Vintage House Quirks

Hi! Welcome to our house! This is the view from the front window where the cat likes to watch the world go by. When I was writing this post about our house, I had a lot more to write but blogger somehow crashed and I lost a lot of work. 

When I first realized I'd probably be moving in here (March, almost a year ago) I got interested in the history of the house. I read this blog a lot and was super impressed by how Daniel tried to keep his (extensive, insane) home renovations true to the historic character of his 1865 house, and the other properties he worked on (because one home reno isn't enough?) Plus I like watching a lot of HGTV when I'm on vacation.

Anyhow I wondered how to identify the age of the house and the general architectural style. I looked at some books and pamphlets about Chicago architectural styles - Georgian, Edwardian, Victorian, bungalow, American Four Square, Dutch Colonial, etc. This article pretty clearly describes the "frame two-flat" but said the era varies from 1900 - 1920 and could be in a variety of architectural styles. Ours looked similar-ish to the illustrated Victorian, with the bay windows and dormered little front porch off to one side. But the descriptions of other architectural styles seemed to sometimes fit too. The exterior of our house has been covered in vinyl siding like most old houses around here, making it a bit harder to really tell what it used to look like. Then I remembered that our moldings around the windows and doors looked a lot like the windows in Daniel's old Brooklyn apartment, and he had said they were original and 120 years old, and that was in 2011. So I googled around trying to describe them correctly until I found some images of molding that looked just like ours with the date of the house they were found in. That confirmed the general ballpark era, and I was able to search around more effectively. I decided on 1887 although never could find the original building permit.

Here's the first picture I took of the moldings, you can kindof see here where I think someone sawed off (?!) the top bit which is like a little crown. I remember reading somewhere that back in period the house was built the moldings likely would have been painted white with patterened wallpaper on the plaster walls. The walls are still plaster but full of cracks, so many cracks. I am afraid fixing them is going to end up really expensive.

If you look closely in this picture, you can see the little crown. Sorry about the poor contrast in the photo, white on white was hard to capture well. First of all, I don't know why some of the trim has no crown and others do. The kitchen only has basic, boring trim around its three doors and two windows but it does have the super tall grooved baseboards the rest of the house is #blessed with. Second of all, look even more closely at the picture above and notice how the trim on the right side of the closet (that's my closet, you can see my striped dress poking out of the darkness) just disappears into the wall. WTF. This really gave me pause, because I was so convinced that the trim and walls were original and I couldn't imagine why they would have just designed it like this. It just looks so much like an afterthought, like they wanted a closet and put it in and then they were like oh, crap, the trim doesn't fit here, let's just cut it off, no one will notice. 

By the way, see how narrow this closet is? There was a folding door in there (you can see the tracks for it) but when folded, it took up precious inches and wall space, so I took it off. We don't use this room as a bedroom so it's ok with me to have it open (you know if you have your closet door open at night that's how the monsters get you). I'll show you my closet some time, it is a work of art how I squeezed everything in this tiny narrow space.

Back to the topic at hand, which is the crazy things going on with the trim in this house. Ok, this is basically my view right now, lying in bed, except we now have an IKEA light fixture instead of this broken sad thing. The acoustic tile drop ceiling is horrifying and I hate it. I especially hate the parts that are coming loose. But I can't do anything about it, and that's not the point of the picture. The point is where the diagonal line of the bottom of the staircase that that leads up into the neighbor's place cuts off the window trim. Daniel, my hero from Manhattan Nest, dealt with a similar situation on the outside of his house, and concluded that the windows were added later, disrupting the trim line, and so I wanted to conclude that the plastering over of the stairwell bottom was a later addition, but after noticing the closet trim abnormality in the spare room, I am wondering if the original builders were just not as detail-orientated as they should could have been.  I mean, it was a working class dwelling, built probably pretty quickly in a subdivided urban lot with a lot of basically identical working-class dwellings. I was raised in the 1990s version of this, and let me tell you that the builders are not always perfect artisans. However, the tract home nature of the house makes me think, wouldn't they have worked out the kinks if they were working on a plan that they did over and over again? But then again, I think that the original owner was a carpenter. Maybe, just maybe, he decided to take the plans into his own hands, but messed up a few details. I really like this idea. I now have a whole personality in my head for him (basically the dad from Home Improvements).

