Magazines, logos, education gadflies and berries...

April's been crazy busy for us, in a good way (though Steve's been working too hard.) I'll try to hit the highlights...

Steve got an interesting and experimental assignment from the LA Times -- illustrate, on a ridiculously short deadline, a daily reader-written noirish serialized story. Steve illustrated two of the seven episodes each week (in an average of 4 hours from getting the story to submitting the art), on top of April being the deadline month for Nexus. So he was working almost around the week for the last two weeks.

During that time he had his 15 minutes of local fame, after winning a logo design contest sponsored by the local alternative weekly. The city of Fort Collins hired an out-of-town marketing firm to rebrand the city and design a quite mediocre logo that has drawn significant public derision. Here's Steve's design.

The kids and I have been hanging out with our homeschooling friends, at park days and the roller skating rink. Harry and I have just gotten our own skates to practice on, and Maddie may get a pair too. I went to a fascinating lecture by John Taylor Gatto with my friend Jill, and met a handful of other unschooling parents there as well. Gatto's a two-time state of New York educator-of-the-year (and three-time NYC-e-o-y) who is radically critical of public education as it has evolved through the last century. He's quite the firebrand and offered a banquet of food for thought. I liked his label of "open-source learning" as the way to go, as that's what we do and validation of one's personal choices always feels oh-so-warm and fuzzy.

On the garden front, spring's here, albeit a chillier one than I'm used to. I've been digging like crazy in the garden, and have a long, beautifully mulched bed of strawberry plants, two more beds to plant today (with berry runners a friend gave me from her bountiful garden), and 10 raspberry plants in the ground and sprouting (well, one isn't looking too good, but the others are thriving).

Our cold frame cold-crops are getting close to harvestable size and I've got some sugar snap peas started outside. We'll probably start a flat of warm-weather seedlings in peat pots before we leave for California and plant the sprouts when we return.

We're flying to California on Wednesday for 10 days or so, with a housesitter to watch the dogs, rats and plants for us (with any luck, Maggie will hang in there for our absence -- at 15 1/2, she's doing pretty well for her age, but every month starts to feel like an achievement....)

We're looking forward to spending four days at the beach at Camp Pendleton with my folks, and a trip to Sea World, courtesy of our neighbor Joe across the street, who works at the Budweiser brewery and gets free tickets to A-B attractions. Oh, and we get to go see our old kids' dentist (woo hoo!), as so far we've had terrible luck with the two children's dentists in Fort Collins that we've tried. Dr. Cutts is the most laid-back dentist I've ever met, and the kids feel so at ease with him. And we'll get to see some of our California friends again as well!