beware the white t-shirt ambush!!!

so last week, josh got new white t-shirts. and he wasn't quite sure what to do with the old ones yet, like did he want to save em as rags or whatever, so he made a little pile of them on the bedroom floor.

they stayed there for a few days, and then i asked him about it - he mentioned "yeah, i'm not sure what i'm doing with that yet." and i can't tell you what the starting point was, but shortly thereafter we were in a huge snowball-fight style tshirt throwing frenzy! TSHIRTS EVERYWHERE!!!

since then, it's become a source of comedy and careful planning. on sunday, as i was leaving for patchwork at 7:45am and saying goodbye to josh, he snuggled down deeper under the covers and gloated a little about how nice and warm it was in bed.

and he got a faceful of shirts! he told me later "you know, i didn't do anything with those shirts when you left, they just stayed piled around my face cuz it made bed that much cozier."

curses, foiled again!

a favorite ambush is hiding around a corner with an armful of white tshirts, waiting for the other person to walk through the door - WHITE TSHIRTS!!!

last night, josh was getting his new work phone set up and i took his concentration as a golden opportunity for shenanigans:



this morning i woke up to being covered up, coroner style, in white tshirts.

i love my life.

new garden pics and uhhh... we got chickens!

ok so some major updates in our backyard:



our carrots got harvested last weekend! they definitely could have stayed in the ground longer, but we figured they wouldn't get much longer since our planters are so shallow. so we'll save carrots for another time (or big deep pots next year!), but these little guys were totally tasty!



and our sugar snap peas have started kickin out some peas - they're so freaking good! it's kinda crazy how tall these plants have gotten. we're thinkin about planting some more so we can have peas to share with friends or freeze or something like that.

but the biggest news in our backyard last weekend was...



WE TOTALLY GOT CHICKENS!

the one on the left is martha stewart. an easter egger type chicken, she'll in theory lay eggs that are blue, green, pink or brown. it's a good thing. the one on the right is paula deen - they said she was a silkie but we're not so sure, we're thinking she may be a hybrid of some kind.

and yes. we named em that because they're the dirtiest birds around! if we'd gotten a third it woulda been named oprah.

they're old enough to be laying eggs, but nothing yet. we read they'll most likely start molting because of the new home and then start again when they're done molting, so we'll see what happens! they're super cute, we've let em run around the backyard and they are crazy wily when it comes to trying to get em back in the coop!

check out the full flickr set here, including pics of the sweet chicken coop josh's uncle donnie helped us build!

a quick thought for a monday evening...

i have quite a lot of times in my life where i am excited and happy about things that are going on.

and i am really fortunate and grateful for how freaking awesome my life and the people involved in it are.

T to the G to the I to the F y'all!!!

this weekend is gonna be jam-packed with awesomeness, here's what josh and i have on tap:

kickball championships on saturday - it's the last games of the season, and it's almost unnecessary to play the games because i know exactly how it's gonna turn out... there's 3 games being played. #1 top team will play the #4 bottom team, the #2 (us!) and the #3 team will play each other, and then the winners of those two games will play each other.

so basically, #1 team will win and we will win (cuz we've beat the #3 team twice before), then we'll play the #1 team and they will kill us because apparently they're amazing. but it'll be good times and there's gauranteed snacks!

after that josh gayle and i are gonna go to the sneak preview showing of whip it at the long beach towne center. i don't know if i've mentioned before... but i'm crazy about roller derby. if i'd discovered it like 10 years ago when i didn't have things like a sometimes-angry knee, and i had the money and time, i would so join a league! but alas, for all the reasons stated above, i must be content to sit and drink my beer from the sidelines.

