Easter Weekend

I went home for Easter Thursday night and stayed through Monday morning. I hadn't been home since Christmas! It was a very nice visit, mainly spent hanging out with my Mother. These two kids were up waiting for me at 11:30 when I got home!

Roscoe sitting pretty in his favorite chair.

Miss Many posing too :)

Some home improvements had been made recently. Our family room rug had been shot for quite some time. It owed us nothing, being 15 years old and trampled upon by three dogs, two cats, numerous caged animals, three resident girls and their friends! Last weekend my parents put in wood flooring (Pergo or however it's spelled...), and my mother and grandfather painted the walls a nice gold color. New furniture is on the way! That's Grandpa's leg. Mandy is always happy to be petted; Bubs was showing us all how yummy his chewy was!

Bubba posing again...he looks sad when he is on his best behavior for a photo!


My sister is managing Giffy's Snack Shack this summer. So if you're in Clifton Park, NY, come get ice cream at the mini golf course....and before that get dinner at Giffy's Bar B Q up the street. I worked there for 4 years, and gave my sister my job when I moved to the city. Anyway, the point is she was awarded the responsibility of managing the Snack Shack, and we went to get ice cream Friday, the opening day for the season. She's still getting a hang of the soft serve machine, as is evident by the cone she made for my father!


And I'll leave you with a picture of myself in my new spring jacket. Half off at Macy's! Let's hope I can keep the coffee stains (and worse!) off of it...although it is thankfully machine washable!

Hope you all had a happy holiday weekend as well!

Baking Baguettes

This weekend I finally had success baking french bread!! I've tried a few times, with minimal success at quicker recipes and utter failure at my first long-term attempt. So it was quite exciting to finally do it right. To celebrate (and help devour three baguettes), I had a couple guy friends over for a bread, cheese and wine night. I also made a bead dip. Coupled with some oil and vinegar-not to mention a couple movies- how could it not be a successful get together?? I need to repeat this baking performance. The boys showed JUST as it was done baking...and the baguettes even sang! Delicious.

The successful loaves, and the nice crumb!



The food spread, as it looked on my living room table.

Hope to repeat this soon!

Cartooning

Maybe I should share some of my cartoons here, eh?
I started these after going on the "Most Ghetto Family Vacation....EVER." My Dad won a $99/person cruise over the phone....and boy was it evident! The best part of the trip was the people watching and making up stories about these people.

This coupled with an idea from a sketchclub blog I used to follow (and will have to find and link...) I began to draw them from memory. Now, taking the subway every day, I have a LOT of time to observe all the people one runs into in NYC. and then draw the outrageous or most interesting ones.

The first is Jem, aka 80's Stripper, aka Rod Stewart. Her hair had so much hairspray that it did not move. She had had a boob job....but about 25 years ago. and her clothes were all circa 1984. and she did NOT have the muscle tone to pull off this teenie bikini! Also note the extra long belly chain.

This is her husband, Bob, that I dubbed a used cars salesman. He had what looked to be jerry-curled hair. The best thing about these two had to be that they looked very much still i love (I garnered they'd been married awhile, could be wrong.)
This woman we dubbed LaFonda, a la Napoleon Dynamite. This is what she showed up to dinner in on the first night. A see-through net top witha bra. and she was a veery curvy girl. She believed she looked stellar in it.
This is LaFonda's husband, dubbed Germaine. He had gooorgoeus blue eyes....and then showed up to the snorkeling excursion in this speedo.
This girl we dubbed Pimple Ass, for obvious reasons!
And last in the Cruise series are The Jonas Brothers. These were three brothers from Alberta, Canada, the only family as pale as us on the boat.
and there they are! more to come later!

Diller Scofidio

My boss just told me about this website for a firm called Diller Scofidio.

It is a pretty awesome site! The firm just did a lot of work for Lincoln Center.
This shows all their projects, and when you mouse over them it looks like an aerial shot.

This is what happens when you specify a particular category of projects. The ones standing up are in that category!This is a project called Dissident Ironing. I am crazy and like to iron, so this was interesting. IT explores the social convention attached to ironing, and plays with breaking the conventions of ironing. What if you went crazy and ironed outside the box??


...and this one I just liked. :)

Interesting site and work....AND it was navigable! Novel, eh?

Insomniac

I was ALL excited to morph into a new, morning-loving me....and then proceeded to become and insomniac. How unfair is that?!?!

I have not been able to deter the trend, either. None too happy about it!

At least I was productive on Sunday. I organized my drawers and closets, put away all the laundry I did on Saturday, scrubbed the bathroom, planned my dinner, shopped for ingredients, cooked it AND cleaned ALL the dishes...went through my spending and bills, put work onto a site profile to help find a job, and started a cartoon of a woman in a ridiculous fur coat walking her similarly coated dog that I saw the other morning. Soo...yea, somethings done!

But yea, I got up at 7:40 after a night of tossing and turning and waking up on the hour. I know my weekend activities didn't help (parties Friday, just up late Saturday)...but still. Last Monday was such a tease! Any suggestions for getting to sleep easier??

In any case, things I need to-do tonight are: get a hair cut, pack for Tim's (for an overnight trip), finish cartoon, job schtuff, and some exercise. And of course get some sleep!

Oh, and how do you like the new color scheme? I liked my doodle so much, but it is kind of an odd tone to really hold up as a header. I may change it/add color at some point....but for now, how is this??

Morning Person?

Today I am feeling...very much awake!

Dare I believe I am turning into the morning person I have been trying to morph into for so long?? I hope so. I've been trying to wake up earlier for awhile, and failing. But today I am quite awake! Maybe thanks to a weekend on sleeping in??

Trying to change a lot of habits in my life. I had signed up for livestrong.com a couple months ago, and have neglected it...I think it's time to start re-tracking my progress. Back to better habits!

Mouse!

This better be on a sticky trap in my apartment when I get home tonight. Amanda and I have seen these little buggers and thought they were getting in through the kitchen. We had the exterminator that comes through the building give us a bunch of traps and put poison behind our stove...and a week later nada. Last night, one RUNS from about the kitchen to under the recliner in the living room! He is trapped. We can't do much but put a couple traps around it and hope he is dumb enough to step on one. Of course not. When I am engrossed in House, it runs out and under the BEDROOM door! Mana and I scramble to see where it goes...to find there is a space between the molding and floor where this mouse disappears. So now there are three sticky traps in that vicinity and there damn sure better be a muse caught!

Although we have the cleanest mice ever. There is absolutely no evidence of them until we see them scurry...maybe because they live in the building's wall? In any case, they don't chew anything or poop anywhere. Just run across the floor and freak Amanda and me out.

Weird. But I still want them out!