Thing-a-day.com

My final Thing is a celebration of completing Thing-a-Day:

Hooray! What a fun, inspiring and altogether awesome experience. I cannot wait to do this again!

I made some tags to put on the party favor boxes for my friend’s daughter’s b-day this weekend. She’s giving out boxes of origami paper with instructions for a few simple folds. I find the kids names, and how they differ from the names that were popular when I was young, particularly fascinating.

My thing for 2/27 was baking cookies. White chocolate macadamia cookies baked up to a nice browned crisp because I like a little crunch in my cookies. I went home at lunchtime and baked them so my coworkers could have hot fresh cookies as a halfway through the day/halfway through the week pick me up.

I meant to take some pictures of the baking process or at least of the finished cookies but they were so warm and crispalicious and enjoyable right out of the oven that I rushed them straight back to work and plumb forgot the whole photo thing. We finished them in a jiffy. Not a crumb left. Yum.

I made a small poster tonight and matted and framed it, as well. It features one of my favorite phrases:

It’s from Horace’s Odes and it translates as “Now is the time for drinking”. As in, “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” As in, get up out of your seat and do all the things you want to do!

I also made a companion poster which shows the proper response to “Nunc est bibendum”:

It means “neither delay nor rest”, also saying, “Fool, get started now!”

I made vanilla Meyer lemonade last night, loosely following a recipe I read on Vanilla Garlic. My Meyer lemons weren’t quite as mild as usual, but the flavor was still really nice and paired quite well with the rich complexity of fresh vanilla bean in the simple syrup. I poured it into an empty Italian soda bottle I’d saved. It’s also delicious mixed with limoncello lemon liquer — sweet, tart, handsome and alcoholicious!

Inspired by these fabric letters I bought at Anthropologie:

I decoupaged some wooden letters with some of the new scrapbook paper I picked up in Berkeley last weekend:

I worked on it while I was watching the Oscars which was a good thing because the awards were pretty boring.

Weekend Catch - Up:

My MINI Cooper was in the shop last week getting an oil change and engine service and also getting his front tires and brakes changed. I ended up walking to work all week and took lots of contemplative pictures of rain-soaked bare branches along the way:

All of this car repair hullaballoo was in preparation for a road trip from San Jose down to L.A. I picked my baby up at the service center on Friday afternoon, paid them a bajillion dollars and that night we were on our way. Everything looked and felt great. It did NOT seem like the car battery was gonna die halfway there. Yet that’s exactly what happened. Ugh.

So my Thing for bright and early Saturday morning was having my boyfriend and his dad (we went to stay with his parents) show me how to replace the battery. An unexpected but important lesson learned.

There isn’t much in this world that is better than catching up with one of your best friends while making dinner at home. And if that dinner happens to involve these delicious, yeasty, honey wheat rolls made from scratch, well then so much the better:

What I was planning on doing tonight: watching the lunar eclipse and then driving to buy some craft supplies. Unfortunately it was super cloudy all night where I live; couldn’t see the eclipse at all! And I had to take my car in for a service this morning so I spent most of the night getting to know my new pink Asus Eee PC:

I got this little micro laptop as a Valentine’s gift and boy am I in love with it. It weighs two pounds, has a seven inch screen, is sturdy and reliable and is just the perfect thing for me to take out to the neighborhood coffee shop to check email and work on my poetry. I’m slowly making my way through the Eee Users Wiki and I can’t wait to really settle in with it.

That’s right! You get two days for the price of one today! I had too much fun last night (yakitori dinner, Press Your Luck & the American Gladiators season finale) to post so here now is the very simple ring I made out of some leftover buttons:

And also the pendants I worked on tonight:

I used pink sakura printed origami paper for one and a drawing from an Adrian Tomine notebook for the other. Tomine is one of my favorite comic artists so I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. In the next few days I’ll probably put more layers of acrylic sealer on them to make sure they can last me a long time.

I went thrifting today and picked up some gorgeous, delicate Noritake teacups and saucers. Oh, and this too:

The item on the left is a trivet but I think it’s pretty much demanding to be hung up in the kitchen. It’s gonna go perfectly with my plastic KFC picnic bag.

It was gorgeous outside today. I went up to Berkeley and took pictures of cherry blossoms in bloom:

And I read some Rumi poems.

“This is love: to fly toward a secret sky…”

A few weeks ago I embarked on a massive house cleaning project, during which time I collected together all the ticket stubs I could find. Movies, concerts, tourist attractions–there was memorabilia of all sorts. Since then, I’ve been looking for an album in which to store these paper items. I found just the perfect thing while thrift shopping:

Totally awesome.

Posting my Thing a Day for 2/14 a day late. My apologies; was out late last night and didn’t have time to post during the day because I was in a zombie-like state. I’d gotten up balls early to bake some madeleine cookies as a Valentine’s gift for my boyfriend:

They were kind of tricky and I had to spend ages whipping the batter into a perfect ribbon consistency, but they actually turned out well! I was mega, mega stoked. The little, buttery shell-shaped cakes got wrapped up in a homemade gift box and delivered as fresh as possible to his work.

I started cleaning out my closet tonight. This is gonna take a while. The bad thing: I’ve bought a lot of dreadful clothes that I don’t want anymore. Salvation Army, here I come. The good thing: I found a bunch of stuff I still love, like this t-shirt I bought after a tour at the Sharffen Berger chocolate factory:

Tonight I made a Valentine’s Mix CD:

• Just What I Needed - The Cars
• Mushaboom - Feist
• This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) - Talking Heads
• Here Comes My Baby - Cat Stevens
• I’m The Man Who Loves You - Wilco
• You’re The Ocean - Teitur
• Strange And Beautiful (I’ll Put a Spell On You)  -  Aqualung
• Lover’s Spit - Broken Social Scene
• Love And Some Verses
• Somethig In The Way She Moves - James Taylor
• You On My Mind In My Sleep - Richard Ashcroft
• High - The Cure
• Brand New Colony - The Postal Service

I usually bake something to give out for Valentine’s Day, but this year my co-workers are all so health-conscious that I thought it would be best to think of alternatives. Inspired by the blooming hearts on the cards I designed, I bought a flat of organic strawberry plants and reset them into these darling little rectangular planters I got at Daiso. I even used organic potting mix when I was replanting them. Because there are only a few tiny white blossoms on the plants, I also made some heart plant picks to give it a nice burst of color.

My friend just enrolled her son in one of those really earnest preschools where they’ve got very strong views on childrearing (i.e. no television til age 7). At the school they don’t write or label their names on anything. They use symbols to identify their belongings and their work. My friend’s son is Mushroom. So for Valentine’s day I designed these heart-bedecked mushroom cards for him to give out.

I ended up liking them so much I might make some to give out myself I think they’d look great placed in a tray of grass.

I worked on a design for some personalized stationery as a gift to a friend who is doing me a favor today, even though I had to be at work from 8 a.m. til 5 p.m. I am severely lacking in the sleep department and I came home with five minutes to change, write this and then head out to a hockey game. Good times, really

Tonight I put together a desktop aquarium:

for my new African dwarf frogs! Meet Elizabeth, Snoop Froggy Frog II and Vasco de Gama.

These are full aquatic pets and are pretty fun and easy to take care of. You need to make sure you’re good about cleaning their tanks, but I think they are so cute and charming. They’ve each got their own personalities and make wonderful desk companions.