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I painted some fabric. I love you, Scribbles Shiny 3D Paint in Petunia Purple.

May 12th, 2008

My friend B. likes purple. A great deal. It’s his most favoritest color ever. And he has big feet (size 13), so sometimes it is hard for him to find purple shoes. I took pity on his metatarsal plight and bought some Converse Chucks in his size and just JAZZED ’em right up. They are so purply and peppy, I’m tempted to buy a pair and craftify them fer m’self. I tried to keep these as masculine as I could, but with mine I could use sparkles! Ah, sparkles.

And here is some of the painting in closer detail. JAZZY.

And because my purse with the pomegranate/virus pattern on it started to rip a little, I painted my latest purse with a delightful octopus. He’s black, but his spots are shimmery russet and on top of that are aquamarine rhinestones. EVEN JAZZIER.

My kitchen has a big ole piece of Formica-covered plywood next to the fridge, and I think I will make a cloth hanging with octopi and cuttlefish and jellies and other sea-beasties to hang over it so it’s not quite so… plastic-looking. I’m really going to try to make my kitchen more organic. Incorporate some wood and stones, things like that. We’ll see what happens.

Posted in Apartment, My Art/Design/Business | No Comments »

Bamboo flooring. And photos of GCT.

May 5th, 2008

The flooring is made of strips of ‘boo, and you can see the hinges or links or whatever you call it when the ‘boo does that thing it does with the stopping and starting. Sooo pretty.

The only problem is that my new flooring is much lower than the original flooring. The doors are all an inch and a half too short on the bottom. It looks stupid. It’s one of those things that I will fix if I get around to it, but I don’t really care. The flooring looks so spiffy I don’t care about much of anything. Central VA Flooring does flooring Lynchburg, VA. In addition, if you want to add comfort and softness to your flooring, consider getting a wool carpet. Invest in professional carpet stretching to have your carpet look good as new. You can also browse for more flooring options at Floors2Day – Flooring Store.

I chose three pictures for my bathroom. They’re not necessarily the most beautiful angles or the most interesting subjects but to me they have meaning and significance and all that junk, so whatever, it’s my bathroom and these are the pictures.

This is a shot I took at about 9:15 in the morning from under the overhang of GCT. The Chrysler Building is one of my favorites in all of Mannyhanny, and the clouds looked really cool that day. You can see the atmospheric haze. I see this everyday on the way to work and it makes me happy. I always think that the Chrysler Building is a giant hypodermic needle poking the fleshy clouds. Why that should make me happy I don’t know, but it does. Perhaps I have a secret affinity for diabetics and heroin addicts. Moving on.

This is a swirly architectural detail near Posman Books. I pass this all the time as well and I love that this could have been a boring old bracket and the architect decided to make it into a charming bit of design. And it’s about a foot above my head, so I can really see it, as opposed to many of the other neat-o things in GCT that are too far away to appreciate (the famous astrology ceiling, the chandeliers, etc.)

This is right under the boards for the New Haven line. I like three-sided things and I like light fixtures, ergo I LOVE this lamp. And there are so many textures and shapes in this picture. I’ve actually never seen these windows open, only the ticket windows on the other side of Vanderbilt Hall. They should really switch over to this side soon, the floor is starting to wear down on the other side. Anyway, I lived in Rye for most of my life and I took the New Haven line, so it has a great deal of significance to me. Now I’m going to live in White Plains and I’ll be taking the Harlem line, but the New Haven line will always have a place in my heart.

Posted in Apartment, My Art/Design/Business, New York | No Comments »

Remember how I said I wouldn’t be talking about owls for a while? Yeah, I lied.

May 5th, 2008

I went to visit B. this weekend and his wife D. graciously took Cricket and me to see where she works (Tenafly Nature Center in NJ). We hiked around and that was nice, but even better… There was an owl! And two hawks! And two snakes and a toad (which I got to hold, wheeee!) Here’s a picture of me holding the corn snake. It was shy and disoriented because it’s about to shed. You can see that because its eye is blue and opalescent and its colors are muted.

I also held a hognose snake named Henrietta who was just the sweetest. She likes holes and caverns, so she slithered into my sleeve and hung out there for a while. I think that was my favorite part. Cuddling with snakey-snake!

They also had an owl, a barred owl named Mitzi. Mitzi was found with a broken wing and it healed, but it’s weak and so he/she is unreleasable. I say he/she because nobody knows what sex Mitzi is. Female owls are larger in size, males are smaller and Mitzi is… in between. They’d have to knock Mitzi out to be able to rummage around in he/she’s tender regions, and birds don’t do well under anesthesia, so everyone is content to leave Mitzi alone. In the other aviary are two red-tailed hawks. The male had his right wing amputated at the elbow and the female’s left eye is damaged. The first pictures I took of my new raptor friends I took through a chain-link fence and my stupid camera insisted on focusing on the fence. The pics look kind of cool, actually.

But then D. let me get closer and I could place my camera on the chain-link fence and get far better photos. Here’s a picture of the female hawk. You can appreciate her wonky eye. She looks like a pirate. Arrrr.

And here’s Mitzi. I was tempted to sneak into the enclosure and give Mitzi a big hug ‘n’ snuggle, but I think that would be frowned upon and most likely it would end badly and I would be bleeding, so I stayed outside the fence.

I was thrilled at the opportunity to see the beasties, and the Tenafly Nature Center is lovely and I recommend you go visit it.

Posted in Activitays, Beastiesbeastiesbeasties, Nature | 1 Comment »

Check out my NY subway-style bathroom!

May 2nd, 2008

I got my master bathroom done with large marble tiles and hexagonal floor tile and I chose a dirt-colored grout which accentuates the white tile and makes my bathroom look grotty like the Victorian-era New York subway. I LOVE IT. I took photos of some of my favorite elements of Grand Central Station yesterday and I’m going to hang three of those pictures in my bathroom. I might even install speakers and pipe in the sounds fire trucks and homeless people yelling to complete the tableau of greatness. An air freshener scented faintly like sewage and the look will be PERFECT. No, really, It’s exactly what I wanted and I’m thrilled to bits. Let me take you on a journey of my bathroom.

I’m standing in the shower to take this picture. You can see the hexagonal floor tile and the lovely wall tile. Precision Tile Inc is a tile contractor Lynchburg. I’m having the painter paint over the grout smudges all over the walls that you can see there.

And this is a photo of the inside of the shower. My contractor (who is a genius) used leftover marble floor tile from the other bathroom for the seat in here. It feels like a sauna on the Lower East Side. I want to sit in there and sweat and then have a large Russian woman throw cold water on me.

Now the floor man is laying down bamboo flooring throughout the apartment and then the painter comes and paints and we’re DONE. FINALLY. And then I can move in.

Posted in Apartment, New York | No Comments »

A humbling moment. I have lots of them.

April 28th, 2008

I’m a big fan of hand-painted signage. It’s a dying art, but it’s still out there. You see it sometimes on trucks, but where you see it the most are the rip-off electronics places scattered all over midtown Manhattan. They always have flat-screen TVs playing Britney Spears videos. All the stores of this ilk that I pass are playing one Britney video or another. I wonder if they had a meeting and decided that Britney was the artist to go with. Did you know between the perfumes and the clothes and the investments and attaching her name to stuff, Britney pulls in $700,000 a month? But I digress.
So I pass about three or four on my way to work, and all their hand-painted signage is very nice, but then there’s this one store. Their lettering is PERFECT. I could never paint so flawlessly. I always stop and gawk when I pass by. I made a collage of pictures I took of the signage in the window. Even if you have excellent handwriting, you can feel the humility wash over you.

Posted in Advertising, New York, Random Art Bloggery | No Comments »

Rawk of Lurv.

April 24th, 2008

I’ve commented on the VH1 herpestravaganza “Rock of Love” before (here, in fact) and I try not to watch it because the idea of many women competing for a man and wrasslin’ greased pigs (no, really) to win dates with him is a wretched concept to me. However, I watched the final episode because one of the girls on the show had a regular job (TV host) and was 37 and mature and funny and had natural small bosoms. And she was competing against a woman who was a 25-year-old stripper (which is fine, get yo’ paper Booboo, I ain’t mad atcha) but who was really not very bright and had some of the worst plastic surgery on her face I have ever seen. Anyway, I watched the final episode (my choice won, hooray) and I think Bret Michaels seems like a genuinely nice person with very pretty blue eyes. Afterwards I decided I was really unfamiliar with Poison’s music so I put Poison’s Greatest Hits on my iPod and listened to the whole thing at work. Here’s the thing: IT’S BAD. Not dated like Whitesnake (whom I love) or tongue-in-cheek wink-wink bad, no. They’re very serious about what they do and it’s awful. I mean, “Unskinny Bop” is horrendous. If I wrote a rock song, it would sound identical to “Unskinny Bop”. This is not a compliment. But for now, we shall deal with the vaguely unsucky song, “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”. Apparently Bret wrote this when he and his girlfriend had just broken up and he was really sad and it comes through, so good for him. However, his lyrics are at a second-grade level. We will discuss the chorus:

