enJOY it

The early stages of what I hope will be something good.

Today, I woke up early to make some stuff before work. Next week I will probably choose sleep over paint. But this week, my brain is buzzing.

Again and again with the Mondays.

This week I will:

• Celebrate Bethesda Restaurant week at Grapeseed
• Keep my desk clean
• Write cards to my spread out across the country girlfriends
• Run and Run and Run and Run
• Watch Wipeout + Project Runway + Secret Life
• NOT USE MY ATM CARD UNTIL FRIDAY : enough is enough
• Frame some photos
• Make some stuff
• Letterpress. Anyone need want some custom stationery? I promise it is fabulous.
• And work 4 more days

Badda-Bing, Badda-Boom. Cowabunga.

I had to order some after seeing Kelly’s amazing cards. They were printed by VistaPrint and I am happy with the results (and the pricing). If I order again though, I will go with the glossy finish instead of matte. Otherwise…very, very cool.

My plan for today was to run some errands then go to Starbucks and dream up a website.

But instead I took a look at my messy TV room and nearly went back to bed. It looked like a craft bomb exploded. I have been organizing and packing etsy goods down there. And I have been using it as a creative space – because for the last few months my desk upstairs looked like this:

I know, right? A hot mess. And by hot, I mean ugly. So much stuff all over the table that I had resorted to using the floor. Which meant there was so much stuff all over the floor. And I would have loved to throw stuff away except my recycle bin was full. And why is that jar of ribbon there? I do not even use ribbon in projects. BLAH. Over it.
Four hours later : Better. Much much better. I moved the ribbon to the top of the bookshelf. And tossed a ton of crap. And cleared off the table space. And made room on the shelves for letterpress materials. So the TV room no longer looks like a hole punch factory exploded. And of course, I got rid of the frames. I debated for about 3 seconds over this decision. I did love the frames. But the fact is they are hard to change. And much of the stuff on my work surface was odds and edds that I wanted to save, but had no place for. Now they are all up. In my line of sight. Ready to be inspire. And much less likely to be thrown away.
To create a back ground for my inspiration board I hung up two long sheets of woodgrain contact paper – I just stuck it to the wall and pined the top corners to make it stick. It has tons of wrinkles and the edges are horribly crooked but whatever: I have no patience. Then I just used removable double stick tape and slapped everything up there.

Man. Feels good. My reward for hours of work is that I get to turn on the air conditioning. And of course I have a clean new space.

Happy Friday. Go buy the book 5.

Yesterday, I bought a fantastic book. Called FIVE. It is not so much a book to read as a book to look at and enjoy. The typesetting alone excites me.

I have been thinking a lot recently about the next five years. And who I want to be then. If five years ago you had asked me who I wanted to be now, I would said something like “Single. In a high powered corporate job. Not living in Maryland.”

But I am pleased with where the last five years have taken me. And the choices that I have made. And I am in love with the idea that we get to pick the future. The next five years. I am excited to become someone new.

Monday.

Even though my days off are Friday and Saturday, Monday still always seems like the start of the week. Why is that, I wonder?

The weekend was good. Good, good. We ate good meals with good friends. And we saw Batman which I loved. I even enjoyed the parts that I watched with my hands covering my face.

Right now I am giving up on cleaning the mess that is the house before work and instead baking onion rings. Healthy onion rings to be exact. I will let you know how they turn out.

I have a post office drop off that I have to make and then it is off to work and home from work for the next four days until another weekend comes again.

Update : The onion rings are good. (I highly reccomend adding season salt and some other spices to the Fiber One crumbs.)

So remember about a million years ago when I went to Kauai? And I had big plans to create a album while I was there? I wanted to share some pictures of the album:

The covers were Kolo photo box dividers that I punched holes in and joined with book rings.

I used tags to separate the days : stamped the date on the front and wrote what we did that day on the back.

The “guts” of the book are all sorts of things: business cards, tickets, restaurant coasters, postcards, napkins and of course, polaroids. It was great to have a polaroid camera on the trip because I could just snap a photo and stick it in.

Which is excellent. As I have yet to get a single digital photo (or my rolls of film) printed yet.

A couple of different ideas came together to form this art journal kit. It is a 5×7 pack of papers. One letterpressed, one stamped, four created from copied polaroids and two other favorites. Handmade in the best way. I also added other pieces that I love to include in my own mini books. The best part is the stamped plastic packaging. It is meant to be used in the book. There are nine available along with some new letterpressed prints.

+ + +

Other news: It is about a million degrees in Maryland. I just watched my DVRed episode of “The Secret Life of an American Teenager” …and I loved it. Project Runway better hurry up and get exciting. Paul did better than outstanding on his medical boards. We are celebrating with sushi and The Joker tonight

Good is:

• wine
• ketchup and mustard on homemade fries
• getting home in less than an hour
• listening to Paul talk animatedly about his job
• listening to Paul talk about how he saw a documentary about the world ending on 12.21.12
• (don’t worry, I think the documentary was lying)
• coming up with new letterpress ideas
• (there will be a store update on Friday)
• brainstorming in general about future paper projects
• kisses
• the fact that THIS is my 900th post
• (I had no idea that I would ever have 900 things to post about)
• (i am still not sure that I DID have 900 things to post about)

Here is to the next 900. Thanks for being here.

So I had big plans to beat the system today.

Everyday that I drive into work, I see a gas station on Wisconsin Avenue that has gas for cheap. Like $4.12 cheap. A steal. And everyday that I drive into work, I do not stop. Either I am late, or I am in the wrong lane or I already got gas at another place because I thought the cheap place had dissapeared.

But today, I was bound and determined to pull over and get gas. And I was actually planning on going so far as to FILL UP THE TANK ALL THE WAY. Something I have never done since Mom and Dad stopped paying for my gas.

So I pull over. And am amazed to find that there is not a line. Or at least a crush of people and a news team filming the scene of what must be the lowest gas prices on the east coast.

I get out and notice that there is no machine to stick your credit card in. Slightly confused, I read the sign “NO CASH. CREDIT CARD ONLY. Please pay after you fill up.”

Excellent.

I select the gas grade, insert the pump and wait. The dollars get up to about $15 and I read the sign again. This time it says “ONLY CASH. NO CREDIT CARD. Please pay after you fill up.”

WHAT?!?!

I turn off the pump and approach the man in the glass box.

“Hi.” I say. “I am an idiot. I didn’t read the sign before starting to fill up and unfortunately I do not have cash.” (I figured admitting to not reading a sign was much better than admitting to incorrectly reading a quite obvious sign.)

“Oh, it’s no problem” he says. “There is a Chase Bank right across the street.”

I figured now was not the time to tell him that I am a Bank of America girl and I abhore using other ATMs and getting charged fees. Instead, marched across the street and got charged $3 to take out $40. Then I marched back across the street to finish filling up my car. Unfortunately I could no longer completely fill it because I had not taken out enough cash.

As I got back into my car and pulled on to the street, I pondered the two morals that my adventure had revealed. The first being that I hate high gas prices. The second being that there is no such thing as a free lunch.