Though I haven't made an appearance here in some time, the last day of the year and the 35th anniversary of my birth seems like a natural time to revisit this space and share some words to close out the year.
It's been a growing season, this 2008. And for the experience I'm 75% grateful and 25% borderline post traumatic stress symptomatic. My vision of who I am and my ability to shape my own character and worldview were shaken this year in a rather humbling and sometimes frightening way. But the benefits have been enormous: trust, love, honesty--with myself, with God, with friends who I now know love me far more than I ever had imagined before. And that has made it worth it. So much energy throughout my life has gone into building a facade of independence and strength. Finally having to admit and accept that I'm fragile has been freeing. I'm learning to be kinder to myself, and as a result it's easier to be kind to others. And that's a good thing.
I've also witnessed suffering in others that has left me without words. The breakdown of marriages due to infidelity and horrible cruelty. The loss of loved ones from old age or disease. Illness and frightening diagnoses of cancer, diabetes.... My heart is heavy for these friends and acquaintances whose lives are being changed forever. And I am more grateful than ever for good health, while realizing it's not something to be taken for granted.
Friends moved away. Some of my favorite people who I can now no longer see and touch and smell and just BE with on a regular basis. They are family, and I miss them.
So it's been a sad year in ways. Scary at times. But above all, tranformative. In a good way. People I loved a year ago I now love more deeply and more honestly, if only because I realized at last just how much we need each other and how much sweeter fellowship can be when you stop trying to take care of everything yourself. I appreciate my husband's love and patience and kindness more. I trust God in a way I never have before--some days actively relying on Him for each and every breath. And my prayers are genuine and urgent and, in a word, real.
I hope that you are well and healthy, that you know you're loved, that blessings abound, and that 2009 brings all of those things and more.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Honk if You Have a Love/Hate Relationship With Bumper Stickers
I've been seeing these yellow and blue "=" sign bumper stickers for months and months, but never remember to research what they mean. 
My mind can rest easy now. They're distributed by Human Rights Campaign to promote equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender folks.
I'm not a bumper sticker person. Are you? I'm not against them in any way--I get that they reflect one's personality, values, etc. and frequently they keep me quite entertained on the road. I just would never put one on my own car. Wanna know why? Well, I'll tell you:
My mind can rest easy now. They're distributed by Human Rights Campaign to promote equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender folks.I'm not a bumper sticker person. Are you? I'm not against them in any way--I get that they reflect one's personality, values, etc. and frequently they keep me quite entertained on the road. I just would never put one on my own car. Wanna know why? Well, I'll tell you:
- I'm a private person and don't necessarily want to advertise how I feel about things to everyone and anyone.
- I hate conflict. Really, really hate it. And by putting my opinions out there I'm automatically opening myself up to hear people's differing views. Even people I like and don't want to disagree with.
- There are crazy lunatics out there who wouldn't think twice about doing something stupid to me and/or my car simply because they don't agree with a sticker.
- As soon as they start to look faded and worn, I think they look tacky. (What can I say? I'm a product of the American consumerist culture.)
- They're a pain to get off, right? I mean, I can't know for certain because I've never had one. But I imagine it's a laborious task.
I do, however, keep an unofficial running list in my mind of which bumper stickers are proudly displayed on a virtual car in my mind. This one is now on it. Alongside these:
(By the way, these stickers are all available on Cafe Press.)Does anyone else do this? Or do you emblazon your actual car with stickers? If so, which ones do you have, or would you have if you were brave enough? Or cared enough?
See, Rich Food is Good For Us!
(Photo borrowed [ahem] from People.com.)
Is it just me, or is this the best Gwyneth Paltrow has looked in years? Glowy, healthy, cute hair, and a gorgeous dress in the most luscious shade. I used to hate orange, but lately I'm loving it! I read somewhere or other that she's no longer such a die hard vegan or whatever it is she was for so long that made her look ashen and stringy. Eating her way through Europe with Mario Batali for their new show has done her good!
