SPRINKLES!!!!

Hey there. It's been a while. 

This morning I got an article torn out of BUST magazine in the mail.

It was titled,

Cut from a Different Cloth: Amy Sedaris' New Fabric Line will Give you a Crafting Boner

Now that is a fucking title. 

Which reminds me. I've decided not to censor myself on my blog anymore. I drop F-bombs like sprinkles and that's okay. It's part of who I am. I try to refrain from dropping too many in social situations where it's inappropriate or around my 1 year old, but to be honest, I'm also a lot more concerned about her speech being kind than I am about whether or not it includes a few expletives. Yup. I just said that, Mom. Sorry. Love you!

Anywho, it lead to me having this little conversation with myself in a chat to the AWESOME person who sent it to me. 

I really want to blog about a crafting boner

think it's okay if i start blogging like i actually talk? maybe that's my niche? people who drop f bombs like sprinkles and want to build awesome shit and crafty things?

in fact, i think it is

So, there you go kids. My new niche. It's what sets me apart from all the awesome mommy/DIY/home decorating blogs I read. Which are totally awesome. I love you all. I'm just not you. I'm someone who totally got a craft boner over Amy Sedaris' fabric line (and yes, I'm aware it was a very old article and it has been out for a very long time). I also have hilariously inappropriate conversations while walking across campus with my bestie/GBF(gay boyfriend). My authentic self demands it and I will no longer suppress her.

I'm really happy about this because I think part of my deal was that I just didn't really feel like my blog was me. It was generally random (totally me), and crafy (also me), but it didn't quite ring true somehow.

I know, you're thinking, "how exactly does the judicious use of expletives make that big of a difference?" 

I does. To me. And that's really all that matters since it's MY blog.

In related news, I found this other article from BUST while searching for a link to the article she sent me. Hint, it's bigger on the inside. That's a Dr. Who reference for those of you who didn't catch it. It was mostly just for you, Babe. 

How to Make a Sweet Blog Header (For Your Mom Even if You're Still Not Totally Satisfied with Your Own)

Hey guys! I miss you. Norie was sick all last week and I spent this week trying to catch up with life. I'm almost there and have several reasons to be extra motivated about life so expect a flurry of new posts in the near future. Anyway, back to the post.

I love my mom's new blog header.

I love it so much I went crazy and sized it for her facebook page and even made her business cards to match.

I have one too, but I'm not totally in love with it (thanks for the props though, Crystal!). It's definitely an improvement, but it's not there yet. I really think maybe I just made one for her that was a lot like what I really wanted and then didn't know where to go with my own. That and it's a little too crafty (as in it doesn't speak to the parenting, decorating, building, gardening, and cooking parts of what I write about). I hope to get it updated (again) over the weekend after I had some time to think about it.

Since Crystal thought it was great I wanted to tell you how I did it. You know, just in case you wanted to make yourself one too and had some crazy idea that I would do something super hard. 

I'd had this idea for a while and finally just did it over Craft Weekend. I sketched out a basic idea and made my mom pick out some scrapbook paper she liked (it's from My Mind's Eye Bramble Rose).

I'm obsessed with decorative tape so I made some faux decorative tape from one of the pattern she liked by cutting a 1/2" wide strip and tearing it. I used a random sheet of off white card stock cut down to 5"x11" so there would be come visually blank space for the lettering. I laid everything out on her kitchen floor and just took a picture of the whole thing from directly above.

Then I used Picasa to crop the image to the dimensions listed for her header.

And finished off by using the Add/Edit Text option to add her blog name and tag line. I highly recommend using a font with two versions since it lets you switch it up a little without making it look like you're a crazy font person. I used Niagara Solid and Niagara Engraved.


For her Facebook cover image I simply recropped to meet the cover image dimensions (851x315).

Easy peasy. Now if only I had my own thought out I would be set.

Baby Photography and ShootFLYShoot: How I finally Learned to Use my DSLR and You Can Too

Hey kids. I've been way too busy Christmasing to post recently, but I took some pictures this week that were just too freaking adorable to keep to myself.

Isn't that just the cutest little sock monkey hat you've ever seen? It's even cuter when the two of us where them at the same time, but I don't have that documented.

Austin really wanted to get some pictures of her with he light saber, but really good ones haven't quite happened yet. For some reason they turned out pretty well with her new paint brush toy though.

And then yesterday I took some pictures of Norie practicing her almost crawl while I was working on some other stuff. 

I am so happy I decided to take the shootFLYshoot Photography 101 course and learned how to use my camera.

It only took me 7 years. Yep, seven whole years. Not the actual learning. That only took a couple of hours thanks to Kevin and Josh, but it took me seven years to do something about the fact that I didn't know how to use my camera. Sound familiar?

My husband bought me an amazing Cannon EOS Rebel DSLR as a graduation gift circa 2005. I had never used anything but a point and shoot before, but had a lot of fun with the program settings. They worked pretty well and I liked the pictures I took on vacations of landscapes and flowers and other pretty outside stuff.

