lilu

i know.. hardly any posts for a month and then two in a 24 hour period?!

it's because i have to tell you this story. last night, i'm laying in bed, buried beneath a foot of blankets and down, when i feel my whole bed shake. i'm thinking 'you imagined it. go back to sleep,' when i feel something walking across my legs, and i'm thinking it miiight be a ghostie, but really, it was just lilu, our neighborhood cat.

i don't know if it's a boy or a girl, but lilu curls up in the curve that my legs made and slept there all night. we both have colds, so she kept wheezing and sneezing.

this morning, neither of us wants to get out of bed. and we don't have to. not for another hour.

isn't it funny how she's kind of the same color as ripley?

orange sky

for the last several mondays, i've gone to central market, my favorite grocery store in the whole world, to shop for the week. they have all kinds of special fruit. last week i bought two blood oranges. they tasted like gummy worms. in a good way. 

going to bed early tonight. i woke up with a scratchy throat, and it doesn't help that i'm talking allll day long. need to delegate some talking to others so i can just sip my tea and heal. 

it's been a rainy evening and it's so nice to listen to the rain and feel cozy. time to close the computer and read. 

synchronicity

last night, becca posted a facebook post about how the price of stamps had again gone up.. which stuck in my mind because i knew i was sending out one million thank you post cards today.

fast forward to this morning, i'm on the way to work when i see an open parking spot in the parking lot of joe's bakery. i had tried to go there three mornings in the last two weeks, but i can never park because it's so popular that there are no spots.

but this morning i park, order a hot chocolate and a migas taco (that was deeelicious on a home-made tortilla) to go and sit down on a bench to wait. the man sitting beside me smiled and i told him i was happy i finally got to come here, and asked what he normally gets. he said the carne guisada is delicious and tender and juicy. we got to talking about where we worked. and can you guess? he works for the post office.

he told me there was a post office right down the street, so on my way to the office, i stopped in to buy some one cent stamps for my post cards. i asked the woman at the desk if she knew leonard. she said no, he must work at the big branch a few blocks away. but she was very friendly after that. but it all felt very much like an 'everything happens for a reason' kind of morning the way things came together.

the rest of the day was fairly chaotic, but fun. glad to be in my bed. cassie made pepper jelly as a wedding favor for her sister's wedding reception tomorrow, so our apartment smells like peppers. makes you feel warmer on a cold night.

kale salad

tomorrow i am throwing quite a large potluck, and i'm trying to think of ways to make it more fun. it's hard to think of fun party activities that can accomodate over 100 people. at first i was thinking a raffle, but there's not a lot of time or resources to make that happen.

i did find really cool neon labels for name tags, and made little flags that people can stick in whatever they brought so a) people know who brought it so they can compliment them and b) so it's easy to tell what mystery foods are. i always bring bertie v's english muffin things to parties and i always have to get a small group of people to try them so that the word can spread that they're yummy since they look so scary.

aiesha

well my dilemma is that i can't talk about work things, which are about 90% of my funny/interesting stories right now. but! there are still some, like this one:

so i'm a night showerer. and the other night, my roommate wasn't home, and i open the shower curtain, and there's a big window in there that appears to be normal glass.. as in, not frosted, not cubes, nothing to prevent people from the street from looking in. i look out the window and see the neighbors house, and the street. yep, you can definitely see right in. i figured maybe since my roommate showers during the day, she doesn't think it's as much of a problem..?

so i pushpinned up a dish towel that covered 80% of it and showered, ducking below the window every time i needed to reach my soap on the other end of the tub.. laughing every time.

when cassie got home, i asked 'heyyy what do you do about the window in the shower..?' and her response was 'yeah, i was worried about that too when i first moved in, but my boyfriend [who lived with her at the time] said, oh cassie don't be silly, people have all seen breasts, and they have better things to do than sit outside your house looking in your bathroom window when you shower... so now i don't worry about it anymore. but if it bothers you, we can find something to cover it.'

needless to say, the dish towel hasn't moved.

