Honour Your Inner Magpie

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ArtLog: current shinies on sale, and new shinies to come soon
( Ooh, SHINY!! )

ArtLog: there will be sale shinies tonight, and current shinies beginning tomorrow
Yep. Watch this space. I've been busy.

Also, I think we're caught up on shipping-fu. If you haven't gotten an email about your order or a click-n-ship, please let me know, OK?

(There's at least one chapbook order that still needs me to invoice it, though. I have you on the list.)

ArtLog: sudden sale alert
OK, so due to server issues I've missed the last couple of Friday Current Shinies updates, or else had sufficient photo issues that they didn't really count. I say the best thing to do now is to put up all the new shinies starting tomorrow and continuing over the weekend, and to have a bit of a sale.

Hey, if I sell everything, I can sit at my table at Worldcon and make new stuff and chat, right?

I can't, but maybe you can. And some of you already have.
There are some things I'm not eligible to do, but they're things that need people doing them. One of them is registering as a bone marrow donor. Melissa Singer made a post on Tor.com about this, and I want to encourage people to check it out, and to register if you can.

It needs doing.

Same deal with donating blood or other useful stuff. Not everybody can do these things, but if you can, please do consider it, OK?

(Back when Mike was looking for a kidney, I offered to get tested to see if we matched. We both had A- blood, which isn't all that common. But he wouldn't let me. He said that if anything happened to me, he couldn't live with that. Anyhow, it turned out OK because he did get a kidney, due to some anonymous good person signing their donor card. I just put up a post reprinting my account of the transplant, readable here. If you want to know how being a donor can affect the world, read it; that's all I've got to say about that.)

repost from the past: Mike gets a kidney
(This was originally posted to alt.polyamory on Nov. 20, 2000.)

Newsgroups: alt.polyamory

From: Elise Matthesen

Date: 2000/11/20

Subject: Thank you, unknown good person.

Hi, you guys. Elise here. I am waaaaaaay tired, so this will be less
coherent and more, um, jazz improv than usual, but I wanted to post
before i go eat chocolate and get into bed with cats and Juan and books
and sleep. Before which, I will eat pasta, which the boonful Juanian
mammal of love is cooking for me. (Or, as he says, drowning for me; he
likes radiatore much more al dente than I do. I prefer them when they
are easily dented.)

Anyhow, I got home from the hospital a little while ago. Here's the
compressed version, sort of the music video of the whole deal, I guess:

I was sitting up late last night, about 2 a.m., about to answer a piece
of e-mail from an alt.poly person in fact, when the phone rang.
Transplant center, calling me, trying to reach Mike. A kidney. Call
Mike, say "A kidney." "Ohmygawd," says the Mike. Snow, bag of
cross-stitch, copy of The Last Hot Time, apples, cookies, neighbor with
car, picking up Mike at his door with his bag, loaded with dialysis
stuff for his maybe-last PD (peritoneal dialysis -- a kind which is
particularly good for diabetics, it seems, and which was, I believe,
developed in Canada; did I mention that I have a crush on Canada? just
another good reason) and notebook and Stuff. Drive. Headlights, snow,
ice, empty streets, giggling passengers. HCMC, our destination, and the
Trauma entrance, which is what we were told to use.

Check-in, blood draws, cool nurse named Dayton (he was very very cool,
and nicely acerbic) that makes Mike feel right at home. Wait, wait,
wait. Make important statements and wordless embraces. Mike is smiling.
Almost continuously. This is cool.

Phone call, crossmatch confirmed, all systems go. Grin like idiots. Kiss
Mike, and he disappears into surgery area labeled Pre-Induction. I
wonder vaguely if he is being sworn in to some strange legion. The
Legion of Three Kidneys. They don't take the old ones out; they just add
one. Huh. How... how poly of them, I guess. Heh.

Wait. Wait wait wait. Find out that the family next to us in surgery
waiting room is family of police officer badly wounded in line of duty
outside bank that was held up. Bank is Elise's bank, the branch she
usually goes to just before ten a.m. The takeover robbery was at just
before ten a.m.; Elise has been praying for health and recovery of
police officer since reading news. Find out that sister-in-law and
brother of officer Michael Blood are actually nearly neighbors of Elise
and Juan, and also that they are parents of fan Simba Blood. I think
Officer Blood has been upgraded to serious from critical; he's been in
surgery a lot of the time since the shooting. Elise makes resolution to
post note telling fannish types that Simba Blood's uncle is in need of
blood donations; many folks (especially other police officers and city
workers) are donating blood in the name of officer Michael Blood of the
Edina Police Dept., and several family members gave me hugs when I said
I'd be glad to pass the word along to fans about it, too. (I'll try to
make a coherent post to some fannish newsgroups as soon as I can, too;
feel free to pass this along, though if you feel moved to do so -- but
make it more coherent, if you can, OK? Thanks! ) Chat with people in
waiting room. Wait. Wait. Wait.

