The year's almost over already? Golly. I've been working on lots of stuff, I'll be telling you about it soon!

I get the feeling I'm being watched... or at least that I need to wash my windows...

I just put up another new batch of buttons. There's a link for seeing all the most recently added buttons together in one search now too - click here.

I spent some time on making it easier for me to do button updates. Previously it involved lots of gesturing and incantations (flipendo!) and caused some of my hair to turn from blue to gray. Now it just involves counting to ten. Technology trumps magic every time!

I think it worked at least. Tell me if it didn't please! More buttons will be coming if it did. Also, you can now just hover over the button and sticker images to zoom in, I don't know why I didn't do that before, twas easy.

Anyway, click on the Space Amoeba button to see the new buttons.

Go here to see them!

This is the first of smaller and hopefully more frequent updates! I've got some new shirt and bumpersticker designs. They're terribly cute, at least I think so anyway.

I drew Mr. Polar Bear years ago but I saved the file to the wrong folder and lost him. When I found him again I decided he needed a friend... (shirts and bumperstickers)

Happy and Yummy Tofu are just more of my tofu craziness, as you probably know, I love the stuff. tofu! tofu! tofu! rah! rah! rah! (shirts and bumperstickers)

Some people got together recently and decided that Pluto was no longer a 'planet', thus making Pluto sad! Pluto was kinda eccentric anyway, but it's got Charon so things will be alright. (shirts)

All of that will be available on buttons soon, I just haven't gotten to it.

The new bumperstickers are especially cool, cut out shapes and all:

Also, the 2322 raglan nigh-hoodie shirts are back (I love those) but I've taken down the zip-up hoodies for now in an effort to make my life more stress-free (they were a lot of extra work). I'm still printing on the pull-over hoodies though!

You may remember my kitty Little Bub from when she used to grace the front of mushycat (if you do, hearts and stars! That was a long time ago!). Poor bub was just diagnosed as diabetic.

Kaki King is kinda amazing guitarist/songwriter. How come no one told me about her before?

I added Google Checkout as a payment option. I actually had it working the day after it came out but they didn't have everything working properly on their end. Anyway, it's just another way to pay for your order with a credit card, like paypal. Unfortunately it's for US residents only right now, sorry! Not up to me.

If you have any problems using it please let me know!

ken

I hope to do an update sometime soon but I always say that. It'll come when it comes! I have a bunch of nifty new stuff that I'm just sitting on because I want to do a big update, since it's been awhile and the pressure is mounting. It's a little stressful to be honest. Anyway, in the meantime you'll just have to sit through my photos. Get comfy! Ready?

I took this one today. You can't see it but this lovely little Tufted Titmouse (not tufting at the moment) is holding a seed between its claws.

Here's chippy looking for seeds. Can I just tell you, I LOVE chipmunks. SO CUTE.

Here's chippy after finding an awful lot of seeds. Not the greatest photo, but it's the biggest I've ever seen its cheeks. It fills its cheeks, goes off, then comes back and fills up again, then goes off somewhere else, repeat. It's got at least three burrows that it fills, I've watched it!

Water lily bloom and a little frog. The powdery pink bloom was just incredibly lovely to look at. There's a least six young frogs in the pond now...

The big frogs, like this one, seem to come and go.

This frog jumped right up out of the pond and onto the rock I was sitting on!

Mr. Squirrel has the podium! The other day I saw a squirrel hanging upside-down high up in a tree eating a nut it was holding in its front paws. Nutty things those squirrels.

A groundhog (woodchuck!) is now a regular visitor. Here he is peeking out from under the deck. He's so cute, he likes to eat leafy greens. I'd worry that he might get into a neighbor's garden and they might try to poison him, but none of my neighbors grow anything. Heck, I don't think they even eat veggies from the looks of them.

So cuddly looking! Except for those claws of course...

And to end, here's Bunny, my sweet kitty. He's got the craziest ear hair I've ever seen.

My new favorite 'health food' (tangent: All food should be healthy, don't you think?) store had Gluten-Free, Wheat-Free, Dairy-Free, and Corn-Free Communion Wafers on the shelf! I have no idea why, but I felt compelled to buy them. Maybe it was all those years of being dragged to church. Unfortunately they aren't anything like the ones I remembered, and they're not blessed so it's not even blasphemy to put peanut butter and jelly on them. Darn.

They were excessively packaged in a corrugated cardboard box and tons of bubblewrap.

