Water from the hose...

From Spring 2010, just a reminder of a favorite spring and a favorite little buddy.  Might be time to start thinking about a new addition to the family again...

"We have had a cold, rainy, snowy, blowy spring here in Colorado which has made everything lush and green and the trees have been flowering powerfully and then suddenly the past two days have reached into the eighties. It feels like Summer! I spent much of the day planting my veggies and herbs. My favorite basil and cilantro will be great in recipes this summer! We got four heirloom tomato plants which are going to respectively produce black, yellow, green with yellow stripes and red with orange stripes. We were going to opt for the white tomatoes, but were just having a hard time imagining them in a salad. I am pretty sure I am going back to get them this week. My curiosity is peaked and there are still some sunny spots out there.

As I work in my gardens and yard, it is often that I am shadowed by either my Italian Greyhound (Toots aka Batman) or my little Tonkinese Manx cat (Pwowie and the fact that she is a manx is why she has just a tuft where most cats have tails). Toots will generally recline within feet of where I work if there is a nice, shady tree to spend time under, but Pwowie is fairly insistent about remaining under foot and exploring and examining the slightest changes in her territory. She has a large rock in my front garden that is her outpost, where she watches the world go by, called Pride Rock, but if I'm working in the yard, she simply must come and oversee.

After working in the vegetable garden it was time to pot some flowers in the front pots to adorn our wonderful front porch, where we like to sit and take in evening and is my outside writing office often during the day. My mind drifted as I listened to Hall & Oates covers on my iphone (by THE BIRD AND THE BEE, which I highly recommend) and watched my cat following me from place to place as though she were really doing something to assist rather than just sniffing everything and looking at me curiously. After potting several pots and making a wonderful mess on the porch, I hosed it off and filled the watering cans getting ready to tackle my next project.

As I came around the corner, back up onto the porch I caught my little buddy Pwowie in the act of taking a cooling summer drink off the freshly filled watering can and I was suddenly reminded of two things; illustrations in Beatrix Potter's wonderful Peter Rabbit books and those long ago days as a boy when "stolen" drinks from the hoses connected to houses up and down the street was simply the premium refreshment, even rivaling many a mom's lemonade or Kool-aid (though for me, NOTHING rivaled grape Kool-aid!)

I remember summer days when we came home so hot from our adventures in the fields, at the fishing holes or riding in our gang on our stingrays when we felt like we were somewhere near Hades. The August sun baked the skin a dark brown and parched the throat so dry. The water that ran in the ditches was cool on our feet and fun to play in with hours of digging out holes where crawdads backed in trying to get away from a bunch of rascals or having water skipper races, where we each picked ours and tracked it up or down the ditch as it skittered across the top of the water either going with the flow or racing upstream against it. But somehow we all knew the chocolate milk looking water wasn't water we needed to quench our unbearable thirst. So we would hustle to one of our houses and turn the water on at the spigot and wait until it ran all the sun-heated water out of the hose and went cool to cold. Then we would drink so deeply that our stomachs would bloat, impatiently pushing each other aside to get a drink and invariably turning it into a cooling water fight, with the lucky one in control of the hose tethered to the house and hose as we scrambled to find other sources to drench him or her and steal away the hose. There simply has never been a more refreshing drink of water in my life that those. The water flowing out of that hose was like nectar.

So, this summer as I toil in the gardens, I will make sure there is plenty of cool water for my little buddy in the watering can and I will be drinking from the hose. Now I am off to my favorite gardening center to pick up some white tomatoes and I just thought of a place where I could put a catnip plant for Pwowie."

Bringing back the Chronicles of the Squirrels...?

It looks like another spring of Squirrel mania.  Yesterday I spotted three when the woodpecker was taking great liberty with my chimney.  I think I spy a nest, meaning there will be another gang.  My Italian Greyhound, Tootsie aka Batman is keeping a vigilant eye on the back windows.  Please reference the word cloud, click 'squirrels' or 'critter count' to see my saga in the past if you are not familiar.  Somehow, someway, this is all going to be a book someday.

What kind of squirrel capers would you like to read about?  OR, do you suggest to leave this subject be and find another saga? 

Newspaper debut!

I found this old newpaper article in a drawer with a bunch of old stuff.  

Two things stand out about this article: having been in numerous newspapers for my books and writing, I could count on my left hand how many times my last name has been spelled correctly.  ALWAYS two T's in the middle, when the proper spelling is MATOTT!  

Also, funny about this article is that the teachers of the Montessori school I went to figured out how to call something a "method" when in reality they were just getting around child labor laws and getting their silver polished for free... SHEESH!

The impact of social media

I generally stay out of public policy, religion and political discussions on my social media forums, but this is none of that.  

Much of my career and public speaking is about anti-bullying and KONY is the most evil kind of bully.

