Chez PLJ

I like to say trick or treat. We are going to the gym for a dance. I love to dance along with the songs am about to go to the gym to dance along with acupple of songs I had a great praid. I was walking around the schoool with the song The Monster Mash. Tonight I’m about to go trick or treating with my dad.

Jonathan

The costume construction continues. We had our first fitting with Jon in the wheelchair and nothing self-destructed, yay!

General structure done; now for the fiddly bits and paint! Surely you know by now!

Here’s how Jon’s costume progresses.

Is it obvious yet?

Ad for diet dog food. (This could only be done in Europe!)

We certainly didn’t mean Jon’s Hallowe’en costume to be any sort of top secret project (as per the Oct. 21 post), but we try to keep ourselves amused. Here’s what it currently looks like:

Partial view of the costume, a/o noon today. Any guesses?

Every year many person-hours are spent doing Jon’s costume. Part of it is because of our Hallowe’en-happy neighbourhood (every year a bunch of neighbours down the block put on a Hallowe’en spectacular in front of their houses, with a huge stage, much choreography, even a lighting grid. Literally hundreds of people show up to watch—how do you compete with that?); part of it is because of Jon’s interesting costume choices (he picked last year’s mountain goat, not us!)

Mainly, though, because Jon’s in a wheelchair, we have to think of clever and always time-consuming ways to integrate the chair with the costume. (Or maybe we don’t have to, but you know how designers/illustrators are with creative projects! Your average graphic designer also goes overboard with their toddler’s birthday invitations, but I digress…) So how do you integrate the chair with a mountain goat? Throw in a mountain! There’s not much precedent to go by; you generally don’t find commercial patterns for wheelchair costumes. So when you do come across some great costumes, it’s very gratifying. Check out the wheels and babe of this dude!

This morning, we’re an audio blog!

When Jon came home yesterday and nonchalantly told me he’d be the man today, I humoured him, “Oh yeah, what are you going to say?”

Without pausing, he launched into this.

(It’s post-breakfast, so it’s a little slurpy)

We’ve been busy working on things for the past few weeks, and now’s the time to spill the beans about it. It’s a couple of projects that will go under the collective banner of Doodle of the Week, related to our past lives as kids’ science authors. While we work on the main event for the site, we’ve decided to serve up an appetizer: our 1993 out-of-print book Born Smart?—all 113 pages of it—will be posted on the site. It’s digitally remastered—scanned, cleaned-up and coloured—and content updated where it needs to be. Courtesy of our French publisher, we’re posting it in French, too. And it will take a while to do, so we’ll post about two pages a week.

And there’s something more exciting coming to the site too; we can’t talk about it just yet.

We’re looking forward to this. The freelance lifestyle can be terribly reactive: after all, you’re job is to respond to the client’s needs, or their arbitrary wants. Sometimes that can leave one a little cynical. Both of us feel great getting back to this kind of work.

It will take time to get this into full swing, and it will be entirely in our spare time until we can figure out how (or if) it can generate income.

In the meantime, don’t spread the word just yet. We’ll let you know when things are about to get interesting on the site. Stay tuned.