Wordless Wednesday

Tuesday Bluesday

I think I'm going to start wearing gloves at work.  There's no happy medium, temperature-wise, in our office.  The main cube-farm area is always freezing (high ceilings = energy inefficiency), the lunchroom is usually too hot, and the rest is either one extreme or the other.  The exception seems to be the accounting department, where I used to sit, where I used to complain about sitting because everyone forgot I was there, and where I now wish I could sit again because it's so nice and quiet and halfway warm.  Ugh.  The grass is always greener...

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I'm on a new music kick lately and have been loading up on CDs from the library to stock my iTunes.  Free is good, even though one in five discs are scratched beyond hope.  Anybody have any good recommendations?  I'm open to anything except gangsta rap and scream-o death metal.  I do like SOME rap - Jurassic 5 or The Roots, and some old-skool like Hieroglyphics - and SOME metal - Atreyu, Coheed & Cambria - but otherwise I'm not very picky.  Anything from bluegrass to classical, new rock to techno.

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I love wearing long-sleeve tees, but why do the sleeves always shrink just an inch, so they don't quite cover my wrists?  I wash everything in cold water and dry on low heat so I know it's not anything I'm doing... I'll be looking for some trim at the fabric store this week to see if I can lengthen them just a little.

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I had a very depressing dream in between snooze alarms this morning.  (Anybody else have the weirdest ones during those 10-minute intervals?)  I dreamt that B & I were fishing on a river, and when he cast he got a Barn Swallow tangled in his line.  The line was wrapped around the poor bird's neck, and I was crying and telling him to cut the line and let the bird go but he wound up killing the bird.  It was strange in and of itself, but even stranger was how upset I was when I woke up.  It totally ruined my day.

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We cleaned out the veggie beds last weekend, which included harvesting the salad greens and brussels sprouts.  I'm still not entirely sure if I'll work up the nerve to cook the sprouts, but the greens... SIX GALLONS.  Iceberg leaf lettuce, arugula, & mesclun.  I brought two gallon bags worth with me for lunch today to share with my dieting friends.  I didn't bring any cheese out of respect for them, but I'm already regretting not smuggling some for myself.  Salad just isn't salad without a little cheese.  At least I remembered the croutons.

Antiques, part 2

I re-shot the beaded jewelry this weekend, among other things.  We think the necklaces and the collar belonged to my Grandma Jones, and the beaded flowers were Grandma Meredith's.

Antiques, in more than one sense of the word...(kidding Mom!)

My mom visited this week, and rather than packing a suitcase across the country and paying $20 in fees, she shipped her things to me.  I unpacked and hung her clothes in the guest room closet, and found a package among her jammies.  I had asked her to look for a patchwork quilt that I'd started in the eighth grade, made from fabric scraps of dresses she'd made for me when I was little.  She'd found it for me, but she'd also found a few other treasures... some beautiful beaded jewelry that both of my grandmothers had made, and some letters from my dad to his parents from when he was young.  Unfortunately the photos I took the other evening turned out crappy due to artificial lighting and my stubbornness about not digging my tri-pod out of the closet.  So I'll add some artsy-fartsy pics soon when I get over myself.

Mom had never been to Chicago, and neither had my mother-in-law, so we took the train on Friday morning and stayed until Saturday evening.  It rained and was windy (duh...) but we still had a good time.  Of course when I go to Chicago on my own I walk everywhere, and had hoped to do the same on this trip... but I failed to take into account the fact that my mom is... er... not as energetic as she used to be.  I had a hard time slowing my pace down so I didn't leave her in the dust, abandoned somewhere on Michigan Ave., and my plans for walking up into River North had to be changed to sticking to the Loop.  But we still had a great time and enjoyed ourselves at the Art Institute, Giordano's, and Millennium Park.

[caption id="attachment_237" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Mom & I at "The Bean""][/caption]

These are a few...

The Pioneer Woman does photo assignments on Flickr, and today she referred to I Heart Faces for more weekly assignments.  I'm excited to start doing these (using NEW photos, not just archived ones) to keep the creative juices flowing and get some use out of my fancy SLR!  (Although this first project is using archived photos.)

So this week's assignment on I Heart Faces is "My Favorite Things." It's ironic, every time I think about having my own shop/studio, I think about naming it this even though I've never seen The Sound of Music.  But I remember having a record with that song on it when I was little, which I loved.



My husband - Sappy, I know, but he's one of my favorite people EVER.  It doesn't matter what we're doing (or not doing for that matter), he makes me smile, laugh, roll my eyes, grimace, hide my face... but most of all he makes me feel good.



Gardening - I don't always have the best luck with my plants (poppies that took over the world & drowned coreopsis...) but I like getting out in the warm spring sun, digging in the dirt and making things pretty.







My Pets - I love having fur-babies to cuddle and snuggle and play with, despite how exasperating they can sometimes be.

Well, it's a start... and of course there are more things that I love, I just don't have any good photos of them on-hand.