#Iowa tiny house

[chaoticdesertdweller]

Des Moines, Iowa c.1899

[tinyhomesofiowa]

The Future of Housing: Trend Toward ADUs and Tiny Home Living in Iowa 

People are moving towards Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) as an alternative type of housing. You can explore the world of tiny homes in Iowa with many different floor plans. You can also customize the space with the help of our design experts. 

In this blog, we will discuss ADU's advantages and share some insights into floor plans for tiny homes in Iowa City.  

What are ADUs?  

ADU stands for Accessory Dwelling Units which are small homes built right on the same property as the primary residence. These units can be detached, or attached to the main house in the basement, or even a garage conversion.

Top Benefits of ADUs  

Affordable: As compared to traditional single-family houses, Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) are very cost-effective. They can be used as guest houses, for rental properties, or to house aging parents in a close and safe home.  

Highly Sustainable: Tiny homes are also considered cleaner and more sustainable for the environment, as they do not use as many resources.

Why a Design-Build Construction Company?  

When it comes to building ADUs or tiny homes, you need to hire a design and build construction company to get the desired results. They know the right way to execute the plan and make it easy to go through the planning, and construction process.

Managed Process: A design-build company manages both the design and construction parts of the project. Here you must deal with one party with clear communication and the process will be well managed.  

Cost Efficiency: There is a scope for saving money by going through a design-build firm.  They are also good at budget handling and ensure to complete your home within the given budget.    

Highly Experienced: When it comes to design-build companies, they are experienced and put that expertise into your project. They also know the local regulations related to construction that help you in the long term.   

Tiny Homes in Iowa City 

The city of Iowa City is very favorable towards tiny homes and encourages people to build them on their property, by making the zoning and permit process much easier and faster.

Types of Tiny House Floor Plans in Iowa 

There should be many floor plan options to build your tiny home. Here are some trending options in tiny house floor plans Iowa that you can select for your dream house. 

The Studio Plan: It is the best layout for people who like open space concepts. There will be a large room including space for living, dining, bathroom, sleeping, and kitchen.  

One and two Bedrooms: There are a few different options for one and two bedroom ADU’s. It really depends on who will be living there and the orientation of the ADU for your yard.

Custom Design: Many ADU builders Iowa also offer custom design services which are affordable and able to create a floor plan to accommodate your specific requirements.  

Conclusion 

When it comes to building an ADU for your family, trust the builders of Tiny Homes of Iowa. We are a professional design-build construction company that will make your dream project into reality. Reach out to Tiny Homes of Iowa today!

[frances-baby-houseman]

I would have bled out in the parking lot

Amber Nicole Thurman's death is on Trump's hands

Bess Kalb

Sep 17

In 2019, about six weeks after my first child was born, I found myself on the bathroom floor in a small, but nonetheless unsettling puddle of blood.

“Oh no,” I remember thinking. “I just did the laundry.”

I called out my husband’s name, but the sound caught in my throat. The pain I felt inhaling to get enough air out of my lungs to yell the two syllables in “Char-lie” jabbed my guts like a bicycle spoke to the abdomen.

So I was quiet, trying to keep breathing in a way that didn’t move anything inside me, and the pain pulsed a bit, then steadied, then dulled, then evaporated into whatever hell ether it came from.

Because there is no G-d (unless there is, in which case I abbreviated His name so as not to desecrate it, and also thank you, King of the Universe, for subscribing to this newsletter) this was the one time in my life I hadn’t brought my phone with me to the bathroom.

I decided to sort of slither-lumber to the door like a lame harbor seal, because I didn’t want to stand and loosen the spoke that had just stabbed me. I reached for the knob and let the door creak open.

The cat was there, looking at me right at eye level, keenly aware what was happening, and completely unmoved by it.

“You are dying,” he blinked, “Pity. Have a nice time.” He sashayed away.

Fortunately, our house in Los Angeles was small enough that from the bathroom door one could see everything. My husband was sitting on the couch with our infant, and I knocked on the open door to summon him. Within one one thousandth of a second, he set the baby on the (since-recalled) donut pillow and was holding my head.

I sat up. I breathed. No pain. I took a picture of the bloody mess on my husband’s phone, texted it to myself, he found my phone, then I texted the picture to my OBGYN.

Apologies for being graphic, but within the puddle there was something roughly the size and shape and color of a fig.

“Is this ok?” I said to my doctor, the bicycle spoke scraping lightly at my insides again from all the lumbering.

“Come in,” she replied.

Within two hours, I was in the waiting room of her office, accompanied by my terrified but SMILING mother, who was still, as is the Jewish custom, in town for “a few days or so” after the birth.

An ultrasound which felt like the finger of Satan himself revealed there was retained placenta in my uterus. If I hadn’t come in, there would have been more hemorrhaging, then sepsis, then whatever the cat foretold.

The next day, I was in surgery getting a Dilation and Curettage.

I went home, pumped the anesthesia milk, then fell asleep perfectly fine, my sweet newborn cooing merrily in the bassinet next to his alive mother.

Amber Nicole Thurman’s story was the same as mine, but it happened to her in Georgia in 2024, not California in 2019. She was a Black woman in a healthcare system that disproportionately kills Black women, especially postpartum. In 2021, the Black maternal mortality rate was nearly three times the rate it is for white women. Post-Roe, the toll is and will continue to be staggering.

Because post-Roe, the procedure that saved my life, the D&C, is something doctors cannot perform in states where matters of life and death have been left up to non-medical Christian-supremacist superstitions.

I know the pain Amber Thurman felt when that placenta dislodged and carved its tiny, treacherous hole in her uterine wall. I know the terror she felt when she saw the blood, and the rush of dread when she thought of what her child would do without her.

And when I vote in November for Kamala Harris and every progressive down-ballot candidate, I will do it because she can’t. And I will do it so that women in Georgia and Idaho and Texas and North Dakota and South Dakota and Utah, Arizona, Nebraska Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Florida, South Carolina, and West Virginia won’t have to meet the same completely preventable doom.

This election isn’t just about Amber Thurman. Every day of my lucky, breathing life is about Amber Thurman. Because the only thing that separates us, is one of us bled out under the right Supreme Court.

Let’s raise absolute federal hell about it.

-- From Bess Kalb's newsletter The Grudge Report. I pay for this substack -- though it's free-- and think this is a message worth sharing far beyond her newsletter.

