Meet Chris and Jodi. Super nice, super cool, musically inclined, tooth-achingly-adorable couple. They just moved into a new place together and had us over for supper last night. Partway through the meal we were talking about how our paths have crisscrossed over the past decade, long before we actually met many years ago… how Mikey used to know Jodi’s cousin… how she grew up with my best friend’s ex… how some of Chris’s family graduated with Mikey’s sisters… and lots of other small-world anecdotes. I tell them about the blanket, whose status I am now updating to The Blanket. Capitals.

About a minute into the tale I start to mention names and places, and Chris throws has hands out like a traffic cop.

“Wait. What? ………….. I know them. That’s my family.”

Different last name, family by marriage. He knows every single person involved. The blanket maker and her husband, the priest cousin of her husband… everyone. I showed him a photo of the blanket, and he said his grandma had one just like it in autumn colors. Well… of course she did.

“So wait, there’s more. We’ve also found out that Mikey’s dad went to seminary with this pair of brothers, Matt and John. How are they related?”

“Those are my dad’s cousins!”

So we think my father-in-law’s adolescent buddies are the blanket maker’s nephews, but we’re beginning to get mixed up in a web of cousins.

Kevin Bacon, you’ve got nothin’ on this woman.

Incidentally, thanks to these two lovely ladies for the blog mentions :)

This week’s organization resolution is making me giddy. Filling up bags of stuff to take out of your home and never bring back is one kind of purging-thrill, but majorly condensing stuff that you ARE keeping around forever is a much more satisfying task, but harder to do. We know lots of people who, for space-saving reasons mostly, get rid of all of their CD jewel cases and keep the liner notes and cds in binders or wallets (the current issue of DIY magazine has a really cool photo-framing idea using empty jewel cases). This is a great idea if you are That Kind of Person – we aren’t. The album art is a huge part of the deal to us and we just can’t get rid of all of it.

BUT.

We don’t care about DVD packaging. We own somewhere around 150 movies and documentaries (as it turns out, eep) and it never occured to us to store them in a more condensed way. We’ve only ever really gotten rid of DVDs when we got married and condensed our collections, and I think we’ve put a few on swaptree. For the most part, though, all of the movies/etc. that we own are in our possession because we watch them over and over and over (we don’t have cable – we do Netflix, so all we do is watch stuff on DVD from there or our collection or stream it).

And… I HATE having shelves and shelves of DVDs – they are ugly, they take up lots of space, and I just hate them. Did I say that? I hate them. I’d never entertained the idea of getting rid of the packaging because I think CD wallets and binders are even worse. And let’s face it – I’ve got more pressing organizational needs than DVDs (…you should see my fabric.) We’ve built up quite the collection over the years because we usually buy them used for a few dollars or in the $3.00 bins at BigLots (does anyone else love Spellbound like I do? Capote? Maria Full of Grace? The Squid and the Whale? – all in the $3 bins at BigLots)… so movie-buying is like a treasure hunt.

Anyway – I had a revelation the other day that hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s definitely not ingenious, but I’ve just never thought of it before because, well, you know – fabric, all that. I bought a set of boxes like these and some packs of single protective CD sleeves, and will make some alphabet tab dividers to fit. As soon as we got home from picking up these things we attacked our DVD collection with gusto. A few things got to stay in their packaging: the few TV series that we feel the need to own and watch and rewatch and rewatch, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Wes Anderson, Tim Burton, and some music stuff. The rest got filed into the boxes and then gutted and sorted into bags for recycling.

So, so, SO satisfying for my OCD and aesthetic brain. *sigh*

Was it good for you?

In other news… we keep running into people that we know, or used to know. It took awhile for this to happen. I was beginning to feel so weird about living here because we’d go run a whole afternoon full of errands and not recognize a soul. Now it happens all the time and all is right with the universe.

Today’s parenting freakout is about whether or not to turn Hazel’s carseat. I knew this day would come but every time I tried to think about it my brain would scream no, not yet, for the love of god just STOP. She has a Graco Safeseat and since she’s such a peanut it will fit her for quite awhile longer, but we were about to buy a new seat so she could face forward. And then I started reading, and now I think we should keep her rear-facing for as long as we can, but I still think we should buy a new seat so she’s not so reclined and so she’s sitting up a bit higher and can look around more. I hate trying to decide these very hard things. Even if I’ve committed to rear-facing in my mind and Mikey is on board… WHAT THE HELL SEAT DO WE BUY??? This isn’t the kind of things you can just… go buy. Or I can’t. Right now I am thinking the Britax Marathon, but I just don’t know. Thankfully she DOES still fit in her infant seat and I’m quite sure she’ll outgrow it in length before weight, so we don’t have to decide right now, but I do think her car trips would be more fun if she was in a “big kid” seat. I have to eternally protect AND entertain / comfort this precious little gal.

