This little guy arrived special delivery, mail dropped from Barbara Haiges to Stan and Mary Bruederle.  They brought him to me from California along with my Writer’s Magazine and my Chico’s catalog. Chimpie comes courtesy of MailChimp, my email list management and delivery service who does such an awesome job for free on my enewsletter. Now that’s a lot of e’s, and probably more than you want to know, but he’s so cute I wanted to introduce him.

MailChimp, meet the lovely people who read my blog.

Honorable and respected readers, meet Chimpie.

The first thing I did was show him around town. We met Stan and Mary in the parking lot of the Shemer Art Center in Phoenix where we planned to take a look at the MicroDwell exhibit, a builder’s showcase of alternative spaces for simple living. I’m thinking it’s not so simple to upcycle materials into clever designs that fills holes in your life and call it simple. (Upcycle is a new word in my vocabulary—definition: upcycle one ups recycle.)

This captured my imagination. Friends and neighbors, join me in a MicroDwell colony, a lovely space where artists, craftsman and hobbyists circle their MicroDwellings to practice their arts and crafts and hobbies in a simple, supportive environment. Mine is the writer studio fashioned completely from discarded oak wine barrels and old library shelving; Mary’s is the quilt space pieced together from all natural, gluten free, plant-based  materials; Joel and Stan have the double wide garage that violates all MicroDwelling standards. They make up for their lack of appreciation for simple living by building model airplanes out of the cheapest materials they can find on the internet.

Here you see Chimpie demonstrating a MicroDwelling you can build for the kids that provides space for their Checkers competitions and guitar jam sessions.

So, I was explaining my plan to uppurpose Chimpie as a blog tour guide when Joel saw the light. He decided that Chimpie was the perfect weight to balance The Foul Flyer, his RC airplane built from Dollar Tree foam board using a hot glue gun. This runs afoul of my plan, but I’m willing to go there for the sake of the environment.