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
To Prove My Point...
...I had to show you a side-by-side of that tiny, delicate Rowan Kidsilk Haze next to a typical yarn.
See what I mean?
See what I mean?
The Gift is in the Giving
Now that the item in question has been completed and handed over to the recipient, I can safely reveal the secret surprise project I hinted at in a previous post. Tada! 
It was a lacy shawl crocheted especially for my friend Suzanne, who recently celebrated her 40th birthday. Thankfully the yarn called for in the pattern came in Suzanne's favorite color and shade of all time! It's 70% fine kid mohair and 30% silk. If you don't know much about yarn, all you need to know for the purposes of this blog post is that this stuff is SUPER fine and light, like crocheting with fuzzy sewing thread. It took some getting used to (read: it was a pain in the arse), but was well worth it for the light airy quality and softness it gave to the finished piece. This is quite possibly the simplest and most basic crochet pattern one could possibly follow, but I must confess that it was tedious work. I took it with me on our recent trip to visit BAM in Portland (post on that to come soon) and worked on it nearly every spare moment I had, and yet I still didn't make it all the way to the pattern's recommended 29.5" width. (Seriously? Did the pattern writer really think that last half inch was so important?) I stopped at 25" wide, which turned out to be a good thing. Suzanne is a tiny little thing, and at that shorter width it fit her petite frame perfectly. I finished off the two shorter ends with tiny glass beads, which added a little flair and sparkle. 
In the end I was quite pleased--mostly because Suzanne was so surprised and delighted. Hooray, a successful gift!
It was a lacy shawl crocheted especially for my friend Suzanne, who recently celebrated her 40th birthday. Thankfully the yarn called for in the pattern came in Suzanne's favorite color and shade of all time! It's 70% fine kid mohair and 30% silk. If you don't know much about yarn, all you need to know for the purposes of this blog post is that this stuff is SUPER fine and light, like crocheting with fuzzy sewing thread. It took some getting used to (read: it was a pain in the arse), but was well worth it for the light airy quality and softness it gave to the finished piece. This is quite possibly the simplest and most basic crochet pattern one could possibly follow, but I must confess that it was tedious work. I took it with me on our recent trip to visit BAM in Portland (post on that to come soon) and worked on it nearly every spare moment I had, and yet I still didn't make it all the way to the pattern's recommended 29.5" width. (Seriously? Did the pattern writer really think that last half inch was so important?) I stopped at 25" wide, which turned out to be a good thing. Suzanne is a tiny little thing, and at that shorter width it fit her petite frame perfectly. I finished off the two shorter ends with tiny glass beads, which added a little flair and sparkle. In the end I was quite pleased--mostly because Suzanne was so surprised and delighted. Hooray, a successful gift!
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Guilty as Charged
You know that lame youth group or party ice-breaker game where everyone stands up and someone starts by saying something they've never done--like, say, "I've never kissed a kitten or puppy"--and then everyone who has done that thing has to sit down? Well, I can no longer use as mine, "I've never received a traffic ticket--not even a parking ticket." Because, folks, I am now officially a recognized traffic violator.
I received my very first ticket Tuesday afternoon from the Most Disinterested, Unsympathetic, and Bored-Looking Police Officer in All of Pasadena. All I have to say for myself is that I did it, yes, but it was a trap. He was hiding out just waiting for someone to go straight at that ridiculously mundane little backroad intersection with the totally illogical "Right Turn Only" sign. In fact, the guy driving right behind me also went straight. But who got the ticket? I did! It was sexism, I tell you.
So I was feeling all bad for myself that now I'm going to have to pay a fine and go to traffic school. Not to mention coming to terms with the ugly reality that I am not perfect. It's hard to accept, you know? In fact, can we have a moment of silence to recognize the demise of my driving record perfectness?
**********MOMENT************
But then I started telling people at work or friends on the phone about my law-breaking shame, and guess what? Every single one of them has had at least one ticket. One coworker who shall remain nameless even got THREE speeding tickets in the span of about 2 months! Knowing that I'm not alone made me feel tremendously better.
