best laid plans

i've been sick for a few days, and unusually tired for several days. but i have managed, in my own way (read: stretching and massaging the definition of "make something") to make something pretty much every day. i might have missed one or two. i have not, however, been very good at photographically documenting my creations...many of them were food related and were eaten before i remembered. a couple of them were just private (read: logo design sketches and/or: ugly). i have for you today a representative photo of the last week-ish (well, 2 photos. anyways). it's my favorite project of late. here's why:

1. i did not think about it. or the time it involved. i just did it.

2. it totally reused stuff that i hoard (magazines, amazon delivery boxes)

3. it took stuff i hoard and made it into stuff to organize other stuff i hoard! rad.

4. jubal did it with me.

5. it used tape, which is an awesome invention.

6. it did not involve moving a lot, or getting in and out of "the zone". i didn't have to move further than 15 feet from where i was to get everything i needed to make it, from start to finish.

7. it has pictures on it.

i wanted something to organize my communication arts magazines, a subscription to which is a gift to myself to support my interest and career path in design. it's not a cheap magazine and i keep them all to reference for information and inspiration. i want them separate from all the other magazines so the kids don't accidentally cut them up, making a VERY EXPENSIVE collage. but. i have a thing against spending money on those fancy magazine holding box thingies that you can get at fancy places that i don't shop. the most money i will devote to organizing or holding the things that i pack-rat is the occasional purchase of a big clear plastic tub or a pine board to erect a shelf.

so i found a box. and i grabbed two national geographics. i was determined to use only 2 and not head back to the magazine stash. i also grabbed some packing tape, a utility knife, and some scissors.

the box was too deep to snugly hold the magazines, so i made a spacer out of the flaps of the box all taped together with some other random cardboard pieces i found. then i cut down the front. and i just found images i liked and taped them on. jubal joined me and he found stuff he liked and i taped that on. he made "books" out of stapled magazine pages for a while and then he wandered off and i just kept cutting and taping. when the box was all covered i put another solid layer of tape on it for sturdiness. THEN i had to leave the zone to find all my communication arts magazines scattered around the house. i didn't find them all, but when i do, i know where to put them.

another cool thing about this project was that before i started it i was checking some musical reference online for a discussion r. and i were having and noticed my e-music amount had re-booted, so i bought some new music and got to listen to it while i worked. my e-music account is almost exclusively for treating myself to stuff i wouldn't necessarily normally buy. it's like a "hey, try this" account. or for splurges on things i've always wanted but never gotten around to buying.

here's the set-list to my magazine box making:

the black keys: the big come up

beck: mutations

breathe owl breathe: the fall album

demons: scarcity rock

the maccabees: colour it in

*i didn't get all of those albums in one day, some of them were still un-listened to much from last month. i also got nina simone: nina simone sings the blues, but didn't listen to it in that session (i did later though and it was deeeeelicious.)

intentions

tuesday after school rodney made dinner and asked if i wanted to go to the pub for a while and play some pool. of course i did. we had fun and even one really good game, where i only had one ball left on the table when he beat me. i've never won, except when he somehow fouls hitting the 8 ball and i win by default, which does not count. i took my camera along to "make" a photograph. it's been a while since i fooled around with the manual settings and i thought i might get some interesting slow shutter speed shots. i'm not in love with them, but it was fun and i did get this nifty image with rodney's ghosty form playing billiards. i didn't notice until i dragged it into photoshop to put the B&W adjustment on it that my sweetheart wrote "megan rulz" on the scoreboard. rad. it was nice to bust out the camera and the tripod and photograph stuff with intention, rather than the ill-lit, tungstony, snap-shots i've been taking of late.

today i did all kinds of making stuff. i spent a good three hours finishing the format job on dad's book. one of those classic "this should take 30 mins tops" kind of scenes, where you're, you know, WRONG about that. it was a breathtaking experience, being responsible for it. he's printing through lulu and needed me to upload it for him for some reason i never understood, so when it came time to deliver the files i was confronted with this page of questions to navigate that seemed so very final and important and BIG. i called him and we sorted it out to the best of our abilities, but i must say, i don't think i would publish a book with them. their website is really hard to navigate if you need information, and their response time is sluggish. i'd much rather be face-to-face with a printer who can answer my questions just then and personally address my needs. regardless of my opinion of lulu, it was a really exciting experience for me. i'm so proud of dad. after i did all the formatting i just kept scrolling through the pages looking at how beautifully it looked like A REAL BOOK!!! and getting all butterfly-ey. we still need to upload the cover art, so i get to go through it all again in a few days. when i answered all the questions and uploaded my file and finally pushed "submit" the result was this little, silent, anticlimactic message.