SO EXCITED FOR THIS MOVIE! josh and i have been waiting for it to come out for months. and if you go to the sneak preview they're givin out free tshirts! they're showin it at more places than long beach town center, check out moviefone.com or fandango.com and you can find the theater near you!

also, sunday morning josh and i are starting a 4 week long sailing class - i don't know why this terrifies me... but i'm kinda freaked out by the idea of driving a boat. i'm pretty sure i know why, but it's a stupid reason so hopefully i'll be able to put that behind me and kick some watery ass!

and then mixed in there will be the usual weekend web design class homework and some writing for the next week's oc weekly blog posts. and painting a commission. aaaaaand what else. sleeping i hope! i definitely hope there'll be some sleeping in there.

like i said, this weekend's gonna be chock full of awesome! will hopefully get a post up this weekend with an update on our backyard garden - our plants have completely BLOWN UP!!!

fight for your right to carbs!

josh decided the other day he was going to start making ribbons out of spaghetti noodles to sell on etsy - to raise carb awareness!

concert fun and internetty news!

ok so last week josh and i went to see the killers play at the hollywood bowl, and it uberrocked!!!

i didn't realize until like a day before the show that the psychedelic furs were opening for them, and i was like uhhh that's cool. because it makes me wanna rummage through thrift store racks for pink things to shove in jenn's face while singing (badly) "PRETTYYYYY IN PIIIIIINNNNNNNK". i didn't realize at the time how amazing this one-two punch of musicness was gonna be!!

so we pretty much had the perfect concert experience - we drove up to hollywood early afternoon, got there before rush hour traffic had even begun. checked into the best western that's like 2 blocks from the bowl, and moseyed down to the hollywood/highland complex. it really kinda cracks me up how this place is billed as so hip and trendy and the oscars are held there, but really... it's just a fancy mall.

i'm not exaggerating. it's a mall. there's a hot topic. steps away from where they hold the oscar. it just cracks me up.

we were lucky! we were there the same day hot topic was having a q&a about that new jennifer's body movie, and i guess panic at the disco was gonna play. i didn't so much care about that, we were just there to gawk at celebs. so we hung out directly behind the sound booth, listening to them talk shit about everybody was awesome. and on the second level you could see celebs getting their pics snapped and doing interviews. saw adam brody from the oc, megan fox and diablo cody.

i don't know about you but i wanna party with diablo cody. she reminds me of my girl liz. i bet she rocks the karaoke stage!

anyhow, i found out after the fact that my old pal ed killmond from scad was there and thought he recognized me, and that is super awesome even though we didn't get a chance to say hi. hi, ed!

after we hung out there a bit, walked back to the hotel and packed up our snacks for the concert. i LOVE that you can bring your own snacks to the h-wood bowl. we brought enough for 20 people, but it was just me and josh... we may have overpacked. for certain shows you can't bring your own booze, and i declare shenanigans!

the show was AWESOME. every song psychedelic furs played i was all "i know this song! i know this song!" it was like sitting and listening to a john hughes movie soundtrack. and then they didn't play pretty in pink. and their set was over. and i was like "WHAT THE HELL!!!"

josh and i started figuring maybe they were one of those bands that was so sick of that song, maybe they refuse to play it these days. but then the killers started, and their sound is SO psychedelic furs, i started thinking. omg that's gonna be the encore. they're gonna do pretty in pink with the furs.

and they did.

and it was AMAZING.

seriously, the killers rock my socks off and almost every song has this nostalgic quality about it, every song is so awesome. i heart them hooray!

once the show was over, instead of having to deal with crappy parking lot traffic we just had a short 2 block walk to the hotel and that was it. bliss.

the hotel thing, it made all the difference. a while back i saw the police at dodger stadium with my sis danielle and some friends, and we were in the parking lot for like an hour and a half after the show.

so that's my recap - in other news, hearts and laserbeams was offline for a couple of days due to hacky shenanigans. it's back online and all fixed now, so thank goodness for that! i have to seriously thank raina from the queen's men for getting rid of all the hacker shenanigans, and bluehost for helping me get my hosting account unsuspended. y'all are the best!

he works hard for the money...

here we see my fabulous huzzz hard at work in the hearts and laserbeams sweat shop! we're sending a box full of tees to shopScad today; if you're in the low country you besss get in that shop later this week and pick one up! shopscad features work by students, alumni and faculty of the savannah college of art and design, and is located at 340 bull street in historic downtown savannah.

not fortunate enough to live in the south? don't fret my pet, our tees are also available online!

i've had the time of my life...