Surgeon appears. Says surgery went well. Kidney looks real good. Great
kidney. Good, then. Details, blood supply, hopes, expectations,
procedures. Recovery room, they say, and we wait where we are, "we"
being Elise plus Pamela and also Joel Rosenberg, who have slain the
fatted bratwurst and brought it to the hungry Elise.

Recovery says, "Almost ready to take him to room; gotta do renalgram
first." Think vaguely of postcards from Reno; also landshark. Get room
number. Walk there from waiting room to scout territory. On way back,
see gurney wheeled down hall. See familiar hair, high forehead, arched
eyebrows like which there are no other. Nurse raises eyebrow. That one's
mine, I say. And then Mike opens his eyes, and looks at me, and I say
"hello, my heart," and he says "hello, precious" and we very carefully
reach out and the nurse lets us, because we look so careful and intent,
I think, and we touch. just the tip of index finger, mine to his.

Go back, hug Obble, overflow in happiness, grab stuff, get to room. As
Mike is wheeled in, his phone rings. It is his
chosen-brother-of-the-heart Robert Jordan; they tell each other they
love each other. I hear Mike begin to exchange literary gossip and
critique.

That's when I relax, because somehow it reassures me that he's really
really here, and I think we got a good shot at all this being OK.

Wish us luck, please; there are many things ahead. But this is amazing stuff.

Oh. As they wheeled him away after we touched index fingers, I look at
my watch. Six p.m. Fourteen hours earlier, I got a phone call, and
since then, the world has changed.

Whoever you are, unknown good person who signed your organ donor card,
thank you. Thank you thank you thank you, a thousand million times, more
than there are stars or grains of sand or flamewars on Usenet. ;-) Thank
you. Your generosity will not be forgotten. Thank you for my beloved's
chance at more life.

Elise,
noting that she has no idea whether her parts will be useful or not, but
she has signed her donor card.

ArtLog: untangling the recent email problems, and shipping stuff
If you're waiting for something, you might receive a click-n-ship notice tonight or tomorrow on it. (If you're waiting for something and you DO NOT receive a click-n-ship notice on it, please let me know by emailing LionessElise@gmail.com, which is my useful backup email.)

(For the person waiting for something overseas, we are checking receipts and mailing dates, and we're pretty sure it's stuck in customs somewhere. If they do not shake it loose soon, we will learn what to do to find out where it went, and we'll figure out what needs to be done to make things work out right.)

There certainly was a lot of email lost. The PayPal confirmations alone were a bunch. I'm really sorry our outage caused so much inconvenience, and I hope we've got it all cleared up to your satisfaction soon.

And we're pondering what we need to do to make it not happen again.

Thanks, in all sorts of directions at once.

more New York memories
I forgot to say, but last Monday when my "self-adopted brother" Mark and I were spending his birthday together, we went walking across Central Park at one point, and a wild turkey walked out right in front of us. Pretty cool.

on bug reports, time management, and triage
I was discussing this subject with PNH today, as Tor.com prepared to go live. Over the years of living with Juan, I have observed some of the practices that keep people sane when managing the development of systems with multiple users and time-critical stuff. In the course of the conversation, I wound up saying earnestly, "...so one of the most important parts of dealing with bug reports seems to be determining what's an immediate fix, what can wait, what's a short-term fix that needs to happen so you can get back to it later, and what has to be a long-term fix with no interim steps. Otherwise you wind up getting nibbled to death by ducks... and stomped by the occasional monster because you're busy talking to a duck."

PNH and TNH both cracked up at that, so I figured I'd better write it down somewhere.

Before I forget...
Happy Moon Day!

and speaking of Tor.com...
I has a bookbag! With a Tor.com screenprinted logo!

(Check the bottom row of photos in this post. I was there helping with Teresa's t-shirts and dress. Claire and I also tried some gauze scarves, but they didn't come out very well.)

Want a lot of good reading for free?
Tor.com is giving away a whole bunch of downloadable books and art this week. They're celebrating the launch of their site, which went live thirty-eight minutes or so ago. Check out the list of freebies.

That's not the only reason to go there, of course, but I know a few folks around here are in a budget-pinchy time, and getting good reading for free is a great comfort at times like that. (

papersky's book Farthing is there! Also

mistborn's book Mistborn, which is on my to-read list.) Also, nifty art in various formats. Enjoy!

(P.S. If you look around the Tor.com site a bit and find a comment from me, you'll see that my current placeholder icon is that purple My Little Pony wearing the Zombie Queen crown. I told this to the current owner of the 2 MLP crowns,

cadhla, the other day, and she told me the crowns are getting their own custom ponies to wear them. I'm really looking forward to photos of those.)

coming home and catching up, and an apology, and a note about Worldcon
Yep, I've been on a mostly-stealth visit to NYC lately, spending a lot of time in Manhattan and in Fair Brooklyn, as the Sondheim tune has it. I apologize to anybody who feels shorted, but I really did need to buy some beads and then hole up and get a bunch of work done here. I've been at least partly successful in that, although the bead wholesalers I most wanted to see seem to have closed up shop, leaving a wan promise of possible reincarnation after some construction is finished. (But the shop looks pretty bleak and torn-apart, and there's been no activity in over a week, so I do not hold out much hope just now.)

