More New Necklaces

Instead of lolling on the couch, half asleep on Sunday, I decided to dig out my most recent order of lampwork beads by Austin Hamilton, of Vancouver, BC and made some necklaces!

Don't the beads look like candy?

I love Austin Hamilton. Very reasonable prices and beautiful artistry.

Lazy Sunday and a List or Two

It's finally cloudy, and the temperature has dropped back into the 60's. I don't know why August seems to take forever to finally end. I climbed back into my jammies after my shower and have been enjoying a lazy Sunday of card making & colouring. Brian's gone upstairs to take a power nap and I'm dangerously close to falling asleep too.

Here's a Free Association Meme I pinched from Music Wench :

Say the first thing that comes to mind:

Bangs - Phil & Anita, a family in my hometown

Diaper - Something I have never changed nor plan to. EVER.

Coffee Table - Large picture books

Cops - Bad boys bad boys, whatcha gonna do when they come for you

Matches - Don't play with them

250 - Area code for Vancouver Island, BC

Hurricane - "Step into My World" by Hurricane #1

Bad - A U2 song

Confirmation - a/k/a CYA (cover your ass) letter sent by a lawyer to confirm a phone conversation.

Fiber - Arts & Crafts Medium

My pal Rob posted a list on Facebook called "15 Albums" and tagged me in it.

"The Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. List 15 albums you've heard that will always stick with you. List the first 15 you can think of in 15 minutes." This one was hard for me because I could have filled the list with Clash, ELO & Dead albums. Easily. So instead I opted for ones that blew me away the first time I heard them. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. London Calling - The Clash

2. Nevermind the Bollocks - Sex Pistols

3. Face the Music - ELO

4. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables - Dead Kennedys

5. Skeletons from the Closet - Grateful Dead

6. Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd

7. The Doors - the Doors

8. Fine Art of Surfacing - Boomtown Rats

9. Old & in the Way - Old & in the Way (70's bluegrass that featured Jerry Garcia on banjo)

10. Islands - Kaja (f/k/a Kajagoogoo, without Limahl)

11. Up to Date - Partridge Family

12. Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd. - the Monkees

13. Architecture & Morality - OMD

14. Boy - U2

15. New Clear Days - The Vapors

It's all I can do to stay awake so I think I'm going to adjourn to the craft table and salvage the rest of my afternoon before I doze off and regret it later!

One Nation, Under Surveillance

In the immortal words of the Boomtown Rats: "Someone's looking at you".

Cameras, cameras everywhere. Security cameras in stores, red light cameras in intersections, lurkers on blogs, Facebook's ongoing privacy issues. It never stops. It's getting to the point where I can't even deal with a wedgie situation in the supermarket because of all the 'eyes in the sky'. I really don't want strangers watching me tug my underbritches out of my ass crack, especially when I frequent the same stores in town. I don't want to be branded "the shopper with the creeping underwear issues" by unseen employees. Security cameras do have their use of course, catching people doing things they shouldn't be doing (like the bitch who dumped a cat in the trash bin in England). But thanks to the misnamed "Patriot Act", we are flirting dangerously close to George Orwell's "1984".

A few weeks ago, we got a red light ticket in the mail, along with high resolution and closeup photos of the back of Brian's truck. He had no memory of going through the light, but it was clearly his truck. You could read the bumperstickers. Some towns in Washington and Oregon are rebelling, and people aren't paying the tickets. There are a few lawsuits out there on the constitutionality of these red light cameras. They are a cash-cow for revenue-starved cities and towns, but it's been shown that the traffic lights have been reprogrammed to cycle from yellow to red a lot faster than they used to, in order to catch people going through a yellow light. It was only $101 and doesn't go on his driving record, so I wasn't pissed about it. And lord knows that it's only through sheer luck that I haven't gotten one.....yet.....*knocks wood*.

Last fall, I did a ranting blog post about one of our more selfish clients. I went off on a tirade about this person. I shared what I thought were generalities of the case. Then I received a private email message from Ann, who calmly talked me down and implored me to delete my post, "just in case your client finds your blog, recognizes herself and has you fired." I hadn't thought about it that way, so I took her advice and deleted the post. (Ann - thanks for keeping me in line!).

Yesterday I was checking the firm email and there was an invite sent to my boss, from one of his colleagues, to join Facebook. Steve has no interest in Facebook so he told me to delete it. The thing that really unnerved me, was that embedded in the email was a list of 'people you might know on Facebook', and which displayed the profile pictures of several of our clients and some opposing counsel. That freaked me out. Somehow Facebook has managed to figure out a way to match the email addresses of the various people from whom we receive emails at work to the email addresses used on their Facebook profiles, and put them into the invitation that this one person sent. Although I figured that many people we know from work were on Facebook, it never really occurred to me that any of them would send invites to my boss. All the more reason to constantly check your privacy settings so that only your friends can see your statuses and posts.