if i ever run an online printhouse i hereby vow that when you submit your first-ever, beautifully formatted, blood and sweat covered manuscript some rad flash of steve martin playing the banjo at the head of the awesomest marching band EVER will scroll across the screen and george carlin will appear knocking at your door, delivering a celebratory cake.

i also made chili today with all the various chili-appropriate left overs in the fridge ( i think i am becoming famous for this ability to turn any kind of left over into some form of soup product ). i used the chilies from our friends bryan and kym's garden that have been drying in a bunch from the kitchen ceiling, accusing me of neglect. we are just about to eat it and i am so ready.

also, hazel and jubal wanted to make oatmeal raisin cookies and we needed brown sugar, so i made that too. you just drizzle some molasses into a running food processor full of sugar until the color suits you. i'd love to go into a whole thing about how much i love raw sugar over white sugar, and dazzle you with my nutritional and humanitarian rights factoids, but lately all i ever have on hand is white sugar, thanks to my southern-born hubface and his sweet-tea addiction. i just let it go. when i'm a rich and famous yippie designer, i promise to only buy organic fair trade raw sugar that was sustainably harvested and transported on the backs of lovingly tended burros. or something.

and speaking of intentions. smoking. so we had the january 1st inferno of cigarettes and cigarette packaging. and then rodney slipped. so i slipped. then we might have been on again and he slipped again. and then we were back on track and he got sick and was in bed for days and i had to do everything myself from morning til night and i cannot adequately express how lovely it was to smoke just a tiny bit while he was sleeping for days on end. and then he was smoking again and breaking a couple other resolutions, and i got fed up with the on again off again crap and delivered an eloquent speech that involved the notion of shitting or getting off the pot, except more refined and passionate sounding and he actually took it to heart and quit for reals. he did this while i was mid-pack, so i stretched it out, smoking a couple times a day, finishing my smokes early monday morning. today i bought another pack. he's been quit for reals for a week today and i'm the horrible one who bought another damn pack. the irony is killing me, since he's the one who was smoking like a pack a day and i'm the one who has painlessly quit smoking at the drop of a hat several times, easily and without fanfare. and now, NOW?! it becomes some stupid challenge that i'm sucking at? frustrating.

i am grateful for:

oranges. i haven't eaten one in, possibly, years, but my friend andrew eats them at school all the time and it inspired me to try one again. yum.

quiet. i'm sure i'll get some sometime and i know it will be lovely.

the new decemberists album, which is very mellow and americana. i'm partial to rox in the box. january hymn is sweet, too.

date night. we'll be seeing the fighter this weekend!

enduring love which sees past irritations, frustrations, disappointment, failures, mistakes, and all the other crap.

i (heart) inDesign

today i worked on formatting dad's book (find out more here) in inDesign, my most favored of the adobe creative suite programs. i don't get to design the interior of the book, dad ordered some kind of package from lulu to do that, but it still needed to be formatted before it was sent to lulu. i spent a nice chunk of time changing spacebar tabs into real tabs and putting in page breaks for the chapter ends, and a few other things, including some awesome "find and change" tasks that saved me, literally, hours, were i to have to do it myself (especially changing the double space after a period to the book-friendly single space after a period). dad's book is almost ready to send to the printer!

i am grateful for:

opportunity

kindness

pleasure

calm

joy

exhale...and...!

it's been a long week. most of you will not be surprised to learn that it is actually very hard to make something every single day. most of you will not be surprised, if you know me at all, to learn that i have really elasticized the definition of "make something".

last sunday: i made time for myself. i NEEDED to get out of the house. i went to the movies. this may not sound like much but i don't actually get much time to myself and it was worth it. i saw black swan and it was very effective, though i'm not sure i can say that i liked it. it did give me quite the stomach ache for some time after it was over. like i said: effective. tales of madness get to me because of all the actual madness in my life. the acting was very good, and the direction, and the filming. still, i'm not sure how i feel about it. no matter my ambivalent feelings--the time to myself was SO AWESOME. it might even be nice to make time for myself one thing i make every single week. especially if it involves movies.

monday: chicken soup with star pasta and cannellini beans. part of the sunday time to myself involved verbally shoving a chicken at rodney and telling him to figure out how to roast it on my way out the door. he did an excellent job and we made the soup together. it was yummy.

tuesday: i made tiny brochures for my design class. yeah, i know, more homework as making something, but these, at least, were tiny mock brochures. made by hand. so cute. sorry, i neglected to photograph those.

wednesday: vesta needed to speak at a school board meeting for a presentation that her school was doing, so i brought yarn. i thought i would make some fingerless glove/arm-warmer thingies. so far i just have rectangles that i pull out and restart, but it was nice to bust out the needles and yarn all the same. vesta was awesome, by the way.

