whew!
After a whirlwind 8 days of travel, family and friends, I feel like I need a vacation! Isn’t that always the way? I’m short on time, but here are some topics I want to discuss in the next few days:
- Lisa Williams - I love her.
- Gossip Girl - too raunchy?
- Snapfish gifts - photobooks all around!
- My new job!
- Spa treatments and my related awkwardness.
Hope all is well in your world. More soon…
unsigned and awesome
I have a myspace page. I’m a 30 year-old mother and wife, and I love myspace. Mostly, I keep in touch with old friends, but I love the grassroots political movements happening on there, and I especially love to find new music. But it’s kind of hard - I find someone I like, then I check out their friends, and sometimes they’re good, and sometimes they’re not. Either way, it’s a time consuming process.
I found a new site called Unsigned.com. It’s a huge assortment of unsigned singers and independent bands. Every genre is covered - I went straight for folk music, and found an awesome band called Choonz - gorgeous fiddle and guitar musicians from England. It’s like a treasure trove. I also found a ton of cool bands, like the Club 7 Jazz Band when searching the jazz artists.
I always feel like the radio and the internet are telling me who to listen to, not playing who I want to listen to. Unsigned.com is a nice change of pace. It’s also a kind of social network, so you can join, save your favorite artists, become their fans, follow their links to their websites and myspace pages, etc. It’s also free for musicians to sign up, create their profile, etc.
Very cool site - highly recommended.
yummy recipes
Sometimes I post things that seem like a sponsored post, but they actually aren’t. Like this one - I love the container store (like, obsessively). Look at this cool link they sent me:
http://www.containerstore.com/experthelp/recipes/index.jhtml
It’s all stuff you make and stuff into containers for gifts. My favorites are the easy play clay and the all-natural dog biscuits. I’m totally making those this year.
Now I have a reason to go to the container store :) As if I needed one.
More crafts
I’m officially in the mad rush of sewing for Christmas. Here are a couple projects - the purse and zipper pouch are from Bend-The-Rules Sewing, and the sweatshirt is my own creation. My friend Sara has a question mark tattoo on her leg, and we decided it would make a good logo for her sweatshirt. She got the sweatshirt at WalMart for $10, and I added some cute Denyse Schmidt fabric and blue thread. My first foray into customizing clothing, I think it came out pretty cool. I got the instructions from DIY’s Creative Juice tv show. You can see better pictures (and more projects) on my flickr page. Thanks for checking out my crafts!
An International Phone Card Affair
My husband’s family is spread all over the world. Mother in France, Father in Mexico, Grandmother in the Dominican Republic. As you can imagine, we have an international calling plan on our phone. But phone cards are still the best bet, sometimes.
We keep a cell phone in the Dominican Republic, so that when someone goes there to visit my husband’s grandma, they have a phone to call the states. Usually, whoever is there just purchases a phone card or two for the duration of their stay. The problem is that there’s a bit of a monopoly on the phone cards, just as their’s a monopoly on many things in the DR. But if we didn’t use the cell, my mother-in-law would have to go to a call center (which is crazy and stressful).
So we found this site, The RichCom.com, which is an excellent source for all international phone card needs. You just plug in the country, select the dollar amount, and purchase them.
My environmentalist mind likes the fact that they just email you the code - there’s no wasteful plastic cards or mailing costs. Some cards work better than others, but we’ve had good luck with all of the ones we’ve purchased.
The other thing I like is that once you’ve put in your search criteria, the results are listed by quality (they assign a star rating), rate (cents per minute) and value in total minutes (i.e., $20 = 540 minutes).
If you’re planning on doing any international traveling, I recommend richcom.com for your calling cards.