Every rose has its thorn
Just like every night has its dawn
Just like every cowboy sings his sad, sad song
Every rose has its thorn

Okay, first of all. he should have used “morn” instead of “dawn” because then you wouldn’t have to mumble to get all these things to rhyme. Now, from the first line, you think he’s going to set up a pattern, “Every good thing has a bad aspect to it”, which is true. The next line is “Just like every night has its dawn” which is that idea backwards, putting the bad aspect in front of the good thing. Then the third line: “Just like every cowboy sings his sad, sad song”… which has NOTHING to do with ANYTHING. He could have substituted any rhyming element there and it would make the same amount of sense. Something about how his ass is chafing from a tight, tight thong, or he can’t smoke weed through his clogged, clogged bong, I mean, really, anything. Needless to say, Bret’s solo album that VH1 was hawking during the entire “Rock of Love” episode, yeah, I won’t be buying that.

Posted in The Telly | 1 Comment »

I made some things! Let’s look at them, shall we?

April 18th, 2008

First, some ads I made for NewCastleNOW.org that are nice, hooray for me:

Then I designed a handout for NewCastleNOW.org that I’m very proud of. I went to New Castle and took pictures of various buildings, signs, statues, etc. and created a tableau in Illustrator. I had a bit of a struggle because the buildings in New Castle tend to be short, like two stories, except for the churches, and I couldn’t have a town completely comprised of churches. “Welcome to New Castle, the most religious place on earth! You got a faith, we got a church for it!” But I think I made it work (thank you, old-growth trees for being so tall, I appreciate that), and I think it turned out really terrific.

Posted in Advertising, My Art/Design/Business | No Comments »

This is the end of the owl posts for a while.

April 18th, 2008

Across the street from where I work is the park with the owl monument, the one where the owl’s eyes blink green at night (SO AWESOME). Well, I took the time to walk over there and the whole park is covered in owls. Apparently the park is dedicated to Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, so owls aplenty. There are two who greet you as you walk in.

This is one. “Welcome to my park. I’m very serious and I glare at visitors. Don’t litter!” (smacks you with ruler across your hand)

And on top of this bell there is a wee owl, bringing the total to five owls in the park.

Anyway, the reason I walked over there was that it smelled really flowery and springy for blocks all around. When I got there, I saw that they were planting a gazilion and one plants. And it was very photogenic, so here are some pics to wish you happy spring.

Posted in Nature, New York | No Comments »

Little angry owl.

April 14th, 2008

My friend B. sent me a picture of an owl that he saw at a raptor exhibition. It’s a wee screech owl, it weighs no more than a candy bar. BUT YOU CANNOT CONTAIN ITS RAGE.

That glaring eye haunts me when I sleep. It’s like the Eye of Sauron, I tell you.

Posted in Beastiesbeastiesbeasties, Nature | No Comments »

My apartment Part 637. Plus some pretty cool news.

April 11th, 2008

First, my interesting news. I got a job. I didn’t plan to, I was perfectly happy working in my underpants at home all day. But I was offered a terrific deal so I took it. Now I work at Publicis in Herald Square in Manhattan across from Macy’s. No one really knows my title, so I am going to say I am the Grand Poobah Designer of the Communications and New Business Departments. That’ll look nice on business cards.

Now, my apartment! Progress! I’m so happy!

A sink! A toilet! A floor! It’s so great! Really, it looks fantastic. I’m thrilled with how this came out. People should feel honored to tinkle here.

A view of the tub with the sink next to it. They still have to put in the hook that holds the showerhead up so right now it’s draped into the sink. Everyone remember that the walls are going to be painted white, so the tiles will “pop” more than they are now against that aqua sheetrock.

Since I’ve bought this apartment, I’ve been hemming and hawing about the other bathroom. I planned to redo it someday, but later on when I have more money. My mom called me the other day and said the workmen were there already, the hell with it, redo the other bathroom already. So I’m gonna. Money be damned! Here’s a pic of the bathroom as it is now:

I replaced the sink and the cabinet and I ripped out the formica countertop and full-wall mirror and that’s where I planned to stop. Now we’re going to tile the walls (halfway up, like wainscotting) and the floor, get a new toilet in there (this one is tiny and grey, new toilet will be bigger and white) and replace the tiles and fixtures in the shower. Here, look at the shower:

There’s three handles in there. And the tile is chipped and you know, bleagh. So I’m going to the tile place this weekend and I shall peruse the stock and pick wall tiles that fill me with mirth and delight. I spend my weekends looking for tile for the bathroom! I’m old now!