Then I started a blog and wanted to take pictures inside. It was a whole new ballgame and my pictures were okay at best. Mostly they looked like were amateur shots taken with the flash in poorish lighting. I knew they weren't great, but I didn't know how to do any better.

One day Layla over at The Lettered Cottage linked to a series of posts by Centsational Girl about blog photography. I read them and got motivated to try my hand at shooting in manual mode. I busted out my camera's manual and figured out how to adjust the settings she mentioned to the ones she used, but since I had no idea what they did I couldn't adjust them to the picture I was trying to take. I was lost.

Then Layla's husband Kevin started a photography website called ShootFLYShoot.
I liked the facebook page and added the RSS feed for their blog to my Google Reader, but I didn't actually sign up and pay for their Photography 101 course. I wasn't quite ready to commit. I mean, it was $69 whole dollars.

The conversation in my head went something like this.

$69? That's kind of a lot of money. Like more than half a week of day care. Can I really justify spending that much?


Then I realized that I wasn't able to use my several hundred dollar camera the way I wanted to because I was too cheap to spend 69 bucks.

I bit the proverbial bullet an paid for their Photography 101 course. It was totally worth it. probably the single best $69 I have ever spent. Kevin and Josh are amazing and I actually understand what all those setting do.

I feel like my own personal photo taking super hero. Not that I'm suddenly a professional photographer. I'm not, but I do know how to take a great blog or baby scrapbook pic.I''m sure it helps that my baby is ridiculously adorable, but I take credit fir that too.

Kansas Agriculture and Health Summit

I'm having a hard time verbalizing everything I want to express about my experience yesterday, so bear with me. It was just so awesome and I got so excited that I'm having a hard time organizing it into a coherent set of thoughts. I tried last night, but I couldn't make it work so I'm up early this morning having another go at it.

Deep breaths. Lets start with the context.

Yesterday I went to the Kansas Agriculture and HealthSummit. I got an email early this week promoting it as an event to

 "kick off the conversation in Kansas about the intersection of food, farming, health care and public health" 

If you've read by blog for a while I'm sure you've noticed that food and gardening are two of my passions,but what you probably don't know is that my CV lists my "Research Interests" as

"Human interaction with the environment through agriculture as it relates to the experience of health and disease..."

Are you starting to see why I got all excited yesterday?

I was very interested in talking about agricultural policy and health in Kansas, but it really got me thinking about things a little closer to home.

Like growing food for my family and feeding them the way I want to feed them instead of the default which seems to be eating whatever we can scrap together in the half hour between when I get home and when Norie needs to be fed and put to bed. Don't get me wrong. It's generally been pretty tasty, but it hasn't exactly been produce heavy.

I also got reinspired to help other people with traditional skills like growing food and cooking it and canning and home dairying and sewing and all those things our grandparents know or knew exactly how to do but are incredibly rare skills in my generation.

Don't worry. I'm still really excited about decorating and building and you'll see tons of posts about that you'll just also start seeing more about gardening and food. They all work together in making a family and a home and that's just the stuff that I love to share here.

On my to do list for today:

• Take the puppies and Norie for a walk
• Read this week's entry in my Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener's Handbook and actually do the things it says I should do this week
• Measure for the bracket for those blinds
• Love on Norie
• Work on my Birthday Desk
• Clean the kitchen
• Fold and put away laundry
• Add things to my birthday/Christmas wishlist on Pinterest

I better get started.

I'm Me and I'm Awesome

You may have noticed that I read a certain number of blogs on an almost daily basis. (If you've missed out on this you can find them a little ways down the page on your right.) I say almost because I don't have a super, set in stone time dedicated to reading them and sometimes I don't get around to reading them for a couple of days. Sometimes I'm busy and other things are higher priority and other times I save them to read later. I like to wait until I can focus on posts if they seem especially interesting or pertinent. That's what happened with this post from Miss Mustard Seed. She wrote it three whole days before I read it.

It's about the secret to writing a great blog.

I've been working on improving my blog lately so I thought I should save it for a moment when I could really focus and glean some of her wisdom on the topic. She writes a great blog and I value her advice. You know, so I could take notes and incorporate her tips into my future posts so I can be great someday too.

Turns out I'm the secret. Me.The whole thing that makes this here blog interesting is that I write it (at least that's the theory). And I think she might be right. At least that's the part people tell me they find most entertaining about it. They like that I post about all kinds of random stuff that keeps it from being a niche blog. They like that I write exactly the way I talk. They like that if they read it with my voice in their head it makes them laugh out loud even when they shouldn't because they're reading it at work. One even told me I should write a book about pregnancy and becoming a parent because he and his wife own a ton and none of them are as entertaining as listening to me talk about it.

So why have I been stressing out about making my blog fit some sort of mold I assume is more attractive to random readers?

Good freaking question.

Don't get me wrong; I do want to increase my readership and I will be actively working to make that happen, but I'm going to focus a lot more on writing posts that make me smile because I'm awesome and things that make me smile are awesome too.

