About a week ago I had an idea for a mobile and became obsessed with the idea of a New Project. This often happens when I have other projects in the works, usually unfinished. In this case I had two unfinished projects taking up all the space on my work desk. But, this new project was bright and shiny and I was terribly excited about it so I cleared a couple of square feet on my desk and went out shopping for my materials.

Often it is the idea of shopping for new materials that inspires a new project.

[The butterfly tin is one of the things I picked out from my grandmother’s house when she died to keep as a reminder of her; it was packed with a snarl of embroidery floss—floss, incidentally, that happened to be the same color palette as the felt I had used.]

My plan was to make ten mobile cosas—raindrops in this case—out of colored wool felt (oooooo!) to attach to the mobile skeleton that hangs over Ronin’s cradle (the one that held Joshua’s Expired Credit). Ronin and I skipped on down to the local yarn/Crafty McCrafterson shop on Burnside and I spent an hour poring over the many beautiful colors. I desperately wanted one of each color but limited myself to shades of blue and green.

I decided to make them double-sided (twice the work of course, because I am a crazy person) so that when they spun, they would be nice from both sides, and I cut out twenty different drop-like shapes. Then I cut out 49,577,601 various oblong and wobbly littler shapes out of the felt and neurotically pieced them together on the drops to make pretty topographies.

I think it turned out pretty cool. Ronin likes it too. But then she is equally impressed by a slotted spoon.

SE 13th and Alder, Portland, Oregon

I’ve embarked on an art installation project intended for education and enlightenment. My first work in this series, “Expired Credit”, opened on April 19th. Critics were struck dumb, opening and closing their mouths without sound and feebly pawing the air.

Artist Statement: Here the credit cards are dangling just out of reach. A tribute to the tantalizing nature of consumer culture. From the lofty Fordian goal of paying workers enough to afford the products of their own labor to the Keynesian ideal world economy driven by consumers consuming products they will never need and services they’d be better off without. Soaking up the surplus capital, and exploiting resources to extinction. The cards circle endlessly like debt-ridden martyrs borrowing against their own uncertain futures.

It turned summer on Friday and we spent half the day in our pajamas blinking squinty-eyed at the bright light and rotating through morning naps and coffee. Saturday was equally brilliant and we went to the park to check out some bicycle jousting.

We arrived early and ate lunch, played with Ronin on the swings, and then found some slackropers to harass. I haven’t slackroped since Texas (when I was a lithe 11 weeks pregnant) and basically, I suck pretty embarrassingly now. I know that after an hour of playing around, I might recover some of my former glory (which is to say, marginally less wobbly but not anything you’d shell out the big bucks to go see) but in front of an audience, I stepped up, ripped out the crotch of my [PRE-PREGNANCY!!!!!] jeans, made some vague excuses about having not done it for a while, and preoccupied myself with Ronin, who had finally decided to unleash Poop Diaper 1.0 on the day. Somehow she managed to deposit nearly every bit of leakage into Joshua’s front jeans pocket. It was pretty amusing. Joshua was sort of flummoxed that he had poop in his pocket, particularly since sitting in the bottom of the pocket was the cell phone. We hoped nobody would call us.

Bicycle jousting was highly entertaining. We watched people start to gather decked out in their SCA gear and driving tricked-out Portland bikes. One guy had a sweet chainmail hoodie and was on a seven-foot tall custom BMX bike.

They took over a set of basketball courts using eight-foot PVC pipes fitted with large conical points made of foam and duct tape. One guy served as the referee/announcer and there were various guys acting as hecklers, snatching away poles if they were dropped and forcing the jousters to chase them down to get them back. Jousting, of course, has two players ride swiftly at each other armed with their jousting poles with the objective of poking the opponent off his ride. It might be considered dangerous. At this tournament, safety gear was clearly optional. Some wore football helmets and elbow pads, others were naked.

The first few rounds were fairly benign. Two wobbly cyclists rode toward the center and batted inexpertly at one another with their long poles. One usually fell over right there and the other would recover and swerve dangerously away, the victor of the match.

Here’s a blurry cell phone shot of Daryl Hall and John Oates duking it out (it’s a crummy shot but you know how celebrity photos are). Oates: “I will kick you and your pathetic solo album’s ass!” Hall: “Get the hell away from me you mustachioed mulleted freak!” Sadly, yes it has come to this.

The Hall and Oates tournament was a bit boring actually, mostly because they couldn’t seem to either hit each other with the jousting poles or if they did, knock one or the another off and end it already. They spent long minutes riding their bikes around in circles, chasing one another with poles, the hecklers dashing around making a nuisance of themselves. Finally I think Oates won but I had lost interest because a whole herd of naked bikers invaded the park, sporting various wacky props and a very loud sound system.

We cut out early to change Joshua’s pants, rescue the cell phone, and catch a bus to another bike event (because it’s stupid to drive to a bike thing, but we don’t have a baby carrier for the bike). Unfortunately, we missed our bus and then the connecting bus was taking forever and so we gave up and just went for Indian food (Tandoor Indian Kitchen), which was awesome as usual and halfway through, Ronin released Poop Diaper 2.0 and ruined Joshua’s second pair of jeans for the day.

[Here is a pair of BMX/recumbent jousters swiftly dispatching one another.]