Mood Indigo

I just got the latest digital issue of Style at Home and this spread on how to incorporate the latest tie-dye trend into your home got me all excited.  It is full of great ideas on using dye, from creating this amazing artwork using dye and watercolour paper to batiking or dipping fabrics.  It works beautifully with this gorgeous turquoise blue and indigo, and is such a summery treatment.  There are so many ideas you could use here!  Hello - tie die, a spray bottle, and a chinese lantern?  So awesome.

100 Days in Glacier National Park

This project was completed last summer, but the images are still breathtaking.  100 days In Glacier National Park  is a blog chronicling photos of Glacier National Park over 100 consecutive days, starting on May 1, 2009 by Glacier Park Magazine editor Chris Peterson. Chris used a mix of film and digital cameras, including an 8 by 10 field camera, a Kodak Pocket Vest camera, circa 1909, and a Speed Graphic, among others. The idea was to use the cameras that would have been used over the course of the Park's 100 years. The blog is an endless parade of gasp-inducing photos that make me want to 1) take a lot of photography classes, 2) give up the rat race and move to the mountains, and 3) abandon this post and go for a hike.  But instead I will just post these photos.  There are a lot because I couldn't stop looking at them!

Oil Disaster

Even being stationed in the remote Rockies without much access to TV as I have been the last few weeks, one cannot help but be sickened by news of the oil debacle in the Gulf Coast.  It is so huge, and the numbers used to describe it are so big, that it almost defies the imagination.  I have come across a couple of sites, however, that have put it into terrible perspective for me, via the site informationisbeautiful.net, which helps the visually-oriented such as myself digest baffling information.


The site above, ifitwasmyhome.com, drove home the magnitude of the spill for me.  I looked at this map and thought about how many hours it would take to drive from London to Kingston, and then imagined driving for that long across an endless expanse of lethal, stinky, mucky oil.  Wow.  Then, because I am from the East Coast, I put in Halifax NS and realized the spill is about the size of the province of Nova Scotia.

Informationisbeautiful.net also links to the New York Times, which has another heart-sinking lime-lapse account of the spill.  It is also worth a visit.

If all these images leave you feeling the need to get off the computer and help, here is a link to a great list of organizations recruiting volunteers: http://www.takepart.com/news/2010/04/30/the-gulf-coast-oil-leak-how-to-help.  Or if you are too far to help in person, like myself, there are many organizations accepting donations, including the United Way, the National Wildlife Federation (US), and the Nature Conservancy (US); although BP and the US government are supposedly covering any clean-up costs.


(I found informationisbeautiful.net on Oh Happy Day, and now I am hooked.)

Why having a toddler is like being at a frat party

I just saw this hilarious post on Suburban Snapshots and just had to re-post it.  It is pretty funny, especially the added comments below. Hey - university parties were fun, right?  Oh but Mum, I only heard about them from other people...


Ten reasons raising a toddler is like being at a frat party:
10. There are half-full, brightly-colored plastic cups on the floor in every room. Three are in the bathtub.
9. There's always that one girl, bawling her eyes out in a corner.
8. It's best not to assume that the person closest to you has any control over their digestive function.
7. You sneak off to the bathroom knowing that as soon as you sit down, someone's going to start banging on the door.
6. Probably 80% of the stains on the furniture contain DNA.
5. You've got someone in your face at 3 a.m. looking for a drink.
4. There's definitely going to be a fight.
3. You're not sure whether anything you're doing is right, you just hope it won't get you arrested.
2. There are crumpled-up underpants everywhere.
1. You wake up wondering exactly how and when the person in bed with you got there.


My favourite additions from the comments:
- At least one person is lying on the floor, either face up or face down, singing at the top of their lungs.
- You ask the two nearly naked girls what they're doing and they say they're having a 'naked underwear party.'
- There is a pretty girl alternately screaming and crying at you (or at nothing) from the staircase.
- You look inside the "clean" cups for offending material before filling with a drinkable liquid. 
- You find yourself saying things you never thought you'd say- like: "Please stop licking the dog"
- Someone has pee on their pants and marker all over their face.


Oh yeah.  Good times.  Gooooood times. Anyway, Brenna's blog is hilarious, and so on the money.  Check it out if you are a mom.

The Kitchen plans

So I did up some basic plans in Google SketchUp for the kitchen.  You will see I am hardly proficient in this programme, but it helped me get a general idea what different adjustments to the layout would look like in 3-D.  So the above is a photo of the kitchen as we left it, and below is the same wall from a different perspective.

We made the tough decision to close up the back door and move it into the dining room.  We didn't want to be without the light or access, but there was really no other way to get more counter space and cabinets! Our kitchen had an unbelievable 4 doors, 1 window and a huge radiator - a real puzzle!

We managed to move the fridge around beside the counter, which makes a lot more sense, and leave more space when you walk in from the front.  We also made the wall from the dining room into a peninsula, letting the light go through the space and leaving lots of room for lower cabinets.

The SketchUp images really don't have the same perspective, but it is cool to be able to toggle around all angles of the space.

Man, I really can't WAIT to have a dishwasher!  And storage!  And workspace!  How terrible it must be to move into a house with all of these incredible features and to take them for granted... ;p

A moment in time

Um, Wow.  Argentinean photojournalist Diego Goldberg has photographed himself, his wife Susy, and his three sons every June 17th since 1976 in a project he calls The Arrow of Time.  It all started on the first anniversary of Diego and Susy moving in together, when Diego took the first photos.  A year later, on the same anniversary, he took them again to see if they had changed at all in a year.  After that, it became a family tradition, and even the kids came to look forward to 'family photo' day.   As he puts it, "On June 17, every year, the family goes through a private ritual: we photograph ourselves to stop, for a fleeting moment, the arrow of time passing by." Now 34 years later, his project has become an incredible testament to the constant march of time.  His eldest son Nicolas is now also a photographer and has started his own branch of the tree with his young family.

Doesn't this make you want to mark your calendar and get out your camera?  What amazing perseverance to have done this every year for 30-some-odd years.  It kind of shocks me to see how quickly the boys go from babies to big hairy men!  As they say, the days can be long, but the years are short.