Girls' Night, Ladies' Night... whatever you want call it, Girls' Night is a fun concept that my adorable husband just cannot grasp. I have plans tonight to go to a Girls' Night with my former co-workers and earlier, on the phone with Luke, he referred to it as Girrrls' Night (with a long "rrrr" sound and in the same tone you'd mention toenail fungus). His exact phrase was "since it's Girrrls' Night, I can't stop in. Huh?" No honey, cause you're not a girl.
I held a girl's night for the same crowd at my house a few months back and we had to turn it into a girls' and guys' night because he was so saddened that no guys would be coming over to keep him company. It was still a lot of fun but somehow I think the night would have been different of the guys stayed home. For instance, I'm sure I wouldn't have been walking back to the house with Megan and Angie at two in the morning in my socks, and we wouldn't have been covered up to our knees in mud. Long story involving a Jeep. And testosterone.
Don't get me wrong, I love hanging out with the guys, but there's just some overeating and complaining that can't be accomplished when the men are present. I need the girls' nights to remind me that I am a girl. I spend so much time with men that I need this time set aside to eat junk and talk about whatever comes to mind and hang out in a room where everyone has showered recently and no one farts and the only time boobs are mentioned it's when we're complaining about our bras.
My family started the tradition, several years ago, of a Girls' Night Out every year on the day after Christmas. It eventually turned into Girls' Morning In and now it's even harder to keep my persistent guy out of the group. He can't understand why he can't hang out when he knows and likes most of the people in the group, too. One year he even got the flu just so he could stay home and not go away when the girls arrived. (The nerve!)
I think I might know the reason for this Girls' Night aversion. The two of us have been together for 14 years now and we've sort of become one person. We do everything together, good and bad. Going somewhere without Luke is like going without my arm. My sometimes irritating, often grumpy arm. He's so used to being with me all the time that Girls' Night seems like a personal attack on him. I'm so used to having him with me that I get to feeling antsy after being without him for too long. I guess that's sweet... or maybe co-dependant, I'm not sure which.
So honey, I love you, but I need my girl time. I'm going to Girls' Night!
Friday, March 31, 2006
Monday, March 27, 2006
More Places To Buy My Stuff (cause I know that's what you all want)
Da-da da-d-da-daaaa! An exciting post announcing the opening of my new Etsy store located here: http://lgaumond.etsy.com Woo-hoo! What's that you say? A what store? Let me explain...
Etsy is a place to sell handcrafts of all sorts where a person like me can have a little store and sell things to nice people like you without having to program a shopping cart and update my webpage constantly. Yes, it's all about me. So go, shop, enjoy like crazy! Check back often, I think I might try to sell all sorts of fun stuff on there if it goes well. I might even have a few tie-dyed onesies left in the closet that I could throw on there.
I was signing up for my Etsy store and one of the questions it asks is how did you find out about Etsy? How DID I find it? Well, I'm not entirely sure.
You know how you can be riding in the car with a friend and you're talking about, I don't know, something that happened at work maybe, and then you stop talking and look out the window and see a street light on with moths flying around it, which makes you think of summer, which reminds you that you wanted to buy some sunless tanner, which makes you think of going to CVS, and that CVS is right next to a sushi place and then you remember that guy you were listening to on the radio who talked about mercury poisoning from sushi, an then you wonder if tuna has a lot of mercury, too and tuna makes you think of Chicken of the Sea, which of course makes you think of Jessica Simpson... then your friend asks you, (since it's been all of 10 seconds now since you stopped talking), what are you thinking about and you have to say "Jessica Simpson".
Yeah. That's how my net surfing goes. I go from one site to another following links and recommended sites and links in blogs until I'm absolutely lost and can't remember how I got to where I am. So thank you, whoever it was who had an Etsy store that I followed a link to in order to find out about Etsy. Ths announcement wouldn't be possible without you whoever you are.
So browse Etsy, there are some great shops on there, and be sure to stop by my shop every now and then!
