I Am Art

Autumn switcheroo

We are grooving on:
~Frizz-Ease Secret Weapon. It adds shine, tames the frizzies, and it smells like fruit salad. Just use a little bit on dry hair.
~ I have made the Autumn Switcheroo to Black tea at Starbucks.
~I finally got the chance to see Chris Pureka live! I listen to her CDs on repeat and didn't think I would get to see her when she was in town.  I'm so glad I did. She was fantastic.
~An adventure in San Francisco is in my near future.
~Solving mysteries
~I started reading Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake on the plane last week. It's very good!


We are annoyed by:
~I attract screamers and crazy elbow-at my face level-dancers at concerts. The person who screams out song titles the moment the singer is silent is always sitting or standing next to me. If you really want to hear a song bad enough to scream the title every four minutes, just listen in your car or at home! Why scream it at the top of your lungs in a crowd? If the singer and her band are not prepared to sing the song you can't shut up about, no matter how many times you scream it, she won't sing it.  I have never been to a concert where musicians stopped their rehearsed act and took requests screamed by drunk people.
~Men in Silverlake wear skinny jeans and have tails. I mean tails in their hair. Uhhhhhhh. Silverlake needs a fashion intervention.
~People who have iPhones taking DAYS to respond to important text messages. Why have an iPhone?
~The Perimenopause Fairy. She is on our hit list right now.
~Not having time to tell the stories I really want to tell.
~I can't find the perfect camera bag/purse combo for walking around San Francisco.

going in circles

Today We're FEELIN' GROOVY about:
~Maple leaf cookies really from Canada
~The Venice Beach Boardwalk is way better on a weekday than on the weekend. Take your Canadian friends there on a Wednesday. There are fewer henna tattoo and pot sellers and more art and skateboarders.
~Pam is selling prints of the Freedom art we made together! YAY! Check out her blog for details.
~My hair is growing. Thanks for all your comments, by the way. I appreciate your never ending support when it comes to me and my bad hair cuts. I know I can always count on you guys to make me laugh and feel better. I have another hair appointment July 27th. Whose love child will I be that day?
~The promos for The Big C have renewed my love for Love Today by Mika. So good on the treadmill.
~Pantene Fine Hair Spray Gel Root Lifter. Don't let the "gel" wording scare you away. It's the best volumizer ever. There's nothing even remotely gel-like about it. It's VOLUMIZER. It won't make your hair at all crunchy or flaky and even after a day at the beach your hair will stay fluffy and styled and not all stringy. And it smells good!

Our Bêtes Noires:
~It turns out that Suki is the bad pizza cat.  It's just like when you tell people that the pizza at a place is great then you take them there and the pizza is awful and you have to keep saying but it's usually good-- Suki is usually good when it's only me and Dustin at home. If you visit me, don't expect my cat to be cuddly or sit on your lap. We're learning the hard way. She's a bit on edge. She will, however, sit in the center of the dinner table if food is near you.
~I accidentally deleted photos on my memory card that I had not yet saved.  When the earth beneath your feet suddenly stopped and your hat flew off your head, that was the moment I realized it.
~Karen and her sweet baby girl are going to look at COLLEGES next month. COLLEGE. ON THE EAST COAST. I cried just typing that.
~Watching people you love make mistakes with the repeat button firmly pressed.
~My boyfriend Joe has been out of the frozen fire roasted corn. I am too afraid to ask if it has been discontinued.
~I have so many stories I want to tell, pictures I want to share, stuff I want to say. But I also have raging PMS so I am just sitting here staring out the window.

~~~~~~~~~~
There's new art in my shop including these prints from my Circles Of Enlightenment series. Take a look!

More Rice!

Today We're FEELIN' GROOVY about:
~My boyfriend Joe totally gets my love of white rice. He's giving me more (for a change). The packets of rice in the boxes of frozen baggies of rice are now 14 ounces instead of 10 ounces. I am not sure if the price changed because I only noticed as I was pouring the rice into our bowls for dinner. MORE RICE!