[reasonandempathy]

The weird radical/revolutionary politic larpers on this site are so allergic to political pragmatism I swear lmao. I am definitely left of the Democratic Party and I am certainly voting for Joe Biden in November. Not because I like him (I don’t). He is absolutely horrific on Gaza and that’s only the top (and priority considering there is a genocide going on there) of a list of complaints I have about him. I even voted uncommitted in my state’s presidential primary (the Pennsylvania one; I had to write it in) to protest. However, I’m still thinking pragmatically. Trump has said things that make me credibly think he will be worse on Gaza (insane that being worse on Gaza than Biden is possible but it is unfortunately), and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Project 2025, the potential for him to appoint more deeply conservative justices, more of his aggressively screwing over poor and middle class people with his tax policies. And does anyone else remember the spike in hate crimes after the race was called for him in 2016? Before he was even inaugurated? Whether people vote or not in November we will still have to deal with one of these two men in office come January unless all of the internet ancom larpers overthrow the government by then (doubt), so I’d rather deal with the one who will be marginally less bad and who didn’t try to overthrow the government. Can’t have your revolution if nobody’s alive cause you kept pushing off politically participating because there was no perfect option. 👍

Political pragmatist anon, sorry for ranting in your askbox but I feel like I lose brain cells watching these people talk. The other day I saw someone say Biden is bad because Roe v. Wade fell under his administration… even though the reason for that was Trump appointed justices. 💀 (2/2)

Fucking insane. Sincerely.

It's a completely, flatly binary choice for anyone with a brain stem and sincerity. It's distilled into the two below images:

Where all major third party candidates are even on the ballot

How many electoral votes the largest of those (green party, a.k.a. Jill Stein) would win if they won every single state they're on the ballot for.

They are literally, legally, incapable of winning the election. They are not on enough state ballots to win and Jill Stein would need to somehow win California and Texas to even "win" all the states they're on the ballot for. Which, again, would still not be enough to win the presidency and throw it to the currently existing Republican House of Representatives. Which would put Trump in office.

It's that straightforward. That simple. That BLARINGLY obvious to literally everyone except these people.

On the one hand you have:

Significant and continuous support for Israel and it's genocide

Record levels of pardons for low-level drug offenses

the gearing up of the strongest anti-trust regime since the early 20th century

the most aggressive NLRB I've seen in my lifetime, with massive wins and institutional changes to help workers

Including getting Rail strike workers a week of sick-leave that gets paid out at the end of the year, which is better than NYC and LA sick leave laws

Millions of people (not enough) getting student debt forgiveness

Some trillion dollars (not enough)of investment in renewable resources and infrastructure

Proposed taxes on unrealized capital gains (a.k.a. how billionaires never have any money but can still buy Kentucky, Iowa, and Twitter)

Effectively an end to overdraft fees

The explicit support of leftist world leaders like Lula de Silva. Who he has explicitly worked with to expand worker rights in South America.

Has capped (some, not enough, only a tiny amount really but it's something) some drug prices, including Insulin.

Reduced disability discrimination in medical treatment

Billions in additional national pre-k funding

Ending federal use of private prisons

Pushing bills to raise Social Security tax thresholds higher to help secure the General Fund

Increasing SSI benefits

and more

vs

Said Israel should just nuke Gaza and "get it over with"

Personally takes pride in and credit for getting Roe v Wade overturned

Is arguing in court that the President should be allowed to assassinate political rivals

Muslim Ban Bullshit, insistently

Actively damages our global standing and diplomatic efforts just by getting obsessed with having a Big Button

Implemented massive tax cuts on ich people, tax hikes on middle class and poor people, and actively wants to do it again

"Only wants to be a dictator for a little bit, guys, what's the big deal"

Is loudly publicly arguing that the US shouldn't honor its military alliances after-the-fact

Tore up an effective and substantial anti-nuclear-proliferation treaty with Iran

Had a DoEd that actively just refused to process student debt forgiveness applications that have been the law of the land for decades now

Has a long record of actively curtailing and weakening the NLRB and labor movement, including allowing managers to retaliate against workers, weakened workplace accommodation requirements for disabled people, and more

Rubber stamped a number of massive mergers building larger, more powerful top companies and increasing monopolistic practices

Fucking COVID Bullshit and hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths

Openly supporting fascists and wannabe-bootlicks ("Very fine people" being only the beginning of it

It's really not fucking close.

[fuzzballsheltiepants]

People always want to say that we shouldn't let politics divide us. That used to be true. The thing is, voting for Trump in this election tells me a lot about who you are as a person. So does abstaining, or voting third party.

If you support Trump, you are telling the world that you don't care about disadvantaged people, you don't care about the LGBTQ+ community, you don't care about the Black community, the Indigenous community, the Latino community. You don't care about pregnant people having complications, or those who don't wish to be pregnant. You don't care about seniors, who are looking at loss of Social Security and Medicare prescription benefits, and the retirement age being raised. You don't care about your own right to vote in the future. If you support Trump, you don't care about honesty, or decency, or fidelity. You don't care about competence. You can deny this, but if at the same time you're filling out your ballot for this man, your denials will ring hollow.

In the past 2 weeks, we've seen Trump's campaign have a horrifically racist rally in MSG. We've seen him threaten political enemies with facing a firing squad. We've seen him pretend to fellate a microphone. We've seen him lie about knowing Epstein, and we've gotten access to tapes of Epstein talking about the real Donald Trump, the one who he was friends with for decades. And we've seen him once again dog-whistling the Proud Boys.

You were paying less for groceries in 2019? Yeah, blame the corporations who took advantage of supply chain shortages to jack up prices and then decided those higher prices were what the market would bear. The government doesn't set grocery prices, and Harris actually has a plan to try to stop price gouging and collusion. Trump has a plan to once again add tariffs to China, something he did in his first term that had absolutely catastrophic effects on US farmers when China did the same to us and started getting their soybeans from Brazil instead. You may not remember the 28 billion dollar bailout that was given - ineffectually - to Iowa farmers, but you better believe the farmers do.

You don't agree with the US continuing to fund Israel's actions? Harris has challenged Netanyahu, called the situation a humanitarian crisis, and has, with the rest of the Biden administration, been trying to negotiate a ceasefire, only to be constantly stymied by Trump. Trump brags about being besties with Netanyahu, who he talks to regularly (despite that being, you know, illegal).

You're concerned about the border? Crossings are way down this year, to 2019 levels, and that's DESPITE the bipartisan border bill being crushed in Congress due to - you guessed it - Trump pressuring the GOP not to vote for it because he thought it would help him politically.

Your rent is out of control and you want to buy a house? Harris has a plan to build hundreds of thousands of new affordable homes AND help first-time homebuyers with down payments.

Your health care costs too much? How about the Harris prescription plan, which will cap ALL prescription costs, not just for seniors, and will cap ALL insulin at $35 regardless of age or healthcare plan?

You don't want to vote, or you insist on voting for Stein despite the fact that she has no plans, doesn't know how the government works, and has done zero for this country ever? You're telling us that it's more important to keep your own hands clean instead of helping take one tiny step in the direction of freedom, the direction of equality.

Your vote is your voice. And we can hear it.

[b0rtney]

you want homosexuals in every conceivable scenario?

Boy oh boy do i have the substack for u: mine!