Now that I showed you the terrible ceiling in my bedroom, I might as well show you the even darker underbelly of it, as a further example of the madness that went into the multiple renovations of this old house. The light fixture that was here when my husband moved in (before I met him) was an ugly frosted glass dome with flowers etched on it that was held flush to the horrible ceiling with the three hook looking things you can see in the picture. One day the bulb blew out and I discovered it was a weird-looking tiny halogen tube. We didn't replace it for, like, a month. I went to Ace Hardware (which is located next to an Ulta, Kinko's, Pizza Hut, my phone carrier, and a coffee shop and across the street from Binny's making it basically the most amazing shopping strip ever) and found the bulb but it was kinda pricey and I hate the light fixture anyway, so I convinced husband we could replace the whole fixture, no problem. I wanted to install in the bedroom the chandelier which I had gotten him to help me install in the kitchen, and in the kitchen I would put a globe light I'd been carrying around for years since I found it in a dumpster. This is making me sound crazy and kind of awful, I know.

However, that plan was not to be. We took down the ceiling tile to assess how possible it would be to install the chandelier and found the scene above. The yellow line of wire comes from the light box, which is sensibly mounted into the ceiling, travels about a foot or so horizontally, and then goes through the foam-board ceiling tile to attach to the light fixture. The whole weight of the fixture is just hanging on the quarter-inch or less of foam tile that hangs on the cross-bars, which as you saw are not all attached to the wall and basically falling down. I reassessed my plan and decided to get something extremely lightweight and something that would detract attention from the ceiling instead of attract it, which in retrospect was a way better plan and a chandelier would have been a terrible mistake.

So we went to IKEA. It was amazing as it always is. I drank a bunch of coffee and bounced off the walls but managed to choose this funny paper lamp. Husband said he thinks his parents had a similar one in a different shape in the 80s, and it does have a sort of retro-futuristic style that I don't hate. Its a very different style from the classic 1880s/90s style that I was going for, but it gets the job done, weighs basically nothing, and has a lasts-forever LED lightbulb. I actually like how the dots on it mirror the dots in the ceiling tile pattern. Since we aren't going to remove and replace the drop ceiling anytime soon if ever, it seems a decent compromise. Once I saw what lies beneath the drop ceiling, which is open ductwork and pipes and a horrific collection of dusty wiring, I see why there is a drop ceiling, and lost interest in trying to tear it down. And after a month of crashing into stuff in the dark trying to get to the bedside lamps, having an overhead light is amazing.

 Here's some more pictures of the living room windows to apologize for making you look at the atrocities behind the ceiling tile. You can get a shot of our bay window, which is a pretty cool thing to have, actually. We are about half-a-story above street level, so we don't get a lot of light, but this window really maximizes what we do get. It's kinda messy; we've made some changes recently since we got terrariums for a wedding present! The cat and his paraphernalia get pride of place. You can see in the top photo the white globe on the floor. Around the time I was in grad school I walked past a dumpster outside one of the 1960s era buildings that was getting some mild renovations and they had tossed out some glass dome light shades. I took three -- two like this white one and one really huge, beautiful gray smokey glass. One white one broke almost immediately, all over my former roommate's apartment building lobby. The gray one went with me to several more apartments, used as a vase, a source of Darth Vader voices, and eventually I dropped something on it and it cracked. However, I knew I could use this globe and it would be worth it, but I needed lamp parts. I tried a lot of places: Ace, Home Depot, and a lighting store. I was finally directed to Midwest Lamp Parts, which is in a giant warehouse in a random part of town. We went over one day only to learn they are only open 9-5 Monday-Friday unless they feel like closing up for a few days randomly. Finally, ages later, I was sick enough to stay home from work but well enough to get in the car and drive over there. I was a little shaky and felt weak and feverish but I am very committed to this project.