So how about you? How many tickets have you received? Did you go to traffic school? If so, did it serve pizza (an amazing number of people have mentioned attending a "pizza driving school"--who knew such a thing existed?)? Have you ever successfully talked your way out of a ticket? Please share your secrets.
I received my very first ticket Tuesday afternoon from the Most Disinterested, Unsympathetic, and Bored-Looking Police Officer in All of Pasadena. All I have to say for myself is that I did it, yes, but it was a trap. He was hiding out just waiting for someone to go straight at that ridiculously mundane little backroad intersection with the totally illogical "Right Turn Only" sign. In fact, the guy driving right behind me also went straight. But who got the ticket? I did! It was sexism, I tell you.
So I was feeling all bad for myself that now I'm going to have to pay a fine and go to traffic school. Not to mention coming to terms with the ugly reality that I am not perfect. It's hard to accept, you know? In fact, can we have a moment of silence to recognize the demise of my driving record perfectness?
**********MOMENT************
But then I started telling people at work or friends on the phone about my law-breaking shame, and guess what? Every single one of them has had at least one ticket. One coworker who shall remain nameless even got THREE speeding tickets in the span of about 2 months! Knowing that I'm not alone made me feel tremendously better.
So how about you? How many tickets have you received? Did you go to traffic school? If so, did it serve pizza (an amazing number of people have mentioned attending a "pizza driving school"--who knew such a thing existed?)? Have you ever successfully talked your way out of a ticket? Please share your secrets.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Illiteracy and a Meme
So apparently the NEA thinks that the average American has only read six books from the list of 100 titles below. Only six?! This makes me sad, sad, sad. Because 1) so many Americans are non-readers and that makes their worlds and their minds VERY small and then they go out and are allowed to do things like dictate what can be in school libraries and, say, vote for our next president. And 2) I've obviously spent years and years of my life on a couch or in a bed or in a nook with my nose in a book. This helps explain the width of my arse.
So someone out there on the web turned this list into a meme (I only recently realized that that means "me! me!"), and of course I had to steal it and share it with you guys because I am a book whore. Here's what you do:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you L.O.V.E.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia complete series - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (en Francaise, no less!)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
So someone out there on the web turned this list into a meme (I only recently realized that that means "me! me!"), and of course I had to steal it and share it with you guys because I am a book whore. Here's what you do:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you L.O.V.E.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia complete series - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (en Francaise, no less!)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Engage-a-versary
It pleased me more than is probably appropriate that y'all liked my littled knitted projects! Thanks for the kind words and encouragement. (Let's see if you all still like it once you're saddled with wearing things I've made that maybe don't turn out quite as cute.) I've already started my next item, but it's a secret/surprise so you'll have to wait for details and pictures.....
Meanwhile, in other news, two years ago today my sweet Matthew asked me to be his wife. Saying yes was the best decision of my life. Thank you for "choo-choo-choosing" me, Bug. I love you.
Meanwhile, in other news, two years ago today my sweet Matthew asked me to be his wife. Saying yes was the best decision of my life. Thank you for "choo-choo-choosing" me, Bug. I love you.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Getting in Touch with My Inner Caroline Ingalls
People, I have a new obsession: Knitting. Carol taught me while we were in Colorado last month and I got started straightaway on a beautiful baby blanket. Which I promptly tore out after I'd completed about 5 inches. They say that baby items are good projects for beginning knitters because they're small and you get the satisfaction of completing a project fairly quickly. But they should clarify that baby blankets don't count, because man do they go slowly. And when you're done with all that hard work basically all you have to show for it is a big square. What fun is that? Answer: No fun. 
So I tore out my blanket and started over on a simple boat-neck (read: no shaping around the neckline, so easy-peasy) baby sweater. I knitted up the front, back, and two sleeves in no time flat. See the sort of wonky stitches here and there? My new BFF knitting teacher at Unraveled yarn store in Monrovia assures me that those will magically straighten out after the first hand washing.
Next came blocking, which is when you pin out the pieces to their correct dimensions and either steam them or dampen them and let them dry in place. As you can see, I went a little overboard and used like a million pins. Because I'm a perfectionistic freak and wanted it to be just right. Then I sewed the pieces together, which required a little in-person assistance (hence my bonding with the gals at Unraveled last Friday afternoon), and voila! A baby sweater! 
It looks sort of drab and plain displayed such, so Henry came down to model for you. 
Look at that perfectly shaped cuff. I made that, people! Henry was especially excited about the next project I'd started--a little baby beanie--so he wanted to give you a preview. 
But then, being the anal retentive obsessive type that I am, I finished said hat a couple of hours later. So here it is, too. My second ever knitting project completed in one afternoon.
How cute is that? After seeing it, Matt asked if I know how to make anything in "normal sizes," so yesterday I went out and bought a big book of hat patterns. For grown up people heads. So if I know you, you can pretty much count on getting a big wooly hat or cap from me sometime in the future. And I don't care if we're in California where it rarely gets below 60 degrees on the coldest afternoon of the year: You will wear it and you will like it.
So I tore out my blanket and started over on a simple boat-neck (read: no shaping around the neckline, so easy-peasy) baby sweater. I knitted up the front, back, and two sleeves in no time flat. See the sort of wonky stitches here and there? My new BFF knitting teacher at Unraveled yarn store in Monrovia assures me that those will magically straighten out after the first hand washing.Next came blocking, which is when you pin out the pieces to their correct dimensions and either steam them or dampen them and let them dry in place. As you can see, I went a little overboard and used like a million pins. Because I'm a perfectionistic freak and wanted it to be just right. Then I sewed the pieces together, which required a little in-person assistance (hence my bonding with the gals at Unraveled last Friday afternoon), and voila! A baby sweater! It looks sort of drab and plain displayed such, so Henry came down to model for you. Look at that perfectly shaped cuff. I made that, people! Henry was especially excited about the next project I'd started--a little baby beanie--so he wanted to give you a preview. But then, being the anal retentive obsessive type that I am, I finished said hat a couple of hours later. So here it is, too. My second ever knitting project completed in one afternoon.How cute is that? After seeing it, Matt asked if I know how to make anything in "normal sizes," so yesterday I went out and bought a big book of hat patterns. For grown up people heads. So if I know you, you can pretty much count on getting a big wooly hat or cap from me sometime in the future. And I don't care if we're in California where it rarely gets below 60 degrees on the coldest afternoon of the year: You will wear it and you will like it.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Dr. Horrible
Are you a Joss Whedon fan? How about Neil Patrick Harris? If so, welcome to my circle of love and friendship. And then go here and watch Act I of Dr. Horrible. Not a fan? You will be. (Be advised, the free online airing of this web series will only be available through Sunday!)