When I first joined Facebook, I had a lot of questionable content on my page. I was accepting all the gift apps, no matter what they were. Brian did too. Over the course of the last 2 years, I have deleted almost all of it, except for the ones I really liked and which were not offensive to anyone. I also had to delete it all off Brian's page b/c I was afraid that prospective employers were looking at his profile and perhaps that was why he wasn't getting hired. "Hmmm, he seems to like guns and drugs and 60's music. He's a leftist atheist too. Pass".

Have you all heard how people are getting fired for content on their Facebook pages and blogs? It's unreal. There was a Portland Metro bus driver who was fired for ranting on his blog about an incident with a cyclist. He vented his spleen about what he wanted to do to the person should he ever see them again. Now, you and I both know that when we say, "OMG I am going to KILL him/her", we don't really mean that we are literally going to hunt the offender down and murder him/her. Unfortunately, companies are taking a zero-tolerance attitude towards threats, and fire the employee rather than face a lawsuit by whoever received the employee's wrath via Facebook or on a blog.

Although our Facebook pages are now locked down, I've been reluctant to make my blog 'invite only' or use those incredibly annoying Captcha boxes with the scrambled words (to those of you who have them, no offense, but it's a pain in the drain to have to keep typing those damn Captchas. I just want to leave a comment and move on to the next post). Yet I'm also afraid to go off on a tirade about work on my blog, just in case a client or opposing counsel has decided to see what's being said out there by employees of other law firms. I have no idea who lurks here, but doesn't comment.

For example, I got today off to a really bad start at work. I'm fucking swamped AND pissed. But I don't feel comfortable going off on a tangent about it. I don't know who will read it. All I can do is sit here and quietly fume about it.

I hate feeling like I'm always being watched. Now I'm afraid to say anything in my Facebook status if I've had a bad day. I don't feel like I can use my blog as a 'diary' of sorts, to vent about the good, bad & ugly of life in a small law firm. Although I would never, ever accept a friend request from a client, I don't like knowing that there's a possibility that they can see my page. The way Facebook keeps tinkering w/ the privacy settings, every now and then they default back to letting everyone in the world see all of your content. I found this out when one of Brian's FB friends (not one of mine) stole one of my photos to use as his profile picture. I was more than annoyed. I asked him if he realized that was MY photo and the guy said yes, he did, and he loved it so much he had to have it for his picture. But did he give me any credit for the photo? No. It was then that I went back to my photo settings and saw that they were now set to allow "Friends of Friends" to view them, when I had them set for "Friends Only". So this guy was able to access MY photo albums and stole my picture. Brian thought I should be flattered, and maybe I would have been flattered, if the guy had ASKED my permission, instead of just taking it.

Perhaps that's what 'they' want. Keep everyone good and scared about potential repercussions about what you say, and you control the masses. Unfortunately, the last thing I need is to be fired or have the Men in Black show up on my doorstep because of some innocuous comment on my FB page or the content of my blog.

So much for free speech.

Treating Myself

Last Monday I was in a bad mood. A wicked bad mood. I'd been sick all night Saturday, having eaten what I can only guess was either undercooked Fred Meyer deli chicken or bad potato salad. So I wasn't 100% by Monday morning. Had a very busy, rough day at work and was PMSing on top of it. Talk about the Trifecta from Hell.

I was in such a rotten mood that I came through the front door already yelling at Brian to turn the fucking music down and jesus christ he knows I need peace and quiet when I get home. Small wonder he slunk back downstairs and then decided to escape to the local watering hole till I was less chaotic and twirly.

During my horrid funk that night I started online window shopping, which always makes me feel better. Awhile back I stumbled on a website called The Candyland Store, which stocks a bunch of snacks and candy that American baby boomers like myself grew up eating. Stuff like Black Jack Gum, Atomic Fire Balls and Hostess/Drake's cakes. Drake's seems to have been a Northeastern regional brand, which was eventually bought out by Hostess. Children in the 70's enjoyed delicious Yodels, Ho Ho's, Devil Dogs, Yankee Doodles, Ring Dings and Coffee Cakes. I realized that I hadn't had a cinnamon coffee cake in about 30 years, and it was always a fave treat when I was a kid.

So I bought some. I thought I was buying 2 boxes of 6 for a total of 12 crumb cakes, but in my haste to purchase them, I failed to realize that each box held 12!

Packaging still looks the same!
And Oh. My. God. It still tastes the same!!!!
Anyone wanna come over and help me polish them off?