It was amazing, dusty, jam-packed with light fixtures and well, lamp parts. I was helped by a Russian-sounding Orthodox Jewish man who at first seemed grumpy and was annoyed with me for not knowing the names of the parts I was looking for, but turned out to be awesome and nice once he realized I was planning to do all this myself. He made me an honorary construction company when he wrote up my invoice on a carbon copy machine. Cash only, of course. At this point I was still planning to put the chandelier in the bedroom so I got a whole new chain, ceiling mounting hardware, etc.

Putting this light fixture in was... difficult. Husband was not happy with me, because I can't reach the ceiling even on the ladder so he had to do all the hard work... four times because we couldn't get it right. It took hours, with lots of going down to the basement and back up to flip the breaker switch. There were a LOT of parts to get in the right order, and at the right height, and get the wires to connect. He is now officially done with DIY and I'm on my own, but all the ceiling-height work is done so I think I'm fine. Anyhow, we had bought the little (plastic!) ceiling medallion when we put up the chandelier, but forgot to put it up. It is necessary because there's a big ugly hole in the ceiling tile (this place and the ceiling tile!) that isn't fully covered by the light ceiling mounting plate thing (edit: canopy. See above where I don't know lighting terminology). I know it looks really tilted in the photo but it's not nearly so bad in real life. I bought the brightest dimmable LED lightbulb I could find, because the original light fixture (pre-blingy-chandelier) had 3-4 bulbs and the kitchen needs as much light as it can get. I haven't installed the dimmer switch yet mostly because I think the heat went off when I switched the breaker and it's just too cold to risk that. But it'll look so great on a dimmer when we have a meal at the table, or if we have people over! And I can crank it up to 11 when I cook, as I require professional-kitchen level lighting or I get grumpy.

In this photo you can also see the boring nondescript trim in the kitchen. The tiny bathroom is on the left, the two windows are on the wall to the left of that, and next to them is the sink and some cabinets. The door to the basement stairs and back porch is in the back. The door to "my room," aka the spare room, is in the right hand corner, and next to it is a strange piece of furniture we use to store liquor and spare glassware (we have SO MUCH glassware), and then cabinets on that wall include the stove and fridge. I want to replace the strange liquor cabinet with a nicer one, that doesn't have ugly faux-rustic metal scrolls on it. Maybe I could use one of our two identical leaning bookshelves, as husband and I both owned one before I moved in.

Here's the living room couch, which is a gigantic dark brown suede-like sectional. I was looking through my phone for photos of the apartment and there is a massive collection of photos of us and/or the cat on this couch, so it is basically where we spend 95% of our time. It is a little bit ugly but extremely comfortable. I got a lot of light-colored pillows to try to make it look better. I also put up one more painting on the wall as I thought this looked like there's a gap. I bought the map of the world that looks like a strange geometric shape for $20 at Brown Elephant thrift store. It's a Buckminister Fuller projection showing ocean temperatures, and it's awesome. Previously he (husband, not Buckminister Fuller) had a non-working weird modern clock there, and while I see (kindof) where he was going with the asymmetry, it just wasn't working for me. I don't want to hear that we hang the art too high-- we are both tall and the ceilings are tall and just let us live, ok? The tall bookshelf on the left has been mine since the apartment after college. It's a Billy and it's much more stable than the wider standard-sized Billys. My wide Billy fell down spontaneously in a giant crash on New Years Eve, after listing to the right dangerously for months, so I'm on the hunt for a replacement. The nice solid wood bookshelf on the right has been his since he bought it at a proper furniture store in New York. I tried to get him to let me spray paint the oval-with-cut-out wood lamp base gold but he said no. I just think there's too much dark brown going on in here.

