Nica's Artsy Doilies

CactI.

Hello Cactus,
With your dukes up, always ready
holding ever steady.
If you hold your arms up long enough,
the sun dries them out, brittle and rough,
but you look real tough.

Where have you been?!

My goodness, it has been a long time.

Where have I been? I've been inside of this photograph, inside of photoshop, inside of my very, very sweet, but very slow computer for the last month.

I emerge here happy, if still having some work to finish up on the DVD art. That's right, kids, we're finally coming out with all of our sketchcomedyparables on one DVD... or should I say one two-DVD set. "Brain Matter" will be available soon...

My brother Isaac authored it for us, and helped us edit a lot of extra footage for the second DVD... It is all very exciting.

But there are other things in the world that exist...

The Fiz Family, The Grand Canyon, Navigators and Glen Eyrie, Focus on the Family, Crossways International, Steiger Minneapolis, First Free Methodist Church of South Minneapolis, Melheims and FINK...

The Grand Canyon just sounds to me always like the vacation my friends from fourth grade would take with thier families. I was always fairly unimpressed. But when I actually saw it with my own two little eyes, the overwhelming feeling was actually some sort of relief.

For two good reasons that may or may not be scientifically sound.

One, it is nice to see something that we can't tame. I love my wifi, but I love more the vast expanses of the western US, where you can bring in water, you can put on sunblock, you can wear the appropriate ammount of layers, and you can even carve out some pathways down the sides of the rocks, but here lies something so huge, not even our grubby little hands can really spoil it.

(Of course, I know, that given enough opportunities, we could ruin it. But there are things like the oceans, and the Rocky Mountins and the Grand Canyon, and hurricanes, that just stand up to you and say, "Read the warning label, drink lots of water, board up your windows, and even if you do it all right, I could still do impressive ammounts of damage." scary... and cool. Its a big beautiful world out there.)

And the second reason, related to the first, is that it makes me feel peaceful to KNOW, to SEE that there is something out there bigger than I am.

The Canyon is so big, you can't even get any perspective on it, it just looks fake. I would just look up one of the sides as we hiked, at one rock, and think that It was very big indeed, and then next to it was another big cliff that made it look very tiny, and then we were only in one small crevis, on one side, of one canyon on one planet.

And I'm pretty sure that the Grand Canyon isn't the biggest thing out there.

A nice Brittish gentleman and his wife took a hellicopter ride through the Grand Canyon, and when he was relating the experience to us, he said that it looked like the earth was a piece of fruit that God just dug His hands into and ripped open.

Nica.