NO PLEASE LEMME TELL U THE STORIES BEFORE U LEAVE--

Current is Cinnamon Muffins. TLDR: Six queer boys in a homophobic tiny town in Iowa are trying to survive winter break dodging awful parents, social stigma, and mental health crises.

Next up is How to Get Away with Marriage. TLDR: Guy with awful, religious parents marries guy who is living paycheck to paycheck so they can both get all their younger sisters out of their shitty situations (but they fall in love ofc).

Longer desc of these plus the stories coming in the next months are below the cut! (Genres include fantasy, sci-fi, dystopian, mystery/thriller, coming-of-age)

Cinnamon Muffins centers on Taylor Macready, a homeless senior in high school holed up in a sleeping bag under a bridge after his parents kicked him out. He's fully ready to just accept death when it starts snowing on him while he's stargazing, but social outcast Wes Post is taking his nightly walk in a new direction and stumbles (literally) on his longtime crush, Taylor. Dragging Taylor home, Wes's parents prove themselves the only reasonable parents in this book by setting Taylor up on their pullout couch and nursing him back to health. Then Wes, whose closest school relationships include the kids who bully him for his anxiety-related speech impediment, has to get in touch with Taylor's friends to let them know the situation. Meanwhile, the mean girls of Swisher High School are starting a campaign to get homosexuality banned at school. Administratively, it gets nowhere, but it inspires several small-minded shitwads to take matters into their own hands. While Taylor is used to getting into fights, Wes isn't, but he'll have to sink or swim, because the teachers are not paid enough to care what happens in the hallways during lunchtime.

How to Get Away with Marriage opens with Luke Providence, son of a devoutly Baptist family in Nebraska, proposing to Patrick Demden, son of a recently-deceased alcoholic mechanic. The wealthy Providence parents have a longstanding agreement that once their children get married, they will receive a trust of $100,000 to use on the down-payment of a house and to start a life with their spouse. Patrick's younger sister tutors Luke's younger sister, but Patrick's sister is 16. This age gap doesn't matter much to the Providence parents, but it matters a lot to Luke, so he strikes a deal with Patrick: tell the parents he'll marry the sister, legally marry the brother, everyone gets to move to Colorado and escape abusive religious parents and crushing poverty. He needn't have done something so elaborate, Patrick would have married him for any reason at all. But the secret doesn't stay secret forever, and the Providence parents eventually come knocking, trying to recollect their children and their money.

Future stories I'll keep shorter, but feel free to ask about them either in the replies or my askbox and I'll elaborate!

Assassin x Demon King will be getting books 2 and 3! ADK is about an assassin and the king he was supposed to kill, both of whom have quit their jobs and started trying to save as many people as the assassin killed before he dies of a slow-acting poison in twelve months. Books 2 and 3 will have things getting awfully tragic and somewhat more horny than before! (No smut will make it into the print versions of these, that will remain on my substack alone)

How to Find Your Friends After the End of the World is a fantasy inspired by the isekai anime genre. Five friends in their 20s are on earth as it is wracked by a violent battle between the Heroine of the Gods and her Nemesis, and then, suddenly, they aren't. Earth has been destroyed and they are now on a new planet, in new (non-human) bodies, strewn across continents! On their new wrists, they have tattoos with each others' names, plus one (or two) new ones: their soulmates. Court politics and wastelands of monsters await them as they try desperately to reach each other, and their soulmates try desperately to reach them.

HtFYF will also have a prequel, focusing on the events that led to earth's destruction, and the battle between the Heroine of the Gods, a young woman, and her Nemesis, who seems to know more about the gods than she says. Why do the gods keep choosing such young heroes? What has the Nemesis done to put the world in such peril? Will the Heroine get to graduate on time despite the sleep she's been missing!?

The following do not yet have titles, but are fully fleshed out works ready to be thrown onto Substack:

A trilogy of eleven teens assisting in the fight against an agency that traffics, tortures, and then sells children with preternatural powers and abilities, and an exploration of the trauma those kids emerge with.

A murder mystery where a woman's sister dies, the police rule it suicide, and the woman enlists the help of a rumored contract killer to help her solve the murder-- but why does this rumored murderer-for-hire seem to know so much about her sister's death? And who was truly responsible?

A campy novel about a woman who graduates college, goes back to her hometown, and finds her highschool crush is still there, still single, and has since come out as gay. Of course, the only solution is to co-adopt an at-risk child from a neighbor.

This post will remain pinned on my profile, but for the next few days I'm having a sale on my substack tiers-- 20% off! That makes the cost to you just $8 per month to get a chapter every other day. 15 chapters for $8; that's a steal!

[hometoursandotherstuff]

This looked like a nice big old 1890 farmhouse, reasonably priced, in Vinton, Iowa. $399,999 (reduced $30K) 5bds, 3ba. But, I'm so confused by the layout and construction, I don't know what they did to it. Take a look.

This is an entrance foyer.

That has a glass wall & door opening to a nice curved hall with a pretty, original staircase. But, they don't show where it leads.

This looks like an entrance coming in from the barn or garage area.

Is it a ladies lounge area for the tiny powder room?

This room looks like a sitting room, but it's set up as a double office. Has a lovely fireplace and inlaid flooring.

The office doors open to this room that looks like it was once 2 rooms or more.

There's a library ladder that is used to access closet shelving, and then you move it and have to lift it down to access the weird high open shelving.

Turn right and there's this hall with a glass ceiling with some industrial windows on the left.

Which I think leads into this enclosed patio room that has an indoor grill with an exhaust hood.

And, then there's this room with a bar. Looks like there's a lot of unfinished construction projects.

Back to another hall.

At the end of this hall is the kitchen dining area. I think there's a glimpse of another ladder to access the high shelving.

The kitchen wraps around to this room were the wall's been removed, as you can see by the changes in the floor.

I think that this may be a full bath.

One of the bedrooms.

A children's room.

Odd bath with nightstands leads me to believe that there was a bed in here.

Small walk-in closet. Is that a shower curtain on the right?

Small bedroom with an open closet corner.

The primary bedroom has a balcony.

Back downstairs this looks like a workshop.

Garage/workshop.

Then outside is a pergola with a confusing ceiling. Maybe they were making storage above?

I can't make this structure out, but it looks like there's a cat tree and a slide.

Nice pool in the middle of all the structures, and it looks like a little town.

Hot tub under a pergola. There're stairs into the hot tub, so what is that other structure for? Spiral stairs go up to the bedroom terrace.

