Poor Robot

My friends started an Etsy shop called Poor Robot with adorable buttons. You should buy some!

Day 4: First Contact!

I thought it would be days before I had first contact with my plants!

But behold: SPROUTS!

I have activity from:

Every single oregano:

One chive plant:

and three basils:


but the sage looks like it has some kind of mold?

He makes me so mad

Grant was being a smart alec, so I pushed him through a wall.

It sucks. Now he has to fix it. PLANTS Day 3: No little growing plants yet.

another way to go green

Since my success with my windowsill Basil, grown completely wrong, from August to March, I've decided to try my hand at balcony gardening.

Since we all know that Sue completely lacks in attention span, I will continue with my ventures into self-watering. I will be growing mostly herbs in my garden, but I'll have some flowers. Tomatoes and berries might come into the picture, but I think I'll by a starter plant for those. I'm definitely going to try hanging the tomato plant though - exciting.

First, I need to start out my little baby seedlings. If I had thought about it, I would have been keeping my egg cartons all winter, but Grant and I do not eat many eggs, so I would not have nearly enough to start my little seeds. 

Friday night, Grant and I went to Lowe's to peruse, and we found a self-watering seedling greenhouse! Perfect! There are little pellets inside, that expand when they are saturated.

You  plant a few seeds in each, put the lid on, and watch them grow.

Here is my tray all seeded up:

A close-up (without the aid of a macro lense, sadly)

And not to worry - I have a labeling system.

My seeds are planted left to right in order of how quickly they should grow, with the exception of the poppies, which I planted more of, cuz they're pretty.

So with hope and within a month, I should have (more) basil, chives, dill, sage, oregano, rosemary, mint, cilantro, parsley and poppies!

Here's hoping!

blanched almonds and red roses

My world smells like almonds and roses tonight. 

Rich in oils and perfume

I hope the wonders won't dissipate in light

that the dawn will bring tomorrow. 

My hero

There is a build your own superhero site. You don't get to pick your name though, This is me!

I made one for Grant too!

pretty cool huh - you get a surprisingly lot of options. Enjoy!

are you a geeky spouse?

Wired did an article on their blog about 10 Annoying habits of a Geeky Spouse.  It's hysterical, but maybe only to geeks, and those married to them. I'm guilty of 4, 5, 8, & 10 especially.  But Grant is just as equally a geek, so we work well together. Takes the edge off I guess.  Let me know if you think I match up with any others. Or if you match up with any.

Superlegs

I don't know if you've heard of this woman, Aimee Mullins, but she was born without lower legs, but has become a runner, athlete, actress, model, and a bunch of other stuff. 

She's also and amazing public speaker. This is her talking about her different legs, and the advances in prosthetic technology. And she does it in heels.

how to tweet

this is absolutely hysterical.  It's only three and a half minutes long. 

They're magically delicious

I just painted a rainbow that ends in a pot of gold for a TD event.

The entire time I had three things going through my head. "They're magically delicious," "Skittles - taste the rainbow," but mostly the song "There's a kiss at the end of the rainbow" from A Mighty Wind.  And a more charged version at the end of the movie. If you haven't seen this movie - it's hysterical. Classic Christopher Guest in true mock-umentary style.

Life is a Cabaret

This weekend I've been helping out with Villanova's set for Cabaret. We got a very watery watercolor, and with it we did the floor. 

We haven't gotten a chance to do the walls, but they will match the floor. And the steps & house floor with be a very pretty metallic purply blue and black.  I'll keep you updated. 

The back walls are pretty scary - they are constructed by people who really don't know how to build.

Scary.

HOWEVER, Villanova is a very pretty campus, full of old stone buildings and all of their charms.

I really need to start taking my nice camera around so I can get some better pictures. 

tomorrow is....another day...

Here it is, up on our wall. The last hauntingly white wall in the living room. I like it. 

Sue is working at Villanova today (and tomorrow). Maybe something will be photo-worthy, and she'll share.

Susan is....

I know that many people are obsessed with Facebook. I have a Facebook account, and I'll check it a few times during the week. However, some people will check it every few hours, updating their info, leaving comments, and looking through everyone's new photos. 

I'll be the first to admit that I spend a fair amount of time on my computer, but it's usually spent on Google Reader (which is one of my favorite tools). 

One thing I do love about Facebook is the status.  At the top of every page, there's bar that asks you "What are you doing right now?" If you click on it, it says "Susan is ...", prompting you to explain what you are doing in a sentence. Very easy if "Susan is reading Watchmen" or "Susan is baking cookies," but how about "Susan is feeling lonely" or "Susan is ecstatic." 

Even though I rarely fill it in on the page, I find myself absentmindedly filling in the blank in my head throughout the day. There's something mollifying about being able to reduce prodigious states of consciousness into a concise sentence. "Susan is.... lethargic," "Susan is expansive," "Susan is contemplative."

My mother is often frustrated with the enormity of the English vocabulary, mostly because she is the one who ends up needing to interpret an abundance of words which meanings have only a gradation of difference.  

I revel in nuance. That may be why I have a hard time defining words - how can I define a word that is already perfect in its tenor (meaning? purport? essence?).  I'd make a terrible interpreter, or at least a very slow one. 

Because of the vastness (immensity?expanse?scope?) of our language, it's almost a game to come up with the right word to fill in the blank. "Susan is reflective," "Susan is livid,""Susan is impish." Thousands of states of being, just waiting to be defined.

So often I want to simply leave it as "Susan is." But in the social setting of Facebook, it just seems cheesy, or spuriously clever. 

So I'll have to save "Susan is." as a deeply personal state of mind. 

A funny thing happened on the way to the streetcar

Lots to share from the past few weeks. 

I was helping my friend Kate paint a backdrop for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at Burlington County College. We got a pretty crappy rendering, had to reverse it, and paint it with colors ordered from a different rendering. 

Here is the rendering. Its lying on the drop that's only been cartooned and had the sky painted. 

Here is the finished drop from the highest point in the theatre. 

I know you can't see it. It looks like the rendering, but neither of us is really pleased with it. Because it matches a lousy rendering.  But you can see the space is  very nice for a small theatre group. 

Next I painted a concrete wall for Salmonpeople at Passage Theatre.  It's supposed to feel like an old wall of a dam.

It has seagull droppings, tidal marks, and a rusty something on it. That only took me a few  hours. 

Then I helped Sarah at Princeton Univeristy finish up stuff for A Streetcar named Desire. Here's a crappy picture of it half set up from my phone.

Here is a toilet tank  I painted  - you'd never know that Michael made it from part of a plastic bin and some styrofoam.

Matt Pilsner took some AWESOME pictures of the set which are here. YOU MUST GO SEE THEM. They're sexy. 

I also am helping Kate with a set for Cabaret at Villanova. So far we've only painted some catwalks, but on the way back we stopped at a rigging place in North Philly and they had this wonderful door, that we both felt compelled to take picture of. 

And last but not least, I found a picture of a set I had helped Sarah paint last season for Princeton's production of Eurydice. 

See the pretty amusement park pier in the background?

Long post. Phew. 

NO SALE

It looks like our old condo is still up for sale. 

THIS was posted on Craigslist on Feb 26th, and it's still HERE on the realtor's website. 

The asking price has dropped $35,000. Bet they wish they'd held onto us for longer.....