Nose-to-Poppies and Lady Lovely Locks fan art (of course) (Patreon)

The skin on my finger pads is too thick to feel the details of my little poppy seed sprouts so I leaned my face in close and brushed the tip of my nose against them instead.

Then I hunted out the new baby slugs with my tweezers. I hadn’t seen them before because they were so small and almost translucent but when your face is that close you’re like “Oh hey, baby slug.”

Portland has had a totally random snowy-hail-y cold snap even though last frost was supposed to be March 30th. I used up a stack of plastic and glass containers covering up my brand new seed starts that have just barely started to poke through, but not before they had a full night and day of being covered under a layer of snow without any barrier (I didn’t know it was going to snow! LAST FROST WAS MARCH 30th!!!)

I didn’t have enough containers for all of them, and a good number of the sugar snap peas have already wrapped their little tendrils into their climbing poles, so I couldn’t put something over them anyway.

This batch of poppy sprouts, though, I planted them in a heavy terra cotta rectangular planter with seeds my French Mother-in-Law gave me from England. I hauled this pot inside and put it on this… cabinet? under the window next to the back door. It’s way heavier than it really should be, but that’s probably because it’s meant to withstand the elements outside and not be pampered like a baby inside a 100-year-old house with windows by the back door.

Every time I looked back into the pot, the sprout tips had moved. The taller ones would lean toward the window until I rotated their (heavy-ass) planter toward the kitchen wall so they’d all be leaned in that direction and then when I’d look again they’d have craned themselves back towards the window again.

My favorites were the shoots that hadn’t full escaped the dirt, their heads still buried while their necks grew straight up up up, creating a tender arch above the soil. I tracked as the arch continued to push up until that little tip flew free and righted itself into a single stalk, pulled to the sunny window.

I didn’t mean to write this. I was just going to write the one sentence about brushing the tip of my nose against my little poppy sprouts, but then I remembered the baby slugs and the snow fall and next thing you know I wrote another goddamn essay. I started tapping this out as a quick Instagram caption but then I actually hit the character limit so I cut it short and finished those last few (TOTALLY CRUCIAL) sentences here for you guys.

In other news, I made some completely ridiculous fan art for the Lovely Lady Locks franchise:

A couple weeks ago I went out to the coast with some friends and because we're all spiritually 65-years-old of course we went antiquing, which is how I found this gorgeous LUVELEE LADY lingerie box frommmmm I'm gunna say the 1920s?

Originally I was gunna draw Lady Lovely Locks herself because... LUVLEE LADY. It was right there. But then I thought "Who is more likely to be admiring themself in a mirror in front of a giant-ass window with lacy curtains and a black-as-night background?" And the answer is Duchess Ravenwaves.

She's the "villain" of Lovely Lady Locks, but really I have this whole hypothesis about how the Maidens of Locks have bullied her into a state of self-defensiveness and really everyone is both the Good Guy and the Bad Guy all at the same time U_U

I can't make myself reply to my email or comments or other online obligations but I HAVE been posting almost daily to my Lady Lovely Locks fan account because this shit just makes me happy in a really basic way.

What simple pleasure makes you happy these days?