There's also a small patio on the side of the house. What's that little door set into the step? This home has such strange features.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/214-W-10th-St-Vinton-IA-52349/93825274_zpid/

[hiwerethemountaingoats]

I wrote this song in Colo, Iowa. That's in Northeast Story County. The Colo-NESCO Royals. I went and looked at where our house used to be. The city of Colo bought our house from our landlords so they could knock it down because it was a fire hazard. So that's how I wound up moving to Ames. We got a notice from the city, "You can't live - we like you fine, but you can't live here anymore, we're gonna knock your house down. May be a good time to check out the other parts of Story County." But, so, the little tiny toolshed wasn't really a shed, it was just a little tiny house behind the house, with a work desk that clearly hadn't been used since the 50s. That's where I wrote this song, it's called There Will Be No Divorce.

John Darnielle introducing There Will Be No Divorce (First United Methodist Church | Ames, IA | September 12th, 2015)

[thoughtportal]

When my mom’s best friend, Colleen, died from brain cancer at the age of fifty-eight, my mom blamed it on the telephone. “Her tumor was right by her ear, where the phone went,” she explained. “And you know Colleen—she was always on the phone.”

With you, I wanted to say but didn’t.

When I was growing up, my mom and Colleen would talk for hours every Sunday evening, a sacred time during which my brothers and I knew not to disturb her. She would stretch out on the mauve velvet couch where nobody else ever sat, in the weird living room where nobody else ever went, the phone cradled between her ear and shoulder, her ankle bobbing to the rhythm of Colleen’s voice.

I hated when Colleen called, because it took my mom away from me.

Colleen died the summer before my senior year of college. Mom and I drove from Kansas to Iowa for the funeral, a mother-daughter road trip I recall as strangely fun, though I imagine it was awful for my mom. At Colleen’s church I was too afraid to look into her open casket, so Mom walked up to it alone. Though I had seen Colleen in person on several occasions throughout my life—including the year prior, when she’d attended her oldest daughter’s wedding in a luscious blond wig and fake eyelashes—it was always odd to think of her as anything more than the voice inside Mom’s phone, an invisible power capable of stapling my mother to the couch for hours at a time, causing her to laugh or gasp or cry or go silent.

After Colleen’s death Mom and I started talking on the phone more often. I’d call her on my way home from class or while walking to meet friends downtown. A couple of years later, when I moved to California for graduate school, we would talk while I walked home from teaching. During these calls I imagined her on the mauve velvet couch, her leg propped on the armrest, ankle bobbing.

I now live in Bellingham, Washington, and call her every morning while walking my dog. She’s still in Wichita, though the couch is long gone, sold along with the house where I grew up. Though we see each other only once or twice a year, I feel closer to her than I did when our bedrooms were off the same hallway. Sometimes during these daily calls my ear will grow hot, and fear will ripple through me: How much radiation is seeping into my head? How much is seeping into hers? Should we cut down on our phone time? Yet I always come to the same conclusion: if this is the price I must pay for staying in touch, let the tumor come. (My mom, who forged my brain in the kiln of her womb, would of course be horrified by this logic.)

She occasionally calls at other times and leaves me voicemails: Hey, Becky, it’s Mom, just calling because I’m thinking about you, or because I’m walking the dogs, or because I heard about a terrible accident in Washington and want to make sure it wasn’t you. I hoard these messages, knowing that if something ever happens to her, they will be precious: forty-two examples of her voice, its lilting cadence, every syllable etched with love.

Before we hang up, we spend a few seconds in an extended goodbye-I-love-you chant that feels weird if someone is there to overhear it. “Bye, I love you,” I’ll say. “Bye, love you more,” she’ll say. I’ll send a kiss. She’ll send a kiss. “Love you,” I’ll say. “Love you more.” Kiss. Kiss. Bye. Bye. Love you. Love you. At least we know that if something were to happen to one of us, our last conversation will have ended with a little parade of affection.

I find talking on the phone to be one of the purest forms of communication. You are receiving the person’s voice, their tone, their laughter, without the distraction of their clothing, their hairdo, their body. I don’t care what someone looks like. I want to hear them sigh with exhaustion or cackle with delight. I want to hear tiny details of the environment from which they speak: birdsong, barking dogs, the beep of a microwave. I want the pleasure of building the physical world around them in my mind, like I do when reading a book.

As someone who has always been self-conscious about my appearance, there’s also comfort in knowing the other person can’t see me. On the phone, all they are getting is my personality, my thoughts and feelings, my words. It’s the same combination of privacy and intimacy I share with readers of my writing.

My passion for talking on the phone makes me something of an oddity among my fellow millennials. I have friends who communicate exclusively through GIFs and memes. Others schedule FaceTime chats with their families once a week or every few months. Some don’t talk to their parents at all.

My best friend, Melissa, is an exception. Her love for talking on the phone rivals mine.

Melissa is five foot ten, so when we hug, my ear lands on her breastbone. When she walks, one of her long toes makes a clicking sound. She is part Armenian, with a mane of curly black hair and thick eyebrows that she conceals behind glasses with translucent frames. Her friendship sits in the bank vault of my life like a mound of glittering treasure I will never spend.

Though we’ve known each other since high school—she played lawyer to my witness in a mock trial—we didn’t become close until we were attending the University of Kansas. Thinking about it now, we didn’t become superclose until after college, when we both moved away from Kansas and began keeping in touch over the phone.

Melissa has always been easy to talk to. She is emotional, intelligent, and curious, and she asks excellent questions. One time we drove together from Lawrence, Kansas, to Denver to meet a friend. I recall arriving at the Rocky Mountains and thinking, Did we just talk for eight hours straight? We had.

When COVID happened, our calls took new shape. We began to talk weekly, sometimes two or three times a week, our conversations evolving into extravagant, marathon exchanges. By the time we said, “I love you,” and hung up, I would feel lightheaded and dazzled. Only now do I realize this must have been how my mom felt hanging up from a call with Colleen.

Whenever we talked, I would lace up my tennis shoes and head out to Bellingham’s Interurban Trail, a corridor of old trolley tracks converted into a densely forested recreational path. Melissa was my companion as I passed the rookery where great blue herons nested in the spring, the village of colorful tiny homes meant for the houseless, the still-active railroad tracks that shuttled unknown quantities of milk and oil across the country. I’d walk all the way to the edge of the city, where the bay lapped lazily at the rocky beach, oblivious to the illness ravaging the humans on its shore and to the beloved, portable voice chiming in my ear.

Melissa was in Billings, Montana, completing a residency at a naturopathic medical clinic, and she’d tell me about B12 shots and the importance of magnesium. She was planning her wedding, an event that chased the COVID vaccine schedule like a greyhound after a rabbit. I was publishing my first novel and told her about the anxiety of putting out a book during a pandemic, which felt like lighting a Fourth of July sparkler during a hurricane, hoping against all odds that someone would look up from the tragedy unfolding around them and notice my little sizzle of art.

Our calls continued. My book came out. Her wedding date miraculously arrived just weeks after most people received their second vaccine. I was her maid of honor, crying hopelessly through my speech. Soon after, she and her new husband began thinking about where to move once she’d finished her residency. They did not want to stay in Montana but had no leads on other places to go.

