You Make Me Happy When Walls Are Gray...

Big. Sigh.

Me and my room are still waiting on the carpet.

Apparently picking out a good priced, good looking, bedroom approved, stain proof-y, pleasing-colored carpet is way more difficult than I had originally thought. So while we continue our carpet quest I have been collected many odds and ends for the new room and endlessly have been thinking about how they will all look in their new home. I am always obsessing over something...


Sometimes I think if I hadn't chosen a career as a writer, I probably could have ended up as an interior designer or something related to fashion...or some type of job that involves combining colors, textures and patterns in vibrant, unique ways. It just makes me happy. It is like oversized, livable, 3D art. That makes me smile a lot alot.

That's the color of my walls. Sparrow Gray. With Onyx Black doors.

This is my $5 vintage, crazy orange lamp. Needs a shade (IKEA!!!!!), but once it has one it will be the coolest lamp this here side of...Europe.

These are the happiest draw pulls of my life, and soon they will be fastened to my newly painted, black desk. They might be what I am excited most about, strange since they are such a small detail in the big picture...
They are also the only thing that I can afford in my "favorite store" Anthopologie.
(and by favorite store I mean the one that I most like to just stand in and wish I was silly enough to pay hundreds of dollars for a single article of clothing. I actually thought about getting a job there as a Visual Intern...but as it turns out you have to be some sort of design student. Darn. So instead I just go in there, stand next to the giant artful ostrich-one of the visual displays- and soak it all it. *sigh*)

This is one of my many primitive sharpie sketches. Sometime soon I am going to purchase a file cabinet (trust me, I need one), paint that baby red, and SPLATTER PAINT it!

This is my (yes. MY, as in done by me) Jackson Pollock-esk wall art.

This is a pillow which I do not own, but I would like too; the print makes me want to take some pencils and color it in. From Ikea. Another wonderful store, and one that I can well afford.

Various fabrics waiting for me to make them into valences and pillows. I might just end up with more throw pillows than I have places to put them...but...

And lastly, the infamous cukecumber-green vinyl couch. If any piece of furniture ever looked like it escaped from a fresh, summery salad it is this one.

I cannot even tell you how excited I am to put all this stuff together in my most awesome room. I cannot even tell you.

The Adventures of Emikel and Jro...

-CHAPTER 5-

Camp k20, July 2007. Bonfire. Me, Em, and her brother Oli. Looking at Emikel's camera while my camera was looking at us.

Bloglandria, Meet Mr. Awsumly.

I have a new friend.
He happens to be made of several colors of felt and he has brown buttons for eyes.
His name is Mr. Adam Awsumly, the Second. (I threw the Adam in there as tribute to Adam Young of the band Owl City)

Mr. Adam Awsumly is an owl. (He, however, doesn't live in a city...)

After playing around on Etsy (view mine!) I discovered people selling little critters and monsters made of felt. I found them rather adorable and set of to make a 3D Mr. Awsumly.
You see, in order for Mr. Awsumly the Second to exist there must be a Mr. Awsumly the First.
Here is the Senior of the two.
He is rather flat. Mr. A. Awsumly the 1st is on a shirt. One night I was bored and was thinking about how much I like owls...
So I stuck one on a black t-shirt. It is pretty sweet.

I am not sure what I am going to do with 3d Awsumly...I might put him up on Etsy....? Or I might just hold him and...squish him...? Because I can....

Both of the Awsumlys are very nice, in my opinion. And if I keep up this owl stuff I might just have a city...

Quote-ables.

Several years ago (I want to say like 5...) I attended a youth retreat with several youth groups from New England and something that the speaker said on that weekend has stuck with me since then.

"What are you thinking about when you have nothing to think about?" - Bo White

What is that supposed to mean, you are wondering, so let me explain.

After he said that he went on to explain it a little more and it basically came down to this; what is the screensaver/default of your mind?
What is it that comes to mind first when there is nothing else needed to come to mind at a certain moment. What, when you close your eyes, instantly pops into your head.

If the answer isn't God or something that is God-pleasing, it is time to do some reevaluation of what is going on in your cerebral cortex.

