flip18436572 is the GREATEST artist on Earth!

Look, I know you think your friends and your artists and your artist friends are the most awesome. I'm sure you're very sincere in your belief. However, I know my friends REALLY are the best ...

Hmmm, what's this? One of our freshly-former-Special Forces piglets brought this upstairs while I was on the stationary, so it HAD to be important. Because even the Special Forces folks know NOT TO BOTHER ME WHILE I'M CYCLING.

OH EM GEE IT'S FROM FLIPPY!!!

It is utterly gorgeous.

It means so much to me to receive this extraordinary handcrafted gift right on the heels of my IMWA attempt, just in time for Christmas, and in plenty of time to amulet-up my luck for IMNZ in March

Mutti came toodling around right about then and zeroed in on it. She may have Alzheimer's, but she definitely has an eye for special presents (good thing we didn't arm-wrestle over this one like we did the Manatees mug my mentor group sent me, but then again, it was already around my neck and she would have had to strangle me).

She was a professional photographer and some of her work is still on display in our National Museum (kind of like our Smithsonian, I guess), since her subjects were always cultural--indigenous art, people, ceremonies, traditions. She's still considered an expert in Southeast Asian and particularly Indonesian textiles, and if anyone knows what that means, it means the woman knows a helluva lot about everything art, craft, and culture. (Pretty much everything about everything. C'mon. She's my mom).

She loved this gift so much she cried. Being deaf and now having Alzheimer's, she really has what my sister and I have come to call "bat radar"--a sharpening of the sense of the love and care emanating from something, and she really sensed it in this work. She commented that it was amazing that you got all the elements of triathlon into something so compact, and yet it wasn't crowded at all and the circles and curved lines gave it the sense of freedom of being outside.

"You tell your friend that your mother is very impressed," she said.

And so I am, and so am I.

{MELON PRESS} to you, Phil.