See, he does love me! This was taken before the kitchen light installation, so I guess it actually proves nothing, except that we are weird adorable and I had just gotten a new phone to play with. This is taken from short end of the sectional couch. You can see the door to the bedroom and the cool archway opening into the kitchen with the spare room door open in the background. That's an IKEA rug and IKEA coffee table, and one of our two leaning bookshelves (the other is in the basement, awaiting its next role). See the strange underwater rippled effect on the blue wall of the kitchen? That's from the blingy chandelier! When I convinced my boyfriend or fiance at the time to buy it because it was on sale, he had a voucher, and it was fabulous,  I didn't realize it would do that, effectively dimming the light and generally just being Too Much. When I saw the same chandelier in multiples in a River North bar, I knew I had made a mistake. 

The blue walls with dark blue trim in the kitchen were another one of my ideas that I regret. Boyfriend did all the painting, but I gave him the idea, and now I feel guilty. You should have seen the walls before, though. They were tan with brown faux-aged sponging. I think the trim was a nondescript but beigeier tan. They were hideous. Together with the light brown wood floors, light brown wood cabinets, faux-aged metal chandelier, faux-aged metal liquor cabinet, and dark wood furniture, it was a brown abomination. However, white on white is what we should have chosen for the walls and likely will repaint. The apartment is too small for creative trim colors, in my opinion. 

Anyway, it's coming together, slowly. I try to get rid of things, style bits and pieces as I go. For example, I want get rid of a lot of glassware, which is so hard for me, and get some boxes or even shelves to contain the random mess on top of the cabinets, but more on that later. You can even see that I've improved the capacity of the spare room door to hold my entire 54 scarf collection. The issue with this apartment is that there are no closets besides the two tiny bedroom closets, so stuff that needs to be reasonably accessible (only long-term storage in the basement) has to be crammed in somewhere basically in full sight. I plan to address this partly with my larger, better, more sturdy shelving unit in the spare room. To be continued.

Color Inspiration at AIC: Ceramics

 Went to the Art Institute Museum awhile ago and actually remembered my camera. I've loved the ceramics in the Asian wing since my long-ago ceramics class but have recently gotten into them more for the colors. Unfortunately due to my own incompetence I forgot to fix the white balance but you can pretty much figure it out. The last three are in the Middle Eastern art wing.

 This one claims to have a "pseudo-inscription." The only thing I can guess that means is that the writing means nothing. It doesn't look to say anything to me but I'm no expert. Anyway what a cool idea! I used to be, as a kid, very into gibberish writing but to just stick it on your plate seems... awesome.

 I'm obsessed with the roughly-painted blue glaze over the low-relief high-detail background.

Next up: kimonos.

1970s Indian book cover design

 I used to work in a library and was in charge of the India and Pakistan collection. Apparently, back in the Cold War, the US offered a deal to countries they were afraid would fall to Communism: give us your books (in key subjects like religion and science) and we'll give you food. I think this is how it went down; I don't have any sources but my memory. We had a collection mostly from India and Pakistan, with smaller collections from Yugoslavia and Indonesia and maybe somewhere else, mostly from the 70s. Anyway a great number of these books were pretty boring but as I had plenty of time to shelve them, I spent a lot of time looking at the interesting ones. A lot of the ones below I just liked the design of the covers. I don't know the languages involved or the subjects, but a lot of the more colorful ones look like pulp novels. (It was through this job that I also learned about weather modification, Rabindranath Tagore and Zainul Abedin). I've posted one of these covers before, but here's the whole of my photos.

 Some cool marbelized page ends

 vivid color everywhere

Sorry about the poor picture quality. These were taken with my cell phone camera on the sly!

My New Apartment

This is what moving feels like! I've been trying to unpack but ended up slumped against a pile of winter coats on my bed that I don't know how to find a home for. BUT! My new place is great! It is God-awful hot here today and yesterday and I am so grateful for air conditioning. Sometimes I feel guilty for a/c, like that I'll get used to it and not be able to deal when I don't have it (surely, in my next apartment) or that I'll appreciate the cooler nights less, or something. A constant theme in my life: being afraid of any luxury. The illustration is by Julie Morstad and I found it on What Possessed Me.