This is about children and their innocence and helping them.  EVERYONE should be about that!

There is a campaign afoot to make a man famous, well actually infamous TODAY! 

It is a campaign of celebrity dimension.  

A campaign to use "fame" or 'infame', but actually awareness, as a tool to bring him to justice.  Because he is a monster, much like the monster Hitler and his ilk proved to be.  His evil is happening NOW!

We are in a world that focuses on celebrity, titillation, gossip and breaking news.  

Train wrecks get views.  Shock sells.  SO, someone has taken it up himself'/themselves to make a man named KONY infamous, nothing is more shocking that what this man and his evil army have been allowed to do! 

I have mentioned the name KONY to five people I know who read the newspaper daily, keep up on world news and not one knew his name yesterday, nor did I.  

WE all know his name today.  

When I first viewed this video it had over 9,000,000 views on youtube, the day before, somewhere in the 32,000 range (according to a commenter on the youtube video) and at this writing over 32,000,000... 

two hours later I posted this photo below 4,000,000 more hits, 
KEEP IT UP! 
 
Mark my words, this will hit WORLD NEWS TONIGHT!  

IF you help, it will go beyond that.  It will create the DEMAND to take this guy out of power!  

Watch the video (every time someone watches $ for ad dollars goes to the foundation).  

Forward the link to your social media circle and ask them to do the same.  Blog about it, tweet about it, post it on your Facebook wall.  Make a difference.  Pick up the phone and let your representatives know you care
about this issue.  

As the man in video says, If someone kidnapped my son and made him kill it would be all over the news.  This is exactly what this monster and his regime are doing.  

STOP HIM NOW!

And so, predictably, the backlash begins.  Which is inevitable when something blows up this large.  Critics will crawl out of every nook and cranny to try to either destroy the momentum or capitalize on the numbers for their own self promotion. I have seen numerous conversations about this and how the organization that brought this video to bear isn't accountable, is too late, isn't effective in putting the money in the right places, blah, blah, blah...

 This is my response to the naysayers:

Whenever someone takes a HARD stand on something, people come out of the woodwork to criticize it.  This is a good thing in some ways, because it keeps it balanced and creates an environment where the propagator of the information must defend his or her positions.  

 I personally would rather err on the side of sensationalizing something that requires this kind of social media attention to save but ONE child's life, rather than get callus and 'throw the baby out with the bathwater', because the organization doesn't meet all my particular standards.  This is what often keeps people from doing good, doing God work; the thought that there are people involved who may not handle our "precious money" precisely correctly should never stop us from following our leading.  

There are many organizations founded on doing what is right and they will make mistakes because they are human like me.  There is a youtube right now stating the organization responsible for this KONY 2012 video only puts some 30% of the proceeds toward charity, which is, according to the naysayers ONLY $2-3 Million of a $9-ish Million budget. 

 SO, I ask this to the naysayers: how much did YOU raise?  Therefore, how much did YOU give?  This is video journalism, with a point, to convince, to cause change.  We can argue that it is late.  But again, I say, what are YOU doing?  What am I doing?  I heard of the Invisible Children years ago, but alas sent one check and went on my way.  NOW, I see what the fruits of this monster's labors have been since.  It is time to ACT!  

Be smart, but ACT!

And by the way, in the two hours since I last updated this blog the views are nearing 50,000,000, expect doubling within 24 hours.

"Evil flourishes when good men do nothing."

From sketch to finish...

Recently during my school visits I have been doing workshops where more and more kids are telling me they like to express themselves with drawing and art in collaboration with other students who can write well.  Lot's of dynamic-duos are creating comic strips, small books and stories and ideas.  I thought it would be fun to see a little process here.  When I write a story, it is generally chock full of details, illustrative ideas, which a talented illustrator is then able to translate into pictures to make my words come alive.  The sketches below, on the left are actually quite finished, but generally an illustrator does numerous revisions to get to that point.  THEN, on the right, the color is added and the images come alive! 

In some cases with these examples, I turned in hundreds of descriptive words to go with the rhyming text and then was able to throw my words away when the pictures depicted them so well.

These pictures, drawn by the wonderfully talented Mark Ludy were drawn with a bic pen and scanned, then colored on a computer in InDesign.  Very cool process and quite different from other illustrator's techniques in some of my other books.

What's the story?

CLICK THE PIC FOR A CLOSE UP LOOK

When I visit schools, I try to encourage the students to find the story in EVERYTHING!  So, as I was leaving Rock Springs, Wyoming on a twin prop airplane from a my second trip to the wonderful North Park Elementary School, I spied something from my window.

The steam rising up from the stacks formed something that looked familiar and the CLOUD like character began to work its way into my imagination.  

WHAT DO YOU SEE? 

What could you write about?  

What is right outside YOUR window right now that deserves YOUR attention?

'nuff said!