It’s Anew one

It’s the first post from the new phone and I’ve got to say this thing is one of the coolest things I’ve ever bought! It’s taking some getting used to – the keyboard response especially, but I’m really getting into it. Qwerty is great but I miss having the keyboard memorized. I had T9 down pat and could text from my pocket á la Matt Damon in The Departed. I try to text and walk with the iPhone and, well, let’s just say that Cirque du Soleil will not be calling me anytime soon. Falling with grace is not tops on their list. C’est la vie.
I get to do another Trib Tested this week – especially since last weeks tester wasn’t that great. I tried the new Starbucks Via and was completely unimpressed. Fine instant grind or not, the flavor was really lacking; bitter at first and gritty to finish. It might be good for camping if you had nothing else, but I don’t understand how Starbucks can market it as a great cup. It’s bitter and gritty and beads up on the side of your mug. Oh yea, I want that in my tummy.
This week I get to test Avon’s Anew Rejuvenate – a mineral facial – and I’m excited. There is something so alluring about facial scrubs. It’s sitting here on my desk already calling for me to go home and try it out. The directions are pretty simple; twist, apply, wait 15 minutes and rinse. Buh bye fine lines and wrinkles! Well, at least that’s what 86% of women say. They must be 86% of women like 4 out of 5 dentists. I’ll know in another two hours!

Thursday

I finally took the plunge and bought iPhones this morning. And yes, that is plural. Mom doesn’t know it yet, but Thursday – she’s going to flip.

And then Friday I’m going to kick myself for having bought them.

My Cloud

So after yesterday’s post about the wedding albums I noticed that a letter is cut off in my post cloud and it made me laugh. That’s Entertainmen!

I’m also pretty keen on the word combinations and font heights of “bad day bill pay”, “Cleaning Closet” – particularly because one does not dictate the other – and “School Shoes”.

And I’d definitely be up for trying some “Shopping Sweets” but I do not ever want to see a quiz lend men my mother.

Photo Albums

Working for Joe Appel Photography is a lot of fun. Not only do I get to set up and tear down lights and cameras, but I get to do a lot of behind the scenes work, too.

All summer long I have been taking the beautiful shots that Joe captures and putting them into huge books. Most would call them albums, but because the photos are printed into the book and not stuck in like the 3 x 5 photos you get from Kodak or another printing agency, the work I do is extremely fun. It’s almost like a puzzle, except there are no pieces that fit together with their cut out and you can change the size of the pieces at your whim.

This first album is one I recently did for Joe. The full scale of the page is 9″ x 24″ which is great. I have a half page with of 9″ by 12″ to work with but can do huge 24″ spreads should the image dictate it.

This is a page out of Allison & Brennen’s Album which I did for their Christmas present last year. The album is 14″ by 14″ so I had plenty of room to play. Pages like this absolutely amaze me because, as I scale photos, I want to make sure they’re not too small, but when all was said and done, those 3 inset photos are 5″ by 7″ – Incredible.

This last example is a page for an album I’m finishing up right now and has turned out to be one of my favorites. Robin DeNoma and her husband (name?) were the photographers and, even though I wasn’t there the day of, I really feel like their photography captured the day. I know there is a lot going on, but with all the bright colors, I think it works.

Pages like this are great to lay out because I get to really do puzzle work – not only do I have to be mindful of sizes and shape, I have to watch out for the dreadful center line. Looking at it, you would think the book would fold in half right though the middle, but the photos are actually offset enough that the crease runs a little to the left of where you would think it would be, while remaining balanced.

It’s so meticulous to lay these pages out and make sure that everyone appears in the album, but I love doing it. It’s such relaxing and enjoyable work.

The Owld Speckled Un

Have you heard this one? Not Yeti!

This past weekend was as much fun as it was a blur. So nice to get out of Pittsburgh for a little while, for sure, but terrible to have to leave Columbus after only a few short hours of being there.

Everytime I go back I get to see my friends – sometimes there are oversites, though – So Sorry Domer – but nevertheless, I enjoy being back. The Short North, where I usually stay, has grown up quite a lot since I last lived in the area. It looks more like Olde Worthington, all growd up.