The human mind is sort of like a giant computer (sort of...); it has the ability to collect, store and use information. The human mind also has the ability to "download" things with out us consciously realizing what is happening. What we see and hear at all seconds of every day influences how we think and what we think about. It is hugely amazing the capacity that our brains have...but how is it effecting our lives?

Our giant-computer-like brain can very easily become taken over with "viruses."
What we watch, what we listen to, who we hang around with; all that effortlessly feed our minds with downloads. Our thoughts are easily consumed with what they shouldn't be. The Bible says "As a man thinks, so he is" (Proverbs 23:7).

Think about that one for even just a second and thinks begin to seem a little scary, if you think anything like me...

Keeping the life of our thoughts in alignment with God's will for us is a conscious and daily decision. Often we try to rationalize our sin by telling ourselves we are only thinking it...we didn't say or do it, so it must not count...right?

That verse from Proverbs says otherwise. Sorry.

It is very, very, very (etc, etc) difficult to set our minds on "things above" when we are down here and the world isn't looking so "abovely."

What are you focusing on? What have you fixated your mind upon?

"We bow our hearts, We bend our knees, Oh Spirit come make us humble
We turn our eyes from evil things, Oh Lord we cast down our idols

So give us clean hands and give us pure hearts
Let us not lift our souls to another
Oh give us clean hands and give us pure hearts
Let us not lift our souls to another
Oh God let this be a generation that seeks, Who seeks Your face, Oh God of Jacob"
(Give Us Clean Hands, written by Charlie Hall, sung by many.)

In closing, a not only "life verse" of mine, but a daily one;
"May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer."-Psalm 19:14.

STOP because I say so.

I own some rather interesting things and this is one of them.

Yes, people of Bloglandria, it is a stop sign. Only...it is wood. I am not really sure if wood stop signs were ever in use, but this one is rather old (the first red and white stop sign was made in 1954...but out of what I do not know. Were they always metal?) but even if someone made it as some sort of joke, I still enjoy it. And the long story that goes with it

My Hungarian grandfather, when he was alive, was a "garbage picker" (as I would say); my mom, her sister and her brother carry the same family mantle. I am doomed.

Garbage pickers do things like take tables off the side of the road when left out for bulk garbage day (they also specifically drive around with big cars on weeks that they know people will put out big things). Garbage pickers like to salvage items which they find for little or no cost.

Garbage pickers also like dumps...

I don't think "stealing" things from dumps is legal, but not like anyone else was gunna use the stuff. Let's not focus on the small details.

This top sign was a dump find. No, not found by me. By...well we will let him remain nameless for the sake of legal protection.

Anyway, when I was a little kid he gave me this wooden stop sign. At my old house I hung it outside my "tree fort" to warn trespassers of...I don't know what... all that was in there was stinky mushrooms, faux-bonfires and hemlock trees

Once a police officer, whom we personally knew, stopped outside our house and asked why we had a stop sign (not exactly a thing you should legally possess) hanging in our trees. We persuaded him that it was old and wooden and that we didn't steal it off some road somewhere in our wee little town.

It hung out there for a long time, but then we moved and I was older and tree-fortless.

In our new house the stop sign sat outside in our barn, over my busted up drum set (I had great aspirations to be a self-taught drummer, but dreams those never really took off.) next to a plastic figure of the Muppet drummer from Electric Mayhem Animal. As time passed my drummer dreams faded and the stop sign got tucked into a corner and left alone for sometime.

But the story just keeps getting more interesting.

At some point my youth group decided that old road signs would make cool decorations for our stage during worship and I was like "Hey, I have a stop sign you guys can use if you don't hurt it!"

Now, take a look at that picture above again; that stop sign used to actually look like a stop sign until...a severe miscommunication

When I handed over my sign I sharpie-d my name on a piece of duct tape and stuck it on the back. I carefully instructed them NOT TO PAINT IT.

A couple months passsed and somehow the tape with my name on got taken off and well...that was the doom of my sign. For unknown reasons they flung some brown paint on it and I think ran it over with a tire or something. Still I am not sure why this occurred, but we will just let the past stay past and keep going with this story...

Then they decided that sticking a stop sign on a stage in the middle of worship was kind of a discouragement to the worshipful atmosphere and it was stuck in the closet at the back of our sanctuary where all of our out of use props and decorations go. The poor thing stayed there for years.