Monday, March 20, 2006
Floored
My husband and I bought our house about two and a half years ago from a woman who was a professional chain-smoker, who had lived with her now deceased, also chain-smoking husband and their blind, elderly, incontinent Yorkie who peed on every 90 degree corner in the house, and also in the center of the floor, and on the walls. Anywhere he felt the urge, he peed.
So as you can imagine, the carpet was a little, well... nasty. We had it shampooed and we did our best, but it was still ugly, stained, and tan and on hot, humid days you could still come into the house and smell cigarette smoke. We were dying to tear up the carpets but we were waiting for the money to do it. Well, this year, the IRS was nice enough to direct deposit our floor money and we went out and bought ourselves 1,100 square feet of laminate flooring.
We picked up our new floor on Friday night and were so excited that we tore out the carpet the next morning. We worked round the clock, despite the cold I have and the raging fever and the aches and pains and the blood Luke shed in the process, we were determined. Two days down, we now have a beautiful new living room floor, the hallway is almost done, and the other rooms aren't far behind. Here are some lovely before and after shots. Notice the miserable Molly who thought we were moving and couldn't understand why the couch was no longer in the sunshine where she liked it.
It's a little dark, but this is the living room before:
And here it is after: (Feel free to Ooooh! and Aaaahh!)
And here's the dining room before:
And here's part of it after (we haven't gotten to the new floor yet, but the absence of nasty carpet still makes a difference):
Notice the sad, far-off look from the dramaic pup. She's happy now that the couch is back where she likes it, but this morning she insisted in laying on the dusty, nasty dining room floor.
Next weekend, my pup. We'll have the dining room floor done next weekend, if it kills us.
A big thank you to Amy at DIY Flooring for actually making it fun and not scary to buy a whole crapload of laminate flooring off the Internet from a company all the way across the country.
So as you can imagine, the carpet was a little, well... nasty. We had it shampooed and we did our best, but it was still ugly, stained, and tan and on hot, humid days you could still come into the house and smell cigarette smoke. We were dying to tear up the carpets but we were waiting for the money to do it. Well, this year, the IRS was nice enough to direct deposit our floor money and we went out and bought ourselves 1,100 square feet of laminate flooring.
We picked up our new floor on Friday night and were so excited that we tore out the carpet the next morning. We worked round the clock, despite the cold I have and the raging fever and the aches and pains and the blood Luke shed in the process, we were determined. Two days down, we now have a beautiful new living room floor, the hallway is almost done, and the other rooms aren't far behind. Here are some lovely before and after shots. Notice the miserable Molly who thought we were moving and couldn't understand why the couch was no longer in the sunshine where she liked it.
It's a little dark, but this is the living room before:
And here it is after: (Feel free to Ooooh! and Aaaahh!)
And here's the dining room before:
And here's part of it after (we haven't gotten to the new floor yet, but the absence of nasty carpet still makes a difference):
Notice the sad, far-off look from the dramaic pup. She's happy now that the couch is back where she likes it, but this morning she insisted in laying on the dusty, nasty dining room floor.Next weekend, my pup. We'll have the dining room floor done next weekend, if it kills us.
A big thank you to Amy at DIY Flooring for actually making it fun and not scary to buy a whole crapload of laminate flooring off the Internet from a company all the way across the country.
Friday, March 17, 2006
All These Books and Nothing to Read
I've been poking around online looking for a book to read and nothing looks that interesting to me. It could be the cold I'm fighting off or it could be that I just don't know what the heck I want to read next. Picking a new book is a big commitment. First there's the $14 it costs to buy one, then there's the couple of weeks I'll be spending with it, then there's all the doubt about the choice I made. It's hard!
I used to work at Borders where it was much easier to be daring and try out books - they were free after all. On lunch breaks, I could just take any book off the shelves and give it a try. I did this every day and read a store full of books without ever having to pay for a single one. Sweet.
