Oh, cute little man made of yarn and other raw materials. Why must you stare up at me from the game case with those big black eyes? Beckoning me to play. You know I would love to play with you but I am so busy and I just cannot right now. We will get plenty of play time in, later. Just give me the time to complete my responsibilities. That’s all that I ask. But I promise that, later, we shall frolic and play.

I know I haven’t written in a while - so I figured I would make it up to you all by writing something extremely worthwhile.  The following is a story I wrote in college.

sheila the peanut

once there was a peanut. his name was sheila. he had a friend who was an ape named abe (who was also friends with george of the jungle– but that’s a different story for another day).

sheila and abe lived happily on an iceberg somewhere in the middle of a pond in the southwestern corner of arkansas. there wasn’t much to eat on that iceberg, but abe would use sheila as bait to catch the fish that lived in the pond. then both would settle down and share a hearty meal and their own accounts of the events of the day.

one day, the fish weren’t biting, but abe was mighty hungry, and ate sheila.

from his stomache he could hear the peanut’s cries : “why did you eat me? you were supposed to be my friend! let me out and i will catch a fish for you!”

so the monkey thought and decided that a fish is probably a little more filling than a peanut, so he let him out.

sheila caught him a fish, as promised, and as abe began to cook it (careless in his hunger), the ice started to melt. abe got worried.

“what shall we do?” asked abe, “there is an excessively large hole in this iceberg and it is starting to sink!”

“i don’t care what YOU do…” said sheila, “i’m swimming to shore!” and he jumped off of the iceberg he had once known as “home.”

abe pondered the possibilities and jumped off too, thinking the peanut’s idea was probably a good one, but he had forgotten he couldn’t swim. he sank to the bottom, because that’s what monkeys do when they can’t swim- they sink.

of course, sheila swam to the shore, because when he had jumped into the water he had gone under once but immediately bobbed back up to the top because that’s what peanuts do- they float.

he felt sorry for his old friend and sort of missed him, but then he thought maybe it was a good thing anyway. he hopped off to find someplace to make his home (because everyone knows that’s how peanuts get anywhere important- they hop).

after a while he came upon a big place with lots of colorful plants and hills and odd creatures like he’d never seen before. he overheard some of the creatures speaking of “circus acts” and “clowns” and he wondered what those things were.

he looked up and saw a big grey rock with a long grey vine hanging off of it. sheila hopped over to it to take a nap in the shade (after all, it had been such a tiresome day). no sooner had he leaned himself against it, though, than the vine began to move and sheila felt as if he was being pulled into the air by some unseen force. “maybe i’m dead and this is what it feels like when your soul goes to heaven” he thought, but then he looked down and did not see his body slumped against the rock.

suddenly he entered the inside of the vine. this startled him, as it would startle any peanut in its right mind.

“what IS this? a rock that eats peanuts?” he shouted.

the “rock” spoke back, “no, i am an elephant and you are my food.”

that was that. the elephant swallowed him and ignored every word the peanut said because that’s what elephants do- they eat peanuts, not have conversations with them.

so that was the end of sheila.

the end.

On Tuesday, Aug 19, we launched Mike Schmid’s new site to coincide with the release of his new album “The House We Built”. 

Vote for the design on CSS Fights by clicking here:

The only thing really left to do is touching up paint and sealing the tiles on the wall.  So here are the long awaited pictures.  I am happier than I thought I would be with the outcome.  I mean, I knew it would be an improvement, but it turned out better than I could have hoped.

We have since found out that I miscarried the baby. Which is why it was not very big.

We have been - oh so lovingly - referring to the “it” growing in my belly as the “Dragon Baby” only because when I was supposedly 6 weeks, we got a picture in my weekly email notification that showed something that looked like a hunchback retarded dragon.

Well, I went in for my first appointment today and we thought I was 7.5 weeks along.  We did an ultrasound just to be sure since I have Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, and boy were we wrong.  I am only at 5 weeks and 6 days according to the ultrasound.  Which means that I must have found out very early!

I am going back again on the 14th to confirm how far along I am.  But I am glad we did it today.  I got to see the heartbeat which was 90 bpm.  They said that when the heart first starts to form the heart rate is a lot slower.