When I get home on Monday, I will sift through everything and clear up the outstanding orders, of which there are a good handful. We did indeed lose a lot of email during the time the server fell over and the domain was not working right, so I've got a bunch to clean up, with the help of my trusty assistant, who has been doing his best while I've been at my remote hideout here.

Also, we can ship the rest of the chapbooks when I get home. Yay!

I'm very sorry for the delays due to (or exacerbated by) the email problems and my management thereof. Thank you for putting up with me, and I hope to have all your shinies to you very soon.

In other news, I'll be putting up a preparing-for-Worldcon post very soon. I hope to see a lot of you there, and I'm hoping it's big fun. I'm also hoping to arrange some table-sitting and Lioness-checking-on with a bunch of you, because Katie will not be accompanying me this time. (Work, time, money. She has this Real Job, and all that, you know.) So you'll see a Team Lioness post soon. For now, though, it's hella hot in Brooklyn, and I am going to go drink more fruit juice and then make something shiny. Talk to you all soon!

art that might exist... or did I just dream it?
Every now and then I think of bits of art that influenced me a long time ago, but that I have never been able to track down. Do you have things like that?

There was an album by a guitarist called Steve Mullaney. The album name was Chickadee. It mesmerized me. Wish I could find it again.

That one's not so hard, though, because I have the name of an artist and the name of a work, and I've even found one reference on Google, in some Japanese music-lover's list of best albums, so I am pretty sure I didn't dream it. What's harder are things like the art piece I saw sometime between 1977 and 1982, at the University of Minnesota in the little gallery in Coffman Union. I don't remember the artist's name or the name of the piece, or the name of the installation. All I remember was that it has neon and writing on the walls, and that part of it said "tomorrow's apples today / bought for you / not made / tomorrow's apples today." It stopped me in my tracks, and I stood there while all sorts of art-things fitted themselves together in my head. It was quite something.

There are more bits of art that Did Things to my head, like a painting by Donald Roller Wilson that I saw ("The man has left the moon tonight / he trains some beads upon the face / of Gladys Atlas in these woods / heads of cabbage, heads of state"), the PreRaphaelite opal jewelry in London, and so on, but they have names and mostly I know where to find them, or can find out. It's the ones that got me once and then went away that haunt me.

Do you know any of mine? Do you have ones of your own like that?

ArtLog: new work, but still no photos
Just finished a necklace-crown in lighter-weight (22 gauge) sterling silver with aqua-colored crystal beads. Rather nice, really. Still working on the shaping. And haven't braved Flickr yet; I confess I am procrastinating due to a feeling of technical ineptitude. Instead, I will bend a little more wire and see how I feel then.

fairy godmothers are powerful things, especially when there's flocks of 'em

From 70% to a smidgen under 80% overnight? That is awesome! Go, Team Fairy Godmothers!

Addendum: And now it's 88.8%! Can we crack 90?

A chance to be a fairy godmother, in a flock of other fairy godmothers
I know this cool woman who is working her butt off to raise money so she can attend a writers' workshop that she's been accepted to. She's one of the most determined people I know, and she is really on a shoestring, and a frayed, re-knotted, make-do shoestring at that. She's probably all embarrassed now, but she really does "do more with less" than a heck of a lot of people, and she seems to have an inexhaustible fund of willingness to try and to make do. I wish to heck she had an inexhaustible fund of funds, or at least a big old handful of money to help her take this opportunity.

She's already raised 70% of the money she needs to go to Viable Paradise in September. If you can spare a few dollars, or even one dollar and some kind words, please, hop over to her post and be a fairy godmother. I could say a lot of things, but the heart of it is this: she is one person who in my estimation will make the most of the help she's offered, and will pay it forward in the years to come.

Help make my friend's dream opportunity come true -- please?

Thanks for reading this. And good luck on your own dreams, too! May you have everything you need, and enough of what you want, and the perseverance, luck, and encouragement that it takes to make them real.

ArtLog: current shinies, though all the photo links are down. Got plan, though. Check back tomorrow?
( Ooh, SHINY!! )

email weirdness?
If you've emailed me lately and gotten no reply, it might be that my mailreader ate it. It's having indigestion at the moment, so I am suspicious.

Try again, please? Thank you, and I am sorry for the inconvenience.

ArtLog: new work
Finished two more pairs of earrings:
"Message in a Black Bottle"
"The Gypsy Spring"

...and a lot more are in progress.

Current Mood: glad

ArtLog: work in progress
Finished some earrings called "Beloved-Not-Perfect."

Am partway through a necklace called "They See the River Differently" which TNH thinks is about time travel. She may have something there, though I think there's sensory perception and different species in there too. Or possibly synaesthesia and the Alfar, though I'll have to wait for somebody to write the story and then I'll find out.

Taking a bit of a break now, and then going to do some more earrings, and then back to the necklace.

I like my job a lot.