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…

Mar 31
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

After waxing poetic about my plastic glasses, I found these (also at Stop&Shop) made in Italy. I bought them because I like the lumpy bottoms, and curvy way they fit my hand.

The living room remains startlingly orange.

Alice and I took two friends to the Smith College Art Museum for the family art program this afternoon, and made lumpy art out of recycled materials. They really didn’t care At All about the stuff other people had made (hello? It is a museum? And Gallery? Their response – can we poke it or push it or touch it? we can’t, it’s boring, just let us make stuff. ) but they had fun. Plus we got candy on the way home. Clearly the high point of their afternoon.

Al and I are hip deep in trip planning. We are taking the girls to England this spring. I had a giant shock on plane fares, and we were thinking briefly about twitching them out of school for travel. It looks like the timing will really work better for us if we can wait til they finish the year. The kids’ focus is where characters and authors come from. Swallows and Amazons is top of the list. Al wants to see Christopher Robin’s 100 Acre Wood. But then he twitches because, as he says, there is REAL stuff there, and the people in books are IMAGINARY. I don’t know about his imagination, but they seemed pretty real to me, and if I can go stand on Wildcat Island it is orders of magnitude better than seeing where old fat Henry swapped out another wife. But I digress.

I made two postcards this evening, the other one was so ugly I left it visible on Flickr and refuse to list it here. It was a mad experiment, with a lumpy result. I rather like this one, though.

Mar 30
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I like the concept, and I am tempted to try it again, because a couple technical issues are interfering with my vision. The fusible makes the picture too dark, and the blue background underneath makes it even more too dark. I need to find some reasonable fusible that a) peels easily almost instantly, b) is nearly invisible and c) doesn’t stink. This stuff peels easily but makes patterns on the fused fabric. The wonder-under doesn’t stink and is more nearly invisible but needs to marinate for at least an hour before it peels properly, and even then I get wisps of paper on the back. I have some spray on stuff, and then Red Kate loaned me hers because mine is unlocatable, under something. It is relatively sturdy but it smells vile and makes the house reek both on spraying it on and again on fusing. It may be the fusing equivalent of software (and other projects I’ve worked on); fast, cheap and on-time, pick two…

And in other news, we got two coats of quite orange paint on the living room walls. It is not there yet. I am thinking a lighter, ginger glaze, maybe with some gold metallic shimmer in it, over the top. That should make it lighter and less looming. But the trim is also painted and looks fresh, and two coats – really – I am pleased with progress overall.

Mar 29
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Pouring down the drain. We are so profligate with the water we have. The river is high, and roaring, and the melt is slowly sinking into the ground, but it is still mud season, not spring yet.

We are wrestling with colors in the living room. The new chair has requested a new color scheme. Since the old one came with the house and is entirely white everywhere plus it has seen hard use for 7 years, and is FILTHY – new paint. And new covering on the couch.

The choices:

Mar 28
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

It feels odd to be doing this at lunch time instead of just before bed. Alice is home with pink-eye (yick) but remains cheerful.

I loved the colors of the kid cups enough that I experimented with the adults’ cups today. When I first saw these in the Stop&Shop several summers ago, they made me smile – so colorful, so indestrucible, so nice in the hand – so I got a bunch then and a few more each time they come out with new colors.

I thought I had constructed one of the Tarot minor arcana (eleven of cups, anyone?) but they only go up to 10. That, of course, made me think of making my own tarot from end to end. Not this year. I think I have my hands full with the daily postcard and the monthly journal page. But it would be deeply amusing to construct such a thing out of the materials that mean most to me and everyday objects. Embroidered fabric collage cards, anyone? Maybe a couple of us could cooperate, with some divy of the major arcana and a whole suit to experiment with. I know there is a quilt tarot deck, I have a copy of it and it is quite lovely.

Off to the doctor’s with the dripping child.