 Haha unpacking sucks! But check it out, dudes, I have a closet! I have very carefully packed it chock-full of all my stuff that was ferreted away in various shared closets in my old apartment. My dad was a master packer, and I inherited the same obsessiveness.

My room is so big that my bookshelves fit in there too! It's out of control. Turns out I have even more books than fit because I was colonizing other roommates bookshelf space. Oops.

 

This is the view out one of my windows. I have another tiny one way up in the corner at the top of the wall, above my bed. It made a nice cross-breeze when the windows were open the first night I was here. One might ask, but you have a/c, I thought? Ah, but the first night I was here, there was an epic thunderstorm! I watched lightning crack across the sky from my front window, and saw it hit the lightning rods on top of the Sears Tower which I can just barely see (!!!!). Then there was a floor-shaking crack and the power went out. A few minutes later, the hail started (!!!) and we heard a cry from the bathroom, where a hailstone broke the bathroom window and hit my new roommate! Bad omens, said my best friend. But I thought it was auspicious, a mark of a new, exciting phase of life. 

Here's a couple quotes about big changes and courage that I read on comments on What Possessed Me that are bucking me up:

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. - Anais Nin

Live to the point of tears. - Camus

Mindfulness and Creativity

Happy Sunday, y'all. I'm eating leftover diner omelette from last night's adventures and cleaning all the things. And blogging. Holy crap, there's nothing like being freed temporarily from the worries and stress of work and school to remind you of long-forgotten creative plans. I took a class last quarter where we had to use different mediums to produce our reading responses each week, things like taking a picture, drawing with oil pastels (maybe that was just me and my love for oil pastels), writing poetry, cooking, singing, doing yoga. It was a touchy-feely class, and I gave the assignments a fair share of eye-rolling, but one comment by a classmate on the last day stuck out. She said that it was game-changing to think of creativity as part of normal work and life, not the "reward" we leave for ourselves when nothing else is really going on. For those of us who aren't artists and don't work in a creative field, how can we make the pursuit of creativity and beauty a part of our busy lives, not just something to add on?

I think a lot of us (bloggers, women, friends of mine, people who appreciate aesthetics, I dunno how I'm defining "us" here) seek to add beauty and creativity in to our everyday life in little ways, but those often strike me as something to add on when we've got money and time. I'm thinking of things like buying flowers, sewing and drawing and knitting during our free time. These things are valuable, but sometimes I literally don't have time or money for them (soon, hopefully, my life won't be so damn intense but you can't just wait around living in a future time). I've been thinking of ways to do the shit I have to do in a more mindful, creative way. I read (in Martha Stewart, referencing an unnamed "recent Harvard study") that people spend 50% of their time thinking about something other than what they're doing, and that this makes them unhappy. Let's totally ignore my nagging need to read the whole study and criticize it, and assume that mindful presence in as much of daily life as possible is a positive goal. There's a lot of boring shit I have to do that I don't want to be mindfully present for, though, I just want to get through, like commuting and paperwork and eating old food because I hate for food to go to waste and school assignments I can't get into. Sometimes, though, if I try or just pay attention, these can become enjoyable too. I kind of love commuting sometimes, watching the buildings flash past and the birds and the light sparkle through falling snow and the faces of my fellow metropolis-dwellers. I write little observations on receipts and shove them in my purse and find them later, a little slice of mid-January. My coworker play music while she does paperwork.

