Roomba - friend or foe

Found this here.

don't eat the laffy taffy

My very favorite thing I've read today!

Brought to you by Ashley

Polka dot love

Here is a new vinyl I designed and Grant executed wonderfully: Gotta love a good wood grain! Deb took off yesterday for an exam, but it was cancelled due to "technical difficulties." So she spent the day with me. We hit the gym, had some lunch, and coffee of course. Then we went to Five Below, where I got an awesome color of nail polish. What could make it better? Polka dots. Love them. We'll probably be heading to Pittsburgh on Sunday sometime, and we'll be gone for almost three weeks. So if you want to see us, see us soon. Grant is so hot, he makes this milkshake look like warm milk...  that sounds kinda gross.

It's freestyle walking!

This is gymnast Damien  Walters doing really awesome stuff. On the street, and in the gym. Freestyle.

This is really funny - how to use a "time travel" story to get the girl. 

team zissou forever

One of my favorite scenes from The Life Aquatic. Its only 30 secs.

wonderful....

Find of the day

When G & I got married, or maybe even before, when he first moved into the place at Riverfront, we needed glasses, so we bought some cheap, but nice ones at Ikea. They were about 50 cents each. 

We've been slowly breaking them off, one by one over the last 2.5 years. And I've been wanting something a little bit more unique.

And I found them. G and I went to the Berlin Farmers market and there they were. The wonderful kind of vintage that shows that quite a bit of today's design isn't much more than an homage. 

$7 for the set. They pitcher was part of the sale, and even though I suspect they weren't originally a set, it's close enough that I would have bought the pitcher too, even if it wasn't included. I needed a new iced tea pitcher. 

Grant thinks the glasses are a bit too small, but he usually drinks out of our pint glasses anyways. He jokes that he'll pour himself two glasses if he needs to use them.

Grant also vinyl-ed himself the Killers logo on the back of his laptop. Pretty darn nifty.

and coming soon:

awesome vinyl for Rockettruck.

A Eulogy

Ashley was a dear addition to our family.  She was always enthusiastic and happy. Her love of music and chocolate is known far and wide. She was loved by so many, and she only hated one person, who we will call "Lina," for the sake of anonymity. 

Her passion for the information she learned from WebMD, and her willingness to push forward with her surgery in the face of such appalling odds is commendable, even though we know Dan made her do it. 

 It's tragic that her death followed so closely after finally achieving her goal weight; if only she could have used her Coach purse a little bit longer. 

She was so much more than a friend. She was a cousin.

Rest in Peace, Ashley.

Grant pants and potting soil

Grant is officially on vacation now.

And he is happy about it.

In the spirit of my Kitchen organization, I designed and vectorized some labels for my open shelving, which Grant cut out and is applying currently, because he is the most wonderful one, and because I would probably get frustrated and put them on wonky.

Pretty cool, yeah?

...and he got them done before I was even finishing my post, so here are some pictures:

Pretty awesome. I'm totally geeked. 

Grant also (isn't he a super-hero?) built me a self-watering garden. I planted my poor window-sill basil, and my little seedlings this afternoon.

Now I just need to figure out how to make it prettier - any ideas?

A Coffin for Tim (or maybe Ashley)

What does one do with a prop, after it's no longer useful to a theatre? Well, if you are Grant, and the prop is a coffin - you strap it into the back of your truck and offer it to a friend!

In case you missed it - Grant had a coffin in his truck! It was a left over from an older production of A Christmas Carol at McCarter, and they were just going to toss it.  However, our dear Timmy Lange is obsessed with Halloween. He was thrilled to receive it!

Of course, Ashley has dibs if she passes this Friday. 

And now for some pretty pictures:

what lies in the shadow of the statue?

He who will save us all.

That's what Richard said. In Latin.

Photographic Summer

This summer I've decided to use my camera bag as a purse, so I will always have my good camera with me. 

Here's the best of this weekend:

Grant spotted this interesting root formation in Riverton, as we were walking around the town's community yard sale.

Beautiful Autumn.

Deb & Matt's Fuscia.

Hopefully it will be a summer of pretty pictures.

My apartment is actually clean for once, minus the second bedroom, so I took pictures. If you want to see the photos, sans mentioned bedroom, go here.

Neil Gaiman at Washington College

Last Monday, I tagged along while two of my friends, Kate and Scott, went to Washington College in Maryland to listen to Neil Gaiman interviewed as part of their graphic literature festival. 