~Nordstrom Personal Stylist service:  no time to shop for flattering clothes in your budget and color scheme? Nordstrom's personal stylist really WILL pick out a big room full of cool clothes for you!
~Green Jasmine tea from Teas' Tea. It's the only bottled jasmine tea I have ever liked. There's no gross fake jasmine taste and it's so refreshing and good (and unsweetened). I am totally addicted to it. I got it at Whole Foods in the 2L bottle. It's really jasminey! Karen would hate it.
~My herb garden is still a garden and not a pot of mud and dried herbs.
~I'm slowly starting to put some original art on canvas from various commercial and commissioned projects in my etsy shop. More details on those projects will come soon. I say slowly because a lot of the pieces are big and it's taking a while to figure out how to package and ship them in the most economical way. The smaller pieces are going up first.
~The season finale of Modern Family. If you haven't seen it yet, it must be online or OnDemand on cable. For sure watch it before you take your family photo for your holiday cards.

Our Bêtes Noires:
~It was bad enough when gum manufacturers started making tri-fold, ridiculous packaging; now they have added weird tasting gum, like Stride's "Mega mystery" (grapefruit grossness). You need 4 hands to open the pack while driving, another 2 to unwrap the piece of gum, then you just have to spit it out since it tastes awful.
~ Bare Minerals foundation. The container of foundation is now smaller (compared to years ago) yet the price remains the same.
~If my kids get one more school project assignment (one more diorama, "authentic" Medieval meal, build-your-own working riverboat, multi-media presentation of life in the Renaissance, quilt depicting Amerigo Vespucci's life, iMovie version of Macbeth as a superhero comedy, etc.) no teacher layoffs will be necessary.
~Pretzel M&Ms. The pretzel pieces are too hard and it feels like you are biting on what you think might be a broken tooth. AAAAH!The Crispy M&Ms were way better. Get the Pretzel Bark from Trader Joe's instead.
~The Lost finale and entire last season. 

i want to be

I am procrastinating.
I am daydreaming.
I want to be in Europe figuring out which train to hop on.
I want to be a ball that lands in my garden.
I want to be unreliable.
I want to be at the top of a Ferris wheel in Santa Cruz.
I want to be standing in line for breakfast at Dottie's cafe.
I want to be wrong about sneaking suspicions.
I want to be twirling in Kentucky snow.
I want to be washing sand off my feet.
I want to be listening to conversations in a language I don't know.
I want to be buying something little so I can use a bathroom.
I want to be wondering what is going on at home.
I want to be pleasantly surprised.
I want to be sleeping in the comfiest bed.
I want to be missing something different.

What do you want to be doing?

Hooked

Today We're FEELIN' GROOVY about:
~Chris Pureka's new CD, How I Learned To See In The Dark. You must listen to it 7 times and then you will be hooked. Not even hooked, addicted. I can't stop listening. My favorites are Wrecking Ball, Shipwrecked, Broken Clock, and Lowlands. You can hear them all on her myspace page right now. Someone needs to tell Chris Isaak that he needs to do a duet with Chris Pureka.
~A few lovely days of sunshine and a garden full of blooming flowers.
~J.R. Watkins Lemon Cream lotion. A little bit goes a long way. If you use too much the lemon WILL be barfy. A little on your dry hands is all you need and that little bit is refreshing. And by too much I mean all over your body.
~The Missing Link feline formula vitamin powder you put on your cat's food. It cured Suki's dry skin in days and she didn't even notice it was on her food.
~Planning an adventure.
~I found the Niman Ranch Applewood bacon at My Boyfriend Trader Joe's that was mentioned in the Cooking Light article we mentioned earlier. Oh my Buddha! It's good. 