all right dude by now it's old news, but patrick swayze passed away today. i'm really sad about it - that guy made both the best and the worst movies ever and now you gotta sit there and listen to me talk about it!

number one, like most preteen girls in the 80s i LOVED the dirty dancing movie. had the soundtrack, had the second soundtrack, saw the movie about 8 billion times between the ages of 10 and 32. (lemme share with you that in the back of my head, i always thought it was kinda weird that johnny and baby hooked up because it was like the gabrielle carteris thing in 90210 - i could not get past the fact that swayze looked way older than the early 20s or so character he was playing)

yeah, i liked ghost all right when it came out. (SAM WHEAT!!!) but for me, it was all about coming out - one of my fave swayze movies ever was to wong foo, thanks for everything, julie newmar. PURE COMEDY GOLD.

no wait, what's better - patrick swayze as a drag queen or patrick swayze doing chippendales dancing with chris farley(r.i.p.) ?!? crap. this may take some thinking.

while i still haven't seen point break or roadhouse all the way through, i did get to see a chunk of roadhouse once a couple of years ago, and one of the best lines ever is "you're too stupid to have a good time". also, a couple of years ago the huzzz and his brother introduced me to the classic red dawn. that shit is intense and fully awesome so you should probably rent it. rumor has it they're working on a remake. rumor also has it they suck.

so back to swayze! true story, a couple of halloweens ago josh and i went out to south carolina to see our savannah friends for halloween, and when we got there our buddy trav had carefully placed a huge dirty dancing poster on our bed, complete with fake autograph from johnny castle himself saying "thanks for the great time at kellermans this year! i truly was the time of my life".

i think it was shortly after that, that josh and i found his older than dirt typewriter. we started writing random silly letters to the savannah kids. i don't know who got our patrick swayze letter, but it started as a fan letter to patrick swayze, and then slowly devolved into creepy fanness, and then joking anger that he may have pushed jerry orbach (r.i.p.) down the stairs. and i think it was the last line of the letter where we wrote "i hate you johnny castle".



which we later made into a shirt design that we sold via hearts and laserbeams for a long while.

also, one year for our anniversary i spent about 10 seconds photoshopping (badly) josh and i's faces onto the dirty dancing poster.



that's not all the reasons i love johnny castle, patrick swayze, vida boheme, the whole kit n kaboodle, but it's a lot of em. and that's all the reasons i'm wishin i had a watermelon to carry in mourning.

WOLVERRRRRIIIIIIINESSSSS!!!!!

gardening with the calverts: month 1

ok so about a month ago, josh and i started a little veggie patch in our backyard using the book square foot gardening by mel bartholemew as a guide for our gardening shenanigans.

here's what it looked like when we first built the planter and got the dirt and seeds into it:



and here's what it looks like now:


(these are just the radishes - check out everything else by clickin' the pic!)

josh and i had a tiny balcony garden for like 2 years before this, and expanding the operation now that we have a little more space has been so fun! we're both pretty effing amazed at how crazy some of this stuff is growing; in theory soon we'll have watermelons, peas, pumpkins, corn, radishes, chives, tomatoes, carrots... i think it all kind of depends on the weather - we started all this pretty late in the summer but the growing season in california's longer, so who knows! (we got to eat a few spinach leaves the other night, so freakin delicious!)

we also started a compost bin in the backyard, which both of us are a little unsure of - mostly because neither one of us has done that before, so there's a whole lot of "uhhh are we doing this right?" goin' on... we put this little vinyl fence up for like 60 bucks to hide the composting experiment:


(if you click to see the larger version of this pic in flickr, and you look at the telephone wires, you can see some of the zillions of birds waiting for me to go inside so they can get back to the bird feeder...)

so we'll see how that goes! we added worms to the bin tonight... the gal that we bought em from basically made us smell worm poo, she says to prove that it smells like dirt, but i think it was so she could tell her friends later she got people to smell worm poo.

i feel like i need to get a better handle on timing out what we're planting... what are good fall/winter veggies? anyone got any hot tips for what to plant and when in southern california?

who wants to see something new!!!