Book #64 - World Without End
Ken Follett, writer of my all time favorite book Pillars of the Earth, has done it again. With his new tome World Without End, he takes us back to Kingsbridge Prior and introduces us to the descendants of Jack Builder. Coming in at just over 1000 pages - I still managed to read it in about three days. I won’t say it’s as good as Pillars, because it’s not, but it definitely stands on it’s own and is excellent. You don’t need to have read Pillars either, because other than being set in roughly the same spot and alluding to some of the main characters, it’s not a sequel.
Basically, it chronicles the life of two brothers, and two girls. One brother moves through the life of knighthood to earldom while the other brother goes from apprentice to architect. The two girls live distinctly different lives - one being high-borne and one being very low-borne. Their lives continue to intersect and there are more twists than in daytime drama. Throughout, the town of Kingsbridge and the priory cathedral remain central figures, and the new addition of the plague swarming through Europe makes for some serious storytelling.
If you’re into 18th century English townships and priories with all their sordid goings on, I think you’ll love Follett’s latest creation.
Mutsy - must see
Our son is almost two. I have a jogger (given to me for free!), an umbrella stroller (given to me for free!), and our travel stroller - a giant monstrosity that holds an infant carrier and came with a base for the car. This thing was handy, but it’s so huge! Add to that my feeling that I’m always in other people’s way, and it’s a bad combination. I tried to be one of those mom’s that assume because they have the big aisle-hogging stroller, they get the right-of-way, but I didn’t have the heart for it. I always give in and scoot us out of the way.
Anyway, I always see these cool minimalist strollers, and I finally stopped a mom and asked her what it was. It’s called a Mutsy. Who knew they made such cool, convenient strollers?
So I went to their website, and found out that they’re totally convertible. You can use the frame to hold a bassinet (which can be removed so the baby can sleep in it), an infant carrier/car seat, a regular reclining seat, and something cool called a fun seat that my son would love. It’s like bike handlebars for the baby to play with while you’re strolling. They even have an adapter so you can fit a Graco car seat into the frame.
Mutsy also sells something called a “sitter” that you can put the seat from the stroller into, and it becomes a baby rocker.
I really love this stroller - I especially like the 4Rider model, but the spider looks really handy for small-aisled shops and small trunks.
I don’t know the actual logistics involved in the switching out of all the seats, but I think it’s worth going to a store and messing around with them to see how easy or hard it all really is. I really recommend that any stroller purchase be premeditated by actual manhandling of the merchandise. “Easy to fold” is easy to say, not always easy to do. I’m also curious if they can be steered with one hand, which I find is a priority for getting through doorways.
I’d love to hear from someone else that has a Mutsy stroller.
It looks like they retail from $250 for the Spider to $679 - $699 for the Urban Rider and 4Rider. (Little rich for my blood, but if you do a lot of strolling and have the budget - it could be worth the investment.)
Stephanie’s gifts
So here are the gifts I sent my good friend Stephanie-doo-dah. She’s my crafting guinea pig - she gets all the prototypes. The little bird (filled with catnip and bells) and coasters are from the book Last-Minute Patchwork + Quilted Gifts by Joelle Hoverson (awesome book - you can find my review here.) The apron is from an Indygo Junction pattern, and the slippers were made from a pattern on crochetme.com. You can just search for “mary janes” - there are lots of patterns available online.
Jerry’s kids
I saw our firefighters out in the street the other day doing their annual fill-the-boot collection for Jerry’s kids. I couldn’t remember what the disease was that those telethon’s benefit. At first I thought it was cerebral palsy, but I looked it up when I got home, and it’s muscular dystrophy.
When I first saw them, I thought it was for the California Wildfire Relief fund. I bet lots of people did. Even if they didn’t, how can we refuse to put a couple dollars in those boots that have been saving our hides for weeks now?
I hope they raised a crap load of money.
Happy Birthday, Steph!
Today is my very good friend Stephanie’s birthday. I am so glad she was born and that I get to be her friend. She is a blessing to me, and I couldn’t imagine my life without her in it.
Thanks for being my friend, dude! Have an awesome birthday!
