Last week was a clusterfuck of week which started with slow etsy sales due to the search change (and all the attendant drama) and ended with a sick kitty and a hole in my kitchen wall...

While sales are picking up again, the kitty is better, and they repatched hole they punched to find a phantom leak yesterday..I still feel off kilter, subject to disaster at any moment...

finally...

Some spring like weather and it seems everything has bloomed over night, the magnolias in front of the catholic school, the azalea bushes. For once, I was not freezing whilst waiting for the bus. It's crazy how good weather so influences my mood, hell even what time I manage to get out of bed and the difficulty thereof...Plus, not only was it absolutely gorgeous out, but I managed to arrive at the studio at the exact same moment as the UPS guy, who brought me all sorts of exciting goodies like bubble envelopes, a badly needed toner cartridge, more white paper, and, the piece de resistance, a killer tape dispenser. (actually I am seriously thrilled with this one, having been battling a rather sucky handheld one I never quite figured out how to use...)

May is my favorite month, nice weather before the humidity kicks in. Always the end of the school year (whether I'm in school or not, working where I do, it's always nice to see the place clear out..) dgp, as always has much planned, including the hightly impending (as in the next week or so) release of Maggie Ginestra's Darger poem series, a chap by Anne Heide, and a collaboration by Miriam Pirone and Edward Smallfield towards the end of the month. I am also gearing up for our booth over Memorial Day Saturday (courtesy of Handmade Chicago) at the Chicago Antique Market. I'll be making new stuff for that all month, as well as stocking up on chaps for the Printers Row Fair a couple weeks later.

I get to spend the whole day in the studio tomorrow since I'm library bound on Saturday, so I hope to make some progress on a few things there and at home over the weekend. I have some new collage and notecard ideas, some shadowboxes aching to be filled, and, of course, chaps to be printed. (*sigh*) Just thinking about it exhausts me...

re-entry

has been a little bumpy. First of all, there is the weather. The transition between mild 70's and 80's sunshine to 30's and 40'd wet and cloudy has SO sucked. Our 6 months of winter has appearently decided to be 7 this year. The tulips look cold and frozen along Michigan Ave. I had to put away the flip flops I'd been wearing all week down south, though I refused to get my winter coat back out. Then there is the mounting pile of projects sitting at my door, the chaps to be finished and printed, the several to be laid out for the next couple of months, the etsy orders to be shipped that have come in over the interim. My apartment is still trashed, the dining room littered with papers, supplies, and slips (it looks a little like a brothel..) I managed to sort through the mail (this month's P&W's has an awesome article on the mix-tape strategy of organizing a manuscript by Katrina Vandenberg, you should check it out..) I still have several e-mails to respond to, and my answering machine is blinking at me maniacally. And then, of course, work, but it's reasonably quiet here gearing up for the end of semester rush...I get a little freaked out and just have to keep telling myself to do one thing at a time...

Thank you all for the birthday well wishes...I am going to use my birthday card monies from various sources for a splurge on art supplies at Utrecht sometime this week. My sister, god bless her, gave me a fancy copy of the Inferno and a Starbucks gift card which is burning a hole in my wallet as we speak...

birthdays and beaches..

The reading in Atlanta went fabulously (I must thank one Jenny Sadre Orafai and the New South folks for inviting me down to GSU to read..) We are now settled in Myrtle Beach, a block from the ocean. For my birthday tomorrow, I plan to do some shopping along the strip for cheap trinkets and tacky souvenirs, some lounging about ocean-side (years since I'd been in the Atlantic, I'd forgotten how much the sand slips out from under you as the tide comes in closer), and dinner somewhere with shrimp the size of my fist. And, of course, ice-cream cake, which may be a little difficult to manage in a tiny hotel fridge ...

starbucks is evil and my arm hurts, or why I am a chapbook making goddess

Tempting me with their iced caramel machiottos right next door when Dunkin Donuts is perfectly suitable and much cheaper just a couple blocks away. Today was an early day, stapling and folding (why my shoulder is killing me and I have a rather viscious paper cut between my thumb and forefinger) finishing up the Poetry Center chapbook. That was the most wham-bam-thankyou-ma'am chapbook printing I've ever done, starting with getting the poems on Wednesday and managing to finish the layout and both printing and assembling them in two days. I had initially planned on just printing and leaving them for my sister to finish and deliver, but I was on a roll, so I just went with it. Of course that involved getting out of the house by 7 or so to squeeze in a couple hours before work in the studio today. So they are done and etsy orders shipped and I am out of here.

april at dancing girl press

Fresh out (so fresh the ink is no doubt still drying) is Melissa Crowe's Cirque du Crève-Cœur, a stunning collection of prose poems. This the first of two chapbooks due out this month (the other from Maggie Ginestra.) As with all our chaps, I found myself surprised and pleased at every turn that we were actually getting the chance to publish such awesome work. Buy it, read it, love it!