Fitz and I got to spend some fun time together, especially once it was no longer “Carolinetime”, which is a close relative of the Nelsonville TimeWarp. But I digress.

I always leave feeling a little melancholy that I no longer live in the area that I grew up a part of, but I think it’s because I leave an area that was a part of the history that once was. Allow me to explain.

Most people complain about high school. If you polled a group, any group, you might find that they hated high school. They were teased. They were unpopular. They were waaa wa waaa wa wa wa. (*Charlie Brown teacher voice) They were not what they wanted to be. But not me.

I loved high school. For the first time in my life I really felt like I fit in. Like I had a group. Like I belonged. Granted it was with a solid cast of 7 guys and various female and male subs as we navigated the mine field of growing up, high school and, for most of us, the marching band, but we really had it made.

We made it through ridiculous science projects, had fun times at school dances (anyone remember getting Domer on the Valentine’s court? Or when he forgot the PROM TICKETS???) and seriously enjoyed our senior lunches, with or without wing-dings and rides in Olsen’s van. Where is that beast now, I wonder? The Van. Not Olsen. I know where Olsen is. Relatively speaking.

DMB’s Crash Into Me is playing on my iTunes right now and I feel like I’m 14 again. Back on the drumline and waiting for Friday Night Football to get here, all the while riding around in a silver chrysler. It was such a good time in my life. And, even though I don’t say it, often or at all, I am so grateful to those 7 guys. The brothers I never had, but somehow got anyway.

It was nice to slip back into conversation with Ross this past weekend and I feel like I haven’t missed too many beats with Fitz – did you do the Monday Night Burritos??? I must know, Purple! -But I want more of it!

Ah. Challenge.

Welcome, Adele

Welcome Adele Marie Hydzik!

Born at 6:26 p.m. on Thursday, October 8, 2009 to Allison & Brennen Hydzik.

8 pounds, 3 ounces, 19 inches

Photos by Keith Hodan

Congratulations Allison and Brennen. Your girl is lovely.

Birthday Barcode

Happy Birthday Barcodes. Without you, well. You know.

Spare Change

After all the misery that was the end of last weeks work week, I started to look around my apartment and wonder where exactly all my debt was sitting. I know a big chunk is sitting in my closet – with bows on their toes and leather straps with gold buckles – the non-negotiables – but realistically – where does my budget go?

It’s almost the end of the year and I am still staring at a huge portion of debt; $2500 to be exact. Well, ok, $2494.13 to really be exact. But the scary thing is that money is the credit hindering debt I wanted most to be gone once December got here. And I really am no closer on that portion. What’s worse is the list of things that I wanted to purchase but would only do so once the number was lower, much lower, is no where closer. The iPhone for my 27th birthday … didn’t happen. No camera. Certainly no Dyson (I know. Getting older makes you reevaluate things. Like a Dyson vs. Hoover. Seriously. Wackadoodle.) Some sort of vacation. Ahhhhh!

Even with all my curtailed spending and resistance of coupons and free $10 gift cards, I seem to be not as far ahead as I wanted by this time. And, as such, am no closer to getting the things I want in my life.

After reading each others posts and realizing I’m not the only one who looks to buy these finer things (And Adaena’s very solid query: Is asking for this camera (and a Vespa scooter and a weekend in Paris) really too much? What’s a girl to do?) I couldn’t help but wonder …

How did I get to this point?

I’ve fudged my budget more than I should.

With all the things I have bought – accruing debt or not – I have too much. I have 2 almost identical skirts and 2 almost identical jackets and around 10 almost identical summer dresses. (Need a summer dress with a blue geometric pattern?) With that being said … I think I have found a strong contributor to my debt: procrastination and laziness. If I actually bothered to keep track of and care for everything I had in the way I truly would like to, I might not be out and about so much and could better evaluate what I actually need. $30 is a great deal for a dress and $5.00 is even better, but they still add up!

