Keep Calm & Carry On

Last night, David asked me this question, "Is 'What kind of cell would you be?' a good question for your random questions?" (Looka there. It's a question inside a question. I like that.) Dave's question was prompted by an article I sent him from The New York Times about bone. If you have time, you should read it (link). It's all about the wondrousness of bone and bone building and bone cells. Dave said after reading it that he might like to be a bone cell.

Me? I think I'd like to be a neuron or a muscle cell in a muscle, like, say, in quads or hamstrings. I want to be a really long cell.

So I think it's a good question, "What kind of cell would you be?" But the real question is: What in the hell is that picture up there about?

That, my friends, is one example of The Brain's creative side. (The left side, isn't it?) That is a close up (taken with Dave's camera with the macro lens on it) of a thingy I made out of felt. That thingy hangs from my wire bedside table and holds pens and markers and such. That face and the flowers are just the decorations on the front of it. The face is actually a calavera that I was going to turn into a Christmas ornament. (The Brain, remember? It's The Brain that thinks of those things.) The flowers are from another Christmasy idea that I had to make a kind of advent Christmas stocking that would have removable, repositionable (I don't think "repositionable" is a word, by the way) flowers and calaveras all over it.

(That idea never got off the ground. The problem was that attaching felt to felt is fine--think of those felt storyboards you had as a kid--but when one side of the felt-to-felt connection gets too heavy, they won't stay on the stocking. I thought about attaching the felt pieces with velcro, but even the smallest bit of velcro was too strong and when I tried to pull the velcro'd piece off, it ended up distorting the felt. After that I thought I'd use magnets, but that was too complicated a bit of planning for The Brain. The Brain likes to move through a project by the seat of its imaginary pants. Since the magnet idea would have meant a trip to the hobby store, actual sewing skills, and some kind of success-bound plan, The Brain just walked away from the idea.)

So...that was a lot of not very interesting words, wasn't it?