Her imagination is developing so quickly all of a sudden – it’s amazing. Watching her learn to smile and laugh and sit up and play and crawl scoot and walk (with assistance of course) were all amazing, but watching her learn to pretend… well, I simply can’t handle it. I need more of these creatures in my life.

Listening: Neil Young
(I am) Reading: I informed Mikey that tonight I WILL take a bath and read an actual BOOK for awhile – probably The Happiest Toddler on the Block – I need to get through it so I can move on to my fun reading
(Hazel is) Reading: Big Red Barn
Working on: blue & gold blanket; fat quarters for a fabric exchange; Hazel’s valentine
Thanks to: Delightful Divas for the blog feature!

Thanks to Jennifer for featuring my little white rabbit studs on her super fun blog, The Loophole Lost Forum. Check it out – she features entirely LOST-inspired, handmade goodies. Love!

When I found this seriously trashed lamp, I immediately had a revamp vision that involved lots of white, pea green, red and turquoise ribbon. And some spraypaint. And some mushrooms and snails. And it was going to look so wonderful and adorable sitting on Hazel’s little red dresser when we move home and sell all of our cheap, boring Ikea dressers.

Two months later I’m still at a standstill because I cannot find the perfect, white, cylindrical lampshade – at least not at the right price. I will continue my quest, but in the meantime this really adorable Ikea shade that I’ve kind of been coveting went on sale, so I snatched up the biggest size offered. It’s not quite right for this base, but works for now and will make a lovely floor lamp when the ribbon-shade-project is complete.

Upon getting it home I realized that there was no way to get the new shade on the lamp without completely un-wiring the whole thing to get it onto the base, and even if I could pull that off it wasn’t going to fit securely without a little piece of hardware that I did not have the patience to walk two blocks and get. After a quick eyeball of the lamp parts I realized that lamp wiring is the most simple thing ever – it took me about a minute and a half to take it all apart, another two minutes to secure the shade with green electrical tape (so classy), and another two to wire it all back together and put it on the dresser.

Not awesome, and not what I have in mind, but I think it’s rather adorable and will work just fine for now.

I suppose another color would have been more complementary, but you don’t see it anyway and green happened to be the color of the roll sitting six feet away from me.

Nothin’ to it – two wires and two screws. Now that I know how simple it is, maybe I’ll try undertaking some of the lighting-from-scratch projects I’ve fantasized about. I’ve always been afraid of projects that could potentially blow up in my face.

It’ll do for now :)

lamp – free
birdie shade – 14.99 at Ikea
wiring lessons – many childhood years of taking apart my remote control cars and rewiring them to run backwards
bird and apple puzzles – here
“creation of the animals” icon – gift from scott & alex
pressed flowers and teddy bear – handmade by granny anne
mushroom birdhouse – a buck at a dollar store
bird placemat – 99 cents at target
sock zebra – handmade by elizabeth
vintage charlie brown books – my husband is 32, so that makes his childhood books “vintage”
ultrasound photo – five bucks… the only part of my canadian prenatal care or birth that cost us a dime :)

Also, thanks to the lovelies who featured me on their blogs here and here!

Listening: not a thing – blessed silence of a sleeping/teething child
Reading: The Coal Tattoo by Silas House
Working on: a batch of pendants, and baby gifts, baby gifts, baby gifts…

To the handmade guru for featuring my little nun brooch on her blog!

I’ve also somehow ended up on this site. No idea how, but yay?

For the rehearsal dinner picnic the night before our wedding, my mom had two cases of Jones Soda made with a photo of us on the labels. For almost four years now, I have kept two full bottles, always displaying them somewhere in our kitchen. As part of my new year’s resolution I did the unthinkable one week – I decided to recycle them. My intent was to peel off the labels, keep the caps (which have fortunes on the insides), and do something crafty with the two. After various ways of trying, I realized I was never going to get the labels off in one piece – the glue was just too hardened and the paper was flaking off. Not to be deterred, I photographed them instead. After drinking seven bottles of cream soda looking for a cap with a fortune appropriate to life / a wedding / whatever, and having my best friend mail a bag of the wine corks she’d saved from our reception, I put together this tiny 4×6 shadowbox. Much prettier than a couple of glass bottles of dark vanilla soda – I don’t know what took me so long :) We’ve never really had much from our wedding displayed – one framed photo on my dresser and our funky cake servers hanging in our kitchen – so I am happy to finally have a wedding-something all prettied up, and not as ho-hum as one of our invitations in a boring silver frame.

Also, a quick thank you to tldg rainwear for featuring my little pink umbrella studs in a treasury last week – and for letting me know, since I never remember to check :)

That’s it, folks. I’m going home to WV – and to various places from there – on Saturday. Won’t be back here until the first week of August, so no updates for awhile!

…to Kelly, for mentioning me on her pretty pretty blog, lawn fawn cards. It certainly made my monday!