This past weekend we made the trip up to Berryville, AR to visit Ty’s Aunt Peggy and CW.

We took a very leisurely drive up through the Ozark Mountains. We ended up seeing Steel Creek, the Buffalo River, and three elk.

We also went out to the War Eagle Arts and Crafts Festival. The pictures speak for themselves. Click on the pictures for captions if the pictures aren’t speaking to you.

If you go to Eureka Springs, you should go to the Sow’s Ear in Berryville, AR. Here is a 25% off coupon. They have great vintage embroidered and tatted linens. I could not buy them all.

For my birthday, we just went driving across the countryside, exploring Arkansas. Outside of Conway at 5080 Hwy 64 West we found the Finton Sculpture Garden and Studio. We met with Finton and saw his Bill Clinton sculpture work in progress.

Then we toured his sculpture garden and fed his fish.

I really liked the one that looked like Battlestar Galactica’s “The Eye of Jupiter”. This is why I love driving around with Tyrone: he finds interesting people and places like this all of the time.

Took many pictures, ate much good food, and saw many crafts this weekend. Pictures forthcoming. Even though we didn’t spend the weekend with my friend David, he’s went and blogged about it before I can even get the pictures off of my camera. We went to the War Eagle Arts & Crafts Fair too.

They have a bottom-flow grist mill there, the last functioning one in the US. Arnold, my father-in-law, noted the last functioning top-flowing grist mill wheel is in upstate New York.

The resin cuff is taking a long time to iron out. I was waiting on some chemicals, and they finally arrived. Here are the results so far.

This is the first pour where I can center the lacework in the middle of the cuff. If I just put the lacework in the cuff mold, it would sink to the bottom or float to the top.

After the center piece is done, I put it in the cuff mold to get the “arms”. This is the first one I attempted. There is a bubble on the bottom, and an indentation to be filled at the top.

The entire thing is tacky to the touch and will need to be coated and sealed. The PVC molds do not produce tacky objects, but the latex and silicone molds allow air in, and then the polyester resin does not completely cure to no-tack.

This is my favorite picture of the cuff. You can’t see the knobs on the arms. I need to sand those off. The top of the cuff mold allowed a little too much of the resin to pool at the top. Next time I will just tape the ends up, OR get some sort of automated sander that can get around tiny corners.

The in-laws have arrived, and we’re about to take a vacation to northwest Arkansas. Just in time for our trip, National Geographic Writer, Mel White, has written an article about the Ozark Mountain Trails.

While visiting Berryville, we may take a trip to Eureka Springs or Mountain View. Both have large artistic and craft communities. There is also a Frank Stanford Literary Festival in Fayetteville. Not sure if we can make it to this one, but it sure looks like fun.

Bringing the bug spray!

Thursday, the unemployed spouses of Conway area college professors took a little field trip to the Heifer International building. Like a good blogger, my friend David Barber wrote about this trip the day he took it. The building has an LEED Platinum certification, which means it is heated and cooled with rainwater. It has a municipal water tower to hold the water, and they even flush toilets with it! There are many other sustainable features of the building, but those are the coolest ones.

I am a bad blogger, allowing a few days to pass before posting, but I hope to make up for it with pictures:

This Saturday we followed up our sustainability field trip, and brought some significant others to the Natural State Expo. They had some great resources there, but it mostly focused on sustainable home ownership. As a renter, I wish there was more out there for us. There were many booths for bikers. Judging October, biking should be great here for most of the year. More interesting booths included seed savers and heirloom preservation. It was all very exciting.

Wow. Thursday night the reading was great. Peter Ho Davies read a short story called “Minotaur”, and “What You Know”.

Ty introduced him before he read. Here are some pictures.

My favorite part of the talk was when Davies was asked, “Why do you write?” His answer was that sometimes he is in a situation where he doesn’t know what’s going on, socially, or otherwise, and writing is his way to work out what really happened. That really resonated with me for many different reasons.

My favorite part of his visit was taking him to Smitty’s BBQ, and just hearing the fiction writers talk about craft. Nothing like watching people who mine experiences and distill them into words just shoot the breeze over tasty pork ribs.

Ok we’ve got the words and the visuals covered. If you really want more of the Peter Ho Davies experience, you should listen to this podcast.

On a completely unrelated note, I have a poet friend named Zach Schomburg who really likes to take blurry pictures. Recently, he’s gone more grainy and tight crop, so I may have to take up his blurry mantle. This weekend I was addicted to what I call the blur setting. Since the days are getting shorter, this is how my camera acts. The first of a long series, Ty getting ready to introduce Peter Ho Davies.

I just showed Ty all of my blurry pictures from this weekend and he wonders how long it will last.

The website Threadbanger blogged about my instructable for recycled sweater koozies.

Shoutout to Jen for the headsup!

Andrei Codrescu had a commentary on NPR today. Go to that link and listen to it. You can read it, but I urge you to listen to it. Since he moved to the mountains in Arkansas, he sounds much more like a uber libertarian hillfolksy academic. The strokes of the fantastic, or magic realism make me smile. They also make me think that is the peace my father is searching for plotting away in his man cave, brewing his elderberry and rhubarb wine in a 20 gallon crock while sharpening his chainsaw or cleaning his guns.

Last night, Ty and I had the pleasure of picking up Peter Ho Davies at the Little Rock National Airport. We showed him around Conway, and took him out to what we believe is the best BBQ joint in the area: Smitty’s.

Tonight he will have a reading at 7:30 at Trischmann Hall. This summer I read stories from his book Equal Love to Ty in the car while we were driving cross-country. Sometimes I have problems reading prose aloud in the car, stumbling over every other sentence. This set of stories was a joy to read out loud, requiring me to take frequent pauses to read the fun word play as it was written, instead of the cliche my mind instinctively anticipated.

Last week, when Ty’s class went to a reading and discussion over Mexican food, the majority of the students loved the story “Frogmen” from Equal Love.

I haven’t read his latest novel, The Welsh Girl, but I’ve seen a few of Ty’s students carrying it around. I’m not sure what the reading is tonight. I’ll let you know tomorrow.