This led to my favorite game of "What's Your Favorite Book?"
I asked the retired French teacher who stocked the Literature section (84 Charing Cross Road), the video game and comic book freak who stocked the Sci-Fi section (anything by Tim Robbins), the awkward Music Clerk (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) the dramatic Cafe Barista (Danielle Steel), everyone got asked.
They would tell me a book and I'd read it. No matter how freaky. Or boring. I figured it was reading after all, so even if it was Danielle Steel, there were worse things I could be doing with my brain cells.
This was the best thing in the world, I'm telling you.
Free books and I never had to choose for myself. This of course led to a frightening variety of tastes in books and led to other games like "Whatever Books Are Left On The Floor" where I'd read whatever someone hadn't thought to reshelve at the end of the day. That game was riskier and led to such delightfully bizarre books as Tex and Molly in the Afterlife.
I eventually left Borders and had to start choosing my own books. Which is so hard. I've resorted to choosing books based on their covers. I have to say it's worked out well for me. Being an illustrator who aspires to have her own artwork on the cover of a zillion books all over the world, I can appreciate a beautiful cover illustration and it makes me want to touch the book, to find out more. The covers are what interested me in these three awesome books by Garth Nix: Sabriel, Liriael and Abhorsen. (I think it was Leo and Diane Dillon who illustrated those covers - I love the Dillons' work. ) So I figure, if a publishing house thinks enough of a book to hire a good illustrator (or in the case of Mr. Nix's books - two phenomenal illustrators) then the book has got to be worth reading.
When there aren't any inspriing book covers to peak my interest, I often pick through my mom's enormous collection of books for something good. My mom works full time and goes to school and somehow manages to read three books at a time and, like a dozen a month. I don't get it. But anyhow, my mom likes to read books about serial killers and crazy people. She's interested in the psychology of it all, which I get, but when my mom tells me that she loves Augusten Burroughs and I should read Running with Scissors... Well, if any of you have read Running with Scissors, think about YOUR MOM telling you she loved it. It's like when my grandmother recommends a book with a big, nasty love scene in it. As I'm reading it, I'm thinking, "Grandma read this (eeew!) and now she knows that I'm reading it!" It's just a little disturbing, that's all.
Then there's the best-ever book club in the world, the BBCS, (I could tell you what is stands for, but then I'd have to kill you), which was started with four of my former co-workers. We have very few rules in the BBCS, (and actually reading the chosen book is not one of them), we're more interested in eating than reading, but having a common book to talk about for a few minutes just gives us a good excuse to meet for lunch more often.
The only rules a loyal BBCS member must follow are these: the chosen book must never be sad; never have anyone in it who dies, (unless it's an anonymous character in a murder-mystery book whose death, although unfortunate, is necessary for the storyline - it's the long, painful, harrowing deaths-by-cancer that we're not interested in reading); never have any dying pets, (that's a new one I added after a conversation about this evil book); and never ever ever are any books written by Alice Hoffman allowed in. We read one Alice Hoffman book early on in the organization of the BBCS and we all developed serious allergies to Ms. Hoffman's writing on account of the thick, heavily descriptive, overly abundant flora in her books. We now have an aversion to all apples, apple trees, flowering trees in general, and anyone named Jorie or Collie.
Other than the Hoffman mishap of '05, the BBCS has been a great resource for different types of books that I'd never choose on my own. I've read two murder mysteries, a collection of short stories, a book about a blogger, and my last selection, A Long Way Down, which I really enjoyed, and which added some fun new British curse words to my vocabulary, but which the rest of the BBCS wasn't to keen on. I told them to bugger off. I liked it and that's all that mattered! Our current book is Without You: A Memior of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent, which I haven't read yet because we developed a policy on hardcover books where if you don't feel like investing in the book, you can wait to borrow it from the person in the BBCS who chose it in the first place. So here I am waiting, and now I need a book to read.
