hey

my digital camera is away on repairs.

just some links today.

the portrait party. i might try this. such a good idea!

good movies i've seen lately (in the past couple months):
the namesake (sweetest love story between the parents. and just beautiful all around.)
half nelson (on video. really really good.)
united states of leland (on video. same actor guy as in half nelson. depressing, but good.)
the lives of others (had no idea what this was about when i went to see it. almost left in the first 15 minutes because i was unprepared for the torture/questioning scene, but am so glad i stayed to see the whole thing. timely.)

flickr favorites of late:
rocketina makes interesting juxtapositions
ou la la's yulove
cheer me up and all elif's photos
trinity
kaarel's beautiful light as usual

i feel like there was more stuff i was going to tell you about/link to. but i guess this is it for now.

come in

when i was little i wanted to paint my future car with polkadots about this size. it was going to be a bug or a truck with the big front. you know the old timey kind. (i don't own a car now.)

anyhow, i almost want to switch hair salons just because vertical clearance looks so damn good. look at these floors! and their sign. and that's not even the half of it.

today i had an ice cream on my way home at the newish ice cream parlor by dolores park. (i guess it's not so much a parlor as a tiny store, but ice cream parlor has such a nice ring.) salted caramel. salt + sweet = perfect. (the sugarcone wasn't the best though.)

the weather is perfect and tonight my housemate is having a dance fight party for her birthday. FUN. after that, it's ALL homework ALL weekend. but it's fun homework, so that's ok.

i'm glad so many of you are excited about sew green! thanks for all the encouragement. sometimes it seems like environmentalism has become a closeted topic. (can a topic be closeted?) so many of us are interested, but most of us don't talk that much about it (on our blogs anyway).

more next weekend. off to clean the house a bit, and maybe have a nap in preparation for the dance fight.

miss rumphius

a picture of miss rumphius sowing her lupine seeds. miss rumphius, (story and illustrations) by barbara cooney, is one of my favorite children's books. sowing lupines is the way miss rumphius makes the world a more beautiful place. (making the world a more beautiful place is one of the three life tasks/adventures her grandfather puts to her when she's a child.)

the new project i mentioned last week is a collaborative blog about environmentalism/consumerism. some crafter-bloggers trying to figure out how to preserve (admire, understand, replenish, frolick in) nature's beauty. come on over to Sew Green!

peekaboo

it feels like it's been forever since i've posted or sewn anything. finally had a little time this weekend and finally made this bag from a thrifted skirt. i love the fabric. you can't really tell in the photos that it has a ruffly texture.

starting next saturday, i hope to post again at least once a week. in the meantime, on monday, i'll post info about a new collaborative project.

hope you all have been well.

until next time, here are some flickr favorites of late:

just lovely
love notes
feels like another world
feels like travel
peace: yeahyeahyeah

oh and a (long) excerpt from the excellent book i'm reading, the intuitionist, by colson whitehead:

From Theoretical Elavators: Volume Two, by James Fulton

To believe in silence. As we did when we lived in bubbles. Sentient insofar as we knew it was warm: Silence provided that warmth. The womb. Ants have it easy for speaking in chemicals. Food. Flight. Follow. Nouns and verbs only, and never in concert. There are no mistakes for there is no sentence save the one nature imposes (mortality). You are standing on a train platform. A fear of missing the train, a slavery to time, has provided ten minutes before the train leaves. There is so much you have never said to your companion and so little time to articulate it. The years have accreted around the simple words and there would have been ample time to speak them had not the years intervened and secreted them. The conductor paces up and down the platform and wonders why you do not speak. You are a blight on his warming towards departure. You cannot find the words, the words will not allow you to find them in time for the departure. Nothing is allowed to pass between you and your companiion. It is late, a seat awaits. That the words are simple and true is only half the battle. The train is leaving. The train is always leaving and you have not found your words.

Remember the train, and that thing between you and your words. An elevator is a train. The perfect train terminates at Heaven. The perfect elevator waits while its human freight tries to grab through the muck and find the words. In the black box, this messy business of human communication is reduced to excreted chemicals, understood by the soul's receptors and translated into true speech.

i'm loving this book. have any of you read it?