More recently that closet has been gone through and people have begun to throw out stuff in order to make room for the new and I decided it was time to reclaim my stop sign before its final destruction came upon it. Plus, who wouldn't want a stop sign in their possession.

The beast is pretty heavy but I have decided that I am going to somehow hang it on my wall and perhaps I will require full 3 second stops before people can enter my dwelling place...

Now you know something about me and one of the things that I love that you didn't know ten minutes ago, so I guess this post accomplished something?

And once again I have left you jealous

...now stop that, it is unbiblical

A Bag for a "Dual-Brained" Weirdo.

At this point we are all pretty clear on the fact that I love to create stuff.
Why? Well, I'm not too sure...

Sometimes people can pinpoint whether they are "left-brained" or "right-brained," but I sort of break all the rules and come out as both. (I'm an oxymoronical freak, what can I say!)

• I am right handed, very analytic, good at logic, extremely organized, highly obsessive, strong-willed, and I like to plan things out...this makes me left-brained.
• On the other hand (no, I am not ambidextrous, but I did try for a couple months. Failed.), I am highly creative, love music and art, I see things uniquely, I love to write, and I am rather daring and crazy...this would make me right-brained. (I just took this test and it told me I was 45% left brained and 55% right-brained. Pretty accurate for something on the Internet)

But I am who who I was created to be, I like me that way and if you don't, too bad, it is not my fault. Take that one up with God...

We will move on now...

I basically love creativity because it is art. I delight in the ability to take something and form it into something else, unlike anything anyone else has.

Once I am accomplished at making one thing (say, hats) I have to move to something bigger and harder just to see if I can do it (like the sweater).
So, having made so many roundish, appliqued bags, I was getting bored. Plus my purse, the cool converse-y one, had seen so much love that the handles were wearing through and the poor thing needed to go into retirement.

Obviously I needed a new bag.
Obviously I wasn't buying one.
Obviously I had to make it!

And this time I made it totally different, just to see if I could.
Out of the scraps of other peoples bags and other random sewing projects I created my latest masterpiece. No appliques, no round edges. Instead, it is a cornucopia of quadrilaterals!

It is just a little crazy, but seeing as it is for me, I think it is just perfect!

If you stare closely, you might be able to find a swatch of fabric that looks familiar to you. I spy Emikel's bag, several of my own bags, my shirt, Sam's bag, my sister's bag, Sarah's bag, Julia's bag, a bag for Kendra's sister, my mom's bag and some other random stuff...

I also decided to put some of my extensive collection of buttons, from concerts and travels, to use.

I think my favorite one is the collection of multicolored skull one. I'm partial to pirates...

Now, I am happy and you are jealous.

The end.

"Now I know why God created laws against gluttony..."

A question I get asked a lot at holiday time is "WHAT DO YOU EAT ON THANKSGIVING!?"
You see, I am a vegetarian and people seem to think that the only thing worth eating on the holiday of Thanks is turkey...
Let me tell you, I do okay with out turkey, stuffing, gravy and all other meaty substances.
And I am brave enough to tell you exactly, to the best of my memory, what I ate yesterday;

- Mozzarella Balls- those I lost count of. The Italian in me took over and I lost control...
- Cucumbers- several slices. No dip. I have an odd disliking of all things white and fluffy...
- Other Italian cheeses- enough slices to fit on the many crackers I ate, which I also lost count of....
- 7 slices of really good Italian bread- Family tradition; without this bread we cannot celebrate any holidays.
- 3 servings of Corn Pudding- this is Thanksgiving to me; besides the bread it is really all that I care about food-wise. I had my Aunt double the recipe because there never seems to be enough for me and my cousins.
-1 Serving of Mashed Potatoes- typical.
- Salad- no dressing.
- 1 slice of Pumpkin Cheesecake- Yummmmm.
-1 slice of Pumpkin Pie- also yum.
- 1 Cranberry/Coconut/Chocolate/and some other stuff Bar- this was new. My mom and sister created it...twas pretty good.
- Three cups of coffee- 1 was decaf!
-Several other beverages of the punch-like variety- gotta stay hydrated!

Okay, maybe not wholly well balanced and slightly lacking in protein, but I certainly didn't starve. So you can all stop worrying about me now. Onto Christmas we go!