I just finished reading The Secret Life of Bees which I read in three days and which I loved very much, but what do I read now? There was a little teaser in the back of The Secret Life of Bees about The Mermaid Chair which sounds fantastic but I just can't bring myself to read two books by the same author back to back. It just seems like a cop out. If I wanted to read the same author over and over, I could just read Danielle Steel for the rest of my life. I need to separate authors by at least a few books. So now what?
I got the idea in my head that I should take stock of what I've read recently. Maybe that would help me decide on what to read next. So here goes, in no certain order, just as I remember them, the books I've read in the past year. (This is March '05 to March '06 - not books I've read since January - I'm not that good.)
The Secret Life of Bees
The Dog Walker
A Long Way Down
Why Girls Are Weird
Good In Bed
I'm Not the New Me
Everybody Into the Pool
Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn
Dress Your Family in Courdoroy and Denim
Killer Summer
Sammy's Hill
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
And now I'm sad. Is that ALL I've read? In a year? Well, I have been busy. And I do read a lot of blogs, so that has to count for something.
All right, now I'm depressed at my illiteracy and I still don't know what I want to read next. Anybody got any suggestions?
I used to work at Borders where it was much easier to be daring and try out books - they were free after all. On lunch breaks, I could just take any book off the shelves and give it a try. I did this every day and read a store full of books without ever having to pay for a single one. Sweet.
This led to my favorite game of "What's Your Favorite Book?"
I asked the retired French teacher who stocked the Literature section (84 Charing Cross Road), the video game and comic book freak who stocked the Sci-Fi section (anything by Tim Robbins), the awkward Music Clerk (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) the dramatic Cafe Barista (Danielle Steel), everyone got asked.
They would tell me a book and I'd read it. No matter how freaky. Or boring. I figured it was reading after all, so even if it was Danielle Steel, there were worse things I could be doing with my brain cells.
This was the best thing in the world, I'm telling you.
Free books and I never had to choose for myself. This of course led to a frightening variety of tastes in books and led to other games like "Whatever Books Are Left On The Floor" where I'd read whatever someone hadn't thought to reshelve at the end of the day. That game was riskier and led to such delightfully bizarre books as Tex and Molly in the Afterlife.
I eventually left Borders and had to start choosing my own books. Which is so hard. I've resorted to choosing books based on their covers. I have to say it's worked out well for me. Being an illustrator who aspires to have her own artwork on the cover of a zillion books all over the world, I can appreciate a beautiful cover illustration and it makes me want to touch the book, to find out more. The covers are what interested me in these three awesome books by Garth Nix: Sabriel, Liriael and Abhorsen. (I think it was Leo and Diane Dillon who illustrated those covers - I love the Dillons' work. ) So I figure, if a publishing house thinks enough of a book to hire a good illustrator (or in the case of Mr. Nix's books - two phenomenal illustrators) then the book has got to be worth reading.
When there aren't any inspriing book covers to peak my interest, I often pick through my mom's enormous collection of books for something good. My mom works full time and goes to school and somehow manages to read three books at a time and, like a dozen a month. I don't get it. But anyhow, my mom likes to read books about serial killers and crazy people. She's interested in the psychology of it all, which I get, but when my mom tells me that she loves Augusten Burroughs and I should read Running with Scissors... Well, if any of you have read Running with Scissors, think about YOUR MOM telling you she loved it. It's like when my grandmother recommends a book with a big, nasty love scene in it. As I'm reading it, I'm thinking, "Grandma read this (eeew!) and now she knows that I'm reading it!" It's just a little disturbing, that's all.
Then there's the best-ever book club in the world, the BBCS, (I could tell you what is stands for, but then I'd have to kill you), which was started with four of my former co-workers. We have very few rules in the BBCS, (and actually reading the chosen book is not one of them), we're more interested in eating than reading, but having a common book to talk about for a few minutes just gives us a good excuse to meet for lunch more often.