Our Bêtes Noires:
~ There are some really good videos of Chris Pureka singing her new songs live on YouTube but in every video there's someone coughing. That totally ruins it. If you are sick, stay home. You ruin the youtube experience for the rest of us. Yes, I do believe I have complained about this before but it's still happening. Listen to the coughers here and here .
~Dishes that can't go in the dishwasher.
~I'm apparently giving off an I'm Free For The Taking Vibe. Or maybe it's an I Believe Bullshit Vibe. I can't tell, yet.  What herb do you burn to get rid of either of those?
~A flaky cat. I forgot to add that to the list of things that would gross me out before we got a cat.
~Mosquitoes and spiders everywhere.

*Prints of A GOOD START are available in my shop.

karmic cleansing

Next week I am having a mammogram and ultrasound. I am also getting a haircut. I'll also probably have the cold my husband is suffering from and my period because mammograms and haircuts seems to have the same power airplanes do. Also, my hairstylist is pregnant. Usually my hairstylists turn bad when they either get off or on drugs but I have never had one be pregnant, so I am not sure how this will be. There's just so much that can go wrong (or right!) next week so I think it's best that I do some karmic cleansing.

~I take back any time I ever yelled sell out! When I heard a song by a popular band being used to sell an item in a commercial. I now know that licensing is not an easy task at all and that selling out is way harder than it seems. I hope all my favorite singers and songwriters made lots of money and were able to pay their bills. Also, it's not selling out. It's just doing business.
~I take back the time I accidentally ordered baby cow parts for me and Karen for dinner because I thought sweetbreads were really sweet bread. It was really funny, though.
~I take back any time I complained (too much) about the bad ending of any book or movie.
~I take back all those hours of my life spent in the tanning bed even though I looked really good and felt great.
~I take back all those times I thought I was fat when I wasn't. How stupid.
~I take back all the times I didn't order the pecan pie because I was clueless.
~I take back that one year I didn't vote in our local election because I couldn't get my vcr timer to work and I didn't want to miss General Hospital.
~I take back the time I tried to kill a bee on our kitchen window by hitting it with a broom. The window broke and the bee flew out. Again, really funny but so stupid (it was near the time I couldn't get the vcr to work).
~I take back the hours of my life lost to a Steve Winwood concert even though it was very funny to look over and see Karen sound asleep. We learned that night that noise really won't keep you awake if you are bored. So maybe it wasn't a total waste of time. A lesson was learned.
~I take back ever getting mad at slow drivers. It's a scary world, I get it. I hate to drive, too. Just stay in the right lane so you don't cause an accident.
~I take back that time I accidentally killed that frog in my garage! I didn't mean to! It was suicidal and jumped behind my car as I backed out. Forgive me, Froggy.
~I take back eating cookies for every meal even though it happened as recently as today. Like I said, I'll probably have my period, too.
~I take back any time people thought I wasn't listening. I really was.
~I take back any time I ever gave anyone bad directions. I am not the seester who can read a map yet strangers always come up to me and ask how to get places. Yikes. So sorry, strangers.
~I take back some of the times I got mad when people didn't say thanks.  I am currently suffering from Oh my Buddha, did I send them a thank you note or not? I think I did, but what if I didn't? If I send another one, they will think I am crazy... so I get that sometimes that happens. If I haven't sent you a thank you card or email, it's either on the way or that suffering is about you. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

***The Urban Buddha: Namaste print is new and available for a limited time in my shop.

living dangerously

Today We're FEELIN' GROOVY about:
~People watching on gorgeous spring days. It looks like this cute grandma was enjoying it from her bench on the Venice boardwalk, too.
~Trader Joe's Nacho Cheese tortilla chips. If there's more than one person in your house, you better get two bags.
~Nurse Jackie and United States Of Tara are back on. Oooh, and Sheriff Bullock has a new show. I am not loving Justified yet but he's so easy on the eyes that I don't care if it's good.
~Thinking of all the survey takers and telemarketers calling my phone number and getting the "this number is no longer in service" recording. Life really is better without the phone ringing every 5 minutes.
