good friends are the best

The great thing about good friends is that you can get together and essentially do nothing and have a great time. 

A couple of weeks ago, we went out to Columbus to attend the Dublin Irish Festival (waaay more on that later) and got a chance to hang out with some girlfriends of mine from UD.  We even got to meet our group’s newest edition – Miss Mia.

The girls and I simply hung out like we did back in the day.  Just talking.  Hanging out.  And maybe, just maybe, someone – that would be me – was busy taking pictures of the cutie pie.  And the cats.

 

 

 

Indie was a very good photo subject.

 

 

 

 

 

Mmmmm… feet….

 

Cat nap time…

Will had more luck with Rusty than I did.

Good friends.

commas

I have a love/hate relationship with commas.

I was never the best at grammar in school.  I swear, I must have switched schools just enough that every English teacher I had thought that we'd already been taught the rules in a previous class.

As a result, sometimes I'm overzealous in my comma usage.

Sometimes I go back and realize that I haven't used a single one where plenty were warranted.

Then, of course, there is the old adage about "rules are meant to be broken."  In which case, it doesn't really matter where you put the commas because you don't have to follow the rules.

My issues with commas are more apparent to me now that I have this blog and can go back and reread everything I've written.

These are my random thoughts for the morning.

artists with too much time on their hands – thankfully

From various sources, I’ve come across some interesting things lately.

First, this video, Posted to Facebook by Victor, with stop-motion pictures depicting a guy walking across America.  It just happens to also feature our favorite Edward Sharpe song, “Home.”

There’s even a video of how they did it. The makers also posted a map of their journey with extra pictures if you click on the pins.

The second is another stop-motion video posted by Cup of Jo – this time made with actual pictures.  It appears to depict a man’s life journey towards his 50th grade school reunion.  Very cool!

Oddly from the same Cup of Jo post, I found a NY Times blog, Abstract City, by Christoph Niemann.  She had posted his most recent entry on being on a red eye from NYC to Berlin.  Here’s just a few select images from his posts (each picture is linked back to its original post). 

 

He uses all different mediums and inspirations.  Clearly, the above is an interpretation of DC in the style of a Google map.

  

Paint is a common medium but he has another post that he made, essentially, little voodoo dolls and photographed them.

This one actually inspired a book, I Lego NY.   The post about his kids being obsessed with the NYC Subway is a-dor-able.

I guess I’m just saying that I’m glad that there are still artists in the world and that they put a lot of time into their creations even if those creations are simply YouTube videos and blog posts.

reasons why…

… my husband may never allow me to go to New Jersey to hang out with my mom by myself ever again.

1. a mirror – ok, he knew about that one.

2. a rug

3. new throw pillows

With the view towards hopefully putting our condo up for sale in the next several months (hinging on a whole bunch of other things), I’ve been thinking about what we need to do to it to “stage” it.  I don’t want to have it be a huge deal and have a whole lot of stuff to do when the time does come. 

I took on the living room.

Before:

After:

I added a brown striped rug in an effort to “anchor the room” as I’ve been reading about on Young House Love – there’s also the fact that according to the condo association’s rules, we’re supposed to have 80% of the wood floors covered.  We live above the basement so I never bothered.

I also replaced the boring, yet oh so soft, plush green pillows.  We’ll still use them until we actually put the place up for sale but (a) they’re boring and (b) one of them has a recurring split in the seam.

Ok, it’s still a little messy because, well, I’m lazy and I didn’t finish putting everything away before I took the picture.  There might be a few other things that we’ll do before we actually try and sell it but the rug was a big step.  

The mirror is for the bedroom and isn’t yet on the wall.

So what do you think, Mom?

g&p – 11 months

I can’t believe that it’s been almost a year.

fitness goals:

• I want to run 2 days a week, swim 2 days a week and do something, be it softball, bike riding, yoga, more running and swimming etc, 2 of the remaining 3 days of the week. I’ve been kind of following the training plan that I talked about so I’ve been trying to run about 5 days a week.  I’m probably doing about 4 days and 12 or so miles a week right now.
• I’m going to start with doing bicep and triceps curls while I do my single leg stands – ok, this, of course, presumes that I’m keeping up with my PT exercises so maybe… totally didn’t do this.
• I will continue to do my PT exercises… um, twice a week… 3 times.  or this.
• Oh yeah – and food.  I need to be better about what I eat but I haven’t decided yet what those particular goals should be.
  • at least one should be to not visit the vending machine once a day. I haven’t been avoiding the vending machine as much as I could.
  • Lay off the ice cream.

projects: (in no particular order)

1. change thermostat to programmable.
2. refinish kitchen table – Regained the table but only last week so I’m being lazy.
3. recaulk tub – we did it but we have to do it again because I’m an idiot.
4. sell extraneous stuff on eBay – I still haven’t started.
5. organize the basement, in particular label all the bins and boxes – definitely got started but we’re not finished.
6. honeymoon scrapbook
7. clean Snuffles
8. Christmas stockings - Sara, Autumn, Austin and Will – I was making great progress on Sara’s.
9. sort through stuff at parents' homes – I got started on this a couple of weeks ago on a trip to NJ.  I started with 7 boxes of books and papers and 2 milk crates of books – there are now 2 Rubbermaid tubs of books and the 2 milk crates of books that I haven’t decided what to do with just yet.
10. get the bathroom fixed - ceiling, drains, and tub faucet – I called maintenance and they said it was still leaking from upstairs and now we’ve been in contact with the landlord from upstairs but now I have to see about contacting him about having our ceiling fixed.
11. organize recipes – My easy way to finish organizing hasn’t happened yet.