Late last night I got that burst of energy that only comes between 2 and 5 in the morning and started to go through my apartment – A vein attempt at getting organized, which I now see is key to this whole thing continuing to work out. But I have kept so many things I don’t need simply because they’re not “worn out”. Jeans from college I never have a prayer of fitting into again (I will never be a 26 again. Nor do I want to be); Shirts that would be better off in someone else’s ragpile; skirts that I never looked good in, but didn’t get rid of for god knows why. All stuff. All things. All impeding me from really being totally happy.

It’s a weight on my shoulders to go home sometimes because my apartment can get away from me quickly. Full time job, 3 or 4 freelance works, a night or two out on the town and I’m spent. The last thing I want to do is vacuum and dust. Fold laundry. Do dishes. When in reality, if I did those things more frequently than I currently do, I might have seen better results toward my overall yearly goal.

I always say I’m an organized mess, but sometimes, I’m just a mess. I need to get organized. I found a desk at St. V d P a few weeks ago and at $15 it was a steal. It has drawers for organizing my bills, my doodles, my odds and ends. And it’s helping out in my living room immensely. I’m working on getting a table at which I can eat – bar height if you’re looking out for me – and I’ve noticed that it’s all helping.

With “keeping up with my apartment” in place, I’ve seen more effort on my part to not use the credit card at all (even though it racks up serious points for paying my cell and cable bills) and am working gradually at whittling down my closet. I don’t need all that I’ve got, so I’m going to start thinking of it as depriving others of my deal hunting prowess. Tomorrow morning all those college jeans go to St. V d P and I reclaim 3 shelves – it’s a big step, even though they’re small shelves.

Three things

I’m still having the worst day, but I wanted to mention two things (the third being that Thursday still sucks worse than a vaccum.)

Adaena’s blog rocks

And I want a camera. Then I might have a chance at making my blog like hers. I think I’ll get one. Right after I pay for everything else.

Worst Day

I’m having a terrible horrible no good very bad day.

I got up this morning and barely made it to the gym in time for my super-sympathetic trainer to kick my recovering from a sinus infection butt. The workout was good, but I was so bad. No balance and I felt terrible.

I ran home to shower, change and get to work and, as I was deciding what to wear, found that my first three CASHMERE options had all been visited by the moth fairies sometime over the summer. My brown sweater, red dress and green sweater had all gone well with some little moth’s cheese plate. All 100% cashmere. All 100% ruined.

So I flew into work and sat down for my meeting when what meets my surprised eye but a moth hole on the front – really, like, the worst place for a girl to have a moth hole on her sweater – gaping at me from my favorite and beautiful purple sweater – the fourth cashmere option from the morning that I thought had gone to hell but was redeemed because my favorite garment had been left untouch. Ha. Not. So. Fast. And it’s not like I know how to reweave one of the most ridiculously expensive fabrics on the face of the earth. I can mail them all to NYC and have them fixed but hello – budget is out the window.

I’m still reeling from last week’s trip to the mechanic where I was told that nothing short of $1400 would get my car back into working order – so I’m trying to get money in from all the different freelance jobs I’ve got hanging out there. I got a check for one of them last night – which should have been great except that I decided to run out on my lunch break, pick up some food, stop at the bank and deposit. Nice. Leisurely like.

Nope.

Metermaid got me while I was in the bank.

I give up. What the hell did I do to piss off Karma so bad that not only am I already down in the hole as far as I thought I could dig when she hands me dynamite to blast down a little farther?

Something has to go right at some point. Right? I said Right?

The sinus infection will heal (in 6.5 days) and I’ll be healthy again. The garments can be (albeit expensively) reweaved. The parking ticket was $11.00 (as opposed to the $35.00 you get downtown) so I just won’t eat out the next two times I want to. But I’m just feeling really far down the hole right now. People are getting in touch with me that I really just don’t want to be talking to. My car is ready to quit on me and I don’t have the money to replace it, let alone get it fixed. And I’d really like to leave my office right now and go home. It’s emotion roller-coaster central in my head right now and all I really want is some peace, quiet and a couch. Sometimes, you just need a good cry. And, like my library books, I think I’m overdue.