~Cooking Light reviews the best bacon (the bad side is we have never seen or heard of any of them).
~Speaking of bacon, Happy Passover to Our People! We're breaking the meat and dairy rule this year. We're living dangerously. Let's celebrate with some Adam Lambert, a nice Jewish boy, singing in Hebrew.

Our Bêtes Noires:
~Recently, Karen, my husband, and I ordered CAKE at a BAKERY cafe  and when we sat down at a table to eat it people stopped at our table and stared at us. Or glared at us. Or commented on us having cake. We weren't even being loud or anything.  Aren't you supposed to get cake at a bakery? There were three of us and three pieces of cake. What is odd about that? People so don't know how to live anymore.
~The Venice Beach Boardwalk used to be a cool place to get unique art , buy good cheap clothes and do lots of people watching by the beach. Now it is just a place to buy marijuana, get a henna tattoo, and smell people who haven't showered in months. How sad. There's not even a lot of places to get food which is odd considering how much pot there is to buy.
~We are officially old. We spent an entire day saying "Back in the day, this place used to be so good. What happened to it?Remember?"
~Those rude kitchen ladies on Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution. Oh my Buddha!  They were more like evil Yard Duties.  I don't understand being so resistant to change if the change will help you be healthy and live longer.
~Dr. Drew saying every married celeb man who cheats on his wife is a sex addict. This is getting silly. We are so sick of hearing about men who are sex addicts and the women who love them being love addicts. How about that these people are just careless and self-absorbed? Why must every bad behavior be blamed on some type of new addiction?

not a hybrid blog

In honor of Karen now being able to say Because I Am 46, we thought we'd start her year off with a list of words she'd rather not hear anymore. Some of the words we are still sick of and those have really got to go.

*Swagger: The worst thing about the overuse of this word is nobody knows what it means and everyone uses it incorrectly.
*Meds: ER is not on anymore, please stop pretending you're Dr. Carter. The correct term is drugs.
*I's: I swear to all that is holy if I see one more person writing "this is Jim and I's new dog..."  I'll just flip. Often the people who use I's also incorrectly call themselves myself.
*Hybrid: This one especially bothers me when used to describe art made by people who swagger to their scanners, scan their art, then add stuff to it in Photoshop.
*Resonate: It's faux deep. I am tired of people asking, "does this idea resonate with you?" instead of: "Whaddaya think?" Not every thing has to touch my soul deeply. I can just agree or disagree.
*Reach Out (instead of contact or talk to)
*H1N1: Nobody has it, whew. Why is it still news?
*Census: I have email from 2008 I still haven't answered, sorry no time to fill out that thing.
*Look, clearly: Oh, enough already!!!! You would be so much more clear if you would just go ahead and say whatever it is, instead of asking that everyone let you be clear. Let me be clear: at the end of the day, all this meta speak does not resonate with me at all.
*Miss: For reasons I still haven't figured out, adults call me Miss Linda. This must stop. I am not a kindergarten teacher and if I were, it would still not be ok.

And to balance things out, some words we still love and use way too often, probably to the annoyance of everyone around us:

*LAME!
*Delish!
*What?!<--- actually, we say this one with an English accent. We are so affected. It's more like WOT?!
*What can choo do? <--- Buddha bless Ignacio.
*Kill me now!
*I am soooo done!

We really do speak with exclamation points.

******

We know it can be annoying to go to blogs and keep being told about sales and coupons but we get so excited when we have a coupon to offer that we want to be sure nobody misses out!  Often once a coupon expires, people email and ask us if we'll ever have free shipping on Meeting In The Ladies Room. Unfortunately, we only have free shipping when the fine folks at Blurb offer them and they are currently offering one until March 22nd. And since we're celebrating being alive, we're donating 30% of our march proceeds to Susan G. Komen For The Cure.   Coupons are like warranties, as soon as they expire you need one! 