The good news is that the results came back negative, so I'm fine. The bad news is that I'm still high-risk and I still have to worry. I'm really good at worrying. So I bought a hat to keep the sun off.

Thanks to everyone for writing and thinking about me, I really appreciate that. You're all my sweethearts. I've been kinda mopey for the last week but it's spring, and the cats are purring, the tulips in the yard look pretty, and I've got little seedlings due to pop their heads up soon.

oh, so I have a little frog pond in the backyard and I had just finished cleaning it out the other day when I could have sworn I saw an orange fish in it. I don't keep any fish in there so it seemed rather improbable. Did someone put one in there? Could an egg have hitched a ride on a water plant I bought? Very unlikely. So I came to the obvious conclusion that I was crazy. ^__^ I kept watching and watching until it appeared again and it turned out to be some sort of water salamander! An orange one. Neato.

So I had (am having) a little skin cancer scare. I won't know for ten days until the results of the biopsy comes back. The doctor said I shouldn't worry, but her perky demeanor clouded for a second when she felt that my lymph nodes were swollen. Just for a second.

I've pale skin and lots of birthmarks, and I practically grew up at the beach (Rockaway beach. You know, 'Rock-rock-rockaway beach!') eating peanut butter jelly and sand sandwiches (it's just not the same without the sand) and getting sunburnt a lot. Not the best thing to do.

It's probably nothing, and I wasn't worried at all until I started looking on the web about it, where everything seemed to point me in bad direction (hypochondriacs unite!). As much as I am fine with my mortality in a general sense there are a lot of things I have planned that I'd like to get done.

I like to think that I don't usually feel depressed about uncertainties, but there it is.

Someone was in my backyard eating ice cream and fudge. I didn't see them, I just found the containers. I'm so mad. But it's kind of funny as well...

Super cute new shirt designs coming soon!

I finally put up new postcards, they're a bit silly but hopefully just looking at them will make you smile a bit, which is good enough.

purchase pending! I am selling my ipod, it's a 2G (2nd generation) model. 10 GB, firewire only, with the firewire cable, mini firewire adaptor, wired remote, and a blue neoprene case. It works perfectly and I believe the battery life is still rather good. There's no headphones or wall charger, sorry. It does charge over the firewire cable of course. It's got the usual scuffs all over it, those things are impossible to keep perfect and so I didn't try. ^_^

2G 10GB ipod - $75

oh, and I also finally updated the gallery!

Twas two years ago that Honey and Bunny came to live on mushycat mountain...

Here's a simple way to attach a button to a hair clip, the snap kind.

You need a button with its pinback in place, a twist tie that's at least 3" long, and a hair clip (medium or large size).

Open the clip and put the twist tie through it, close the clip.

Curve the ends of the twist tie like so. Please don't look at my dry fingers, it's winter after all.

Pass the twist tie under the button's pin.

Put the end of the hair clip under the lip of the button and bend the twist tie ends around the pin. Try to get it tight but don't pull the pin out.

Twist the twist tie! The twist tie is now happy because it has finally lived up to its name. Everything should feel snug, if it doesn't, it's easy to undo everything and try again.

Trim the ends of the twist tie off for a tidy look. You can put the clip so that it rests on top of the button ring or under it, whatever feels more secure.

Rotate the button around until it's the way you want it. Remember that buttons like to be turned clockwise.

That's it, put it in your hair, silly. And send me a photo for the gallery.

Or if your bag is getting too jealous and wants its button back, you can just open the pin and slide the clip off.

Can the person who wanted custom buttons that say "EsVa Goth" please email me? The email address you gave me is bouncing. Thanks.

I just finished updating all my shopping cart code to reflect the new postal rates that go in effect today. The 37 cent stamp is going to 39 cents and it goes up from there. For the kind of mailing I do it looks like we'll be paying from 3 cents to 50 cents more, depending on the weight of the package and where it's going. So it's not much, don't worry.

So it's a whole new year already, how about that. I feel like I didn't get as much done as I wanted, though I started a million new projects. My mind is always whirring and I'm continually distracting myself... I procrastinate by attempting new things! It just gets a bit hard to finish them all.

Somehow I always get orders out in a timely manner though!

This year I hope to sew a lot of bags (organic cotton, treadle-powered sewing machines...), update the site properly, I'm working on a game, there's my house design project, writing some linux software, hopefully making guitars... you get the picture.

New postcards this week btw.

oh and hey, in case you forgot... I love you all. xo