I think sometimes what it takes to introduce creativity to ordinary tasks, paradoxically, is ritual and routine. You know, you decide, ok, it's tax time, motherf*ers, time to dress up like my weirdly romanticized version of an attorney, get absurdly into knowing the workings of the IRS website, and pump myself up with a fancy coffee. I know those are kindof add-ons, but if you're going to dress and have a coffee anyway, why not specialize them for taxes? This is an odd example. Maybe like my coworker, when you have an unpleasant task at work, set it up so you're happy and comfortable and then get into it as much as possible. I kind of relish the stress of exam week because I'm so single-mindedly focused on one thing.

I'm going to think about this some more. After I do my taxes.

Took this crazy double-exposure picture in New Orleans on the hotel balcony in the morning, and of my friend's dog in the back of the truck, with my old-school Sabre 620 camera, which I finally got it together to use.

Redmoon and Sartorial Struggles

This morning I woke up feeling unable to get the "Amy's productive day" show on the road. It doesn't help that I was feeling sick again, perhaps from sitting outside in the cold for a few hours last night watching Redmoon's The Astronaut's Birthday. It was a pretty cool show, though I didn't appreciate being packed onto uncomfortable bleachers with irritating children and craning my neck upwards. The show was done entirely with over 4,000 (or something, I forget) hand-drawn, hand-gelled slides and overhead projectors shining from inside the building windows, with occasional people as shadows and puppetry animation. The story was a little "meh" (this review suggests it was too slow-paced, but I also think the overt moral was a strangely uncomfortable one: "don't dream big or shoot for the stars, because love is all that matters.") But I love Redmoon for their commitment to fantastic public art and elaborate low-tech spectacle. And afterwards I got a "blood orange" hot chocolate from a 7-11 and went to a potluck party at a friend's house. I brought a cous-cous salad with grapes, orange pepper, and feta, a combination of two Mark Bittman picnic ideas from the New York Times. Most of them look super good and fast, so I'll be trying them for more than just picnics.

Another thing slowing me down is trying to wear something other than my corduroy pants that I love so much. I think it would be nice to wear skirts and tights, but can never get it to look right or feel comfortable. It's mostly an issue of improper footwear. Somehow, the flats I wore all summer with skirts don't look right as soon as I add tights to my legs, which I can't figure out. And as great as heels look, I just can't bring myself to wear them to walk the 20 minutes to campus, where they will slow me down and make me uncomfortable all day. How do women who wear heels every day do it? I have some ankle boots that I bought last spring and really liked for awhile, but now I feel like they make me look like Robin Hood with my skinny legs poking out of their wide tops. This post from Jane at Ill Seen, Ill Said, inspired me to try to make flats look just as sophisticated, but I can't pull it off. I always love her "Sunday best" imaginary outfit posts, and she's so smart and posts a lot of interesting things about art and books.

Geometric Wall Art Ideas

I'm really into geometric DIY wall art right now. The top image is by U look like a bunny via Design for Mankind.
This photo is from flickr photographer Graphic Surgery taken somewhere in Sweden, also via Design for Mankind.
This is the dining room of Anne-Claire Rohe, whose home was featured on Design*Sponge. She made the hot pink wire installation as a homage to Fred Sandbeck.

There's a lot more out there, Design for Mankind is also really into geometrics. REALLY into. Design Crisis will also hook you up with a lot of fun graphic wall treatments, especially huge colorful ones that involve a major paint commitment and look best with gold. For example, this cool laser light show wall paint job, which is actually pretty subtle and very cool.

Anyway I'm thinking something maybe outside on my front porch? The kitchen is also rather boring, but maybe not after we put up the long-awaited liquor shelf?

Mid-Century Modern lust

I came thisclose to winning this gorgeous Eames chair in a giveaway from This is Glamorous. Seriously, it was given to someone else with my name.

I would gladly throw away all my alley chairs for chairs like this. I have a quiet but ardent love for mid-century modern furnishings, probably because they, you know, cost money. For example, I have been quietly obsessing about whether the chairs in the lobby of my school are in fact the famous Barcelona lounge chairs designed by Mies Van der Rohe who designed my school. I'm not going to say it's site-appropriate or at all a comfortable or practical building (one of my professors referred to it as "the auto showroom" and the huge windows make the rooms too hot or too cold or too bright to see overhead projectors or too cramped for a normal classroom layout or otherwise stupid), but it has a beautiful clean school-like feel that I love.

