Joni Mitchell and Perler Beads

Perler Beads have taken over our kitchen!

Robert says we have a little sweat shop going. I'm constantly ironing these things. Some are gifts, some are tree ornaments, many I have no idea what we'll do with.

There are beads and boards everywhere, which is interesting when you have a 19-month old in the house. Rachael has been cranking these things out like crazy. Rebecca does them too, but she usually makes her own patterns, which are really unique. I'm too lazy to take pictures right now, but she made a few that are a letter (like "R") decorated with flowe

This weekend we were doing beads for a few hours and I dug out some Joni Mitchell albums I haven't heard in a long time.


I'm not sure why I thought of them, but I started off with Ladies of the Canyon and then played For the Roses, which I liked so much I played it about three times.

[In typical Jenny Style, I said to Robert later, "Should I be concerned that our kids spent hours listening to an album that has the words d***, f***, and h*roin on it?"]

That all prompted me to dig out my Joni Mitchell Anthology and play the piano after everyone else went to bed ... and to find interview clips of her through the decades. Gotta love that Internet!

It's interesting to hear how much Joni's speaking voice has changed over the years; don't know if that's an aging thing, or all the smoking, or what. She said she started smoking when she was nine! She almost died from Polio at that age too, which I already knew, but didn't know she spent Christmas in the hospital ... sound familiar? I need to tell Rachael.

It ocurred to me that I've always really liked biographies, but didn't know it until recently. To me, "biography" always means a book you had to read for school about George Washington or something. I never really thought, "Ooh, I'm enjoying this biography!" when I was eight and devoured everything I could find about Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan.