friday morning commute playlist...

ok so admittedly the ipod brought up stinkers i passed over this morning on the way to work, but it DID come up with some really good stuff! if you haven't heard some of these songs you should download em stat!

"triple track" by dance hall crashers

"a kiss is not a contract" by flight of the conchords

"faithfully" by journey

"rang dang" by bloodhound gang

"opposites attract" by paula abdul (this is awesome, family guy completely altered this song for me. now when i sing along and get to the chorus instead of singing "cuz opposites attract" i sing "cuz i'm dressed like a cat".)

"gett off" by prince

"all my rowdy friends have settled down" by hank willams jr. (i started cracking up bad when this song came up directly after "gett off"... cuz that one's a song about one night stands and whatnot... and this one's about how none of the dude's friends go out and party anymore.)

"the new you" by the vandals

"coming clean" by green day (that dookie cd will always hold a special place in my heart... it marked me at 17 just starting to listen to kroq and more rock and punk and blah blah blah. i still love dookie. shut up.)

"uptown girl" by me first and the gimmie gimmies (ok check it out, billy joel came up earlier in the mix but i forwarded past it because it was too sleepy. then the me first and the gimmie gimmies comes on and i'm all YEAHHHHHH BILLY JOEL! KICKASS!!)

"waiting" by cake (cake is awesome awesome rainy day music. if it's pouring when i head home i'm just gonna set the ipod to shuffle through all my cake cds and it's gonna rock my socks off)

the end!

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.

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.

karaoke party pics!

aw nuts, it's been a couple of days since my last post! i'm trying to get back into the swing of writing every day like i used to; sometimes things are so busy it slips my mind!

like these past couple of days - wednesday night was my buddy shannon and i's last chance to karaoke together before her move next week to denver, colorado! we went to clancy's in long beach and it. was. awesome!

i'm getting ready for an open house right now because we're trying to sell our condo, otherwise i'd give you the full and complete rundown of the night's activities - instead i'll just tell you that you should click here to see the pics we took!

by the way, if you or someone you know is looking for a condo in downtown long beach definitely check out www.1919beverlyway103.com and also please buy it! i'll love you forever!

revenge of the reinbeer!!!

ok check it out, for xmas this last year, our buddy gayle gave josh and i a couple of these awesome reinbeer!



and for whatever reason, the beer in our house is always slow to go. i don't know if it's because it's on the bottom shelf of our fridge and it just kinda weirdly gets forgotton? so anyways, here we are at the end of february and those little guys STILL hadn't been drunk! something i'm not proud of!

on saturday night i was hanging out with gayle and her buddy wes, and we were at the pike and having beers, and she ordered something deliciously hoppy and i got my wussy ladylike wyder pear cider, and she point blank asks me "have you drank those reinbeer yet?"

and in my head i was like OH SHIT. and in my mouth i was like "uh yeah! totally!" cuz i didn't wanna be rude and say no i always forget there's beer in my fridge because the rum is right at eye level!

i'll tell you what i TOTALLY got called on it!! the next thng out of her mouth was "cuz the last time i came over (which was recently) they were still in your fridge!"

and i had to fess up. and i had to dedicate a post to gayle, the reinbeers and her delicious HOPS HOPS HOPS!

and i also had to prove that one of them is now gone!



also fun for today, i got featured on found handmade! check out the link and let em know what you think!

imagonna stitch the shit outta it!

today was all kinds of fun! drove up to handmade galleries in sherman oaks cuz the crafty chica has written a new book and she was havin a book signing slash crafty demo, and it was just really cool getting to sit with some of my fave crafty peeps chattin and sewing and laughing and we just had a blasty!

this was my first time meeting the crafty chica (aka kathy cano-murillo), and she was just SUPER nice! her demo was puffy appliques, where you cut a picture from one piece of fabric and applique it to a contrasty piece of fabric - stitch around the edge, add some polyfill inside, and pow! adorableness!

i wish i had thought to get my camera out and snap some pics of the cool stuff people were doing; i was just so into doin my little embroidery thing i lost track of the photodocumenting! it's always kinda fun to just go with the flow without having any sort of plan - i sat there for 3 hours just adding more and more to my piece and here's how it turned out:



and i also picked up a copy of her new book AND 2 little bottles of glitter because i heart glitter like no ones business!



and also, jenny ryan of felt club fame had a book signing on friday at reform school which i also went to and it was ALSO faboo! stay tuned, in the future i'm gonna do a book report on her book, too!

book reports for everyone!

and now i'm kickin back and watchin the oscars!

new sponsorship!

check out our new sponsor!



(site not actually sponsored by calvin klein, but i think you already knew that!)

happy new years!!!

omg i am awful, it's already a week into the new year, i've been home from vacation for like 3.5 days now, and i STILL have not updated anything on the blog!!

i'll keep it short and sweet, but the holidays were a blasty! was bequeathed with a spanky new buttonmaker that will greatly expand the amount of stuff i can make for your artsy fartsy enjoyment, keep an eye out for all kinds of new designs soon!

a big ol group of us went to savannah to stay at the farm for a week and it was amazing. lots of good times all around - if ya wanna take a gander at our shenanigans, go here! if ya wanna see what celeb paid a visit to the ol' farmstead, go here! if ya wanna see actual for real pics of our farm, go here! enjoy!

i did a crazy amount of reading on the trip out and back, so in the next couple of days i'll have new book reports for you!

pow!!! it's great to be back!

SPACE CATS!!!

ok so last night gayle and i went and checked out cats at the orange county performing arts center! it was super awesome and we had a blasty gettin all dressed up and acting like classy ladies! (notice i said acting. jury's still out on whether or not i'm actually for realz classy.)

one of the coolest things about it was that i've had this "highlights from cats" cd for years and years, but i've never actually seen the musical or really knew anything about what it was about.

so i knew most of the songs by heart, but since i'd never actually seen it, there were surprises! some good, like the fact that the rum tum tugger is a total manslut cat, which was really funny. the one bad surprise is when that theater cat is singing about being a theater cat and then all of a sudden decides to perform one of his plays... and it's weird, and you can't understand anything he's talking about, and it kinda goes on too long... there's cool siamese cats prancin around but i really coulda done without that part...

it totally cracked me up that grisella the old raggedy tore up from the floor up cat keeps coming back to sing basically different versions of the same song - i kept picturing in my head that she was popping her head back onstage going "uh, hey guys, i'm super old, can i get reborn please? lookit how crappy my fur looks!" and it's like JEEZ give it a rest old duteronomy's tryin to decide stop pressuring him!!

aaaaaand what else. ok 2 awesome things - i recently bought this shirt from delias:



and am now obsessed with space cats. and at the end of cats, when old duteronomy gets tired of listening to grisella bitch and moan about being old and picks her, and they're on the platform floating up so he can send her to the heavyside lair to be reborn, and there's flashing lights and crap everywhere and it was all i could do to not yell out SPACE CATS!!! in the theater!!! and then of course i had a massive giggle fit, only stopped by the fist i shoved into my mouth.

the other supremely awesome thing about last night's show was they were having some technical difficulties with the wireless microphones, equalling a bit of buzzy feedback here and there. not an excessive amount, not enough or constant enough to really be an issue, but at the end of the musical, there's this huge group number where all the cats are singing, and there's a big ol' BZZZZZZZZZZT!!! that happens mid song that just sounds like a humongous fart. it was quite possibly the best thing ever.

which i guess answers the question about whether or not i'm a classy broad...

jingle bellzzz, batman smellzzzz

ok tonight josh, his bro chris and i went caroling with a group of folks from our building at the old folks homes one street over. i think the last time i went caroling was about 20 years ago back in grade school, and what's awesome is i'm a full grown adult and i STILL want to sing all the alternate jackassy lyrics to these songs!!! and i started really really wanting to make up alternate lyrics to santa claus is coming to town, because really how stalker is it to watch someone when they're sleeping, watch em when they're awake, watch em when they're taking a dump so make it a good one for goodness sake!

for the most part we were all good. but i could NOT resist, and the few times we sang silent night i did the obnoxious little kid thing where at the high notes (sleep in heavenly peaceeeeeeee) i went as high as i could, but i kept it kinda quiet so it wasn't too overpowering...

there was one kinda scary guy at the first old folks home that yelled at us a lot and seemed to single josh out almost making us think he wanted to fight, and then as we were leaving the room he got in his face and asked for a polaroid camera - maybe he was the long lost best friend of savannah's polaroid dude? i dunno!

