Back in a Pinch

In a series of cardboard and plastic bins on the shelf below a built-in work bench in the garage are the stuff of dreams. Colored glass, lead-free solder, irons, copper tape, cutting tools, smooth pour craft cement, shortened 2x4s, chicken feed, traffic cones, used oil filters, rocks and fossils from South Dakota to mid-Washington State, contractor trash bags, waders of waterproof fabric 1/4" thick, mealworms, PVC caps, and more rocks. All these binned and heavily spidered 30 meters west of me, now.

This crab ^ knows what's up. It knows where we bin cymbals crash. We back in a Pacific crab's pinch from a three year hiatus, the props of which populate notebook records dripping in refillable gel ink with descriptions of rugged applications. I will be brief. You deserve that along with a golden bagel impregnated with blueberries and glazed in honey walnut schmear! We are back to "bio log" in response to a resurgent interest in doing things for the fun of it; in an effort to inculcate internet Googlers with sentiments of pocket rocking & wonder tale scaping from this flowery rock rat philosopher.

Beachcombing with Bristol & Tori.

In fall 2024, I trekked out to Portland and Coos Bay, OR, to rep' my company and see the fram. Feather Blue, Fiddler, the Big E, and Little Sandman are crushing it on the West Coast. Next, we have the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council (ARAC) Artist Equity Grant Award which funded a coffeehouse show in June, 2025. The event was spectacular, featuring a wide range of art made by other wildlife biologists and craftsmyn*. Before that, I threw together a zine for Jesscribe the Vibe's Zine Fest 2024. First zine printed with the Mixam.com online printing service and I was splendidly surprised. Those copies. are all gone now, but I might get more rolled out. Big time saver considering until then I was typing zines out manually and stitching them together. Handing them out with a serving of shy reserve to new poetry friends.

Embroidering flour sack towels picked up as well, since last we jived online. You can now find my towels for sale at locations around town, like AltCreative.org and Dovetailcafe.com. Those are both real in-person stores! Printmaking grew from puttering around and bleeding onto expensive paper (using poor, quickly dulled tin carving tools) to working with Swiss made steel and Japanese vinyl. Without effusively praising these tools like a well-paid advertiser, I can clue ya'll in to where I built my outfit from with the support of ARAC.

Unkempt: the 2024 Duluth Zine Fest run.

We're working on tossing up a gallery of prints. Potentially a selection of embroidery patterns for anyone to chose from. Gears are chugging away for a prospective second show of biologist art next spring. There are snowflake and bobwhite quail chicks cuddling up in a rabbit hutch ten feet from some of their parents bobwhiting away while all the flock waits for me to finished hammering their quail coop together.

There are glass pieces to collage! More crab prints to press out from basswood blocks! I've finally shoehorned 60+ poems into my poetry manuscript and sort of.... decided to leave it that way while shopping it around for editor friends. There's more, of course, but let's rebuild our ruptured report with a light pinch just to rosy up our cheeks. The weather is sweltering around our corn sweating region this time of year. Plenty of time to catch us up on where we all bin.

Embroidery table at Soft Edges coffeehouse show on June 8, 2025 at The Loch Cafe & Games.

New friend! JJ organizes the print table at Soft Edges coffeehouse show.

with love & nothing else,

be well,

Rock Rat

Rockosopher

Third Class Lucid Dreamer

TK

*part of my scifi novel is using some new words like 'myn' instead of 'men' where certain professional are gender nuetral. Not that there's anything wrong with men. There's not. AND, this is one of my language hooks for world building on Erynnoa in the year 7862.

What personal language have you come up with lately? Leave a comment.