my san francisco home

Took a month to get everything all organized and decorated.

Another month to get the pictures up.

Just in case anyone out there still reads personal blogs, here's a peek into my teeny tiny studio in the city. It's about 250 square feet, less than half the size of my beloved home of 18 months in Palo Alto, but it's all the space I need, plus a 25-minute walk from the nephews and around the corner from great restaurants & parks, my SF surrogate parents, and all the mass transit vehicles I could ever want. Oh, and there's a huge avocado tree in the backyard. For reals.

Special credits go to: Ikea (furniture), Brady (moving incl. furniture dissembling & rebuilding), Claire (that awesome painting hanging on the wall), Blik (wall decals), Hortica (my very first houseplant), The Container Store (everything else. You should have seen me coming home on the Muni with my burden of 2 ginormous bags full of boxes, crates, drawer organizers, hanging shelves, and all manner of other, uh, containers).

Who wants to come visit? If I move my bike into the hall closet, there's totally enough floor space for my air mattress, I swear.

o canada

Hey, remember how I went to Toronto—twice—and never showed you any photos? Yeah, I was thinkin' about that.

March 2009. Clockwise from top left:

• This is not a harmonica.
• Aged copper, University of Toronto
• Freezing my butt off. + stone bird
• 764, Queen St West
• Warmer jacket, new hat, still freezing my butt off. + CN Tower
• I like numbers, U of Toronto

September 2009.

Top row, left to right:

• Fish + bike, Yonge St
• Lofts, Distillery district
• Streetcar, Eaton Centre

Second row:

• Picnic tables, Toronto Island
• Shop window, Eaton Centre
• Royal Ontario Museum

Bottom row:

• The Boiler House, Distillery district
• Shop window advertising
• Lampshade, community swap stand, Toronto Island

file under: wtf

Spotted on ebay. No mention of whether or not mini-president is included. I'm assuming yes.

ready, set... no, forget set... just go

I'm not typically a reckless person.

But lately, my hasty decisions have turned out to be really good ones.

For instance:

• moving to California without a job or much of a plan of any sort
• signing on a studio apartment practically on the spot
• buying a pretty purple bike without really knowing how to ride it yet

So I feel good about my decision—made no more than 3 weeks before the deadline—to apply for one of these.

I hear back in January. Keep your fingers crossed.

image source: wikimedia commons

wenatchee, washington.

cashmere, washington.

portland, oregon.

photonostalgic

I was going through some old photos for a couple of different projects, and along the way I came across a few that I wanted to share. Well, mostly they just triggered memories of my own, but let's pretend we were all there and reminisce together, shall we?

Holy crap I'd forgotten how amazing those mountains were. And they were right there. I mean, look at 'em. They're about ready to eat those houses. Provo, Utah, December 2007.

Those stairs. How many hundreds of times I climbed those stairs. It was like 4am when I took this picture, some night shortly before I moved out of the Granary. Provo, Utah, August 2007.

I took a few of these odd self-portraits; it was probably another of those 3 or 4 in the morning deals. In my room at G5. See those flowers? I'd had them for at least three months at this point. I always keep them until they're totally kaputt; in some way they're almost more beautiful like that. Provo, Utah, August 2007.

This is where I went to Nature Camp several summers. We camped out on that lawn, made crafts in the pavilion in the background, and canoed on the lake (that was my favorite). Lake Elkhorn, Columbia, Maryland, June 2008.

Beautiful Claire. Chicago, Illinois, October 2007.