That's really all I've got for today. I think I'll head over to Miss Mustard Seed's Facebook Page and join the "I'm me and I'm awesome" club. Then maybe I'll make myself some wall art in case I need a reminder.

Source: etsy.com via Amber on Pinterest

Oh. My. God.

Layla Palmer of The Lettered Cottage commented on my blog this morning.

Check it out.

I can die happy.

Goals for 2012

Sisterhood is funny. Laugh so hard you end up in tears while driving down the road and almost have to pull over funny. At least it is for me. My sister and I have great talks about all kinds of things and they frequently make me laugh. Sometimes she's laughing too. Others not so much.

A week or so ago we talked while I drove home from visiting our grandfather. Among a number of other topics we talked about her list of goals for the year.

I laughed.

She wasn't so amused.

She listed out 45 goals for 2012. 

That works out to only one every 8 days or so, but it struck me as really, REALLY funny when she asked if I thought that was too many. Or maybe she didn't actually ask for my opinion. Maybe I just started laughing when she told me she had 45 and I felt compelled to justify my response. That may have been what sent me over the edge. It could also have been that I desperately needed some emotional release at that point and our relationship allows me the space to do that.

For the record,  I don't think it's too many or it's silly to have a 45 goal long list for the year. That's really actually a very reasonable number for a person as ambitious and accomplished as she is. The thing that's funny about it is that most people would never do it. Kind of like writing a personal Mission Statement. I laughed when she first told me she had one and then last year I realized I did too. She's a forward thinker my sister is and I love her for it.

Despite my apparent subconscious cynicism I'm working on a set of goals for the year too. I even sent a rough draft to my life coach.


Go ahead.

Laugh with impunity.

Having a rough draft of your goals is WAY funnier than having a long list of them. I bet my sister went through at least a couple drafts before she decided on the final list. At least that's what I'm going to tell myself.

Sidenote: Does it bother you that I write sentence fragments as separate sentences because when I talk it's clear that they actually are complete thoughts and I say them like whole sentences? If it does your attachment to proper grammar is clear and you should read this cartoon about using "alot" as a word.

I'm not ready to tell you exactly what all of those goals are just yet, but I will tell you that one of them involves posting more regularly to my blog.

One of my other goals is to work on taking better blog photos which has been a bit of an issue lately. My camera and computer are fighting necessitating a string of images taken with my phone. I also have this little hiccup that I have a full time job and it's the middle of winter so there isn't a ton of time available to get shots with great natural light. By "not a ton" I mean absolutely none most days. I'm going to figure it out though or the sun will stay up longer before I do. I'm also planning to get together some fabulous shots of the parsonage to share and post in the Parsonage page. Who says you can't take great pictures of unfinished projects?

Not this girl.

Or maybe I'll finish them. That would really be shocking.

My word of the year

You know Layla over at The Lettered Cottage? You may have noticed I obsess from time to time. She has some great ideas, like coming up with a word to inspire and motivate yourself throughout the year. She's having a word of the year link party Monday, January 16th. You should check it out. Don't worry. I'll remind you.

I'd already been thinking about this for a week or so. When you have a life coach you have conversations about where you want to be in your life a year from now and words to guide your efforts. It makes you realize things. It makes you think, "I don't want my life to be slightly better; I want it to ROCK OUT."

And then you realize that to make your life rock out you actually have to do something to make that change happen. Not exactly earth shattering, but a major breakthrough on an emotional level. At least for me. The kind of breakthrough that makes you write in your coaching notebook every day for a week.

How am I going to make my life rock out? I'm going to focus on owning the use of my time.

Part of owning my time is structuring it so that I get to work on all the different projects I want to and do all the things that go into a life that rocks out. Here's my list:
 

• My blog & working on creating a business - brainstorming post ideas, improving the layout, taking better photos, talking to a couple of very important people about how me might be able to work together
• Academic work - submitting the articles I planned from my dissertation for publication, creating a course or two
• Baby preparations - financial planning, getting the nursery ready, thinking about the shower
• Home projects and maintenance - finishing up projects around the house, making new stuff and decorating, gardening, keeping it clean
• Austin time - making time to spend my babe. You can't work all the time.
• Amber stuff - reading books I've wanted to read for a while, learning more German, becoming a master cheese maker

Obviously these aren't mutually exclusive uses of time. Some of them have some overlap, but I like the idea of splitting them up so I can think of it as focusing my attention on one of them every night after dinner. That way I don't feel overwhelmed by trying to think about everything at the same time and I feel like get to do a variety of things. Don't be surprised if you notice my posts seem to fall under one of these categories in the near future. Maybe I'll even tag them that way.

So what's my word?

Rocking out.

But that's two words. Why not just use TIME?

Because when you rock out you don't have to follow other people's rules about things like how many words can be in a word.

UPDATE: I found this shirt which I think may replace my skull shirt with the hole as my go-to T-shirt. Too bad it's out of stock. And doesn't come in maternity. Hmmm.