The only rules a loyal BBCS member must follow are these: the chosen book must never be sad; never have anyone in it who dies, (unless it's an anonymous character in a murder-mystery book whose death, although unfortunate, is necessary for the storyline - it's the long, painful, harrowing deaths-by-cancer that we're not interested in reading); never have any dying pets, (that's a new one I added after a conversation about this evil book); and never ever ever are any books written by Alice Hoffman allowed in. We read one Alice Hoffman book early on in the organization of the BBCS and we all developed serious allergies to Ms. Hoffman's writing on account of the thick, heavily descriptive, overly abundant flora in her books. We now have an aversion to all apples, apple trees, flowering trees in general, and anyone named Jorie or Collie.
Other than the Hoffman mishap of '05, the BBCS has been a great resource for different types of books that I'd never choose on my own. I've read two murder mysteries, a collection of short stories, a book about a blogger, and my last selection, A Long Way Down, which I really enjoyed, and which added some fun new British curse words to my vocabulary, but which the rest of the BBCS wasn't to keen on. I told them to bugger off. I liked it and that's all that mattered! Our current book is Without You: A Memior of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent, which I haven't read yet because we developed a policy on hardcover books where if you don't feel like investing in the book, you can wait to borrow it from the person in the BBCS who chose it in the first place. So here I am waiting, and now I need a book to read.
I just finished reading The Secret Life of Bees which I read in three days and which I loved very much, but what do I read now? There was a little teaser in the back of The Secret Life of Bees about The Mermaid Chair which sounds fantastic but I just can't bring myself to read two books by the same author back to back. It just seems like a cop out. If I wanted to read the same author over and over, I could just read Danielle Steel for the rest of my life. I need to separate authors by at least a few books. So now what?
I got the idea in my head that I should take stock of what I've read recently. Maybe that would help me decide on what to read next. So here goes, in no certain order, just as I remember them, the books I've read in the past year. (This is March '05 to March '06 - not books I've read since January - I'm not that good.)
The Secret Life of Bees
The Dog Walker
A Long Way Down
Why Girls Are Weird
Good In Bed
I'm Not the New Me
Everybody Into the Pool
Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn
Dress Your Family in Courdoroy and Denim
Killer Summer
Sammy's Hill
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
And now I'm sad. Is that ALL I've read? In a year? Well, I have been busy. And I do read a lot of blogs, so that has to count for something.
All right, now I'm depressed at my illiteracy and I still don't know what I want to read next. Anybody got any suggestions?
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
The New Christy Line of Jewelry
Exciting news! I have a new jewelry offreing that I think you'll love - the two-strand necklace (AKA "The Christy").
My friend Christy is getting married this June and asked me to make her wedding party some personalized necklaces but she asked if I would make them two-stranded instead of three. Well, I made them, and by golly, I love them!
Just as much casual fun as the three-strand, but a bit more delicate and $10 cheaper! What more could a girl ask for. I don't have a large quantity of them at the moment, and there still aren't jewelry pictures on the website (I know - let's all make a collective "tsk" sound) but feel free to email me with your special orders anytime.
The new Christy is $20 and the earrings are still $10. I even made one for myself and I'm wearing it now as I type.
Sorry for the funky pictures - I took them on the lovely beige counter top in my kitchen.
And thanks Chrsity for the inspiration!
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Before and After
Wow, it's been 8 weeks already!
Here's the before and after of Miss Puppy's most recent haircut. It's kinda hard to see in the pictures, but she was sporting a seroius case of rockstar hair on her head before. Now she's sleek and smooth and she knows she looks good.
Scruffy before...
Sleek and slightly aloof after...
Here's the before and after of Miss Puppy's most recent haircut. It's kinda hard to see in the pictures, but she was sporting a seroius case of rockstar hair on her head before. Now she's sleek and smooth and she knows she looks good.
Scruffy before...
Sleek and slightly aloof after...
