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one of the best episodes of everything is alive went up last month. in this podcast, inanimate objects are given a voice, and take on a life of their own. ian chillag, the show’s host, asks questions, and usually gets a new perspective. in this show he spent 27 minutes talking to shannon the bath towel. at one point he found out she has real concerns of being too good at her job, and what might happen if she dries someone off so much that they disintegrate.

the roads were wet, and the rain fell, but that didn’t stop me from driving to joplin saturday to watch darla blow out her birthday candles a few days early. jenny & i spent the day with mom, jim, darla, steve, mary lynn, sara, and jane. when jenny asked darla the first birthday she remembered, she said, “when i turned 6.” mom & i confirmed that was the year she got a blue bikini and modeled it on the dining room table.

at eddiesrodandcustom.com these words appear on the homepage: if you dream it we can build it. it’s a family business run by one of jenny’s iowa cousins, ed pettus. i see ed and his wife kathy (pictured above) at the herman family reunion every summer. they always bring t-shirts and hats from eddie’s rod & custom. i knew they fixed up old cars, but i had NO idea how creative they were until i talked to ed about the lockhed lakester (also pictured above). ed and his sons turned an old plane’s wing tip fuel tank into one of the coolest race cars on the planet. how awesome is that?

tuesday afternoon, something severed the internet cable outside our house, and left it lying on the ground. no netflix, no internet, just a big sucking sound in cyberspace. when that happened i felt like a balloon on its way to the moon after the string has been cut. so what did i do? i ate pretzels & watched about 12 hours of classic mtv that i had on a flash drive. i was about to start playing my 48 atari games alphabetically when the cable guy came & reconnected me to the outside world. whew!

if it’s not news, is it olds? whatever it is you can read about it here! and here are some stories coming in the next few days:
-Interview With A Bath Towel
-Eddie’s Rod & Custom
-The Shrunken Diner
stay tuned!

we spent a couple of nights in des moines over the weekend. that’s where i found out jenny’s brother ben was an expert in canine footwear. teddy, ben & janice’s dog, over does it when he licks the snow out of his paws. he licks so much, they start to crack. so ben & janice bought these little dog boots. they say when it’s REALLY cold he wears a sweater too.

ben was cracking us up last night… him and his hat head hair! he came over an hour later with the rest of his family (christy, josh, and kaitlyn). when they said “what should we do?” jenny said “let’s dance in the living room!” i played a corb lund song on youtube, always keep an edge on your knife. after the roof blew off and the smoke settled, we thought we were done… then kaitlyn said “play it again!” so we started dancing and yodeling again as corb lund sang:
never put your hat on the bed, son,
never put your hat on the bed
cuz if your hat’s on the bed you might wake up dead
so don’t ya never put ya hat on the bed

here is the irony of ironies: by the late 90′s, all of the arcades i went to as a kid died when people realized they could stay home, and play games instead– fast forward 20 years, new wave toys is making retro arcade games 1/6th the size of the originals that you can play in your home! they have all the sights and sounds of the old games, and retro gamers like willy (pictured above) are going nuts over them. if there was ever a place to create & destroy worlds, it was the 80′s arcade. i loved going to alladin’s castle at northpark mall, spaceworld in neosho, lemans and malibu in kc, and all the other dark rooms dimly lit by a game’s marquee and screen… and now i can can be in two places at once!

our niece, maddie, crawled into the deep recesses of her mind for this super cool design & posted it on instagram yesterday. she used the phrase “moody jungle vibes” to describe this beautiful hand painted art on black paper. you can see more of her creations on her website: merrylittlestudio.com.

this little plastic dinosaur sits in our window next to the driveway. he and i both thought the sun was gonna come out this morning when we saw the little patches of blue sky. i’m really glad i took this photo because the clouds eventually moved in and squashed our hopes. some friends took notice when i shared this moment on facebook. chrisy commented “he looks lonely.” i responded “he’s lonely for the sun.”