Part of the fun of bringing all that old crap from Maine to Brooklyn last month is going through old photos. Woo, there are some doozies!

This, however, is not a doozy, but one of my all-time favorite favorite pix of me and my best girl, taken on our high school graduation day:

Click through to get the poop on my secret crush! (Note: yes, I was way the heck over him before my boyfriend of that year, the infinitely cooler Tyrone II, Esq., came along.)

Also note: I am 18 in that photo.

I have a GREAT superhunky picture of Tyrone too, from the same day.

Hrm. If weekly updates are all I can manage these days, then weekly updates are all I can manage these days.

To be fair, last week took some unexpected turns, the biggest one being Leland’s trip to the emergency room on Wednesday night. He’s fine now, but as you can imagine, it was a scary affair. Leland has lived with asthma his entire life, but it’s all new to me. And hey, finding my husband in front of our apartment at 10 p.m., wheezing and pissed because he can’t get a cab… well, that’ll get my dander up.

They saw us almost on the spot. That’s what really got me. A 15 minute emergency room wait in Brooklyn? Must’ve been an emergency.

We followed it up the next day with a trip to the doctor, who took good care of us and loaded us up with supplies. I liked him. He even had notes on me in Leland’s files. “‘Wife is a knitter.’ Do you still knit?” A thank-you note and perhaps an offer of copywriting might be in order.

We treated ourselves to a trip to Argosy when it was all over. Bought Ms. Nesbit’s collection of Shakespeare for children.

What else? A grand party with the Entelechy Girls and friends on Saturday. Reading MAKE WAY FOR DUCKLINGS to little Evie and her friend Lucy. Made me smile. My father read Robert McCloskey books to me all the time when I was three and a half. I, in turn, would read them to my mother.

Other than that, just working and more working. Tagged along to Deep 6 yesterday and spent 4 hours plotting my next comics project. And I actually got it done! Haha! Who says I can’t write with crazy cartoonists in the room? I can’t really write in a room full of cartoonists talking to one another. But I can plot, apparently.

Anyone else catch the first part of the new Ken Burns documentary last night?

Back to work after a fairly active weekend.

1. Went to the Cupcakes Take The Cake Meetup at Baked. Now, Sugar Sweet Sunshine cupcakes are my personal favorites of the many cupcakes to be had in this city so far, but I have to say, Baked comes in at a very close #2. Two words: moistness and frosting. Ok, four more: melt-in-your-mouth. Crazy. Erin from NYU has more (including an adorable picture of Rachel).

Also, I have discovered that Red Hook is a simple bus ride from the Smith & 9th Street station. This could be trouble.

2. They turned the Beard St. Warehouse (ok, part of it) into a Fairway. Now, this is not news, but it’s been a while since I’ve been out there… probably something like two years, when I took reference shots for Dash for WEIRD SISTER. It is crazy how time flies. (These were taken about a month before the others — I remember that day, it was so much fun.)

I guess a crotchety part of me wants to hate the Fairway, but I can’t. It’s huge. It has a faint-worthy produce section. It’s reasonably priced. They didn’t completely destroy the building.

Oh yeah, and I picked up something incredibly dangerous. It’s called S’more trail mix. Hide the children.

3. Brooklyn Book Festival was yesterday. How cool is this? It reminded me of the good ‘ol New York Is Book Country, which I will miss forever and ever. Met Melissa Marr (woo!), marveled at Sharyn’s outfit from afar (those boots, I tell ya!) and just generally had a lovely time talking to book folk. You know what? Books make people happy. They make me happy. This is great.

Also ran into Ayun Halliday, whom I haven’t seen in ages, and she remembered me, which was just so darn nice I can’t even tell you how nice it was. “I can’t stop doing Inky,” she said. “It’s just such a nice break from the books and the other stuff.”

Now, does that, or does that not, set me to thinking? To longing? To stroking my chin and pondering World Fantasy zine makin’ thoughts? The theme is ghosts, after all. Call me a monkey’s uncle, but I think I have a ghost story up my sleeve somewhere.

(”You have comics to finish, young lady.” “Yes, Mom.”)

4. After the bookin’ and the socializin’ was done, we headed on over to our old haunt, Pete’s Waterfront Ale House, for my all-time favorite sammich, the Pete’s Waterfront Ale House Santa Fe Chicken Wrap. A perfect ending.

This whole “being social” and “get out of the house” craziness is kinda nice, I have to admit.

