the love of a child…

this made me cry - such a beautiful story, what a wonderful gift…

Girl’s ‘Notes Left Behind’ Made Into Book:

CINCINNATI—Brooke and Keith Desserich say they never intended to write a book about their daughter.

It started as a parent’s personal journal to their younger daughter Gracie, so she would be able to remember her 6-year-old sister, Elena, who was diagnosed with pediatric brain cancer.

“They told us at the very beginning that she had 135 days to live,” Keith Desserich said.

Though her parents didn’t want her to know the severity of her cancer, they feel that she must have known what was happening. The tumor slowly took away her ability to talk.

But Elena was still able to write.

“That was her way to letting us know everything would be OK,” Brooke Desserich said.

After Elena passed away, her parents discovered that their daughter had left a message behind for them—a lot of messages, actually.

“We started to pull out notes and they would be in between CDs or between books on our bookshelf,” Keith Desserich said.

Then the couple started finding them everywhere.

“We started to collect them and they would all say ‘I love you Mom, Dad and Grace.’ We kept finding them, and still to this day, we keep finding them,” Keith Desserich said. “Literally, there are hundreds of notes that we found.”

Elena’s parents each hold onto a sealed note they’ve never opened.

“We always want to know that there’s one more note that we haven’t read yet,” Keith Desserich said.

to purchase “notes left behind”.

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Tagged as: books,stuffthatmademecry November 18, 2009 @ 02:31 pm

today is brought to you by the letter Z

To pragmatists, the letter Z is nothing more than a phonetically symbolic glyph, a minor sign easily learned, readily assimilated, and occasionally deployed in the course of a literate life. To cynics, Z is just an S with a stick up its butt.

Well, true enough, any word worth repeating is greater than the sum of its parts; and the particular word-part Z can, from a certain perspective, appear anally wired.

On those of us neither prosaic nor jaded, however, those whom the Fates have chosen to monitor such things, Z has had an impact above and beyond its signifying function. A presence in its own right, it’s the most distant and elusive of our twenty-six linguistic atoms; a mysterious, dark figure in an otherwise fairly innocuous lineup, and the sleekest little swimmer ever to take laps in a bowl of alphabet soup.

Scarcely a day of my life has gone by when I’ve not stirred the alphabetical ant nest, yet every time I type or pen the letter Z, I still feel a secret tingle, a tiny thrill…

Z is a whip crack of a letter, a striking viper of a letter, an open jackknife ever ready to cut the cords of convention or peel the peach of lust.

A Z is slick, quick, arcane, eccentric, and always faintly sinister - although its very elegance separates it from the brutish X, that character traditionally associated with all forms of extinction. If X wields a tire iron, Z packs a laser gun. Zap! If X is Mike Hammer, Z is James Bond. If X marks the spot, Z avoids the spot, being too fluid, too cosmopolitan, to remain in one place.

In contrast to that prim, trim, self-absorbed supermodel, I, or to O, the voluptuous, orgasmic, bighearted slut, were Z a woman, she would be a femme fatale, the consonant we love to fear and fear to love.

- Tom Robbins

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Tagged as: books,writing May 22, 2009 @ 10:04 am

the unbearable lightness of elephants…

normally during the spring, i get the patio all cleaned off and back in shape after a winter of carting plants in and out, but last spring’s foundation leveling and then the summer’s hurricane delayed me and it never got done.  this year, i’ve finally managed to return it to it’s state of ~patio goodness~.  still a couple of things i want to do: indoor/outdoor carpeting on the half covered by the building overhang (that green stuff is sooo cheap), stencil the remaining amount of concrete, and buy 400,000 new windchimes and suncatchers (i LOVE those things).  all in all, though, it’s lookin’ pretty spiffy :D i’ve decided to quit smoking in the house (yes, i’m a smoker.  no, i don’t want to quit.), so that i am ~forced~ to go outside and enjoy my lil patio (and get some stenciling done, as soon as i decide on what exactly i want to paint out there).  it’s been a fairly easy transition and i’ve taken to leaving my book out there, so now i’m getting a ton of reading done, as well:

  i absolutely LOVED this - a story about an old man in a nursing home who relives his depression-era days with the circus.  you can’t help but commiserate with him in his current circumstances - his treatment as a “non-person” by the nursing home employees, his knowledge of the effects aging is having upon him, etc - but through it all, he maintains his sense of humor and irony, while weaving a fantastic tale of his previous life with the circus.  i enjoy stories of the depression-era to begin with.  add in the circus and the lovable old man telling the story and it’s a winner!  it even has a happy “awww ” ending.

  he had me from the beginning with his discussion of neitzsche (one of my favorite philosophers) and his writing style, itself, was captivating - a leisurely, meandering stroll through the lives of his characters - i thoroughly enjoyed it. his stopping to discuss the characters he was writing about was intriguing to me, as well - not often do you feel you’ve met the author while reading their book! along with the quotes below, i found his “short dictionary of misunderstood words” to be particularly interesting - the words we use often evoke entirely different ideas/concepts from person to person.

