“Vintage Kid’s Books My Kid Loves”= wow

So I haven’t even finished combing through the whole blog, but oh wow, Vintage Kid’s Books My Kid Loves  is amazing already. As you can probably guess from its name, the blog houses a collection of vintage children’s books.  A lot of them I recognize, but some of them I don’t.  And how nice is it to have them all in one place? Very nice.  I can’t wait to sit down and really look through it all.  Especially the illustrations!  I can’t wait to gobble them up.  I love that someone is blogging about this.  The only downside is that now my collection of vintage children’s books is starting to look pretty measly.  Well now I have something to shoot for!

Thanks for the tip ohdeedoh!

Story Corps

Does anyone else listen to Story Corps?  If you haven’t already checked it out, you should. Its pretty amazing. Story Corps is a non profit group that sets up sound booths around the country and then invites the public to do their own, informal, interviews of their friends and family.  Everyone gets a free cd of their session, but the really cool part is that every interview is archived and anyone can listen.  NPR does a segment on them every Friday I believe. But you can also listen to stories on their site or podcast.  I subscribe to the podcast and the only complaint I have is that its way too short!

When I first heard about it, I was like, “yeah, ok, that sounds cool…”  And then I didn’t actually go listen to an interview for months.  But then I heard a broadcast on NPR.  That’s when I got the podcast and listened to every one I could get my hands on.  

It such a simple thing really, but there’s something wonderful about listening to regular people tell stories about their lives. Sometimes they’re funny.  Some are incredibly sad.  They’re all pretty touching.  I find them fascinating.

And look!

They now have a book and a cd for sale!

Find out when they’ll be recording in your neighborhood.

Birthday Falafel

So it was my birthday a couple weeks ago. And you know, it was just lovely. Yummy brunch, farmer’s market, picnic in the park of falafel with margaritas-to-go and uh, sangria, and I believe there were a few drinks after. Fun fun fun.

For a while now, I’ve used birthdays as a time to take stock of my life. New Years resolutions have always felt a bit forced and a little arbitrary. Maybe its the winter thing. But reflecting on my birthday, which happily falls in the spring, makes much more sense to me. And for the first time in a while, I’m pretty happy with the way things are going. There has been some real growth, personally and professionally. There are some big projects under my belt, a couple wrapping up and a few to look forward to. I’m really excited for this new year.

 

Being a Beginner

You know what’s funny? The other day I was looking at some “before and after” photos of someone’s new office and was wondering why I don’t take those. I love looking at them– whether they’re mine or of something someone else has done. And they are so gratifying to have paired with the pretty “after” version. Well, working in my little roof garden last night, looking around at how small and pathetic it seemed, it came to me:

I hate taking the “before” pictures.

I take lots of pictures of the “after” part. And yeah, I know, having just the shiny, end result kind of defeats the purpose if you can’t remember where you started. I get caught up in “It doesn’t look good now!” instead of remembering that this is the starting point, and that it will look better and that its okay if its not great now. In fact that is the whole point of beginning something. To let it grow into something better. I’m not good at being a beginner.

Anyways. Here’s the garden now.

 ( And you can get a glimpse of it in its even earlier days here.)

In a month it will be all glorious with vines and such. But this is where it started.

Sunrise

 

This is an experiment. Since the beginning of this little blog, I’ve had to wrestle with the photographs in every post. Which makes it hard to put up anything on a regular basis. Which is annoying to me as I like to do this. Anyhow, I’m trying out flickr’s “Blog this photo” function. Does anyone else use that?
I’ve noticed that lots of blogs I like just post one photo at the top, as opposed to sprinkled throughout. Of course, I would prefer the sprinkling, but I don’t think I can do that with flickr.
So we’ll try this out and see how it goes.

Illustration Friday: Baby

I’ve been doing lots of drawings of baby animals for a long-term project I’ve been working on. I can finally see the finish line which is exciting.  Or the first, of probably many, “finish” lines.  Anyhow, aren’t these little piglets cute?