Monday, March 13, 2006
This One's All For Flannery
Here are some of the fonts I liked for your postcard. I put them on both the hand-painted version and the Photoshopped version becasue (although it kills me to say it and I can hear my paintbrushes gasping as type this) I think I like the Photoshopped one better. You tell me what you think.
Here's Tangerine:
Here's Tangerine:
And Blackjack/London:
And finally, I thought I'd throw in a fancy font, but I only added it to the Photoshopped one. This is Freebooter:
So what are your thoughts? We never talked fonts, but since you're cute and funky and laid-back, I figured that your font should be, too. Cute and fun, not stuffy and fancy. Let me know what you think and if there are any fonts you had in mind.
6 months and three days...
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Pretty Things
I'm too sleepy to write today so I'll leave you with some pretty pictures I've taken recently.
Like this one:
The old red barn at my friends Dave and Sharon's place.
And this one:
The side of our little wood bin near the house which looks like an outhouse when you look at it from the other side.
And this one:
Which I took last night when Molly and I went out for an after-work walk down to the river. The sky was such an amazing shade of blue - this shot just doesn't do it justice.
OK, time for a nap - enjoy your day!
Like this one:
The old red barn at my friends Dave and Sharon's place.
And this one:
The side of our little wood bin near the house which looks like an outhouse when you look at it from the other side.And this one:
Which I took last night when Molly and I went out for an after-work walk down to the river. The sky was such an amazing shade of blue - this shot just doesn't do it justice.OK, time for a nap - enjoy your day!
Thursday, March 02, 2006
How Do I Ever Get Out of the House
When I get this look every time I put my coat on.
It's says "I know, you're leaving without me, right? How could you? You're leaving me here ALL ALONE? No, the cat doesn't count, she won't play with me and she's too small to snuggle with. Can't I go with you? You know, you might as well just beat me if you're just going to abandon me like this. How could you?"
She's perfected it. Does she practice in the mirror when we're at work.
Here it is again:
This is the look I got this morning. She knows how to break my heart, that little booger. And this morning when I was so cold and tired and wanted nothing more than to climb back into bed and blow off work, she had to give me the puppy eyes while snuggled into the fleece blanket.
She's probably going through the trash at this very moment to get back at me...
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
New Job Update: Thrilled, Art-Drunk, Tired, Happy
I was looking back at some of my old posts and read Sad. Scared. Excited. Happy. and got that same sad feeling of loss and lonliness again so I thought I should post a follow-up .
I'm happy.
At my old job, I used to handle checks. Today I handled art. Real art. Amazing art. I held it, I looked at it, I moved it, I rolled in it (no, not really, but I was so excited and art-drunk at one point, I might have).
Sure, I sit behind a desk for most of the day, but a short walk from my desk is a collection of fantastic art. A few more steps down the hall is the gallery. And I have the keys!
I like to go in there before the gallery opens to the public when the lights aren't on but the sunlight is indirecly lighting the space. It's so quiet and private. I can look at everything and be alone with it and not feel self-conscious about looking at one piece for a really long time. It's the best.
So I might still feel a little lost and confused, I might be exhausted at the end of the day from trying to remember everything, I might not feel as comfortable as I was a my other job yet, but I'm getting there. It's good. I'm happy.
I'm happy.
At my old job, I used to handle checks. Today I handled art. Real art. Amazing art. I held it, I looked at it, I moved it, I rolled in it (no, not really, but I was so excited and art-drunk at one point, I might have).
Sure, I sit behind a desk for most of the day, but a short walk from my desk is a collection of fantastic art. A few more steps down the hall is the gallery. And I have the keys!
I like to go in there before the gallery opens to the public when the lights aren't on but the sunlight is indirecly lighting the space. It's so quiet and private. I can look at everything and be alone with it and not feel self-conscious about looking at one piece for a really long time. It's the best.
So I might still feel a little lost and confused, I might be exhausted at the end of the day from trying to remember everything, I might not feel as comfortable as I was a my other job yet, but I'm getting there. It's good. I'm happy.
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