NASA, check it.

I love NASA. Always have, always will. Even their logo rules.

This is artist Tom Sachs, image from The Selby. His studio is majorly cool and looks almost like my friend's physics lab. Other people who like the aesthetics of science:

• Vincent Fournier, who photographs space program training stations around the world, via Mint. Go look at it, it has ROBOTS.
• Kitsune Noir will hook you up with a cool picture of a spacesuit every week, among other wonderful science/art combinations. Yeah, you're welcome.
• Beakers as home decor found all over the place, mostly Design*Sponge.
• Some really cool microscope photography of booze from Deb at The Debonaire who posts some good nerdy science images pretty frequently.
• And cool images from UofC's Argonne lab.
• Please read this quote by "Digital Philosopher" Amber Case from Swiss Miss, when she tells briefly how her father explained to her the concept of worm holes. I learned that concept straight from Madeline L'Engle, but it reminds me of my childhood when my dad explained the fourth dimension and protein folding and how math works to my malleable little brain. Thanks dad, you're the best!

Listening, Watching, Reading, Wearing, Wanting

Listening: I got this video of some peep-looking robot dancing to Spoon's "I Turn my Camera on" from No Good for Me, which it's clear that I'm obsessed with, but I also can't get enough of this song. I've been spending a lot of time in the lab & in the library, so it's my jam.

Watching: A friend at work just told me about Chatroullette, and I am both alarmed and intrigued. I bought a new computer yesterday, and it has a webcam. I can't wait until it comes so I can resist the temptation to get on Chatroullette. She was like, "I can't believe you've never heard of it! Where have you been?" It's quite nice under my rock, actually. Out of the rain.

Reading: nothing, I don't read, I'm too burnt out reading for school. A couple weeks ago though we went to Filter & I sat in the boiling hot sunshine and caught up on all the articles I'd been putting off, and it was fabulous.

Wearing: "it's like a sexy version of Minnie Mouse" except with two pairs of tights and my grandma's old boots and an old thrift-store navy hoodie + this year's favored winter accessories

Wanting: to be out in the sunshine, for my final papers to write themselves, to go pick up the clay beads and birds that I made last night at a friend's house and to string them on some red library string, and to show off the pots that I finally got glazed from my pottery class last spring.

National Women's Month

I no longer know where I found this photo, but I just love the expression on her face. For no other reason other than it looks like photo of a woman looking resolute and smiling and awesome, perhaps doing a difficult job in a "man's world," I give you a quote by Lady Gaga:

"Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you're wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn't love you anymore."

Procrastination

“Distractivity is what you’re doing when you get distracted from what you should be doing. It’s generally what you want to do, often what you need to do, and arguably, what you’ll do best.”
-John Goodman from Distractivity
“The work you do while you procrastinate is the work you should be doing for the rest of your life”
-Jessice Hische, whose funny blog includes this funny graphic about the evolution of her taste in typefonts, full size image here
both via swiss-miss

Well, that's all nice for creative folks, but that's kind of like saying I should abandon my difficult but arguably useful career and what, read design blogs for a living? Bake? Write emails to my friends? Arrange and re-arrange furniture, sew clothes, clean? Please. Even if I thought I should be a designer, what about the part of me that cares about social justice and doesn't believe in accumulating more stuff, no matter how well-designed or fashion-forward it may be?

Ah, Love.

Boyfriend's out of town, so of course the first thing I see on the internet are these pictures of hipster couples making out. It's from a book by Chris Craymer called Romance. Also more importantly, do you think I can (in the real world) wear a lace shirt like the one on the girl on the right? What would you do on the front, you know, if you can't bring a shirtless dude everywhere with you to cover you up?
via niotillfem, a favorite of the Swedish Fashion Blogs