Let them eat layer cake

Holy buckets of sweat, y'all. We finally got the first post over on Generation Q Magazine up last night, with me and Jake trading phone calls, emails and texts until we were both punchy and hyper and next to hysterical. We're working on Wordpress and it's new to all of us, and whenever I have to learn a new interface, there's always these first few moments where it all looks like Sanskrit and I think, "I'll NEVER figure this out." Then, invariably, I figure it out. I guess there's something in me that just likes the drama of going THIS IS STUPID. I'M GONNA HOLD MY BREATH UNTIL SOMEBODY DOES IT FOR ME, even though I like the satisfaction of doing it on my own much more.

If you head over there, please note the logo. I did that. Yep. Me. When I got my first real job as an editor I worked for a VERY small magazine which had a full-time staff consisting of the owner and me. His son was our graphic designer, but he only came in a week or two before we went to print and worked at night with his dad. I taught myself InDesign and enough Photoshop to do layout for the mag and also to design ads for businesses who wanted to advertise but couldn't afford a real graphic designer. So when we were all wringing our hands and wondering who was going to fall out of the sky to magically design a logo for us, I finally said, Well, hell, I'll just give it a go. It was so much fun and I hope I get to do more.

With all of this excitement and work, I haven't had much of a chance to sew. I am currently working on this pattern:

and I'm using a Central Park layer cake for it:

And though I've had the fabric and the pattern for over two weeks now, I've only managed to cut about eleven pieces. Some of that is the GenQ stuff keeping me busy, but it's also my youngest child, who is determined to pick as many fights with me in the course of a day as she can, and it's dangerous to hold a rotary cutter when you so desperately want to throw something. She is the queen of rolling her eyes and acting all exasperated and cheesed off over every little thing, and I've done all that "positive discipline" crap and doesn't work worth a damn on a kid who needs to have a screaming fit in order to feel she's made her mark on the world today. Nothing else works either. Not even bribes. I know this kid, and I know it's a phase, but for the love of all that is good and holy in this world, some days I really want to sell her to the circus.

We took her and her big sister to the Natural History Museum in D.C. yesterday and had a pretty good time. Demon - I mean, Devon - was very patient and calm under the circumstances and we were smart enough to bring a stroller so she could sack out when she got tired. The best part was the butterfly exhibit, particularly how the butterflies would just land on you, not skittish at all.

Devon wanted to see the gem collection and the dinosaur bones. At the gem displays, there was some big-ass diamonds that had belonged to Marie Antoinette, as the little plaque informed us, and we stood and looked at those for quite some time. And as we stood there, people - usually in pairs - would come up and read the plaque and go, "I wonder if she was wearing them when she got her head cut off?" You could have conducted some sort of social experiment - the number of people who made the same lame joke vs the number who didn't because they didn't know who the hell Marie Antoinette was and couldn't pronounce it anyway.

My favorite goober couple was these twenty-somethings who were at the dinosaur bones with us. In part of the display, a set of bones (or casts of bones, really) was laid out on the floor to show how the bones look when they are exposed during an excavation. They even had some handy tools laid out near them to show what a paleontologist in the field would be using to dig up a dinosaur skeleton. And as we're looking at it, this chick walks up and looks at it, then pulls her boyfriend over and says, "Look, this one just fell apart!" They then had a deep and meaningful discussion about the sorry state of museum goers, who probably knocked it over and the poor job the museum was doing in maintaining its displays. And I'm standing there, holding my tongue, and trying not to go HOW DO YOU EVEN GET DRESSED IN THE MORNING?

So it was good to come home and stay up late making something cool on the internet. I hope you'll come over and play with us and I'll be sure to let you know what fun stuff is happening. I will say this: I wrote a humor piece for it and we're all still trying to decide if it's too offensive. I can't help it. IT'S WHAT I DO.