Artsy Fartsy

Look at this face. I have the cutest dog in the world.

To quote what I’m sure was one of Amanda’s favorite hair bands of the 90’s, “you don’t know what you got till it’s gone”. For me, the “it” being “hot water”.

I always thought I could live like a settler: rustic cabin, raising sheep and chickens, making cheese, churning butter. I could do that. No electricity? Sure! Even using an outhouse, I could live with that. That was until last Thursday when we ran out of oil.

We’ve been waiting for the tank to get low so we could make a few repairs to a valve that wasn’t working correctly and since we heat the house with wood, we only use the oil to heat the hot water. It takes us about a year to go through a tank of oil (we’re lucky, I know). So Thursday night, low became empty and there went the last of our hot water.

Being the unfussy settler woman that I am, I thought, “No problem. I like a cool shower.” HA! Cool doesn’t even begin to describe the water that comes from our well. Despite the heat we’ve been suffering in Connecticut the past several days, the 40-degree showers we’ve had to take were a wee bit cold for my taste. For the past few days I’ve listened to Luke suffering through a cold shower with many “woo!” and “aaaah!” noises while I heated my own bath water on the stove.

Because of the weekend and the insane cost of oil, we weren’t able to schedule a delivery until today and I was never so happy to see that oil truck coming up the driveway this morning. He’s lucky I didn’t run up and hug him. I’m so looking forward to going home tonight and taking a proper hot shower. I will never take it for granted AGAIN!

Tease yor hair up and sing it with me everyone: “you don’t know what you got, till it’s gone…”

The Lemons: It’s raining. It’s been raining all weekend. There’s nothing but rain in the forecast. Rain, rain, rain.

The Lemonade: This pretty leaf I saw on my deck during one very brief lapse in the rain. So pretty I almost forgot that it’s RAINING again.

Maybe it’s my current, foul mood, but I doubt it. I’ve had this opinion for a couple of days now - The Cheese Monkeys sucked. Let me step back a second and say that The Cheese Monkeys is a book by Chip Kidd about art school in the late 1950’s and “finding your calling” and “the loss of innocence” and all sorts of similar cliched book review phrases.

I bought the book because Chip Kidd is an awesome book jacket designer and he did a great job luring me in with this one. I love smallish paperback books with the satin finish covers. This one was the perfect size and had a weird cover that intrigued me. I picked it up and saw that the first few pages are printed off the page. The left half of a paragraph on one page, the right half on the back of that page. Interesting and fun. Then I noticed the spine! Is it called the spine? Not where it’s bound, but the other side. The endpapers maybe? When you spread the pages out one way, you can read “DO YOU SEE?” Splay them the opposite way and it reads “GOOD IS DEAD” Fantastic! I must read this book on the spot.

Wrong.

The first half of the book I loved. I could see it all in my head. The characters, I had them all cast for the movie. Each one with their own twisted sides. The narrator, his best friend/worst enemy, the innocent Southern classmate, the loony drawing teacher and the insane graphic design teacher. Loved them all. And I was actually learning! The book follows the design class and some of the lessons the teacher rants about were great and right on. Very interesting. I told everyone how much I loved the book, told them all they had to read it. Well I take that all back.

It was as if one day I was reading the book and I loved it, the story had been on a path for some time now and I looked forward to finishing. Then the next day I picked up the book and it was a different book. Or written by a different person. Suddenly it was much darker. The characters were turning really bizarre and they were all starting to use a lot more 50’s slang. And am I crazy, or did the font change? What’s going on? It picked up momentum, destroyed everything I ever enjoyed about the story and SLAMMED to an end. A seriously messed up ending. A dark and desperate, sleep deprived, vomit-descriptive, bloody, frantic and UNFINISHED end. I looked for more pages. I knew when the ink of the dialogue of a certain character started to get lighter and lighter that the end was near and I wasn’t going to be happy.

I decided to go to my computer and write about how disappoined I am in this book. But first, I wanted to Google a name from the book. The narrator’s best friend/worst enemy (not sure what to call her) is named Himillsy. Himillsy Dodd, to be exact. An odd name, but I like it when names are used to add meaning to the story, so maybe this one means “crazy little woman in need of serious therapy”. I Googled Himillsy and found this blog, cowritten by not only Himillsy Dodd, but also Winter Sorbeck - that’s the crazy graphic design teacher’s name! Now I’m curious. Who are these people? Does Chip Kidd hate them?? They appear to live in D.C. and be a normal, young, modern couple blogging about life and work and politics. Where is the connection? I read several interviews with Kidd after the publishing of The Cheese Monkeys and I see no mention of his friends Mills and Winter. Weird.

Upon further digging, it appears that there’s a band called Himillsy Dodd also.

Still disappointed but now also intrigued…

A big happy birthday to my little big sister Andrea - look how cute you are!

Although I make pretty jewelry, I don’t usually wear much of it. I’m not sure why, I just like to keep things simple. A necklace here, a bracelet there. I like rings, but only one on each hand. I wear earrings sometimes, but I won’t wear a necklace AND earrings at the same time. Whenever I do, I feel like it’s just too much sparkle. “Overdecorated” is how I like to put it. Other people look great with matched sets of earrings and neckalces but for me, it’s just too much.

I once told this to my friends Amanda and Flannery who somehow took “overdecorated” to mean “street walker”. Now whenever they wear a necklace and earrings together, they will point out the fact that, thanks to their jewelry choices, they’re prostitutes. They point out coworkers and people around them who wear jewelry like prostitutes.

I think of them whenever I put my jewelry on and this morning I decided to go wild. I chose to wear my Mandi necklace AND a pair of stud earrings from Lia Sophia. WOAH! It felt like too much when I put it all on, especially with my shiny glasses and the stripey shirt I’m wearing, but it’s summer and it’s hot - why not be wild? So this post is for you guys. Just a warning, I’m looking like a hooker today.

I’m gonna need an ice pack if I pat myself on the back any more about this thing - but I just love it!

Here’s how the base for Dan and Mitzi’s birth announcement came out. Is it cute or what? I drew that! That’s the craziest thing for me to believe. I keep looking at it and admiring it and then I think, I drew that. How cool.

OK, enough about that. My big ego and I will leave now.

Among the weeds in my garden yesterday…

My friend Dan is about to meet his new daughter any day now and he and his wonderful wife Mitzi asked me to create the announcements for the soon-to-arrive Molly. What an honor! Yesterday I got to work creating some fun underwater animals with a tropical feel since Miss Molly will soon be arriving in the very tropical Tampa, Florida. Here’s how it all went down.

First I sketched out some rough ideas of the creatures in pencil.Then I inked them by hand with my favorite Penstix pens. (If there is a way to do this in Illustrator or Photoshop or anything - please don’t tell me - I don’t want to know. It’s bad enough that I used to win penmanship awards and now, thanks to my friends the keyboard, you can barely read my handwriting. If I learned to ink fancy lines with the computer, I’d forget why pens and pencils were ever created in the first place.)
Then I played and played in Photoshop and added color and had a little fun with the polka dots and - VOILA! Here they are. More on the announcement to come soon.

I have several half-formed thoughts I wanted to write about today but my brain is still not operating at full speed thanks to either the beautiful weather, turning 30, or the unshakable sleepiness due to the vacation I can’t seem to get over. While I collect my thoughts, I thought I’d show you this hibiscus I shot while we were in Glens Falls. Hibiscus in New York state? Who knew!?