Welcome Offbeat Mamas! I’m very excited to be featured by my friend Ariel on her wonderful Offbeat Mama blog today. Her post includes a SPECIAL DISCOUNT OFFER for my shop — so don’t miss it!!

If this is your first time here, thanks so much for visiting! My little business is still in its infancy, but I’m doing my best to pick up speed. I hope you’ll check out my Etsy shop and definitely let me know if you have any custom requests.

More new items coming as fast as I can manage, with this little dude demanding my attention.

(photos by .ariel)

Three years ago on the spring equinox, Ben and I had a big fabulous commitment ceremony. Surrounded by friends and family we made promises to spend a lifetime together. It was a wonderful perfect day.

Before the ceremony, we spent a lot of time explaining our reasons for not getting legally married. Since then thousands have people have read about our decision via our friend Ariel’s Offbeat Bride book and website.

Thus, many people may be surprised to hear that today in the downtown Seattle Municipal Court, Ben and I stood in front of a judge and became husband and wife. Although it was a joyful occasion, it was not an easy decision. We still feel strongly that the institution of marriage is not what we wish it was. Ultimately we decided that marrying one another is, for us, the right thing to do for the baby we’re expecting in about five months.

Marriage is the most direct way to ensure that we share full custody of our child and we both have total authority to make legal and medical decisions on his or her behalf. Marriage ensures that I can continue to freelance and stay on Ben’s insurance, along with the baby, wherever he ends up working in the future. Marriage ensures that if something terrible happened to me, Ben would have unquestioned legal rights to our child. Marriage will also help us at tax time and making smart fiscal decisions seems all the more important now that the expenses of raising a child are close upon us.

We resent the fact that homophobia continues to prevent these basic rights from being available to all families in this country, but at the end of the day we simply can’t risk allowing our personal beliefs or politics to have detrimental effects on our baby — at least not when we can choose otherwise. We are consciously taking advantage of our privilege as a woman and a man. We can only hope that the institution of marriage will continue to evolve and that perhaps we can help that process along by continuing to challenge homophobia, gender role assumptions, religious persecution, and other forms of oppression in our relationship and in our lives.

We want to be clear that we don’t feel any more committed to each other now than we did before we were married. We were in it for life three years ago, and we will continue to celebrate our commitment ceremony as our anniversary. Nevertheless, making sacred promises to one another once again was a beautiful experience, and we want to shout out a big thank you to Ariel and Saundrah for being our lovely witnesses. In fact, thanks to everyone who has supported us for the past three amazing years! We know how lucky we are, and we love you all.

I got my photos up from our weekend in Portland with heather and mark. Much fun was had, in spite of the weather.

photo by arielmeow

My weeklong birthday celebration culminated in a lovely Friday evening with my Seattle ladies, hosted by Heather and Arielv. It was just enough of a surprise to be delightful, but totally stress-free and laidback. I can’t stop talking about how lucky I feel to have found my way into such a warm, intelligent and fabulous group of women.

Late in the evening Ben and Mark returned from their manly adventures and cracked Heather and I up by lipsynching to Journey.

photo by heather corinna

I had such an amazing weekend! After an exceedingly enjoyable Friday night with our friend Saundrah, Ben and I got up Saturday and went straight to the as-is section at Ikea. We were looking for one or two new dressers to replace the broken crap that’s been gunking up our bedroom. We scored something even better – a big bookcase that fits perfectly in the space. I couldn’t resist spending Saturday night reorganizing the whole room, and it looks gorgeous now. We finally have a grown-up bedroom.

Saturday afternoon I finally got my new tattoo. Most of it, anyway. I still have to go back in a couple weeks for the color but all the outlines are done and it’s utterly fabulous. Seattleites, I can’t say enough good things about Alexis at Laughing Buddha. She’s amazingly talented and just a very cool person.

Saturday night also featured Blade Runner: The Final Cut at Cinerama and late in the evening a surprise visit from the lovely Andrea.

Sunday morning Ben continued my new favorite weekend tradition by bringing me coffee in bed. We hung out in our gorgeous new bedroom for a long time until we finally had to get up and get ready for a photo shoot with Elly. The three of us went first to the old Bridge Motel in Fremont where some graffiti artists have been hard at work. Ben and Elly snapped away while I just soaked it in. There were owls involved.

Then we went to a cemetery in Queen Anne, where I modeled for them in the gothiest outfit I could assemble. I’ll let you know when they both get their sets up. Elly’s already posted her favorite picture here. Can’t wait to see the rest!

Finally, as the icing on the cake of a perfect weekend, my friend Cristy came over for dinner Sunday night, and we walked down to Harvard Exit to see Control, the new movie about Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. It was great catching up with Cristy, and the movie was beautifully filmed and surprisingly funny — at least for the first two-thirds or so.

