Thing-a-day.com

I’ve been in a blogging funk.  How do you know you’re in a funk?  When an earthquake cannot get you to blog about anything, you know you’ve temporarily lost your creative spirit.  What’s with February that just gets me half paralyzed?

Anyway, my last thing-a-day has to be a shitty photo I took with my new camera.  I’m ashamed of putting it up here but I’m in such a black mood that I don’t even care much now.

Sometimes a hawk will fly by my office window. If I’m lucky the hawk lands on a branch and stare at me typing, coding, slacking. When I look into the eye of the hawk it seems to have a purity no human can possesses.

This is a fun gif of my friend Andrew. Don’t worry! This was a rotten piece of wood and the tree was not hurt.

Finally I made this as an art piece. Questions about life, aging and finding happiness.

(this is not me)

It’s either our backyard or upside-down lungs…

I took my boring planner and made it pretty with modge podge.  yay!

I live in Cupertino, California - a relatively small city in the Bay Area about an hour away from San Francisco. Nothing very exciting happens here, but it is nice anyway.

Today was mild and sunny, so I took a stroll down to the University of Leicester Botanical Gardens. I’d never been before (despite living here for three years), and was pleasantly surprised - it’s beautiful, even in winter! Looking forward to taking a book down there to read in the summer. Anyway, I snapped lots of pics and, for my thing for today, I’ve created a collage of the best.

P.S. I am clearly obsessed with trees at the moment!

Valentine’s Day is my favorite holiday after Thanksgiving. I enjoy crafting for it so much and, since I love cards and writing, a handwritten valentine for each of my dear friends is a must! I think a thoughtful little card is what really captures the true spirit of the day. I reworked an older card design (with the blue dots) to go with a project I’ll be working on later this week for my co-workers and I also put together a new design, inspired by the bright color and the shape of Luv Pops, a favorite candy from my childhood. Now I just need to write the actual messages

I for one am delighted that Punxsutawney Phil (who is referred to on his site as the “Prognosticator of all Prognosticators–how awesome is that??) announced six more weeks of Winter. Of course, I live in mild and pleasant Northern California, where Winter means a bit of rain and weather in the fifties and sixties. Not too shabby.

The thing is, I adore rain and haven’t tired of it at all even after a couple straight weeks of it. Today was the last rainy day for at least a week so I had to go out and take some pictures:

For todays thing-a-day I decided to go take some photos. I have been slacking with my garden blog New Sprout. This was the perfect opportunity to go and take photos of the plants on my balcony (my only garden). For once I tried to just take things at weird angles and make something more artsy. I really loved how the photos of my wanna-be bonsai tree came out. Most are my Peruvian Myrtle and one is my Dwarf Crape Myrtle Sacramento. I’m hoping these will grow once spring hits and that I haven’t killed them during transplant. Both of these two lost all their leave and haven’t shown sign of any new growth. My Jacqueline Hillier Elm didn’t lose it’s leaves and it got some new ones during around November. I played around with photoshop to get some funky colors. I always wanted to do that but on my garden blog I like to keep my photos more true to what I really see.

I took a photograph of this wonderful root system of a tree in the Colorado mountains. It occurred to me that it looks like a wheel so I decided to make it spin…

I have to say I’m really excited about this. I hope I can catch up on some unfinished art projects, like this one. It’s a badge for a friend who has an oak tree for a character.