Bellingham is not a difficult place to sell (lucky for me, since I work for the tourism bureau). It’s a vibrant college town wedged between the moody Salish Sea and the Crayola-green Chuckanut Mountains, in reach of North Cascades National Park, where the lakes turn a startling matte turquoise in summer, a color I call “mermaid juice.” Sitting on the highway in town for more than twenty seconds is considered a major traffic jam. When you go for a walk, people look you in the eye and smile. Most important, anytime there’s a rainbow—and there are rainbows often in the spring and fall—everyone comes outside to look, passing around the multihued joy like a spit-soggy joint at a party.

I shared these details with Melissa: the rainbows, the heron babies, the friendly mail carrier who knows everyone’s name and once taught me how to go “apple bowling” on my street. (If the apple rolls past the neighbor’s Camry, it’s a strike.) When she told me she and her husband were considering moving to Bellingham, I saw my life unfolding like a fairy tale: We could go camping together and take trips to the Canadian coast. She and her husband were planning to have a baby, and I imagined watching their child grow up, being there for his first words, his first school play, his high-school graduation. We would all be together in this beautiful place, a chosen family.

I didn’t think about how she and I would no longer have our marathon phone calls.

When I was very little, my mom used to cook dinner for my brothers and me every night: lasagnas, stir-fries, spaghetti and meatballs. Then my dad left when I was eight, and she eventually stopped cooking and started microwaving Stouffer’s ziti or throwing a bag of chicken tenders in the oven. Some nights she just let us kids loose on the freezer. When I asked her a few years ago if the divorce was the reason she stopped cooking, she shook her head adamantly (or I imagined her shaking her head adamantly, because this conversation most certainly took place over the phone). “That’s not right at all,” she told me. “I didn’t stop cooking because your dad left. I stopped because I always used to talk on the phone with my mom when I made dinner. When she died, I didn’t feel like cooking anymore.”

Melissa has lived in Bellingham for more than a year now. Her son—an unbearably adorable baby with a smile as rich and warm as melting butter—is already walking. She found a job at a naturopathic clinic near the marina and loves the people she works with, a crew of tenderhearted, hippie-adjacent women who perform craniosacral therapy, organize sound baths, and squeeze the arm of whomever they’re speaking to. We see each other once a week, sometimes twice. We have dinners at each other’s houses and sometimes meet downtown for a drink while her parents, who also moved to Bellingham, watch her baby. Usually when we hang out, someone else is there: her partner, my partner, her parents, her son, one of my roommates, one of our friends. The conversation is light, choppy, distracted, a hundred butterflies flitting from place to place, only occasionally settling onto a surface.

Only a few times—while driving to Seattle for a girls’ weekend, our eyes on the highway instead of each other; while sitting on my porch, gazes fixed on the forest surrounding my house—have we been able to slip back into what I think of as our telephone mode: conversation that exists on a deeper level, beneath the sparkly waters where our face-to-face chats typically linger, a dark but beautiful realm where all the peculiar fish with no eyeballs live. Once, even though she was just a few miles away, Melissa called me because she needed to talk. I was startled by how good it felt to slip back into that mysterious, silty space where it’s just our two voices, a pair of glowing lights blinking at one another. What is it about the sight of each other’s bodies that prevents us from descending to those murky depths? Why is it so much easier to connect emotionally when we can let the physical world drop away?

Sometimes, when I think about our phone calls, I picture confessional boxes. Chaise lounges in therapists’ offices. Internet chat rooms late at night. Like a confessional or a therapy session, a phone call is a container. The call draws a circle around the conversation, saying: This time is meant for talking and nothing else, and there are only two people involved, you and me. The boundary pushes away the outside world, aims a spotlight on the exchange.

I no longer regularly walk the Interurban Trail, but when I do, certain markers remind me of those pandemic conversations with Melissa. A bridge, for instance, recalls the time I was having trouble adopting a dog, because everyone else in the Pacific Northwest was also trying to adopt a dog during the pandemic. “I know it feels frustrating now,” she said, “but eventually you’ll get a yes, and none of this hassle will matter.”

I think about how often life does the opposite and throws you a no—a tumor, a virus, a shift in an important relationship—and suddenly all that matters is what came before, those moments that are now just memories: happily lounging on a velvet sofa, taking long walks to the end of a city, cooking elaborate meals.

Perhaps this is what appeals to me about the phone: for however long the conversation lasts, you can pretend there is no body. No tissue capable of growing tumors, no lungs that could harden, no bones that will turn to dust. There is only the voice of the one you love, pure and immediate despite its impermanence, a song unrolling itself in the music box of your head, for you and only you.

[westadventure24]

Day 2 - Mid-Day Fun

We have spent much of our time today driving across Iowa. It is true what they say…acres upon flat acres of corn, corn, wind turbines, solar fields, and, I know you are shocked, but more corn.

We may have taken a 1 mile unexpected detour to a state we didn’t intend to visit. As brief as our stay was, I can say the two miles of Nebraska we saw was nice. Good road anyway.

We did make our way into South Dakota as planned and Todd was thrilled to find the speed more to his liking. So, after an immediate increase in cruise control, we visited Sioux Falls for a nice patio lunch. I will let the pictures speak for themselves. The restaurant was the site of a power plant built in 1908 and the remnants of an old brick mill house that was only in operation for two years in the early 1900’s. Mom was pleased to see the mill house reconstruction had been sponsored by her colleagues of the Telephone Pioneers of America. (That is what the tiny sign says in the pic that you probably can’t see!)

Whew! That’s a lot for a mid-day update!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Marina Bolotnikova at Vox:

Every five years, farm state politicians in Congress perform their fealty to Big Ag in a peculiar ritual called the Farm Bill: a massive, must-pass package of legislation that dictates food and farming policy in the US. 

At the urging of the pork industry, congressional Republicans want to use this year’s bill to undo what little progress the US has made in improving conditions for animals raised on factory farms. The House Agriculture Committee late last month advanced a GOP-led Farm Bill with a rider designed to nullify California’s Proposition 12 — a landmark ballot measure, passed by an overwhelming majority in that state in 2018, banning extreme farm animal confinement — and prevent other states from enacting similar laws.  Prop 12, along with a comparable law in Massachusetts passed by ballot measure in 2016, outlaws the sale of pork produced using gestation crates — devices that represent perhaps the pinnacle of factory farm torture. While many of the tools of factory farming are the product of biotech innovation, gestation crates are deceptively low-tech: They’re simply small cages that immobilize mother pigs, known as sows, who serve as the pork industry’s reproductive machines.  Sows spend their lives enduring multiple cycles of artificial insemination and pregnancy while caged in spaces barely larger than their bodies. It is the equivalent to living your entire, short life pregnant and trapped inside a coffin. 