Sounders Necklace

This is what I made with that Sounders charm that came in the gigantic UPS box. It was a birthday gift for my friend Char.

I was pleased that she loved it!

VICTORY IS MINE!!!!!!!!!!

I vowed to get the back yard completely and totally cut, this weekend, even if it killed me.

It took nearly 2 hours, one gas fill up and about 20 bag empties, but it's done. At last. Had to keep going over and over it till it was finally gone. Brian came out applauding and saying, "We're not worthy!"

It only took almost 3 months.
Just in time for the rain tomorrow.

Epic Win.

So Pretty!

I was headed upstairs the one late afternoon and this was what I saw in the big window over the door! The pleated shade was down and the sun was shining through the stained glass piece hanging behind the shade.

I ran to get my camera because I knew the sun would move off the window quickly.

Have a great weekend!

American Capitalism at it's Finest

President Obama was in Seattle on Primary Election Day (Tuesday, August 17, 2010), stumping for Senator Patty Murray. Security was extremely tight, highways and roads were closed for the motorcade, air space was restricted, and all flights were grounded till Air Force One left the area.

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Unfortunately, some yahoo pilot failed to check in with the FAA bulletins and didn't realize there was a no-fly zone in effect for the Seattle Metro area, so he flew his float plane back to Seattle, from Lake Chelan in Eastern Washington, completely unaware that he was about to cause a headline-making event.

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About 1:50 PM, the entire region was rocked by two huge sonic booms, as fighter jets scrambled out of Portland, OR to intercept the float plane. They were on afterburners the entire way, and made the trip from Portland to Seattle in 19 minutes. People from Chehalis to Seattle, including myself, were startled out of their wits to hear these booms out of nowhere, as the fighter jets made their way north, above the I-5 corridor.

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The float plane pilot was met at the Kenmore Air facility on Lake Washington by the Washington State Patrol and Secret Service. Needless to say, his shit is weak. The pilot's license will probably be suspended, since it was a mistake, but could also be revoked because he should have tuned into the FAA's channel for their announcements.

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What killed me is that, less than 4 hours later, these t-shirts were available to commemorate the event:

America. What a country.

Creepy Catalogs

You know the holidays are right around the corner when catalogs start filling your mailbox in August. I enjoy looking at them, and there's a lot of cool stuff out there. Three of my fave catalogs are Wireless, Signals and What On Earth. However, their most recent issues really creeped me out.

For example, I'm sure this is supposed to represent a nostalgic scene of little Tommy admiring his Grandpa's train set, thinking, "Golly! Grandpa promised he'd give me his trains someday!"

However a close up view finds little Tommy demonically looking on, eagerly awaiting the explosive charges he set under the tracks to go off, thus giving grandpa a heart attack and coming into the train set immediately. "This is what a really cool DEAD Grandpa looks like."

Then we have these lovely little Flitter Fairies. They are attached to a super fine, but sturdy, filament wire, and when in motion, they flutter their wings. The wire is attached to a clip that you wear in your hair, so as to give the illusion that the fairies are flittering around your head. The catalog description also says, "Flip the switch on her leg and she'll sleep". Ermm......

But good god look at their eyes!!!! I would run far and fast from a fairy that looked like this, and I certainly don't want her attached to my head, you know? Get it off me, GET IT OFF ME!

Then we have this alarming photoshopped squirrel army who apparently have no arms. What On Earth indeed.

Overkill

I get home on Thursday night and find this rather large box on my couch. I stared at it in disbelief. I said, "Are you kidding me? They shipped it in this?" Brian says, "Yeah I've been wonderin what's in it." I said, "Well wait till you see what's inside. Geez talk about overkill."

I didn't realize that one of my friend's birthday was on August 4. Ever since Facebook changed their Events calendar, I only find out about birthdays after I get home from work, on the day of the event. It used to be set up so you could see at least 3 days' worth of birthdays. Now if I want to see them in advance, I have to remember to click on "See All" every day, so that I know what's coming up. If I had known, my gift to her wouldn't be so tardy. I knew exactly what I wanted to make for her: A necklace in the colours of her fave futbol team. But I had to order the main component directly from the store in Seattle, as I needed it for the pendant.

This teeny, tiny Seattle Sounders FC charm was in that ginormous box. They couldn't have put it in a smaller padded envelope?

Now I know why the shipping was the same price as the merchandise!!!

Frugal

Please ignore the Politically Incorrect child doing her best stereotypical Native American impression, fake tomahawk and all.