More photos from the Infinite Canvas party. There are some really, really nice shots of all the AIVers here and here.

Of course, I like this one the best:

But then I’m biased like dat.

A rare night out (well, okay, almost rare — we were at Mr. Wood’s latest @ Rocketship but left 45 minutes in because it was so crazy hot) last night to the opening of Infinite Canvas, new webcomics exhibit at MoCCA.

What a grand time and what a grand exhibit! Lots of ACT-I-VATE in the house and even a little Chemset action compliments of Kevin. The crowd always makes these things for me and this one was a just-right mix of people we know and love and new faces. We spent plenty of time with some of each and even ran into Scott McCloud on the way out the door.

Here’s a picture of me and Nikki Cook, who looks simply stunning these days, from Heidi. Nikki posted more pix, including a hella cute one of me and Rachel Kramer Bussel (there’s one of Leland and I too, but I daresay it’s notable for his cuteness, not mine. ).

Speaking of Rachel, she talked me into feasting on cupcakes in Red Hook at the Cupcakes Take The Cake Meetup group this Saturday. Do I need a better excuse to get out of the house? Why no, I don’t think I do!

I don’t normally shamelessly crib other bloggers practically word-for-word. In fact I’ve never done it. But for Madeleine L’Engle I’ll make an exception and I’m sure Gwenda will understand. She posted this excerpt from Madeleine’s 1963 Newberry Medal speech for A WRINKLE IN TIME and it’s worth disseminating far and wide:

“So how do we do it? We can’t just sit down at our typewriters and turn out explosive material. I took a course in college on Chaucer, one of the most explosive, imaginative, and far-reaching in influence of all writers. And I’ll never forget going to the final exam and being asked why Chaucer used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote in a white heat of fury, “I don’t think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn’t the way people write.”

A writer of fantasy, fairy tale, or myth must inevitably discover that he is not writing out of his own knowledge or experience, but out of something both deeper and wider. I think that fantasy must possess the author and simply use him. I know that this is true of A Wrinkle in Time. I can’t possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice. And it was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.”

Madeleine l’Engle, Children’s Writer, Is Dead

“L’Engle told Newsweek in 2006 that she had read one Potter book and, ‘It’s a nice story but there’s nothing underneath it. I don’t want to be bothered with stuff where there’s nothing underneath.’”

Holy, holy holy, it’s Anne Briggs on YouTube.

Longtime readers will know that, like many a mainstay and folk pioneer (not that I’m comparing myself in that way, mind), Anne is one of my muses. She wasn’t on the scene for very long and footage of her is very, very rare. But sure enough, there she is — greeted on the couch by Louis Killen and then some impassioned banter with… oh geez, I can never tell those two dudes in the early Watersons apart… I think that’s Mike Waterson (someone help me out, if ya know).

I was stunned and drooling, but not for long, for there was much, much more to distract me. Apparently YouTube is just a veritable treasure trove of old skool British Isles folk clips. We have more Watersons (here’s a great performance of “Hal-An-Tow” — ELLEN KUSHER! I’m looking at you ’cause you turned me on to this album) and there’s a plethora of cool old Pentangle, including “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme”, “Wedding Dress” and — hang on to your 60’s medievalist Arthurian britches — “Hunting Song”.

Dang, that Jaqui McShee is just riveting. Reminds me of this cool girl I know, but I’m not gonna say who because she reads this.

Now, that last one may be a little hard for some of you to take. I totally understand. However, I’d just like to state for the record that Bert Jansch, in addition to being a bitchin’ guitarist gift from the Otherworld, was actually pretty hot back then. But I really don’t know what’s going on there. I do love how he calls it “a thirteenth century rock and roll song.” I don’t know if they wrote it or not, but, despite the glockenspiel, “Hunting Song” is in my personal top 10 favorite folk songs, hands down (lyrics, influences demystified and trivia here).

Lastly, I’ll leave you with a video of Richard Thompson singing “Beeswing,” a song supposedly inspired by/based on Anne. That’s how the legend goes; however, the story also goes that he only met her twice, and that both times she was “drunk and unconscious.” Whatever the case may be, it’s a beautiful song and well worth listening to. Fair warning: it is emotional; in fact, so emotional that one YouTube viewer has commented, “What a song. It makes me weep every time I hear it, and that’s a lot of weeping.”

Anyway, on the Annie tip, her Wikipedia entry is a good source for the basics — while it’s still up, anyway.