My friend Simon’s latest design is NOW LIVE on Threadless.com!
Now that it’s approved, it needs your vote in the next week to become a sweet T-shirt!

Click below to get started.

If you like the design, please share it! You can post it to facebook, twitter, etc., straight from the threadless page.

This T-shirt design is accompanied by a story co-written by yours truly, along with Simon (proving that two opinionated redheads can work together)!
You can read it here:
Page 1, Page 2, Page 3

My friend Simon’s latest submission on Threadless is undergoing approval, and it features a story co-written by yours truly. The story and design are both called “The Room in the Elephant.”
The design isn’t up on threadless.com yet, but here’s the story:
Page 1, Page 2, Page 3

Once the design is approved, you can vote for it to become a shirt (I’ll keep you posted).

As part of this year’s One Laptop per Child campaign, you can actually buy the laptops that are made just for small hands and flourishing minds. It’s the first year they’ve ever been for sale. And when you buy one, OLPC gives another to a child in need. Check out the “Give One, Get One” promotion.

Here are the “Give One, Get One” laptops for sale!

Jed, Archer, and I attended the Election Night rally in Chicago last night, which was clearly a history-making event.

There was much discussion about whether to take Archer along with us. There’d be a crowd, sure. There’d be excitement, sure. But I gotta say, Archer was the biggest reason I was excited to see whether Obama would become our next president. I wanted to be able to tell Archer, “You were there!” It turns out that we spotted several babies and kids, of families who had the same idea.

Archer was there, but he slept through almost the whole thing! We couldn’t believe it.

We arrived downtown when the line into the ticketed area seemed to stretch into infinity along Michigan Avenue. As we tried to find the end, it was around 10 o’clock and cheers erupted from the Hilton across the street. CNN must have just called Florida for Obama, or maybe that’s when Fox News called the whole thing for Obama.

I spotted an old friend and coworker Ron in line with his wife Julia, who invited us to join them. In the end, the line didn’t matter – tickets were quickly checked by a line of mounted police at the entry point whether we’d waited in line or walked over from the other direction. The event was well-organized. After a long walk to the rally area, we came upon a split entry – one for folks with bags, one for folks without. Security personnel pored over our tickets and IDs. And then we were finally on our way to that giant rally. As we cut through the streets that are transformed annually for the Taste of Chicago, we heard the sounds of John McCain’s gracious concession speech from the huge towers of speakers next to the stage. It took a good three more minutes of walking before we reached the crowd. And what a crowd it was.

We made our way around, following the contour of the crowd, until we had a good view. A view of the stage? Not even close. The rally was so huge that we were all going for a view of the jumbotron. It was a fantastic screen. Why go downtown for a view of a screen, you ask? It was about the excitement of the event, and the crowd – people full of positive energy, taking a collective sigh of relief after eight long years.

Watch “A Nation for the People – Grant Park rally”

Watch “Yes We Can – Grant Park rally”

Recently, I got the chance to meet up with an old friend of mine for a quick breakfast before work. She’s lived in the UK for the last several years, serving the sustainability movement there through smart architecture (Indeed, very cool.) She and her fiancé were in the midst of crossing the country via car after crossing the pond, in order to attend her family reunion in Wyoming last month. It was great to see her after so many years, and fairly impossible to get caught up in less than an hour over too-buttery soufflés and breakfast sandwiches. Eliza met Jed, and they found a connection over movies (no surprise there!)
17 years… it’s hard to believe.

I honestly don’t know how Eliza and I met. I was 8 or 9 years old at the time. She was one of my rare friends who lived as far out in Parker as I did, east of Plano (where we attended school, one year apart). She lived even further east (AKA “further out in the country”) from my old house. Her family lived so close to Southfork Ranch that they often received passersby asking for directions. If they were feeling especially salty, they’d send them the wrong way.

Eliza was rare in other ways, too – for the most part, she grew up without television. Ohmigod! Very different from most kids at the time, especially myself. When I went to Eliza’s house, I knew we’d be running around the yard (acreage is more like it), exploring the creek behind her house, climbing atop the roof of her fort (yes, an actual fort!), swimming in the neighbor’s pool, or – alright – sneaking a few minutes of TV from a tiny black-and-white set in a secret upstairs location (don’t tell her parents!)

By the time I was 12, we were fairly inseparable. I’d had her join up with my soccer team (the Panthers), with hilarious results. I jest. Hey, at least we had fun.

But then, I found out that Eliza had to move to Wyoming. Major bummer. Even as far north in Texas as I lived, that big square state seemed so far away. We probably talked on the phone every month or so after the move, and things seemed to be going well for them all. Eliza’s big brother, Michael, finally got to stretch his Eagle Scout wings out in the big, open Wyoming landscape. Her parents were adjusting well, too, as was Eliza. But I wanted to visit this mysterious place, and see my friend again. Eliza and I were both involved in the Girl Scouts (my involvement was more peripheral, since I hadn’t been able to relate to more than one of the little snobs in my 4th-grade troop back in the day). She suggested a cool camp there for the following summer, which had a lot of separate programs. One was a movie-making camp. By the end, we’d be certified auteurs. Sold!

My visit to Wyoming spanned an extra ten days in addition to the camp, so it totaled about three weeks. We spent time at her new house, in the small town of Saratoga (so small, residents picked up their mail at the post office). We also took a number of road trips, including one to Steamboat, Colorado where we observed a veterinary procedure (I was interested in veterinary medicine at the time). The movie-making camp was fantastic and fun – it’s amazing how down-to-earth all the Wyoming girl scouts were. (It was then that I understood why my hometown was known for its snobs.) The camp leaders went by fun code names – one of them was Quasar. Our two leaders made a lot of Monty Python references… (That must be where it all began!)

Oh, and the movie we made? It was a modernized version of Cinderella in a camp context, complete with Cinderella’s evil stepsisters forcing her to clean latrines.

I have to admit, even after receiving the acceptance letter and author’s contract, I was wondering if the story would actually end up in the magazine. I’d ordered several copies of the issue, so I’d have felt pretty silly if it hadn’t.

It turns out that Faces magazine, part of Cobblestone Publishing (which also includes Cobblestone, Cricket, Odyssey and Muse) still liked my story enough to print it – and it’s IN the April 2008 issue! You can get a copy here – just use the link on the right. (It’s the issue called “Go Green!”, shown at the bottom.)

The story is a retelling of “Old Man Winter” after the advent of global warming. The most unexpected feeling came when I opened the story to find three beautiful illustrations. The illustrations were made specifically for the story, showing three scenes that I had written. I can’t even describe it. But I can express my pride in this story’s potential to help kids make more conscious, earth-friendly choices.

I had written the query for the story as part of an assignment for a class called “Writing for Children and Teens” at the Institute of Children’s Literature. It’s a class that you can take more or less at your own pace. My pace has been slow, because I’m working full-time and sporadically nurturing other hobbies. How slow, you ask? I started the class in fall 2005, and I just sent my second-to-last assignment two weeks ago. At the beginning of the class, I was paired with my instructor Constance, who has extensive experience in the field (she was an editor at Highlights magazine). I send each assignment to her, through snail-mail (whoa), and she sends comments and suggestions within the next several weeks. Throughout the class, I also learn more and more about the submission process, so that I can market my work as well as write it.

My most recent assignment was a chapter outline for a novel-length project for teens. The next is three complete chapters from the outline. From there, I’ll have what I need to submit query packages to a few book publishers that I feel are good fits for the project. I can’t wait!

The first clue were the three helicopters hovering above my neighborhood this morning as I left my building. Next were the trademark blue “City of Chicago” sawhorses lining a street corner on my way to the Montrose brown line el stop. Once I was just west of Ravenswood Avenue, I experienced an oddly brown mud/ice concoction underfoot. I saw some activity in the street ahead as I entered the station, but I focused on getting my train. I’d hear something about it at some point, right?

On my way up to the platform, a girl was taking a photo with her camera phone from the first flight of stairs. “Whoa,” I said. Here’s why:

A water main had broken along Montrose, East of Damen, at about 1:30 this morning. The water was shut off at 7, and there’s a big clean-up job ahead. Several cars that were parked along this stretch were submerged or towed away.

My coworker Tim took both of these photos. He’s calling it “Crater Day.” I blame J.J. Abrams for devising this elaborate publicity stunt to remind Chicago to see Cloverfield.

A few points to remember as you’re riding the CTA trains in Chicago (we Chicagoans call it “the el”):

1. Don’t worry so much about getting ready for your stop. Standing near the door for your whole ride just puts you in the way of other people trying to use the doors. Similarly, preparing yourself for the next stop well beforehand by forcing a tiny path through the rest of us (packed like sardines) is equally curious and irritating. Seriously, chillax! I have never seen anyone miss their stop because they didn’t get out in time.

2. Use your inside voice. When you’re in a group on the el, people aren’t amused by you unless they have nothing better to do. Same thing goes for cell phone convos. No one cares! In fact, they’d rather you shut your gab-hole so they can read their books. Red line riders are sometimes exempt from this rule, because the train itself can’t be bothered to stay quiet.

3. Seats have borders, too. When you’re lucky enough to score one of those not-quite ergonomic seats on the el, you get all the space within the confines of those nifty lines that border its fuzzy blue (or brown) surface. In other words, no one should cross borders with their giant elbows as they read the paper or text their (probably equally self-entitled) friend.

4. Check your scent. Everyone knows that voices carry – but breath travels, too. Carry a pack of gum with you for those post-coffee mornings.

I know I’ve missed a few – feel free to let me know your El-iquette additions.