”...vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us, which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

“it is much more important to dig a half-buried crow out of the ground than to send petitions to a president.”

i had not read anything by kundera before and after reading this, i can’t wait to read more!

speaking of reading… perhaps i’ll go do some of that now!

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Tagged as: books,day2day May 19, 2009 @ 09:27 am

book covers as art

i’m fascinated by the work of thomas allen…

American photographer Thomas Allen constructs witty and clever dioramas using figures cut from the covers of old pulp paperbacks. Using salacious pulp art drawing’s of the ’40s and ’50s that covered books such as ” I Married a Dead Man” and ” Marihuana Girl’, Allen constructs one set of pictures up close while obscuring another, and in the process creates a different context. Each piece is given a brand new storyline, though never quite strays from their cheeky origins.

see more of his work at Thomas Allen’s Book Art Photography

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Tagged as: art,books May 19, 2009 @ 09:17 am

what i’m up to…

it’s been a busy couple of months and likely to only get busier. 

first, i finally got my haircut.  they took 18 inches off!!!  it hasn’t been this short since i was 4.  i hate it.  i fully expected to hate it, but it’s *shorter* than the length i had envisioned when i thought i was going to hate it for being short.  ah well, it will grow and i’ll never cut it this short again.  i can’t even make a pony tail :(

then, i was sick for a week.  fun, fun.  some kinda kidney infection or something.  fever, lower back pain.  the more fluids i drank, the less my lower back hurt, so i spent an entire week drinking gallons of water, cranberry juice, and gatorade and then peeing every 20 minutes.  annoying, because otherwise, i felt fine, just really really fatigued.  thankfully, ~that~ has passed.

i have several crochet projects in the works: the crocheted moonkin is done, but needs it’s pattern typed up.  (i’m toying with the idea of not only selling the pattern, but smaller versions of the actual stuffed animal as well.)  i’ve a couple of baby gifts to finish for my ex-roomie and his wife who are expecting their first baby.  (catman having a baby… i’m still in ~shock~.  ~shock~, i say.)  plus, a monkey to crochet for a friend and a couple of other designs that i’d like to give a try.

  i’d read the book “why we hate us”, which took me FOREVER to finish…. mostly because he was exactly right.  all the things he talks about… i hate, but it’s rather difficult to read a book about all the things you dislike… without getting irked while you’re reading it.  so i kept putting it down and going back to it.  that said, i DO suggest the book, as it’s a very insightful look into our current culture:

“Dick Meyer is a man with a list of hates. Meyer, NPR’s new editorial director of digital media, can rattle off plenty of examples: corporations that profess to care about you, the words “managed care,” and reality shows that promise a shot at love with a celebrity called Tila Tequila.

Those are some of the gripes to be found in Meyer’s new book, Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium.

All those little complaints are indicators of something bigger, Meyer told Steve Inskeep: a lack of trust in public leadership and an overall weakening of public morality.”

i’m working on a video for my mom’s department to use at christmas for their charity program.  i’ve got the beginning of it put together, now it’s a matter of getting the audio settled and adding some extras here and there AND i’m still working on a couple of websites as well - a new site to be finished as soon as my client has time to devote to it and a bit of a redesign for http://www.hypnobird.com.

plus, it’s ~rodeo time~ so i’ve been ~immersing~ myself in country music the past couple of weeks.  i’d really like to make it to the livestock show this weekend.  we shall see.  hope everyone has a great weekend!!

on that note:

the tractors - baby likes to rock it

which of course just led me to:

Kenny Chesney She Thinks My Tractors Sexy

Blogged, Just for Fun, arts&crafts, books, music, Personal, Comments (0)
Tagged as: crochet,books,music,me,hobbies,videos,personal March 20, 2009 @ 03:55 pm