It’s All About Meme.
I’ve been tagged, twice (by This Young House and midwestmoderngirl). I suppose I’d better get around to it, eh?
1. What did you do 10 years ago?
I had just graduated high school, and I was getting a head start on college with a philosophy 101 course that crammed an entire semester into an intensive two week course. I loved it, but I learned not to major in philosophy (which was my plan at the time). My teacher said that philosophy majors either become teachers or garbagemen. Yeah.
2. Five items on your to-do list:
- Finish coding two WordPress blogs for clients.
- Plant the flowers I bought that are slowly dying in their containers.
- Pull up the weeds that are EVERYWHERE.
- Put a patio in the backyard (I am NOT looking forward to the digging we’ll be doing this weekend).
- Take Murray to the vet for a check-up.
3. Snacks I enjoy:
I LOVE chocolate and peanut butter, but I haven’t had much peanut butter since it made me sick a couple of months ago. I’ve been eating green seedless grapes and cheddar flavored rice cakes lately. Not at the same time though.
4. What would you do if you were a billionaire?
We would of course help our family (pay off all debts/mortgages) and donate a lot, but for the fun stuff… I would love to have a house with an open, airy studio space (similar to Amy Butler’s). I like the whole fixing up process (as you may have noticed), so I’d love to have a new ‘project’ to work on!
5. Places I would live:
- Portland
- New York
- Paris
6. Jobs I have had:
- Amusement Park Ride Operator
- Handy(wo)man
- Telephone Survey Person (not telemarketing, but almost as annoying)
- Bookseller
- Stationer / Shop Owner
- Web & Graphic Designer
7. Bloggers I am tagging who you will enjoy getting to know better:
I will simply remind Jules that she was also tagged and that we are waiting…
Just Because You Can
… doesn’t mean you should.
I’m getting rid of the fancy font for post titles. For now, at least.
A Huge Blogroll, a Nice Font
I’ve made two changes to the blog that you may or may not have noticed…
I had been meaning to update the blogroll in the sidebar for some time, but I hadn’t gotten around to it. I thought it would be nice to actually link to all of the blogs that I read (all 100 or so of them), but the list would be waaay too long to fit! I’ve seen some blogs that use Blogline’s exported list, but I switched to Google Reader a few months ago. I wasn’t aware of a way to export my list from the Reader, but I found out that it is possible. If you want to try it, look for “Settings”, then “Tags”, make the list(s) you want to share public, and then get the code from “add a blogroll to your site”.
The new and improved blogroll can be found here.
Now, about that “nice font”. At first, I only wanted to change the font headers for the sidebar sections. I figured I could just make an image for each section, set the h2 to “display, none” in the css, and be done. I started working on it and I realized that it wouldn’t be quite so easy. There are several widgets that don’t work that way (no easy way to add html), and they would have to be edited individually. OK, that would be a lot of work, but it would be manageable. Oh, except updating plugins would overwrite the changes. It just started to seem like one big headache.
I went off in search of an image replacement script and I found a great one at A List Apart. There were a few adjustments that had to be made to my css files (my images are set to have a border, which had to be removed for h1 and h2 elements), but it was fairly easy.
The blog now looks like this:
The font is Natural Script and I love the look, but I’m not 100% sure if I’m keeping it for the blog post titles. The script loads last, so there’s a delay before you see the prettier version. More troubling than that though is the loss of linking. You used to be able to click on the post title to be taken to that page, but now you have to click on the comments count instead. I’m not sure if that’s something that will bother me or not. I could make the date beneath the post title into a link, so maybe that would be an acceptable alternative.
Working on the blog is like working on the house… there’s always more work that can be done.
Flowers for My Garden
Another trip to the nursery, another batch of plants taken home with me.
We already have the green velvet boxwoods and francee hostas for the front.
And now we’ll have (clockwise from top left) purple dome asters, pixie meadowbrite coneflowers, ruby star coneflowers, and sweet dreams coreopsis. They’re all at varying heights, from 15″ to 36″. I still have to (re)prepare the side garden before I can plant them.
I feel like I have a direction now, but I’m not so sure about the burning bush and the crimson pygmy barberry bushes that I’ve put out there. They don’t really go together. I also put a cistena plum out front because I thought it was going to be more tree-like and less bushy (because I thought I saw the same plants in neighboring lawns). I think I’m wrong.
I wonder if I could move them? I think Brandon would be mad if I just got rid of them (money wasted). Eeesh.
Front Garden Mockups
What do we think? I like this idea for the basic layout of the front landscaping…
The bare spots could be filled with more colorful flowers - but which ones? We have the peonies…
It looks like too many rounded forms though, right? It needs something spiky and some height variation, yes? I feel like I’m 70% there, and I kind of need guidance for the rest of it. Eep!
I do know that I really want one of these iron garden spheres.
Aren’t they amazing? I wonder if shipping is prohibitively expensive.
Help, Please!
Here’s the photoshop file that I used for the mockup – if you want to play around with the layout, that would be AWESOME. Simple comment suggestions would be appreciated too though! Do you think the basic layout works, and just the finishing touches need to be modified?
Garden (Lack of) Progress
Some of my fellow bloggers have been making enviable progress in their gardens.
This Young House (I loved seeing their “growth chart”! It gives me hope.)
Door Sixteen (I think we have similar taste in gardens - more modern and geometric).
The front of my house looks better than it did (but not like I want it to):
I planted all of those hostas, and the peonies were there already. I’m planning on moving them this fall so I could put something evergreen in their place. It looks nice enough, but it’s not really my taste.
My side garden, on the other hand, looks like this:
We joke that at least it’s green, but it’s so disappointing. I did so much work clearing out the area and even planting a few things, and now the weeds have obscured and choked out the bushes I put in. I think I was supposed to use mulch to prevent that from happening, right?
I’m determined to give it another go. I did some weeding, and I need to do some more. Still, I am finding that my talents do not extend to the garden.
Acting Natural
…in photographs takes a lot of work.
We’re in the middle of a photoshoot today! Brandon and I posed (very casually - “turn left, no, more right, tilt your body, lean in, hold it…”) in the library, and the office and studio are being photographed as well. It’s for a September magazine, so I’ll spill the beans when it’s out!
$50 worth of flowers (in 5 vases) has made the house very cheery, by the way.
The photographers have been here since 8 o’clock this morning, and I’m not sure they’re even halfway finished yet! Their photos look amazing though.
Cabinets
Remember when I bought a new screwdriver, and then I bought the tool I actually needed (a new drill), and then I never followed up with the project that I was working on? Yeah, that was awesome of me. Sorry.
Anyway, here’s the project. This is one of my new cabinets (from IKEA, w/ knobs from Anthropologie):
The drill was necessary because I cut a hole in the back to feed cords through.
I’m trying to figure out where to keep them now. I have two right now in my office (with my desk floating in the middle of the room), but I’m thinking about putting the office back the way it was. I could use the cabinets upstairs in the library, which is right outside of my studio, and I could store my many boxes of envelopes in them. I’m thinking that’s the way to go…
Oh, and see how the doors are beige? That’s because the white doors were $50 and the beige ones were on clearance for $6. Beige was sounding mighty fine at that price.
Hello there! Thanks for visiting my blog.