It’s all just the beginning folks. My birthday’s tomorrow, and I plan on celebrating right through next weekend. Wheee!

More pictures of my recent visit to Virginia are up on Flickr.

Having blogged about burningman, shambhala, meadowfab, and the moonlodge, I would be remiss to leave out another great episode of my summer. Don’t miss the recent flickrization of our visit from beth! It was so wonderful to have her here. I love it so much when my Virginia people come to visit. And we finally got around to doing the Underground Tour. Not as cool as I’d hoped to be honest, but still worth doing.

gratuitous pear shot courtesy of yelahneb

the pictures are up!

I also posted a few videos on YouTube. I tried to embed a couple here, but the code kept going wonky and I don’t have time to deal with it right now. They’re very short and silly, but fun to watch.

We’re back from Burning Man.

Overall it was as exhilarating as it was challenging. It was a week of beauty and adventure and art spread across a minefield of drama and angst. We survived and we had much fun, as you will see when Ben finishes editing and posting all the pictures.

Sadly, there are no pictures of the most lovely thing we saw, an enormous double rainbow spread all across the playa over the man. Oh wait, correction, duh, we have no pictures but there are plenty out there. (Bonus: here’s a gorgeous one that includes one of Gwen’s lanterns!)

On a less enthusiastic note, the Green Man theme was extremely perplexing. I seriously doubt that the fiery explosion of a giant oil derrick using 900 gallons of jet fuel and 2,000 gallons of liquid propane taught anybody anything about our deeply problematic dependence on oil. How exactly is blowing things up educational?

Since all 45,000+ Burning Man attendees travel to the barren playa via car or plane with only what they need to survive for the week, the burn is obviously not a sustainable event. I do think that most burners are pretty conscious about the environment, and it’s my understanding that there were some great permaculture and green living exhibits in the pavilion around the man before the arson/prank/earlyburn debacle. But for the most part, the green theme was overshadowed by the profusion of RVs, beer cans, and cigarette butts.

Still, I’m very glad I went. It was a spiritual journey and an experience I’ll be processing for quite some time. I feel like a burner, for whatever that’s worth, and I could see myself going again. In the end though, it’s mostly just a big wild free-for-all party that gains credibility and intensity from the crazy heat and dust storms and necessities of survival.

Thus my summer of festivals comes to its close. I’m regrouping, decompressing, getting back to work and trying to prioritize various goals and schemes. See you soon!

Oh what a wonderful weekend! I can’t wait for everybody to flickr their pictures of Shambhala. This gorgeous one is a preview from arielmeow.

My camera mostly stayed at the bottom of my bag because I was too busy dancin’ and relaxin.’ The only thing I have to share is this:

It’s very difficult to work after having so much fun. Especially with my NEW SEWING MACHINE tempting me constantly!

You can count on seeing many projects completed in the next couple weeks. After some serious people-watching at Shambles, I’m full of ideas for Burning Man costumes. Even though I’m already missing the special quality of my beautiful antique Singer (which I’m sure I’ll still pull out from time to time for simpler projects) this machine does so much more. Buttonholes! Easier zippers! Decorative stitching! Overcasting! I’m completely geeking out.

Meadowfabulous was a pleasure from beginning to end. There are tons of pictures going up in the flickr pool. As I write this, sweetie is working his way through the 700+ pictures he took. I just took a few to commemorate our evolving approach to camping.

When I met Ben, I was a pretty hardcore camper. I had a tiny lightweight backpacking tent that was ostensibly designed for two people but was uncomfortably cozy when we slept in it together – especially before we were dating. After three years of barely tolerating this situation, my claustrophobic sweetie decided he’d had enough . He demanded a tent he could stand up in and talked me into splurging on the Hobitat.

After that it was a rapid ascent in camping luxury. The new tent is so big and heavy that hiking into a camping spot isn’t very appealing. And of course we had to buy an adapter to plug the laptop into the car lighter. So, why not bring along an electric inflatable mattress and a mini-fridge?

Sleeping bags and pillowcases stuffed with clothes are no longer sufficient. Now we make our campbed with a full set of sheets, three unzipped sleeping bags, extra blankets and two fluffy pillows apiece. Add on the costume wardrobe that we’ve been accumulating and we are, without a doubt, disco camping.

With even more extensive camping on the near horizon, I’ve been concocting additional upgrades to our set-up. I’m thinking we need a set of color-coordinated storage tubs, maybe one of these hanging organizers, and definitely an appropriate doormat. This one rocks, but I think it clashes with the color scheme.

For anyone who hasn’t already seen this on Electrolicious, Elly Fine took an awesome set of pictures at Tuesday’s Salon of Shame, including portraits of readers (sweetie & myself included) with their diaries. My “diary” in this case being a sheaf of scribblings, but I’ll find my little pink kittycat diary with the lock one of these days.