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Meeting In The Ladies Room by Linda Woods and Karen Dinino

sleepless nights

Today We're FEELIN' GROOVY about:
~I have new prints and art on canvas in my shop.
~My husband got the go ahead from Dr. Adorable that it is safe to return to the gym for light exercise (not upper body, though). He is very happy. In a month, strength training physical therapy may begin! Only five more months to go!
~No more wet cat food on the menu and Suki still loves me.  Why can't they make wet cat food smell better? Gag city.
~Quaker mini-delights caramel drizzle cardboard--er--multigrain cakes.  Somehow, these awful things are really good.
~Throwdown with Bobby Flay and his two assistants who hate him. 
~My intuition hasn't been letting me down.

Our Bêtes Noires:
~The entire season of Big Love was LAME. It was trying to be Dallas mixed with Coal Miner's Daughter mixed with Little House On The Prairie mixed with Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.
~Lost is too boring to comment on.
~In an effort to save money we are switching our cable and internet companies which is causing me sleepless nights. We've had the same internet company for ten years and rarely ever have problems.  I'm imagining the worst scenarios ever- slow downloads, slow uploads, outages, and no cable while my husband is home. I'll be stomping around the house unable to work and screaming I CAN'T BELIEVE I HAD TO CHOOSE BETWEEN RELIABLE INTERNET  SERVICE  AND MY THYROID MEDICATION!
~Cinnabon is having an identity crisis.  WHAT is with that lame slogan: "life needs frosting"?? It's a CINNAMON ROLL place, not a frosting store, not even a cake store. Apparently some other exasperated grammar freak told them that, because now they are selling cupcakes, to justify their slogan. The cupcakes are small, and look unappealing.  Maybe that is because they are a CINNAMON ROLL place, and they ought to stick to what they do better than anyone. And lose the tiffany-blue box. We don't need jewels: Life Needs Spice, and Cinnabon used to have it.
~No earphone or earbud EVER fits in my ear. I will crash trying to get the motherfucker in my ear. <----- that was Karen and I didn't edit it just to prove I am not the only one who swears. Send your hate mail to her.
~What is with the host of Shear Genius? Why couldn't they get one who can SPEAK? I can't believe Jonathan Antin isn't borderline pissed off  by her inability to enunciate.



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salty, sweet, and YUMMY

Today We're FEELIN' GROOVY about:
~Meeting In The Ladies Room is YUMMY! There's a month-long contest starting today at The YummyMummy Club and there are 5 chances to win a copy of Meeting In The Ladies Room. Ladies Room Lady, artist Kathleen Tennant has written an article about her involvement in the book , and about being a mom, and about being a woman (and not in that order) and the answer to the contest question is in her fantastic article.
~I'm actually meeting Kathleen tomorrow!
~Trader Joe's Dark Chocolate Pretzel Bark. It's not so barky that your teeth will break and not too salty that you''ll need  a diuretic. A perfect combo of salty, sweet, and dark chocolate.
~Our cat loves to go on walks, just like a DOG! To save face, we only walk her in the back yard.


Our Bêtes Noires:
~ Men turn 75 at around age 41. What age do women turn 75?
~Old Navy's use of mannequins instead of real people in their commercials. Why would sending the message that your clothes don't fit real people be good?
~Any time I try a mascara that a magazine says is the absolute BEST, it is always the worst and smells like a Bic pen from 1970. This time it was Lash Stilleto that Real Simple said was good. I could not get the smell off my eyes fast enough and it was barely noticeable on my lashes. Even with 6 coats, the only way I knew I had mascara on was that I could smell it. 
~Both Winchell's and Krispy Kreme are are virtually gone, and Ghirardelli brownies are for a teensie 8x8 pan.  That's ONE serving.
~Even though lately my average turn around time for responding to stuff not related to work is 3 months (sorry, life change), I'd be really happy if people who make money off me would respond to me in a timely manner. And not just when they need something.