lo siento, too

I wonder how it happened that I used to blahg excessively... I mean, every day, multiple times a day... before it was called blogging... and now, despite reading other people's blogs everyday, I so often just completely forget about my own.

But here we are!

So let's talk about Thanksgiving!

G and I spent Wednesday night visiting a friend of his in Champaign, then on Thursday we woke up and drove to St. Louis where it started snowing right as we got into town! Yay! Snow quickly turned to sleet but we were quickly tucked away in G's sister's kitchen cooking up a storm of our own.  We made pumpkin-walnut and sweet potato+walnut+goat cheese wonton things with a cranberry lemon sauce, a very savory leek and shitake bread pudding, maple brussels sprouts, bourbon candied sweet potatoes, pumpkin kugel, and pumpkin pie, all from scratch, then also this weird but very tasty hazelnut loaf thing we grabbed from Whole Foods (we were the only vegetarians in attendance so we needed our own protein!).  Y U M.  Seriously, it was all really good.  And we drank a lot of Great Lakes Christmas Ale (always a pleasure) and... wine... and... other stuff.  Lots of everything. Yay, Thanksgiving! Yay, 8-hour coma!

Friday morning we stopped at a market and then got outta town and headed south to a cabin we rented in the Ozarks.  I cannot recommend Big Spring Lodge and Cabins enough, and I can't wait to go back when it's greener and warmer (aaaand again when it's back to cold and sparse).  We got to spend two days and nights in a little cabin with just a fire place and a cozy living room and a bedroom that was toooo far from the fire and a teeeeny bathroom and a teeeeny "kitchen", all in the middle of the woods, well off the beaten track, in the mountains, wonderful.  There's something surprisingly awesome about waking up a few times through the night to tend the fire and throw on more laughably oversized logs.

We took a ton of pictures but right now I only have the few I snapped with my phone...

Cabin in the woods!

Cozy living room

Forest path

A CAVE!!!

The beginnings of cabin cranberry sauce

We made some really stellar food while we were there, mostly thanks to G's ambition and dedication.  Fancy greens each night, plus a potatoey cheesy bready savory thing, and the rest of our Thanksgiving roast, and a grilled cheese sandwich, and his special tofu with my cabin cranberries, and a weird but delicious lentil-based desert that G would not give up on. What a trooper.

So that's that. An epic Thanksgiving post! Theeeee end.

Paralyzed

How many existential crises can one (thesis) survive?


I feel crippled by the unknown unknowns.  I feel rundown and disheartened and it seems just entirely impossible to make any headway on anything.

Is this one of those things where it will all just suddenly come together?  I can't really count on that.  I don't know where to go from here, because I don't even know where here is.

Ugh. Aimless.  I don't mind being lost when I have nowhere to be, but May is closer and closer and I have no idea how to get there.

Sigh.

Somebody dial whine-one-one and get me a wah-mbulance.

The future:

Champaign, St. Louis, a cabin in the woods of southern Missouri, Houston, Las Vegas, Puerto Rico.

All between now and February.  I am so excited and uhhh...



Apropos or what?

My first comic ever

Yay comics!

Which is to say:
On Monday I went to the lecture that Bill Ayers and Ryan Alexander-Tanner gave about To Teach: the journey, in comics.  Getting some behind-the-scenes info on the construction of this (wowza) book was really great, but the comic workshop that Ryan led for John's class (plus Lee) afterward really blew my mind.  I didn't want to stop drawing, despite my penchant for reminding people I'm not a draw-er.  (I'm also not a drawer.)  So here I present my first comic ever:

And if you're curious about the Exquisite Corpse-style comics we made as a class about Mr. John Ploof... well I'm gonna try to figure out how to post that PDF collection here, too.

Oh, like T H I S .