Ian Duncan, an emeritus chair in animal welfare at the University of Guelph in Canada, has called gestation crates “one of the cruelest forms of confinement devised by humankind.” And yet they’re standard practice in the pork industry.  While Prop 12 has been celebrated as one of the strongest farm animal protection laws in the world, its provisions still fall far short of giving pigs a humane life. It merely requires providing enough space for the sows to be able to turn around and stretch their legs. It still allows the use of farrowing crates, cages similar to gestation crates that confine sows and their nursing piglets for a few weeks after birth. And about 40 percent of pork sold in California is exempt; Prop 12 covers only whole, uncooked cuts, like bacon or ribs, but not ground pork or pre-cooked pork in products like frozen pizzas.  The pork lobby refuses to accept even those modest measures and has sought to link Prop 12 to the agenda of “animal rights extremists.” It has also claimed that the law would put small farms out of business and lead to consolidation, even though it is the extreme confinement model favored by mega factory farms that has driven the skyrocketing level of consolidation seen in the pork industry over the last few

For nearly six years, instead of taking steps to comply with Prop 12, pork lobbyists sued to get the law struck down. They lost at every turn. Last year, the US Supreme Court rejected the industry’s argument that it had a constitutional right to sell meat raised “in ways that are intolerable to the average consumer,” as legal scholars Justin Marceau and Doug Kysar put it. 

[...]

Overturning Prop 12 would be extreme, and it could have far-reaching consequences

Several other states have gestation crate bans, but the California and Massachusetts laws are unique because they outlaw not just the use of crates within those states’ borders, but also the sale of pork produced using gestation crates anywhere in the world. Both states import almost all of their pork from bigger pork-producing states (the top three are Iowa, Minnesota, and North Carolina), so the industry has argued that Prop 12 and Massachusetts’ Question 3 unfairly burden producers outside their borders. California in particular makes up about 13 percent of US pork consumption, threatening to upend the industry’s preferred way of doing business for a big chunk of the market. 

The California and Massachusetts laws also ban the sale of eggs and veal from animals raised in extreme cage confinement. Both industries opposed Prop 12 before it passed but have largely complied with the law; neither has put up the fierce legal fight that the pork industry has, led by Big Meat lobbying groups like the National Pork Producers Council, the North American Meat Institute, and the American Farm Bureau Federation. 

House Agriculture Committee chair Glenn Thompson (R-PA), who introduced this year’s House Farm Bill last month, touts “addressing Proposition 12” as a core priority. The legislation includes a narrowed version of the EATS Act (short for Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression), a bill introduced by Republicans in both chambers last year to ban states from setting their own standards for the production of any agricultural products, animal or vegetable, imported from other states. 

The Farm Bill language has been tightened to focus solely on livestock, banning states from setting standards for how animal products imported from other states are raised. It is less extreme only in comparison to the sweeping EATS Act, but also more transparent about its aim to shield the meat industry from accountability. At the Farm Bill markup on May 23, when the legislation passed committee, Thompson urged his colleagues to protect the livestock industry from “inside-the-beltway animal welfare activists.”  The provisions slipped into the Farm Bill may have consequences that reach far beyond the humane treatment of animals. They “could hamstring the ability of states to regulate not just animal welfare but also the sale of meat and dairy products produced from animals exposed to disease, with the use of certain harmful animal drugs, or through novel biotechnologies like cloning, as well as adjacent production standards involving labor, environmental, or cleanliness conditions,” Kelley McGill, a legislative policy fellow at Harvard’s Animal Law & Policy Program who authored an influential report last year on the potential impacts of the EATS Act, told me in an email. 

[...]

Why this Farm Bill faces long odds

Despite the monumental effort from the pork lobby and its allies, the odds of this year’s Farm Bill nullifying Prop 12 appear slim. Democrats, who control the Senate, oppose the House bill’s proposed cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which makes up about 80 percent of the bill’s $1.5 trillion in spending, and its removal of so-called climate-smart conditions from farm subsidies made available by the Inflation Reduction Act. Members of the House Freedom Caucus, on the other hand, are likely to demand steeper cuts to SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. 

The broader EATS Act has been opposed by more than 200 members of Congress, including more than 100 Democratic representatives and several members of the Freedom Caucus; Prop 12 nullification language is not included in the rival Senate Farm Bill framework introduced by Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI). Many lawmakers and other observers consider the House bill dead on arrival, which would mean that a Farm Bill may not get passed until 2025.  Prop 12’s pork regulations, meanwhile, took full effect in California at the start of this year after two years of delay due to the industry’s legal challenges. After implementation, prices for pork products covered by the law abruptly increased by about 20 percent on average, a spike that UC Davis agricultural economist Richard Sexton attributes to the pork producers’ reluctance to convert their farms to gestation crate-free before they knew whether Prop 12 would be upheld by the Supreme Court. 

House Republicans want to use the Farm Bill to push back against even modest improvements for animals in factory farms.

[holycatsandrabbits]

Hey, y’all, it’s Weird Wednesday! Where on some Wednesdays, I blog about weird stuff and give writing prompts.

Today: The Villisca Axe Murders: 1912 Tragedy

On the night of June 10, 1912, eight people were murdered with an axe in a house in Villisca, Iowa. Josiah Moore (shown above), and his wife Sarah, along with their four children and two neighbor children, were killed in their beds by a person who has never been identified. And I mean never—the internet doesn’t even have a favorite suspect.

I used to live in Iowa, and I have actually been to the “Villisca Axe Murder House,” now a museum and historical site, and a frequent host to ghost tours. Visitors are free to leave their mark on the rafters in the barn, writing messages which range from the usual names and dates to oddly creepy warnings like “Don’t stand on your head in the kids’ room.” On my visit I was struck by how little has changed, though Iowa has traveled more than a century into the future: at the end of our tour, we were discussing suspects and expressing sympathy for the victims, exactly as people have been doing outside that house for over 100 years.

Check out the blog post for the whole story and some creepy writing prompts, such as: 

The Closet

According to an early rumor about the case, there was evidence the killer hid in a closet and left cigarette butts, and the mark of his own butt on a bale of cotton batting, to show he’d been in the house before the family got home that night at 9:30. Then the killer waited until at least midnight to actually attack.

So first of all, this isn’t based on any actual evidence. But it would make for a good story, because in June in Iowa in a little house without air conditioning, those closets would be sweltering. How would a murderer withstand hours in a tiny, overheated space? Could he be incredibly disciplined? Could he be having a psychotic break? Sneaking onto the paranormal side of things, could he be a ghost or inhuman creature? What would happen if a murderer attempted to hide in a closet and fainted from heat exhaustion?

DannyeChase.com ~ AO3 ~ Linktree ~ Weird Wednesday writing prompts blog ~ Resources for Writers

Image credit

[kaylawritess]

sypnosis: When Steve told you he wanted six kids, you thought he was joking. Spoiler! he wasn't.

Dad Steve Harrington.