one of the bloggers i read, stuff no one told me, is living in taiwan for a while. he drew some super accurate cartoons about life there. check them out.

tour

welcome to my new house! this is the living room.. 

and the kitchen. it's teeny, but has almost everything you need. no dishwasher =\

my room is bright because of the three windows. right outside the double windows is a bradford pear tree. it's the kind that has really pretty blossoms in the spring. 

not much on the shelf yet. it's funny how everything looks so empty when you first move in, even though you know it will soon be crammed full of things.

it feels a lot like my room in round rock since the layout is the same. i have a ceiling fan, so i'm happy as a clam. we didn't have room in the truck for my dresser, so once i have that, i'll be all set.

thursday

i know, i've been MIA. i owe you a post. tomorrow i'll take pictures of my new-job-new-shoes and all of the cool things that came with them.

today i went to see the house i'm going to be living in for the next 10.5 months (at least). it's hard to call it a house. it's kind of like the cabin in that it's up on the second floor with a garage underneath. my room is teeny tiny (8.5 by 12, not counting the closet), but big enough for my bed, night stand and dresser.. barely. i laid it out to scale in indesign tonight, and it appears that i might have to turn sideways to get inside the room.

i didn't measure the closet, so that's a guestimate.. so we'll hope for the best. but! it's cheap, close to the office, and the girl i'll be living with is really nice. pictures to come some time. i move on saturday, so.

iCal

voila!

4 hours or so later, we have a calendar. the hardest part is choosing two colors :) and spacing the numbers since 2 digit numbers take up different space than 1. that was a bit tricky.

all of them have the ribbon with the month and then some kind of border. september is the only one with special detail since it's my birthdayyy!

$15 to print 12 11x17 pages in color on thick paper at office max. not toooo bad. i would happily email you the PDF if you would like to print one. 

moonlight

last year i bought my calendar in september. and was it one cent cheaper than it would have been on january 1st? no. so this year, i've been on the hunt for a new one. last year i had the austin events calendar ..was going to try to include a link, but all i keep getting are various city events calendar websites.

(image from winifred studios' etsy page)
anyway i decided that since i didn't actually go to any of the events listed, while it's a cool idea, i don't really need that same calendar again this year. so i went to etsy to see if there were cute ones there.. and there were.. but the vast majority are those one-page ones with every month on it. or one pagers but with no room to write on.

finally i did find one i like that's a printable so you just pay for the pdf file and print it yourself. the one i like comes as a 5 by 7, but i convo'd the woman to ask if she could make it 11 x 17. need lots of room to write. she said she could. but then i decided i could design my own using indesign and print it myself. so that's my plan for sunday. now to decide if i should just do one design in all different color ways for each month, or 12 different designs.

spring in your step

maj and i were trying to make up our minds about the new spring colors. these are pants and shoes from j crew, but anthropologie, madewell and even target have similar palettes. 

i really like the corals, yellow and blue, but i could do without the bright green. maybe it'd be ok on your legs, but that color is really hard for the fair haired.

what i do know is that i'm a lifelong skinny pants devotee. so much more flattering. not the suuuper skintight 'jeggings' (aside from the name itself, the pants are just unattractive), but fitted. ready for spring.

ps andy sent me a funny email today that i don't think he'd mind if i shared with my 14 readers:
Subject: urgent help needed. 5 mins.
Waiting at super clips. Guy getting hair cut now was just cut and bleeding by stylist who poured alcohol on a towel and rubbed it on the guys neck. Do I just leave or hope that lightening and incompetence dont strike twice.

happy new year

i'd say one of my very favorite things about 2011 was baby cate. i love jillian and zach soooo much, they are exactly the perfect friends, and to see the love they have for each other in baby form has been so much fun. 

this is me and cate when she was 2 weeks old.. 

six weeks old during 'my shift' when i watched her for a week so jill didn't have to put her in daycare when she went back to work. luckily i had the first shift, so they weren't tired of house guests yet.

three months for shift #2

8 months for shift #3

and here we are on new years eve at 10 months!

jill was saying how she's going to teach her how to ask about politics when she starts talking ;)