My purpose of this particular post is the actual kitchen itself. This was probably taken in the summer of 1969, when I was 4-1/2 years old, and right before I started kindergarten. We're talkin' "Stone Age" here. My cousins who read this will probably laugh, as I do, about the fact that my mom's kitchen has barely changed since this picture was taken. They had to get a new fridge and new dishwasher, and they changed the wall paper in the late 90's. Other than that, the stove, cabinets, table & chair, counter and sink, and the light fixture on the ceiling, are original, and predate this photo (the stove was bought in 1964). My parents were of the mind that, if it ain't broke, don't fix (or remodel) it. Over and above that, my mom has never been able to make a timely decision in her life. She will agonize for years over a wall paper pattern. The hallway stayed in it's slowly cracking sheetrock glory for about 6 years before she finally decided on a pattern. She's the first one to admit that she is very indecisive. And people wonder why I grew up to be impulsive. And also to have white painted walls.

My parents were extremely frugal. Why buy books when there's a library where you can get them for free? Tape the songs off the radio, don't waste money on the album. Rent the video, don't buy it. Coupons coupons coupons. Mom would tally up her grocery savings each week, and then put all the money she'd saved in a mayo jar under the hutch cabinet. They were generous with me because they only had one child, but I was not lavished, indulged and spoiled with all the latest crap that many of my schoolmates had. I may have been an only child, but I was no Nellie Olsen.

But now I understand how they were able to send me to college without burdening me with student loans, and for that I am grateful.

Looky What I Got!!!

My bff/kindred spirit/sister and college roomie, Michelle, sent me a goody box the other day!!! I was so excited!! Thought I'd share the wonderful surprises I found inside!

I got a box of coyote notecards, drawn by Michelle's mom, Judy, who is also a gifted artist.

Here's a cool cross stitch kit that Michelle bailed on, and which I can't wait to get started on! She and I definitely play to our crafting strengths. She works magic with, and has the patience for, seed beads, and I have the patience for cross stitch but not with seed beads. But we both have the same taste in designs, that's for sure! I would have bought this kit on my own if I saw it in a store!

Michelle made these smart new bandanas for Sagie and Bean.

That flower toy is one of Sagan's faves, that's why I gave him the flower bandana. Plus the silly smiling flower pattern matches his goofy personality! "Tanks Auntie Michelle!"

And the dark bandanna also looks good on the Bean, who is, as usual, thrilled to be modeling for a yet another photo. "Tanks fer da bandana but pwease tell momma ta stop takin pitchers!"

I saved the best for last. This is a knitted/beaded butterfly bag that Michelle MADE!!!! Isn't she amazing??? She posted it on Facebook and I begged her to make me one too, and offered to pay for the materials. She offered to give me this. I couldn't believe that she would want to part with it!! I am humbled and honored.

It's perfect.
The strap is meticulous and exquisite!!
A beautiful beaded dragonfly with Swarovski crystal eyes.
And an ant with the tiniest curly antennas I've ever seen!!!!
A wee ladybug!

Lampwork glass snake made by Michelle's friend Cindy! I am equally thrilled to own some of Cindy's work as well!!

And a little lampworked slug, also made by Cindy!
I cherish this amazing piece of art. It is a prized addition to my collection!

Thank you so much Michelle!!!! I love you and miss you lots!!! XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXO

Wordless Wednesday

Annual MASH Homebrew Picnic - Samuel P. Taylor State Park, Marin County - May, 1997

I WANNA ROCK!!!!

A Rock Wood Fired Pizza that is!


This place is the coolest, if you are a fan of good ol' fashioned classic rock like we are!

A good mix of 60's & 70's era music plays in the restaurant, and there's even a speaker outside so you can hear what's playing when you get there. I arrived to pick up our order during Jackson Browne's "Runnin' on Empty".

Even the menus are the size/shape of album covers and are in the designs pictured above the bar (ZZ Top, Styx, Queen, Supertramp, etc).

I love this!
Large group booth seating.

They make their own microbrews and have named them after rock tunes. Brian has a Suicide Blonde Ale tshirt.

There are 11 Rock restaurants in Western Washington, and the Lake Tapps location is closest to us, on the Auburn/Bonney Lake line.

Equipment case storage.

I asked the bartender if I could go into the men's room to take a pic of the urinal. She said sure, just go ahead and knock first. So I knocked, waited, then opened the door and yelled, "GIRL COMING IN TO TAKE A PICTURE OF THE URINAL!" No one was in there, so I was free to shoot my pics. I do wish that the urinal cake thing wasn't in the way but I certainly wasn't about to touch it!!

I love the way these flames look on the black stall door!
The gargoyle is chained to keep him from being stolen, but the effect is really cool.

West coast pizza sucks out loud, but The Rock's is awesome. It's the only authentic, east coast style pizza you can get in this area.

HELL YEAH....THAT'S GOOD PIZZA!