after caroling was the afterparty at one of our neighbor's, and it was fun! we actually met and hung out with more neighbors! it was totally fun! i learned all their names! will i remember where they live and what their names are tomorrow? probably not, but stay tuned!

also, just fyi be advised, there's only a couple of days left to save 20% with free shipping at www.heartsandlaserbeams.com by using coupon code SPIKEDNOG08! offer good through 12/15!

portland weekend recap!

ok so as you know we went to portland last weekend! we were visiting our buddies rachael and justin (of the ruckus fame, it was halloween, justin is currently in an agatha christie play, so it was a busy few days chock full of fun!

we flew on jet blue, and normally telling you about our vacation wouldn't include saying what airline we used because it usually leaves us super-surly. but omg jet blue is the bomb. you know those commercials where the music is superhappy and feelgood and it just makes you all bubbly inside watching it? it's all true! friendly employees! free snacks! leg room for days! tv at every chair so i didn't have to miss the halloween episode of the office! it was fabulous!

ok so our first day there, rachael and justin took josh, gayle and i to a little breakfast joint in downtown milwaukie (where they live). after breakfast we walked around town a little bit, and near the library there were a bunch of ducks engaging in duck butt showing activities:



we also saw possibly the coolest logo ever:



later in the day, justin went to play rehearsal and rachael was cool enough to take us WAY out of the way to the pumpkin patch. this was seriously the high point of our weekend cuz all josh and i wanna do is run away and start a farm. we went through a corn maze, where josh adopted a lonely ear of ground corn and ate almost all the kernels off of it through the course of the rest of the weekend:



after the maze we all hiked out to their pumpkin patch and picked out some faboo pumpkins - my camera's battery died while we were out there so i didn't get to document what our jack-o-lanterns ended up looking like, but rest assured they were awesome!

went home to don halloween costumes to wear to the opening night of justin's play - i had a pocket full of clear plastic rhinestones with me, and every stranger i talked to that night i gave them a handful of "diamonds" and told them very seriously, "these have always brought me luck". and NO ONE knew who i was, which made it that much more awesomely hilarious. the halloween party following the play was also a hoot, lots of good costumes all around! this worked out well, because when josh and i were tasked with coming up with what the no costume penalty would be, the best we could come up with is "you must drink a cup of pee and get raped."




the next day, justin had his play all day and gayle, josh, rachael and i met some of rach's friends for a tour of the shanghai tunnels underneath portland... can't post any pics of that because they watch that stuff like a hawk, but it was kind of sort of more than a little anticlimactic and i don't know if i'd recommend it to a friend... basically you don't see tunnels you see one place's basement and hear a LOT of references to tv shows that talk about tunnels, and way way way way too many little stories that don't necessarily need to be part of a tour. it was fun hanging out with everyone so i wouldn't say it was a total goose egg, but i don't think i would need to go back to that...

sunday started out as a bummer of a day - somewhere in the course of saturday night burroughs the cat got out of the apartment, and it sucked. totally sucked. burroughs is an awesome cat. so we all spent most of the day working on getting him back. he came home that night though, which is completely awesome. (i was way more excited about the cat coming home than i was that i just saw a basement in downtown portland, by the way...) he came home while a bunch of us had gone out to hang out with josh's buddy jerry that he's known since childhood and his wife also named rachel. this is what rachel looks like holding a camoflauged beer:



that night was pretty sweet, we went to a bar called dots in portland and hands down any place that has velvet paintings on the wall = best places on earth! after that we paid a visit to powells books and had our minds blown by the sheer size of it, and finished the night off with a trip to ground kontrol, this bar with a crapload of video games. got to play the elvira and addams family pinball machines, which are my favorite ones ever, so i count that as a win!

came home on monday afternoon, taking the train to the airport was super easy and highly recommended! the flight home was on-time and just as rad as the flight out, so lemme just say again jet blue rools!

that's my story and i'm sticking to it, there's a buttload more pics of this adventure at my flickr page so enjoy!

they drink too much part 3!

here's part three in the they drink too much series - here we see the partybot way past his recommended intake of boozeahol, poor thing! this painting was also featured on the cover of the district magazine on january 2; how about you take home a piece of history?



they drink too much #3
8" x 10" artwork in black handmade strip frame
acrylic on canvas
$125

available through january 31 at siren
2240 east 4th street
long beach, ca 90814

happy weekending!