thursday: i had a horrible migraine. i asked rodney to make dinner and popped 2 excedrin migraines and laid very still in bed until they kicked in. then i was starving and ate a bunch of his yummy stir fry and made tiny boxes out of mini cereal boxes and other packaging i've been saving, while i watched some addictive trivia game show involving a million dollars and then bones. i love the rare chance to sit and watch mindless t.v. with the girls and especially love that i was DOING SOMETHING the whole time! these mini cereal boxes were very hard to fold against the grain and i don't think i'll be doing this again. the mini boxes work awesomely with recycled cards, though. i feel obliged to put in a disclaimer here--this is NOT normal fare at our house. i specifically got the mini cereals to make artist books out of, but the boxes were getting that hoardy feeling, so i will just get more if ever i am actually ready to do the artist books. it's its ARE very good, though. and i do eat those an a regular once-in-a-while basis. and they make for a cool box because they say "IT's it!" in big beautiful green type, which is nice for putting little gifts in.

friday: i realize this is really stretching it. but, oh well. what i made on friday was a mii. yes. we got our wii on friday because, well, because wiis are rad and we all deserve one. i've wanted a nintendo since i was 11 or so. it looks pretty good and quite a bit like me, i think. (i don't know why, but the orientation refuses to stay changed when i flip it right-side up).

saturday: more homework as making something. in addition to making these brochure comps for mercy corp i also did some (read: hours) of dreamweaver homework. unfortunately we are still at the stage where we just do what we're told and don't actually design (read: what i spent hours on is too ugly to show you). dad took the kids up to portland for my aunt's surprise birthday party and rodney and i stayed home and did homework all day until we left for town to have an early date night. we saw True Grit and it was wonderful. i recommend it.

and finally, this sunday. today we all went to town and played mini golf at some weird "family fun center" type place that was straight outta roseanne, called putters. rodney gets the hook-up over at LCC for free tickets to these strange places we normally wouldn't go to. it was interesting, if over-stimulating. AND, i got a hole-in-one! tonight i made an adobe illustrator "sketch" of an idea i had a few years ago. this is by no means the final design, because originally i wanted it to look very much screen-printed or hand-stamped, which, of course, this doesn't. but it was still fun to play with the idea in illustrator and just mess around. my plan is to do a series--lemons on pink, limes on brown, oranges on blue...and later perhaps a tomato, squash, etc. theme.

have a great week!

i am grateful for:

dad taking the kids all day

rex goliath (best cheap wine EVER)

that i forgot monday was a holiday and now i remember so it's totally extra

sore muscles

good food

variety show and tell

not surprising to any of you who normally read my blog (hey loki!) i've fallen behind in my daily positing, which is probably better anyways. it's likely i'll keep this up, posting my creations a couple of times a week...

on thursday, after design class i had a long lunch break before production class. to make up for being so stressed out the night before (doing the ali posters), for which i was lovingly teased about all through class, i decided to treat myself to lunch at casablanca. it was a risky move, as parking has been hideous (as always at the start of any term) and i'm always too afraid to leave to have lunch in case i won't be able to find a spot when i come back. usually i bring something. this time i decided to risk it. i think a lamb pocket sandwich from casablanca just might be my best comfort food. part of it is the guys that work there. so reliably geeky and friendly. i love sitting at the little bar watching them cook curries and forming falafel in their weird plunger-meets-mold contraption. i love that the lamb pockets ALWAYS taste good, and how spicy they are, and also that the guys always catch my eye and ask me halfway through how it is. the only thing i don't love is that the pockets come wrapped in paper AND on a little paper plate. every time, i leave there with the totally clean plate stashed somewhere on my person to be recycled at home. i decided i would make something with it this time. because the trip to casablanca felt so good i also stopped at oregon art supply for some retail therapy. i bought a pack of faber-castelle broad brushtip markers. they were $20 but i had a collection of OAS customer cards that got me $10 off with $62 toward my next discount. (awesome!)

here is what i made. it's for hanging near my desk to remind myself not to get so stressed out. it'll be okay. we'll always have casablanca. thanks to the one person who laughed a little at that joke.

the next night i made chicken for dinner. no biggie, i make dinner pretty much every night. but this time i made my own cutlets by smashing my chicken breasts to an even thickness utilizing a sheet of plastic wrap and a hammer. it's good to try something new. i dunked them in an eggy-milk bath and breaded them in panko, which i'd seasoned with basil and other rad spices. they were quite a success. rodney had even finally risen from his flu-induced near-coma and was able to enjoy them.

