Apr 4
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

From the Icelandic Kronur, the codfish. Is he in or out of his element? Off his coin, but in something watery. The fabric keeps being this dark greeny/gray batik that looks like the cold gray North Atlantic to me.

From Mark Kurlansky’s book for kids A Cod’s Tale:

"The Atlantic cod is a large and ugly fish. It is often more than three feet long and has gray or brown skin, yellow or gold spots on its back, and an odd whisker like feeler hanging from its chin. The cod spends its life swimming with its big mouth wide open, trying to swallow whatever will fit. "

There is something completely reasonable about this fish being on a one kronur piece –  it is widely available, "not only the most commonly eaten fish in the Western world, but also one of the most valuable items of trade."  (ibid.)

I seem to be off on a fish tangent from my original money theme, but I’ll get back there. Meanwhile, I could recommend two books that would get either you or me around to money again from codfish:

Cod by Mark Kurlansky talks about the codfish at great length, across deep time, well, historical time at any rate, I guess deep time for me is the PreCambrian, more than 600 million years ago, and especially talks about trade routes and settlement patterns on account of this fish. Living in Massachusetts, I have a profound appreciation for the cod. We made up songs about it (Cape Cod girls they got no combs, comb their hair with codfish bones) we named parts of geography about it and we put a gold one on top of the state house.

BUT – codfish could not have been the economic staple it was without

Salt also by Mark Kurlansky talks about salt, and how its availability controlled settlement patterns and trade routes, how important it was and how (wait for it) Roman legions were paid in salt.

So – a circle: fish, salted, paid for, on money, paying for work to catch the fish…

I didn’t say I made sense, it just felt related to me.

Apr 3
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Red Kate loaned me a pile of pre-Euro european money, including Icelandic Kronur. They all have fish on them. The rubbings are untidy, but I like the colors. Then I was thinking about earning money, and catching money, and the fishnet just sort of emerged as a good idea.

Clearly fish are important in Iceland – there is a cod, a handful of herring, a pair of dolphins, and some mysterious lumpy thing with spines on the 100 K piece. In the States we have dead presidents, and a lot of eagles and olive branches. Plus some deeply mysterious masonic symbology on the dollar bills. Some of the images on the Icelandic coins are so good I’m saving them for the next couple of days – the rubbings don’t do them justice, photography is reqid.

Family circus today. Here is Alice in a sling having worked hard on trapeze (go Alice!!) and before she was practicing standing on my shoulders.

Apr 1
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Interesting that I’m willing to spend one penny on your thoughts but mine are worth two…. Al says that is a bid-ask spread (only really funny to stock traders, but I got it too, or at least the idea behind it.)

Of all the colors I expected to use on copper pennies, the light purple and medium blue are the most unexpected.

feeding my coin thing
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

For Mosaic Monday, a mosaic of other people’s coin images found on Flickr.

Postcard yet to come.

Shula at Poppalina tagged me to explain the name.

When I was consulting, I called the company Corvus Consulting because I wanted the wisdom and the attitude of the ravens. When I stopped consulting, I still needed a name to stick on the sutff I make. I wanted to stay within the corvidae family, but crows were easier to see around me than ravens. I thought about all the different colored crows there might be, but only Blue Crow and Red Crow seemed reasonable. Then Aerin drew a picture of a bird to show Alice how to do it. It looked like it was dancing. When Al gave me a domain name for Mother’s Day that year, it had to be Dancing Crow Designs.

I still like crows and ravens.  I read a bunch of great books about them, plus an essay by David Quammen in Outside Magazine about 15 years ago, reprinted in his book Natural Acts. My favorite was Ravens in Winter and it looks like he has a new book due out soon.

Apr 1
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

April Fool’s day, new month, new theme. Inspired by Shula’s rupees, April’s theme is Money, also in honor of tax day on the 15th. Those more organized, or owed bigger refunds, have finished their taxes months ago, but the vast majority of the rest of us wait for the last possible minute, even to long lines at the Post Office April 14th to get the returns postmarked before midnight.

Aerin April fooled me – she rubber banded the sink sprayer on, so that when I ran water for my morning glass of water, I sprayed myself, the floor, the window and the radiator. She is pleased she got me, but bummed it occurred (long) before she woke up.

We had a lovely, sunny spring day. We almost made it out for a bike ride, but out of state friends were visiting, from Texas!, and we had to cross paths with them. We wound up meeting at Herrell’s for ice cream (the best in the world, according to many) and walking back to admire the orangeness of the living room. Opinion remains strongly divided. The other occupants of the house still profess to hate it, but are saying now that if they get to help with the paint application they will like it better. Outsiders are uniformly kind. We’ll see how it looks with the next coat of foolishness added. And the couch comes home this week! I had not properly appreciated how much we needed it until it was gone.

The hamster Pumpkin was getting extraordinarily fluffy,


so we gave her a haircut and put her poor traumatized self back in her cleaned cage. We are taking the bag of shorn hamster fluff in to the teacher who is spinning with the kids. We think we’ll stump her with it…