April 20, 2012

hatch

110:365It was so lovely today that Bug and I ate our dinner on the patio of our summer cottage. Which gave me plenty of time to look around and see what a mess it was from winter. After doing the dishes we grabbed brooms and set to work. There's still a lot to be done, but the bulk of it is clear and swept clean. It looks lovely back there. We played Uno and talked, and it was really a great night. This little hatch (and its companion weed) is on the fireplace stack right next to the patio. I just like how it looks. M home tomorrow! Can't wait!

∼ Continue Reading ∼

• • •

April 19, 2012

Photo teamwork, photo love

M sends us regular shots while traveling internationally, which we love. Every morning I wake up and the first thing I do is grab my phone because I know I'll have at least four or five images waiting to be downloaded. We get lots of meal shots, street shots, and assorted other views. Many time he accompanies them with funny quips or interesting info. Every once in awhile, though, he'll send me something that makes me gasp. This was it today. It needed a bit of work, so I saved it to my phone and Instagrammed it (cropping, filter application, and exposure adjustment for this one). And I really love how it turned out. He did the hard part…he got the bare bones of a really great shot. I just stuck some lipstick on it. From the solitary figure in the street to the crosswalk lines at the bottom to the three lanterns in the upper left…even the little pops of color scattered throughout. Awesome job, M!Shot by Husband with Blackberry in Tokyo Thursday morning. Edited by Wife with iPhone in St. Louis Wednesday night. I love technology!

∼ Continue Reading ∼

• • •

April 18, 2012

More fun from today

Zozer made a self portrait in the morning, on the way to school. Tonight, I set out on a mission to find our 100 Years of Chevrolet book. We are heading to Bowling Green, KY next weekend for an event at the National Corvette Museum. M learned that the book's authors will be there, and are willing to sign them. "Let's take ours!" he said. "Sounds great," said I, "If I knew in what box it's packed!" So, having nothing better to do tonight (note sarcasm), I embarked on a quest to find the book. I have been wanting to go throughout the book boxes anyway and do another purge, as my Kindle and my newfound fling with the library means I can break my security-blanket like grasp on owning every book I've ever read. Simplify, simplify, simplify. (Don't worry…I kept the classics, including Salinger, Tolstoy, Bradbury, Vonnegut. And Nimoy, of course, for M.)Almost three hours later, I finished. When I say that the Chevrolet book was in the last box I searched, I don't mean that I stopped going through boxes when I found it. I mean it was the last f*cking book box available to slice open with my trusty boxcutter. Figures, don't it?Ah, well, the book is located, along with a couple others I've been wanting anyway. And the Zoemobile's trunk is loaded down with seven boxes of books to be donated tomorrow. All in all, a good night's work. Time to kick back, pop a couple Advil for an already-aching back (book boxes are freakin' heavy!), and read. (Biography of Steve Jobs, checked out from the library, of course!)

∼ Continue Reading ∼

• • •

April 17, 2012

corporate

107:365Dropped off The Bug's birdhouse at M's work this morning. I forget how corporate his building looks. I currently work in a low-slung, rather drab, single-story office park. My last job was in a spa, which isn't corporate at all. Come to think of it, I haven't worked in a glass tower corporate building since my post-undergrad internships downtown. Huh. Anyway, this afternoon M and I FaceTimed while I was at work and he was hanging out in a Singapore airport frequent flyer lounge. I instructed him to call all his buddies at work and tell them to vote for Zoe's birdhouse Wednesday. He said, "Don't you want her to win on her own merits?" "Nope," I said. "I just want her to win!" I could hear his colleague snickering off camera, and M cracked up. It wasn't hard to make him laugh today. The combination of caffeinated coffee and sleep deprivation made him pretty slap happy, which was fun to watch roll out on FaceTime. He's flying to Tokyo tonight, which is tomorrow morning for him.

∼ Continue Reading ∼

• • •

April 16, 2012

birdhouse

106:365M's company, because it is awesome, made little wooden birdhouses available for employees to take home for their children to decorate. The birdhouses will be displayed in the employee cafeteria as part of the corporate celebration of Earth Day, and staffers get to vote for a winner. Since the deadline to turn in the decorated birdhouses is tomorrow, and Zoe's father is in Singapore making it rather difficult for him to take the birdhouse into the office and still make his meetings, I'll run it into his work tomorrow so she doesn't miss the opportunity to participate. She designed the color scheme and painted it herself, and she did such a great job. I remember the coloring contests a local grocery store used to sponsor. You could get a giant poster, color it in, and return it to the store to be displayed with all the other entries. The store manager would select a winner, and that one was hung somewhere prominent with a big badge declaring it as The Most Awesome Poster Ever. The winners were invariably completed by the child's parents. The colors were great, and everything stayed in the lines, and usually there was a fair amount of glitter, every speck of which was strategically placed. They were awesome to behold, until you read the entry form at the bottom that said it was proudly done by Skippy, Age 7. WTF. It used to make me so mad because I didn't have glitter and could therefore never compete. Now it makes me mad because I wouldn't have been competing against Skippy anyway. I would have been competing against Skippy's 32-year-old anal-retentive mother. Not cool, Grocery Store Manager. Not cool to encourage that kind of behavior by consistently awarding those posters finished by SAHMs who had nothing better to do. So I allowed Zoe to paint her birdhouse with little interference from her thirty-something AR mother, because it's HER project and she deserves to have that experience. The sides aren't perfectly clean and there are some drips here and there, but it's the most beautiful birdhouse in the world to me. She is so proud of it, and she should be. It looks exactly like it was painted by a six-year-old who did a damn fine job. I'm kind of glad she won't see the other entries at M's work. I don't know if his colleagues are as gullible as the store manager from my youth, but I can only hope they award best birdhouse with age-appropriate decorations in mind. It's not about whether she wins or loses, it's about the fight being fair to begin with.

∼ Continue Reading ∼

• • •
1 … 108 109 110 111 112 … 282