Oh Look: Mousy Longtail

Just a little sketchbook Sketch:

Pulling Out of a Nose Dive

Some days you just never quite wake up. I usually try to charge into the week with gusto, but today I never quite escaped the soupy fog of just-woke-upedness. The day would have been a total wash if our old friend Billy Weber hadn’t shown up, unexpectedly, bearing a box of girl scout cookies.

He talked, I made loose sketches and that, as it turned out, was exactly what I needed.

Nothing Says "Love" Like a New Cutting Board

I got a little more into Valentines Day this year than usual. One thing I did was buy a new cutting board for Anna, specially hand crafted by our good friend Mike Schmiedicke. Mike has a gift for bringing out the beauty in old barn wood and creates some truly unique things out of what many would thow on the scrap heap.
Many of his products are available online at his Etsy Shop. Take a look!

I remember Mike picking up an old sycamore log one day near a soccer field. Some strips from that log ended up in this cutting board. Here are a couple more shots:





Current Reading: Fruitless Fall: the collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis by Rowan Jacobsen. Really interesting (scary) read about the honey bee and the many blights it is currently facing.

Rollin' the D-20s

I like Role Playing Games (RPGs). Dungeons and Dragons. GURPS. Space Adventures, Zombie Attacks, Historical Fiction or what have you. I've loved the idea ever since the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG I played when I was twelve and I still cordon off one evening a week for "Game Night." My daughter makes wax dragons and other minis for me to take with me and has always been intrigued by the idea that I go out once a week to what is basically a live storytelling session.

So when I was recently introduced to a really swell role playing system designed for kids -well, it didn't take much to sell me. The game book is called Faery's Tale, and in addition to being very nicely illustrated by Patricia Ann Lewis Macdougall, it is a great, simple first RPG. Players choose from four basic faery types, pixie, brownie, sprite or pookah. Each type has two special gifts, a concrete gift (such as flight or invisibility) and a more broad gift ("household magic" or "pixie dust"). The stats are simply Mind Body and Spirit and you can make battle (or "challenges" if battle is too stressful) as simple as you want based on the age of the players. Pretty simple for us.

And of course, kids are naturally exciting role players. Why just tonight Mousy Longtail, the Pixie Dewdrop and Ember the Brownie saved a young sprite from the clutches of the Rat King and his filthy minions.

Aaaaannnnnnd here's St. Christopher all gussied up with color: