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Who even are you?

Cherry tomato

Hello, Reader;

I was just thinking about this personal digital space our family has … whatever kind of corner of the world it is, we can call it home and lay claim to it.  It has been quite a while since I wrote out an “About Us” and maybe if I make one, I can use it as a good stake to pin down one wall of our li’l tent, here. 

I don’t know how you stumbled into this site or if we may have met before.  We’ve owned this domain and kept it in one form or another for a very long time — well over two decades — and in that time, life has been lived.  Back in the days of a more open internet and a more personally connected world, this was how we shared a lot of life updates as well as selling the creations we made. 

Our goal is to continue to use this as a space where we can connect with friends, family and community we have built along the way as we navigate life. 

“We “are a family, and there are three of us.  There were two when we began, here, but our third joined us along the way when our kiddo was born 15 years back. 

I will begin with myself and let everyone else take up as they wish, or as they wish me to…

My name is Linnea. 

I surprise myself every year with how rooted I have become in my place, especially since it feels a little like I blew in on the wind.  To continue that metaphor, my seed was nurtured in a family of origin which was as loving as it was egalitarian, and guided by a doctrine of service, helpfulness and hopefulness. 

In my first emergence, as a child, I was headstrong and justice-minded.  Though I also took every opportunity to disappear and disengage into my own thoughts. 

In my urgency to make sense of the world, to live boldly, and to see something new, I caught a wanderlust as a teenager, and nothing could stop me from forging on ahead.  I bused, drove, and hitchhiked all over the Pacific Northwest and then the larger U.S.

Later, I found a traveling partner, and we made a life together.  We made art, nurtured a community of beloved friends, and always lived close to the bone.  It was joyous. 

When our kiddo came along, we shifted our focus and priorities for the next few years and enjoyed every minute of the fleeting early childhood that we were privileged to witness.  Once they were in school, I decided to return to academia myself; I was really inspired by all the helpers I saw in the world when our child was small, and all of the people who assisted or supported us along the way. 

Now, our kiddo is in high school, and we are both full-time worker bees.

I still think in pictures and metaphor, as I’m sure you’ve noticed if you’ve read this far.  I still want to create art and communicate the connections I see in the world. 

Even as chaos reigns increasingly… in the environment, in politics, in social life, I feel like I have something to offer and I hope to have an opportunity to do something meaningful. 

These days, a lot of our creations live within the confines of our home and yard, which we’ve been working on landscaping and gardening for the last few years.  One of my goals for the next year is to begin to build the glass studio back up in our garage, which will provide me with a much-needed outlet for producing liquid art, with the satisfaction of relatively immediate and visceral formation.

I will keep you posted.  We will all try to engage here, at our own pace, to try be part of this world of online interaction.  If anyone is reading this, I ask that you please do the same!  Connect with us and find a way to own your own voice in the digital world that we share. 

Stay cool and collective, beloveds. 

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Building a strong shore.

Sometimes it seems like I’m riding a current and just following what seems right.  I keep on having this same conversation with folks about doing the right thing vs. the wrong thing.  But when I think about all the intention I have put behind the way I live my life, the places I focus my energy, the ways I encourage my own growth… it makes me wonder if this is a river I’m riding at all.  Could I be riding the current and building it at the same time?

I’ve always fixated on that quote… I heard it from Utah Phillips, but I guess it was Thoreau who was originally credited with the thought,

“ The path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked”.

I always heard it as a negative thing, but I was wrong. Maybe along the way, the path of least resistance also builds the shape of the shores.  It selects which rocks to pick up and tumble along to the next bend.  It challenges the roots of the trees and other plants nearby to gnarl and sink in — for danger of being dragged away.  It creates little hollows and nooks for life to occur in all its furry, scaly, beautiful, disgusting, wonder.  

The current is going to keep going.  I guess that’s why they call it that.  It’s a force of nature, after all.  Even when we fight it, we can be intentional: we can gnarl together, and fight for each other, and create nooks of safety and warmth and community.  The path of least resistance exists in contrast to, and because of, the pockets of resistance that it meets.

This is a torrential time we are living in and we could all challenge ourselves to live better into our values and beliefs.  We owe that to one another.  

Sending love to anyone who might find this rambling trail of thought. As well as everyone else.

Here, have a picture of Indie. He’s our youngest cat and we still call him “the kitten” even though he is almost two years old.

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Remember the internet?

Image of a small patch of summer flowers

I’ve been remembering all the different iterations of the internet I’ve lived on and participated in. My local library BBS. America Online. Geocities and Netscape and Yahoo and Forums and MySpace.

Somewhere along the way Facebook became ubiquitous. They won the social media wars and it felt like the only place to reach friends, share our art and our family’s growth, build community. I guess in a lot of ways, for us, it served its purpose. But in a lot of other ways it also broke the rest of the internet. It broke the sense of homegrown creativity and organic, interest-driven community that came with the “world wide web”. I don’t know about you, but I got used to being spoon-fed while I was there. In a pattern reminiscent of how I once played spider solitaire, I kept getting drawn back and scrolling just a little more.

Over the last few years I learned to temper my use of that website but it had my social patterns so maladjusted that I didn’t really properly compensate. I became more and more reclusive on- and off-line. Even when I went back, I was self-aware enough that I didn’t want to feed the thing so I hardly ever posted, or even interacted meaningfully with other people’s posts. Just kept scrolling like an addict.

Of course it got a lot shittier. I actually blamed myself and the way I used the platform for the changes I saw, and for a minute it actually made me start to interact with other posts more, or occasionally post myself. I told myself I was reaching out to my community and it was a step in the right direction, socially/emotionally. It didn’t change my experience as a user and it didn’t make me feel more socially engaged in any meaningful way.

My day-job is heavily social and it burns me out of interacting with people. It also continually reminds me how important it is to have our people to care for us, to build us up and to give us others to prioritize.

This last year has been… a lot. It has been a lot for the world. I have felt overwhelmed more often than I can say. I am also coming to understand my body and my brain in new ways, and learning to better support myself so that I can be a more active community member, in a check-on-your-friends kind of way. In a remembering to text back or even text first kind of way. I’m trying to treat this social part of me like an atrophied muscle – it just needs practice, exercise, stretching and resistance. I’ll build it back up a little at a time.

Just like I’ll build up this website. Like our phone numbers, we’ve held onto it for many many years. It has changed with the different eras of our life together but we have held onto it because we are not hiding who we are from anyone. I’m not sure what is next in store for it, but I will try to refocus some of that scrolling energy into sharing my thoughts here. I might be screaming into a void, but I think I was doing that before, too.

I’ve also been dipping my toes into a little handiwork again, and Ian has been playing with a fun new medium. Jubilee is blowing us away with their artwork and maybe we will all dabble in sharing our creations here again.

The Facebook pages will be gone by the end of the week. I don’t know how it’ll go, but we are setting out into the wide open field of the internet. Reclaiming the World Wide Web. Planting a garden to share with the neighbors.

See you out there in the somewhere.

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Hello, world.

We are here, we are here. With slightly friendlier technology on this end and a little bit of motivation, we hope to be sharing more art with you again soon.

I randomly looked us up on the Wayback machine since it recently came back to life and I found this blast from the past, circa 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20070227085400/http://www.hummblebee.com:80/ I worked countless hours on that website and the camera we had was a relic, even at that time.

I don’t know if we’ll ever set this up as a commercial website again. I don’t know what it will be, but if I am going to publicly post thoughts, share art or ideas or family updates… it may as well be in a space we have ownership of. I hope being set up to more easily post here will encourage us to be more active, both creatively and socially. I do miss sharing creativity and community with like-minded folks… I don’t love that the rigors of late-stage capitalism have drained us of the energy to engage.

I can’t promise anything, but maybe you’ll hear from the rest of the family as well. The youngest among us is also the most artistically prolific … who knows what the future might hold. Hopefully something good. The world needs it.

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A delicious Vegan breakfast bake that we’ve been enjoying!

Breakfast Bake With Just Egg & Beyond Sausage

Click the picture to link to the recipe page!

We have made this several times and hit it out of the park every time! It does have a hour or so bake time but its fairly easy to prepare and makes enough for 3-5 to eat as much as they would want! The leftovers go great in a burrito ( or as a midnight snack ).
We have found that not adding more sausage is a good thing, it tends to dominate the flavor, but adding in some Fakon ( Fake Bacon ) is nice too. Also, we use a TON of garlic in most of the bakes lately, like more than a bulb. We tend to favor bakes these days, partially because there’s usually leftovers, and it gives us time to clean up! The bread is really the heart of the bit, it soaks up the Just Egg and gives everything more texture. As far as cost, its in the medium range:

  • Just Egg = Usually about $5.
  • Sausage= $5 for the package, but we only use 2 links
  • Violife Cheese = $5 ( we use more than the called for cup , about a whole bag! )
  • Veg and Whatnot =$5 or so

Really not bad when considering eating out on a weekend morning for use usually runs about $60 all told, the work seems worth the payoff. We would love to have someone over to make this for sometime! <3 Thanks to Vaughn Chambers at his old website “veganrecipehub” for the great recipe idea!

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Hello friends, old and new.

Maybe we have met before. Perhaps we crossed paths On The Road, maybe we were vending at an event where you saw us. Did someone refer you to us, or maybe tell you we make an item they own that you commented on? Maybe someone gifted you with one of our creations!

You could have met us more recently, in our local community, and in our capacity as parents, children, teachers, or students.

There are three humans in our family: Linnea, Ian, and Jubilee.

It’s been a long and meandering path to get where we are today and we will likely share it with you here in little bits and pieces. These days, we make things mostly for fun and less often for sale.

We get up to a lot of learning, thinking, and working to love each other the best we can. Hopefully we can use this space once again and more regualarly to keep y’all posted on our family’s happenings and progresses and interests. Now that Jubilee is so much more grown and has a lot to say for themself, maybe they will even share an occasional artwork or story with you.

None of us are much for social media these days but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to update those who care to know about what is happening in our lives.