"Steve do you really want six kids?" You ask, a little worried considering you're 9 months pregnant and about to pop and he's already talking about your second.

"Oh yeah. All girls too. Though a mini Steve doesn't sound too bad." He says, flicking through a magazine with his hand on your thighs that are draped over his lap.

"I'm not promising you six kids. If this one's gives us hell you best believe you're getting the snip." You say pointing at his croch and he winces when he thinks of it.

"I'd obviously never force you but doesn't a van full of kids sound fun? Never a dull moment in the Harrington house." He adds with a happy look on his face.

Little did you know your first daughter was hours away from being born.

21/11/87, The first Harrington daughter, Sylvie Harper Harrington, was born.

"She's so cute." You say, your eyes welling up with tears from holding your daughter for the first time.

"She won't stay this small forever." Steve complains, a sob leaving his mouth and you hear Robin's cackle from the side of the room.

"I'm not saying now but when she starts walking maybe we could have another one?" You cave and Steve looks up smiling.

"Really?" His eyes have such excitement and love filling them, how could you ever say no to him?

Steve was whipped. He knew he loved you but seeing you give birth to his child and raise her had him obsessed with you.

So it wasn't much of a suprise that 6 months after Sylvie's birth you were staring at positive pregnancy test.

16/2/89, the second Harrington girl was born. Her name being Juno Faye Harrington.

Both the Harrington girls gave their parents hell. You and Steve thought you were done with kids.

Steve was upset but he knew he would always love his girls but he never felt like their family was complete.

You weren't trying. But 4 years after Juno was born you were sat in a random diner, on the way to Iowa to visit your parents, which already had you nervous since they hadn't met Juno yet, the two lines on the pregnancy test didn't help to calm your nerves either.

4/11/93, the third Harrington was born. You and Steve hadn't thought of names after your other two girls made you not want more kids so after a very stressful pregnancy and a few days of thinking after she was born, Aven Samantha Harrington was finally named.

Juno and Sylvie were obsessed with their little sister. So was Steve. He missed the getting up at night and seeing you feed his daughters.

He missed seeing you getting excited over the tiny milestones.

It was you who brought up the idea of a 4th child.

Aven was one and a half when you started trying, you knew Steve was fertile but 9 months after you were heavily pregnant and trying to figure out a name.

"Why didn't we just find our the gender?" You ask with a huff, throwing the baby book down on the floor, but quietly not wanting to wake your daughters.

"We both know it's a girl. I'm incapable of having boys, not that I mind. I love my girls." He looks over to you and you have a look on your face.

"Livia! If it's a girl can we pleaseeee call her Livia?" You beg. Even going as far as to clasp your hands together.

"You're acting like I'd say no to you. Of course we can. What if it's a little boy though?" He says, rubbing your belly with a smile.

"Junie said we have to name him Wells." You smile, not hating the name at all.

"Hi Livia or Wells." Steve leans down and kissed your stomach.

4 days later, 22/1/96 Livia Rose Harrington was welcomed to the world.

Now with 4 kids life was more hectic then ever. Sylvie was 8 and wasn't happy sharing a room with Juno anymore. So they were house hunting.

What didn't help was Aven kept pointing at your stomach saying babies were in there.

"Aven, if mommy's pregnant why isn't she big?" You asked your sweet daughter with a sigh, trying to get her to go to sleep.

"Because the boys are only little mommy." She says, pushing her face into your chest while you sigh

That night, 6 months after the birth of Livia, you were sat on the toilet with a positive test in your hand. Just like you were 7 years ago with Juno.

On the 28th of May, 1997, you gave birth to twin boys. You also got your tubes tied that day.

Your boys, Lux Becker and Wells Elliot Harrington were born.

You and Steve agreed no more kids at the appointment when you found out it was twins.

Steve got his van full of kids and you got to feel like your family was complete.

Growing up in the house, there was never a quiet moment. Whether it was Sylvie kicking her younger siblings out of her room and then playing Metallica as loudly as she could (Eddie always gave her Cds)

Or Juno crying about how she can't figure out what to draw next and needs to call her uncle Dustin right at that very moment, didn't matter if it was 2am.

Or even Aven running after Steve with her makeup begging to make him pretty or asking if her she could go to a makeup store.

And Livia, their quietest child would have her nose in a book while her younger brothers ran around throwing baseballs at their dad who always had a smile on his face.

When Sylvie came and told you both that she was expecting at 18, just as you were 18 years ago. Steve broke out in tears.

Excited to be there for a whole new newborn stage and to be a grandpa.

Robin never let him live it down.

"Dude you're a whole grandpa at 37!" She teased and Steve's eyes welled up with tears again.

"My baby is so grown up." He sobbed and you rolled your eyes, moving yourself in front of him.

"Honey, you really have to stop crying when anyone brings it up. You cried in Cosco yesterday." He shoves his head into your shoulder, his body shaking as he cries.

"Mommy! My water broke!" You hear Sylvie say and Steve stands up so fast you stagger back slightly.

Sylvie waddles downstairs with her hospital bag in hand.

"Steve start timing her contractions. Sylvie come sit down we won't be going anywhere until your daddy calms down." You sit your daughter down and rub her back, letting her squeeze your hand through her contractions.

You look up at Robin and she's already nodding, knowing you're asking her to watch the other 5.

"Steve. Honey, snap out of it. Go start the car please."

"I'm gonna be a grandpa!"

...

Cute lil Steve fluff!!

[joannes-journal]

Antlers - Entry #1

CW: Broken Bones, Child Endangerment, Sleep Deprived MOD w/ Grammarly as Beta Reader

=+=+=+=+=

The day that spindly fucker attacked, it broke Dakota's leg. DISC0RD leapt at the entity, who picked DISC0RD up and slammed them on the ground. We could all hear the break of several bones, one of which being its left antler. Despite the pain DISC0RD was in, it managed to lure whatever it was away from the car and lead it into the woods behind the house, allowing us to make a getaway.

When we got into the car, Trinity snagged the broken antler off the ground and brought it to the hospital. Before DISC0RD leapt to the rescue, the spindly fucker broke Dakota's leg with a tentacle; it needed treatment. As for the antler, Trinity said she didn't know why she grabbed the antler; she just wanted to do it.

I never told anyone what happened that day; we came up with a lie.

"Dakota fell out of a tree."

It wasn't entirely a lie. Dakota likes to climb trees and sit in them.

Still, when we were driving off, I heard a sound I only ever heard DISC0RD make when attacking Nick, my ex-husband. It was this guttural call, almost like DISC0RD harnessed the bugles of a hundred elks at once. My heart broke as I listened, I--

We lived on the road for months, occasionally sleeping in dirty, grimy, cheap motels. It's hard to shower when you're moving, and the car seats hurt my back. The occasional night at a motel was worth it.

