfect snapshot of my INFJ Myers-Briggs personality. The two books are The Creative Tarot by Jessa Crispin and Predictive Analytics…

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family

A Eulogy for Our Sweet Stinky

Our sweet Stinky passed away 2 days ago, on Friday, June 9, 2017. Erik and I are heartbroken. We got Stinky 18 years ago from a farm near Royalton, Minnesota. Our children were wee tots at the time and one of them decided she should be named Snowball because she was mostly white. That’s the name we used when we took her to the vet for her shots and spaying. However, we immediately started calling…

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reading

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

I don’t read as much fiction as I probably should, particularly because I would like to tackle writing a proper novel one day. I’m drawn to nonfiction and there is so much good nonfiction out there that I never seem to run out of informative books to read. Fiction feels like a luxury to me, so it’s harder to set aside time to read it. I also know that when I read fiction, really good…

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