cookin' and quiltin'. bring it, winter.
vegetarian chili, and a quilt that will look almost nothing like the one i am making.

tiny drawings of the foods i cook and eat. i have been doing this a lot. up top is caesar salad, which i'm on my annual winter bender of, and down low are some awesome roasted mushrooms from smittenkitchen.com, which i ate with a soft boiled egg and some bread. the recipe is so good that i accidentally ate a pound of mushrooms in a day.

turns out the crows were saying, "watch out, your car is totally busted and when you try to drive it home today, the brakes will fail." shoulda listened better.
jack is my 3 year old cousin. he's pretty much an authority on anything.

matt also housed me excellently and perpetrated many puns towards me during my stay in brooklyn, and he and kseniya outfitted a tiny lady-loft for me to sleep in. i had also suggested some type of bucket/pulley system to get linus up there, or a long plank ramp, but, i had to sleep dogless for a few nights. Then I continued my drive to visit my grandpa for his NINETIETH birthday--sheesh! it was -6 degrees where he lives, and he is getting progressively spicier with age.

liz let me and linus sleep with her in her bed in her awesome apartment in brooklyn when i visited. it was excellent. it's true that people all the time want to tell me their problems, when i think that it is pretty clear that, in fact, i am incapable of solving any of my own.

i am the owner of so many letters that were written with no knowledge that i would ever read them, but i can't find any secrets in them.

whatever, sometimes you just have to draw some pairs of underpants.

i am scared that the blackbirds were a bad start for the year, and i am worried about omens, all the time. also here is a concept that i was recently reminded of by the owner of the disembodied voice floating down there in the bottom corner.

sometimes advice is simple and the most obvious, and sometimes i don't know what words to put into my word balloons. pictured is an actual post-it that i am in possession of.

those poor blackbirds! i really haven't stopped thinking about them. it is the scariest.
also, eleanor and i performed rituals to make 2011 a good year. let's hope that we are as magical as we think we are.

i know i said i was done drawing the old house, but i'm not, okay? here is my grandparent's bedroom. that is the actual color of the carpet that they commit to for 57 years in that room.

i was a jewish girl alone on christmas. tater tots better watch out.

dog love is a very, very specific kind. also, i couldn't surrender this mug to the dumpster, even though it is the ugliest, ever, of all mugs. how come things can suddenly become so precious and other things just don't?

it's just that for some reason i don't want to throw out the pencil shavings from this specific pencil. that's not that weird, right? so im keeping them in a jar. whatever. it's fine. here are the contents of my purse and some flags.

well, if i am going to have a blog where i show all of the private details of my life, eventually we'll have to get to menstruation, so, here it is. also, go read east of eden, right now.

i don't think i can ever consider myself a good artist until the scraps of paper i use to blot my paintbrushes on or mix paint on stop being better looking than my drawings themselves. isn't that little black strip i glued in here so handsome? stupid accident.

well, i've been drawing beets a lot, but i can't explain it, and i dont think you'd want me to try, even. but, rest assured, in case you were worried: all sorts of tiny scraps of paper scattered around my desk have small drawings and paintings of beets. i had started a much larger painting about beets, since i seem to be obsessed, but i think they are meant to be small and on scraps, for now.

i've been keeping my apartment stupidly cold. post-shower lagoon-monster is a side effect of this.

during my drive back from thanksgiving in new york, i listened to a whole lot of history podcasts, leading to a very strange and surprising interest/obsession with royal families and their quirks. i was really extra interested in catherine the great, who married peter the third. he was, apparently, totally weird, childish and into toy guns. he was eventually sent to prison where he died mysteriously, and many people believe catherine had him poisoned there. i'm interested in murderous women.

im glad my friends stay friends with me. usually i am a big old sack of crazy, as illustrated in these comics, and they stand by me and even support me. which maybe makes them as nuts as i am. the one called "easily freaked" ties in with the one called "irrational towards eleanor", from the last post. hi, eleanor! thank you for staying my friend. sorry i hate it when you shiver.