While settling down in a motel off I-72, there was a knock on the door. I motioned for the kids to hide under the bed while I grabbed a lamp to use as a weapon. I opened the door, and a young woman awkwardly stood there. Her mousy hair blew in the wind. She wore an orange and black flannel and jeans and had a dog with her.

"Uh...hi...?"

"Oh…hi…did…did you need something?" I cautiously asked the woman. Her dog sat at her feet, tilting its head at me.

She had a distant look on her face, "It's me…Jacklynn? I used to babysit Dakota and Trinity. Was best friends with your rabbit?"

SHIT.

I brought her inside the room, carefully glimpsing around outside the door. Trinity and Dakota clambered from under the bed, clutching Jacklynn tightly. Their tiny faces pressed against her shoulders; they hadn't seen her since she moved almost three months ago. Jacklynn had practically become their older sister over the years.

"Speaking of your rabbit," Jacklynn plopped down onto the bed. "Where's DISC0RD? They're usually always with y'all in some way."

I could feel myself shake; no air was getting in my lungs. I was on a ship in a storm, my vision blurring and hazy. My knees buckled under my weight and down I went. That was the last thing I remember before waking up on the bed with Jacklynn standing by me with a glass of water. Her face had heartache written all over it.

"So...DISC0RD's..." Jacklynn paused, turning away. "Take this." She thrust the glass of water into my hands and sat on the chair in the corner of the small, dingy room. "The kids explained what they could...here." Jacklynn fumbled around in her pocket for a little black book before skimming through it. She wrote down an address. "If you need a place to stay...this is my address."

I sat up, sipping the water, "How did you find us? How did you know we were h--"

She cut me off, "I don't know. I..." Her head was in her hands. "I just did, okay? Listen, you need to be safe out there. DISC0RD and whatever the hell that was that broke Dakota's leg? Just the tip of the iceberg." The room went cold as she spoke; Trinity and Dakota sat on the floor listening, intrigued.

Jacklynn handed me the address and opened the door. The chilly nighttime Iowa air filled the room. "I mean it, Jo. There's more out there." And with that, Jacklynn left. I don't know why she didn't stay the night; I would have let her.

We took Jacklynn up on her offer and went to her place in Kansas. A quaint one-bedroom apartment with cold brick walls; her couch had a pull-out bed that the kids and I slept on. The rest of Jacklynn's place was something else. Sigils smeared onto the walls, salt lined the windows and doors, and windchimes dangled right by every available window.

"Hey, Jackie...what the fuck?"

She explained how it all kept things out. Locks kept the humans out. Sigils and salt kept the supernatural out. I discovered some things about her that night. About her family and why she got into learning about the paranormal.

But that's for another time. I need to go ahead and finish this entry. I'm tired and we're getting ready to watch a movie and I want to spend time with my family.

I just wish DISC0RD was here, we're watching Hocus Pocus. They always adored Binx.

=+=+=+=+=

[vaspider]

Your tags about your relatives on the post about the Manhattan project really struck a chord with me.

I've spent the last 20 years wrestling with my own ancestry in relation to the world wars. My grandparents were all catholics in Nazi occupied territory. One was part of a major node of the underground, a last stop before getting Jewish families and downed allied pilots back across to London. Another used her school bag to smuggle ammunition and forged papers through Nazi checkpoints. One was in a work camp for his teens for spitting on the German officer who ordered him to dig trenches for them. And the last volunteered to drive delivery trucks into Auschwitz.

The conclusion I've come to is that they're not me, I'm not responsible for their actions. I can only take responsibility for how their actions make me feel.

I am very much okay with my feelings about them. Being ashamed of the one I am ashamed of definitely feels like the appropriate emotion.

Sorry I haven't been able too keep even water down for 2 weeks and I'm loopy on painkillers. Tldr I understand how you feel.

Thanks. I appreciate it.

I haven't really talked about a lot of it publicly, but I've been working on art about it for a while. My grandparents on one side were both part of the Manhattan Project - both were broke farm kids who joined the Army because... well. Poverty recruitment is a thing. My great-grandmother grew up in a tar-paper shack in the Northwest Territories, my grandmother grew up in a tiny house on a farm in Iowa, and my mother grew up in a suburban bungalow in Illinois.

The Manhattan Project is where my grandparents met and were married so I literally exist because of that assignment, and the middle-class life that I grew up with is very much because my grandparents could afford a house in the suburban Midwest with the money they made (and not being shut out of GI loan programs on account of being white, and and and).

On the other side of my family are my Japanese-American cousins who had grandparents and IIRC an aunt in internment camps. (My uncle was born after the war.) So I have been kind of sitting with ... all of that... since I figured it out as a young adult.

No, they're not me. I'm not them. But the life I live now, and the life I had growing up, is very much because of their involvement in the Manhattan Project. That's part of my life, and pretending it isn't doesn't do me any good. I just don't talk about it all the time.

[brown-little-robin]

Artist asks: 7, 8, 9, 10, 16

Hiii Rebekah <333

7. Who are some artists that have inspired you?

answered here and I will also add: Clay Coyote artists from Hutchinson, Minnesota; artists of The Octagon of Ames, Iowa, including Steve Aitchinson (who makes these incredible tiny vases)!

8. How would you describe your art style?

umm... for ceramics... I guess... smooth? medium-smooth? Cute...? I mean, not all of it is cute exactly, some of it is more serious, but overall it's definitely kawaii inspired. My professor once called my sculpture work charming, and then clarified, not in a cheap, cliche way, but just genuinely charming, which seems to fit :')

9. What's the longest you've ever suffered from artblock?

In ceramics? Oh, only like three weeks maximum ever, which is kind of astounding. My ceramics hasn't ever been very limited by lack of passion or ideas or... or willingness. I've been blocked by life circumstances in college or while we were moving from house to house, which was painful, but not by just... not having inspiration. not yet, anyway! the recent three-week-ish art block was, I think, due more to anxiety about committing to working in porcelain (which is expensive) than to Art Block Proper. after I overcame my reluctance to use the porcelain, I made like thirty sculptures in four days.

10. How do you deal with art block?

Again, in sculpture, that's not really something I face too much. The biggest problem I come across is when I am just not feeling drawn to any particular animal or idea, and that's when I might get out my handy dandy TINY ZINE and just PICK SOMETHING and make five or six of it. I like doing sets of lots of the same thing to break through that kind of aimlessness; it allows me to make multiple sculptures with small variations without devoting too much brainpower to coming up with a new goal every time.

16. What was something you used to struggle to draw sculpt with confidence/ease, but have now mastered?

Big cats' faces! It took me a while to really understand the three-dimensionality of the face of a leopard. I had to spend a while studying their skulls before it clicked that the nose bridge and the muzzle and the cheeks and the eyes and the lips and the eyebrow ridges can be thought of as separate components that come together to create one face, rather than thinking of the face as One Whole Thing.