This week, a random round-up of stuff to keep you amused.
To Look At:
These are some of my favorite websites/blogs to check out lately.
Design Sponge
Living The Beautiful Life
Color Me Katie and
Whorange
You can see that they all have slightly the same theme… cool things to look at, beautiful artwork, the DIY spirit… I guess this is where my head is at even though I’m not making much at the moment. I like to look and dream. I wish my website were more like these but, well… maybe someday!
Keith is about to come out with his first book of collected Nowhere Band comic strips (numbers 1-56). This is the rejected author photo… He went with something else even more hilarious than him looking through our cat door. The one he chose involves a bathrobe, which is all I can say.
He’s been working hard on formatting everything for the book (which will be available in both color and black and white), doing all that stuff he does on his computer and in Photoshop. I admit my ignorance of the process but I love the results. This is not something that he would ever make a point of telling people, but he taught himself to draw over the course of the last 3 or 4 years. He got into comics, which I think inspired him to learn to draw, took a couple classes and developed his own comic. That’s what I admire about him – that he’ll just take something on, get off his ass and do it. Which is how you need to tackle any art or hobby that requires a lot of practice.
Another Wednesday rolls around…
Item! There is a little shoe repair place in the basement of Macy’s in downtown Minneapolis. I know because I was sent there when the sandals I bought there broke on their second wearing. A little rivet came flying out, causing the gladitor-like straps to go wonky. Sigh.
Big doings over the weekend as The K and I celebrated 6 years of marriage. Well, not such tremendous doings but we marked the day in a way that was special for us. Last year, for our 5th anniversary, we went out to California and had a lot of fun – we saw a blue whale, we traveled by boat through “pod” of dolphins that numbered in the thousands, we hiked, we went to wineries, we saw Tommy the Clown and watched him teach a master dance class.
This year we loaded up the hound and went to Lake Maria State Park, which is a beautiful place to go hiking because it has “Big Woods” and many ponds plus Lake Maria (with some docks that are great for dogs). Maybe it’s because spring has been crappy but being outside that day was the one thing I really wanted. It was warm, breezy and sunny.
It’s been a strange week in the world of work for me. Resignations, heated e-mail exchanges, accusations, etc. Thankfully, none of this directly involved me. I am but a bystander to the action and I have to admit that it’s good to be the (confused) onlooker. When I’m directly involved in exchanges of this nature, I don’t sleep for days. As I was heading in to the building this morning to see what new, indignant e-mails had cropped up overnight (four new ones!), the piped in music in the hallway was “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys. There is something hilarious about this song set in direct contrast to extreme disharmony.
It’s official. I can’t stand the word “eponymous.” If I hear it used one more time in reference to an album, particularly on hipster radio, I’m going to implode. Yeah, we get it, but can’t you just say “self-titled?” My favorite example is on Wikipedia: Bad Company‘s first album Bad Company released in 1974 is another example that also contained a track that was a Rock Radio favorite of the same name, “Bad Company“. “Rock Radio” is capitalized on Wiki; I didn’t do it. Did “Rock Radio” become a proper noun? I guess R.E.M. still has the final word on this very pretentious word with their album Eponymous from 1988.
If you can make it to Wednesday evening, the very summit of the work week, it’s all downhill from there. It’s a coast to the weekend. It’s time to say, “OK, this week is pretty much shot, what have I learned, discovered, thought, seen, etc?” Here’s my round-up: