Seamonkeys: Watch them Grow

I found the Joco Cruise to be such a huge confidence booster. How many times did we hear, during the cruise and afterwords, that we were interesting, intelligent, and incomparable people from each other and the cruise hosts? It does good things to the ego to hear, "You know what, you can do that. Do it!"

It's been a couple of months now, and I have to admit, the good mojo is wearing off. Could be the Portland spring dumps. Could be the ridiculous work load I've got. Could be that time moves us on to other obsessions.

So I thought I'd make a quick post in praise of the people who really started doing something after the cruise. I love following these projects, and I wanted to share them. Because we're the kinds of people who cheer for the people who have the guts to do something.

I mean, just listen to us cheer the Presidents song.



Video from zenofben lives here.

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I'm pretty sure no one reading this blog isn't already a fan of Tracy's Geektastic Pentameter, but I have become a firm believer that it's never wrong to say nice things about remarkable people. Her topics range from pragmatically clever and nerdy to soul-crushingly lovely. Here's a bit of one of my favorites:

Now, at “airplane,” I’m
a splinter falling from the phalanx,
a fletching dwindling, drifting
from the arrow, buoyed
for an instant by a hot
and angry breeze, a
wild susurrus whispering,
“I ought to be above this.”

--The Airplane

These poems will go in a book one day, and people will carry them around in their back pockets, and get them dog-eared, and memorize them and quote them to each other, and smudge them with food and coffee rings. In other words, this is the real thing.

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I've been enchanted by the idea seamonkey SunnyTana came up with to play a game of literary popcorn with an open ended story created by submissions each week:

http://collaborwriter.blogspot.com/

It's a lot of fun to see how the story evolves with each new submission, and I'd be delighted to see a few more people get excited about it. So far we've got a recipe for any number of adventures: Three young women, a road trip, and a mysterious stranger (eyebrow waggle here).

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Immediately after the cruise the last thing I felt like doing was going back to the daily grind. So I particularly appreciated following the progress of ElBueno (Ray) on Twitter. He went to part time work at the day job so he can create his own video game. You can read about the the game, Fortress, here:

http://www.hindrances.com/

But it's Ray's wife Mel who has stolen my heart with her cupcake blog, launched right after the cruise. This has now become my secret obsession:

http://www.cupcakefridayproject.com/


The idea: Each week a new cupcake. During the week: reviews, recipes, and recaps. Every Friday I can't believe how good the cupcakes sound. I convinced Taylor to make the Sprite'cakes, but my mouth still isn't convinced you can pack so much flavor into a single food. Fantastic.

The other day Mel tweeted this:
"Cookies are my first baking love. I'm going to be integrating them into some Cupcake Fridays."

I just have to say, it's lucky I was sitting down when I read that. Otherwise, I might have fainted dead away.

The picture is of the "Vanilla bean cupcakes with chocolate mousse and Irish cream buttercream".

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Those are just the people I follow, but I know there are others I've missed. Now's your time to shine seamonkeys. Who's been working on that pet project? And what can we do to cheer you on?