and tonight i made this little book. it's for rodney and i to keep in a centralized location and write each other little love notes in. we need little love notes. it's perfect for my project because it:

a. uses national geographics AND some of the 4 packs of paper i got off of kyle when she closed the little school. (read: it was an anti-hoarding supporting craft) also the paper is green which is rodney's favorite color.

b. it used the laminator. one of those things people like me buy because it would be SO AWESOME for crafts and then maybe doesn't use it that much. which is sort of a cousin of hoarding. i made little books like this for the girls' stockings and they were a huge hit, even though they don't close properly and you have to keep them shut with a rubber-band.

c. it used the saddle-stitch stapler. see b.

and it's good because it will hold love notes, which are nice.

today was the "celebration of life" for uncle dave. vesta wanted to go and hazel didn't, so we gave lorin a ride and celebrated dave by crying a lot. he was quite honestly one of the awesomest, most generous men i've ever met and the joint was packed. everyone had lovely things to say and there was A LOT of crying and that kind of laughing that happens when someone lovely has passed and stories are told and it becomes obvious how beautifully connected we all were to one person, so we all understand the jokes and mannerisms people mention when they share about them.

i do not normally feel very good about lorin, so it was pretty nice to spend some human time with each other, supporting our daughter and relating as people. after the service we went to papa's soul food because that is the perfect thing to eat at a time like that.

rodney and i got to go to the axe for a while this evening and play some pool. i even almost beat him once! there was this great, loud blues band playing (heavy chevy) and we danced a tiny bit upstairs by the pool table and then laughed about how terribly we dance. it was bad. but awesome. i still had on my spendy shoes and my skirt from the service and it was RAD to go out in my portias. rodney was laughing about them because he always helps me put them on and take them off (they are strappy and fiddly on the side of your foot that isn't easy to reach yourself) and he went to set one on the floor while he took the other one off and i squealed "don't put them on the floor!" because i am SO protective of them because they are well made and were NOT cheap and he thinks it's cute how i baby them and always put them away in their box as soon as i'm done wearing them. he commented about it and said they were like my porsches, and i told him they were called that (because, like the homes of the rich, fancy shoes have names!), this particular model is made by dansko and is called portia. anyways it amused me.

i am grateful for

my shoes!

soul-throbbing music with amazing guitar skills

soul-food (especially the hush puppies at papa's)

vesta being old enough to babysit

rodney not letting me win at pool because when i DO win it will be for reals and it will be WONDERFUL

a justified justification

i had a very long day.

rodney was sick and did absolutely nothing all day.

when i got home from school i tidied and split wood and lit the stove and ate lunch and then i got to work on my design homework. which i distinctly remember tom saying was "easy" and i think also "nothing". so i will not say how many hours i spent on it. but i will say that other than picking up jubal, fetching dinner from :::shudder::: a fast food establishment, and helping the girls with homework as little as i could get away with, i, uh, didn't really do anything else. and it's really late now. so. (and by "didn't do anything else" i don't mean vegging around not doing anything. i mean i was working. the whole effing time.)

the assignment was to make 3 different typographical posters using the same grid and elements, and 3 muhammad ali documentary posters using the same grid, images, and text. somehow i did not grok that each poster had to have all 3 images. so i did not make the posters each with all 3 images. then i found out my mistake. and i had to make 2 of them over again. (by poster #3 i'd started wondering and put all 3 in, so i didn't have to re-do that one.)

now, looking at my grid system ones, i really wish i had pushed more and made them more dynamic. ah well. there's always next time. really, there always is.

so. for today, homework counts as making something. technically 2 of the posters weren't even for homework, since i DIDN'T DO THEM RIGHT.

in case you were wondering, this is an awesome time to quit smoking. really. yes, i am being sarcastic.

today i am grateful for:

jubal falling asleep fairly quickly after we read books so i could get back to work

patience, which i, shockingly, have

sleep, which i will finally get very soon

good books

good headphones (listening to music while working vastly improves the flow)

already i see how tiny make something can be

basically what i made today was a doodle. my original plan was to do a back and forth with rodney and see what developed, because we both had a big chunk of break at school today. but he wandered off to the bathroom right after we started and anyways he kept doing overly complex shapes and right in the middle of the page. when he wandered off i did one on my own, thinking i might scan it and work with it in illustrator tonight. well. i might. things happen sometimes that are unexpected. but i probably won't.

today i had my GD classes, including production. we did some stuff in photoshop that i've never done and it made my brain tired. and there is a lot of homework. i can already see my intentions weakening. i feel the desire to cave and allow school projects to count as the thing i made. we'll see.

here is the doodle i did.

and here is the one i started with rodney that we never finished.

it's okay, i said even the tiniest thing would count. just to make SOMEthing, however small.

today i am grateful for:

takeout pizza

digital cameras

my bed

warmth

a sense of humor and compassion