this here is a photo of the huzzz josh cutting open one of those heineken minikegs with his dremel tool. lookit those sparks fly! there was a rattley noise coming from inside the empty keg so he wanted to see what was inside - i predicted an even smaller keg of beer! unfortunately getting inside this thing is hard work and we don't have access to a chain saw so the project was abandoned.

and that's not the only show and tell i've got for today!



check out our dog jimmy the greek on a brand new coaster set! 50% of the price of these coaster sets will benefit the humane society, cuz we're huge fans of helpin out the homeless animals!

there's all kinds of new stuff in the shop today, including mousepads, coaster sets, stationery and personalized easter plates!



order your easter plates soon soon soon, cuz it takes a little time to get em made up - unfortunately there's not quite time to get them if you're international, but U.S. orders can be placed until march 22 with guarunteed easter delivery!

disneyland fun times!

two days in a row, we're back on blogging track!



friday i got to go to disneyland with my sister michelle and her kids for a few hours, it was so much fun! it wasn't too busy, we were only there a few hours, it was all in all pretty sweet!

we ran around on tom sawyer's island for a while, took jacob on star tours for the first time ever, and got to see my other sister danielle hard at work! make sure you take a look at the pics i took and keep an eye out for her - she's got a big red nose and carries an axe!



then that night i spent a bunch of time working on top secret projects! i hope to be able to share soon, it's gonna be a ton of fun for everyone! pow!

easy peasy nice and cheesy!

last night josh and i busted out our new fondue pot for some cheese-dipping delicousness!

we used this recipe!

and then, because i'm in the process of coming down with a nasty cold, i was alseep on the couch by 7pm. at around 9pm i woke up and realized i should just give up and go to bed. so i said good night to josh, grabbed my phone, and as i was plugging it in i was like OMG i got a text from my brother brandon!

this is news because el brando is an old school sort who is not too fond of things like the internets and texting. it's part of what makes him awesome. he's like the dude from big lebowski, but more sean penn looking.

so i read his text and it says, and i quote:
"best buy is giving away $250.00 gift cards to the first two-thousand callers due to some "lawsuit" i just got one; i was #381. 1-800-429-5683"

and i was like hot damn i will put off going to sicksleep for five minutes and get us some best buy goodness! i try calling the number, and it's busy.

i try calling again, and it's busy.

again.

busy.

again.

busy.

finally, i think on the 11th try i got through! SUCCESS!!! i hear some fun music and then a voice welcomes me to THE BIG GAY CHATLINE!!!

I GOT SERVED!!!!

i called brandon immediately after this and we shared a hearty chuckle and then i went to bed!

the end!!!

also, just a heads up i just got signed up as a contributer on the found handmade blog! make sure you check it out periodically throughout the day, there's a bunch of us folks that'll be sharing amazing links to handmade goodies on the internets for your shopping enjoyment!

best. job. ever.

the winner of "best job ever" has got to be my sister danielle, who is currently interning on the kevin and bean morning show here in l.a.

if you need proof, click here for the link, click on "kevin and bean" on the left sidebar and watch the kevin and bean tv video called "beermug eats prison cheetos". my sister danielle, rockin' a green shirt and short hair, shows up on the left side of the screen a few times as she follows the djs directions on how to make a prison recipe for cheetos.

lemme say it again.

best. job. ever.

cute as hell...

you may or may not know, but my sister danielle has a radio show on her college's online station on tuesdays, 4-530pm.

now that i'm work-from-home girl, i get to listen to it again, hooray! she always plays a fun mix of stuff and almost always plays tenacious d when i ask her to, and for that she gets 20 gold stars.

so yesterday i tuned in, and it was the most adorable thing ever - every time, and i mean EVERY time the music stopped and danielle started talking again, our dog jimmy would run into the room with his tail wagging, looking for her.

it got to the point where he started looking in all of josh's hiding spots he uses when they're playing hide and seek - is danielle hiding in the shower? is she behind the door? where the eff is she, i can hear her i know she's somewhere!!!

it was awesome. the end. tune in next week when i find out if their call-in phone line still works, signalling the return of prank calls to the show hooray!