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Spacelady Resurfaces
Sorry to steal a Dooce-ism, but I owe you an apology, Internet. You've been neglected and downright ignored for far too long, and I'm sorry. Sorry that my online peeps have had to come here looking for an update and instead seen nothing but rusty mailboxes day after day. Can I confess something? I've been slacking off on more things than just blog posting. My Project 365 photo challenge? I haven't taken a single photograph in well over three weeks. And I'm not even sorry about that. My exercise regime? Nonexistent as of late. Matt and I went swimming the other night and I swear I thought my lungs would collapse after two laps. My bathroom floor? Thick with toilet paper dust bunnies (why does toilet paper generate so much dust?). Truly, it's a sad and pathetic state of affairs. On top of that I just haven't . . . well . . . how do I say this nicely? The truth is I just haven't felt like talking to you, Internet. Blogging hasn't turned out to be like what I expected it to be. I thought I'd feel free to rant and wax philosophical and be funny and deep and sincere--all the things I'd like to think I am at the truest core of me. But instead I've come to view this blog as yet another place where I need to censor myself. Be careful what I say and how I say it, because who knows who's reading it? I don't worry about the people I don't know at all who somehow found me here in my little corner of the web, or the friends-of-friends or distant acquaintances. But what about my parents? A coworker? Friends? Will they be offended? Think I'm full of myself or hateful or unkind? Or, worse yet, affected and insincere? And another thing, Internet? I'm not a very trusting person. I'm pretty guarded and private, actually, and have always been extremely careful about who I let splash around with me in my kiddie pool of neuroses, fears, traumas, and even joys, successes, and spiritual insights. So I'm just not sure I'm capable of opening up to you, Internet, and really being myself. This last year has been one of the most transformative and spiritually enlightening of my entire existence, yet I haven't shared any of that here. I wonder if I could, or if I even want to. Because do I really want to deal with all the people in my life who read this blog knowing that much about what I'm thinking and feeling and then commenting on it whenever I see or talk to them? Maybe the only way I could be that honest is if I started a new totally anonymous blog and told not a single soul that it was mine. Just put it out there, and if people stumbled upon it and connected with something I had to say and wanted to comment or dialogue about things, then great. But if not, so what? On the other hand, I think that kind of blog has already existed for eons, and it's called "a diary."
Friday, June 6, 2008
Project 3six5: Day 31
Something we see when we walk through the more rural equestrian areas near our house.
Project 3six5: Day 27
This is what you get for your daily shot when at 11:00pm you realize you haven't taken a single picture all day.
Suds for the evening's dinner dishes.
Home through a rain-splattered car window.Project 3six5: Day 22
Rain makes everything look better and more interesting--including a balcony railing. I also love that I didn't have to edit this photo at all.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Staggered It Is!
Thank you Liz, B, Molly, Kelly, and Summer for your sound advice regarding our giant living room wall problem. Thanks to your input we decided to add a third shelf and hung them staggered. Hope you guys like the end result!
Rejuvenate Kitchen, Part 2 (Otherwise Known as DONE)
Yes, yes, I know. I haven't made an appearance here in ages. But you're about to see why, because kids I've been working my heiney off trying to get this kitchen rejuvenation (not quite a remodel and not quite simply redecorating) done. Ok, Matt helped, too, but since I was the Project Manager on this venture (remind me later to post about my ingenious system for avoiding killing your spouse when tackling home projects together), the onus to wrap things up was squarely on my shoulders. But now...We. Are. Done. Praise Jesus, hallelujah, and amen. Remember this post from when we started? If not and you're too lazy to click the link and go back to review it, let me refresh your memory of what the kitchen looked like before.
[Shudder.]
But a new floor, wall paint, artwork, cabinet paint, hardware, roman shade and tile backsplash later, and voila!
[Shudder.]
But a new floor, wall paint, artwork, cabinet paint, hardware, roman shade and tile backsplash later, and voila!
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Needed: Design Help
Ok, all those of you out there with better design sense than I, please offer your opinion on this. Before we got our new floors in the downstairs, we had an old embarrassing monster-sized tube tv in a big giant entertainment center. The whole thing was ginormous, but it worked because we have cathedral ceilings and that wall needs something to break up the tall and wide expanse of nothingness. But now that we upgraded to a fancy new flat screen and moved it to a different wall, we need something on that big papa-sized wall. We bought two of these shelves (in black-brown) from IKEA and came up with the idea of hanging them on that wall over the credenza. They'll be used mostly for decor and to add visual interest to that wall--and NOT for displaying tons of knicknacks. At the most I'll display on them a small handful of books, probably my two Kate Spade crystal vases, and maybe 2 or 3 framed pictures. My question is, how should we hang them? One directly above the other like this? 
Or with them staggered off center like this? 
What say you all?
Or with them staggered off center like this? What say you all?
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Project 3six5: Day 21
I love it when pictures come out entirely differently than what you'd expected. This is a piece of plywood I'd just finished painting with black chalkboard paint. Light from the window introduced this crazy, beautiful blue.
Project 3six5: Day 20 Help Me!
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