We got there extra early, since Neil's events have a tendency to be very crowded and often more people show than there is real estate to put them. No worries - they had moved the venue to an open lawn, with a guarantee of a patch of grass, at very least. We were free to explore.

Washington College is Kate's alma-mater, so we were able to get some excellent pizza and tour the campus. She was able to run into some professors, her old technical director, and some unexpected friends - all in town for the same event. 

We strolled around downtown, very seriously discussing the purchase of a boat (Chestertown is apparently the place to go). We checked out the local cemetery, looking for a magical concrete tree stump on which to contemplate the mysteries of life or something similar, and we very narrowly managed to avoid early spring flip-flop blisters.

...and we still had hours to kill. So we sauntered back downtown, visited a very manly store at Scott's request called "Twigs & Teacups", went into the small-town bookstore, then sat down in the town's college bar (not to be confused with the "townie's bar," which I'm told is located elsewhere). I enjoyed a lovely bowl of asparagus soup, an unremarkable glass of wine, and proceeded to meet several of Kate's friends who all had similar plans as us for waiting for the event to approach. 

We eventually made it back to the lawn and were able to get seats. The day was just beginning to cool and it made for a lovely evening outdoors.

Neil started out the evening by reading an excerpt from The Graveyard Book - the part were Bod shows up at the cemetery and the dead people all elect to protect him, since his family was killed.

Then the Literary House Director of Washington College, Joshua Shenk, started the Q&A, after some rather humorous moments having issues with his microphone, while Neil very calmly gave him advice on fixing it. 

The talk was amazing. Though Neil must answer questions like these often, he gives real thought to his answers, and loves to expound on each question with personal stories. He talked about how he moved to America because of the first amendment freedoms, and how he is helping make sure those rights are defended on behalf of comic book writers, illustrators, and owners. 

He also had lots to say about actually writing - his processes, where his ideas come from, if his writing would be the same if he wasn't a father, etc.  I found interesting his answer to a question about the idea that there are very few actual stories, and everything else is a re-telling of the same thing. He said that could be true, that most stories could be boiled down to their simplest forms, but that the storyteller's job is to keep the story alive, to make it new, to make it continue. 

He also commented on the phrase "write what you know." Neil thinks he would have been terrible at any other job, but writing works for him because he writes what he knows. He knows about a boy named Bod growing up in a graveyard, he knows about a town called Wall, and what lays beyond it in Faerie. (I wish you could hear him say it. It was so simple, and it made so much sense - I feel that here it may come off cocky - it wasn't.) It just made sense.

And for Aunt Sandy's benefit - he did say that the end of the Graveyard book was one of the saddest things he's ever written. He said there is something tragic about being a parent. You pour so much of yourself into these people that you love so much, and think are great, and if you did a good job - they leave you. 

He also had lots of fun things to say, about how Good Omens was written for fun between Terry Pratchett and him, figuring out what happens next and trying to beat the next part, or make the other laugh hardest.  About how Interworld was a proposal for a TV series Neil wrote with Michael Reaves that they got sick of explaining and wrote into a book so they could just hand it to studios, etc. About how he spent much of his young life in the library reading the children's section then, reluctantly moved on to the adult section. He shared which of his characters he'd like to hang out with, get to know.  How his writing evolved from pen and paper to computer back to pen and paper - He wanted Stardust to feel like it was written a long time ago, so he got a fountain pen and wrote it by hand, and liked it so much that he kept on doing it. How whenever he decides to do something for the money, it never works out, so he writes mostly what he wants. He hinted at how important communication with the people who love his work is to him, and how he feels he has a responsibility to them.

He also announced an unscheduled signing, which was exciting, except I didn't bring anything. He did limit it to one item per person, so Scott and I each took one of Kate's books for him to sign. He caught on pretty to our trick, but didn't mind. We were close to the end of the line, but he took the time to chat with us, he drew a picture of the Sandman (he said it was because Kate gave him a present - some of Dana's buttons) in one of the books, and wrote "Hello again!" in the third. 

Here he is signing Fragile Things for Kate.

What a lovely day.

The middle picture was taken by Aileen Brenner WC class of '09.

Dracula: the blog!

Dracula, the novel, is composed of many journal entries by the main characters.

Whitney Sorrow, in the blog titled Dracula, has decided to post each journal entry in real time, so you can read through it as events are dated in the book. 

The first date was yesterday: May 3rd. The last will be November 6th (or 7th, there is a "note" in the back with no date). 

A chapter of a book every few days is super-easy. It's not like you aren't already spending that time online!

This is pretty awesome too - only 1 minute.