this just in...straight from the Internets

i contribute

File this under photobooth friday AND community. I was thrilled to get my act together enough* to submit my favorite photobooth to photobooth.net. Check it out here.

*it shouldn't be that hard, but you have to remember to bring a camera to the photobooth so you can take a photo of the OUTside of the booth. And then you have to remember to check what the model number of the booth is. So it's a multi-step process. PLUS you have to remember to bring three dollars from the change jar so that you can take a photo.

SPC: shine

I've had a hard time with this month. Nude, I can do. But shine? It seemed abstract, what with the directive coming from hula herself and a quote by emily dickinson*.  And then, everyone was taking it literally, and I just haven't had any shine in me lately.

I telecommuted today, though, which meant an open-faced sandwich under the broiler and lunch on the back stoop, and I glanced over and saw how luxuriously my tomatoes were shining in the half-clouded Seattle sun.  And today's shoot was born.

ps. To say that tomatoes, entrusted into my care, are actually producing fruit is nothing short of a minor miracle. I used to kill succulents.  I was a host to one christmas cactus that never bloomed in all the four years I watered it. As I drove away from Alaska, I entrusted its care to my sister,  it was twice its original size in a matter of weeks AND it blooms something like twice a year now.  So. The fact that there are at least 10 happy tomatoes growing in my very own back yard, is to admit, out loud, that I DO have some shine in me.

for more shine, go here.

* "I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. sometimes i write one, and i look at it, until it begins to shine." ~emily dickinson

and then we were 7

lucky number seven

the seven year itch

seven years ago last sunday the mister and i got married 

and oh what a swell ride it's been

to celebrate, we hosted a staycation, right here in our own town.  the first night was spent at stellar pizza, yum, which has both a photobooth and a kiddie ride airplane. holler.

notes about the photos:

• shot number one: you're never ready for the first shot. never. you always end up looking concerned, or angry, or just plain vacant. in this first shot, i'm practicing my gang sign SEVEN.    there's frankly NOT enough room in the photobooth for two adults even when their arms aren't out at a 45-degree angle trying to make gang signs in celebration of their 7th year of marriage.
  
• shot number two: I've got my seven going, but it's not in the frame.  bummer.
• shot number three: the mister takes over the seven sign.  he is sitting next to the door to the photobooth, and by DOOR, i mean OPEN SPACE, so there's room to jut his elbow out and show his sign.
• shot number four: now i'm trying to get my mouth around the top of the seven (thumb portion) without actually doing it. it's supposed to be a trick of the eye.  supposed to be, being the operative words, here.

tinyfootprint hat is an EtsyRAIN favorite!

Check it out! Team estyrain, the Seattle street team, has posted a tf hat to their favorite list!

Thanks for the props, estyrain!

Rainier Valley Post

Big ups to Rainier Valley Post for publishing my letter to the editor, which is a synopsis of this posting. Check it out here.

Also, thanks to the PI for great coverage here.

I think you need to send a note

New to tiny footprint...

Eco-friendly note cards!

If you've been playing along at home, you'll know that I fancy myself a graphic designer* by day. This means lots of things, including a) I get to play for a living (sometimes**), b) I have a keen eye for color (??), and c) I get books and books full of paper samples.

I LOVE paper. LOVE it. I like to touch it and smell it and rub it between my forefinger and thumb so I can feel the texture. And cutting and gluing are some of my favorite activities. Add a stack of the most beautiful colorway magazines Joe found in the back of a drawer at his office, and you have luxurious note card sets--hand cut and glued envelopes paired with paper sample flat note cards each adorned with hand cut and glued accessories.

It's time to clean out the paper sample books. And that means...upcycled note cards in themed packs. Oh yes. Check them out here.

*okay, if you want me to be really honest, I'm in communications. This involves, YES, some graphic design work. But it also involves PR, marketing, newsletter writing, and long walks on the beach.

**cuz just between me and you, PR work is NOT what I'd call "play"

MID YEAR UPDATE: the list

I took the list off the wall a few nights ago and put a bunch of checkmarks next to stuff that I've completed. Huzzah!

1. hit up at least three photo booths in seattle
We've been to two. The Cha Cha and the very sad Seattle Center arcade area. One to go.

2. get gavron designs up and running
Done! See?

3. start saving money in an less accessible fund
Done! I'm all hooked up with an orange account.

4. take a letter press class here
not done. boo.

5. create a business plan with a fee structure for the freelance graphic design work I do
sort of. i increased my rates, does that count? no? Okay, i'll get on this one.

6. make things out of repurposed thrift-store sweaters (felting!)
hmm. nope.

7. see at least four live music shows with joe
DONE. I orginally posted this one as done here. But I had gotten ahead of myself, because I wasn't actually done, only planned to be done. But now, I'm done. PRE-Bumbershoot, I'll have you know. I volunteered at the KEXP BBQ and saw The Saturday Nights, Common Market, The Dandy Warhols, Helio Sequence, and Joseph Arthur and the Lonely Astronauts. Whew.




Also, I'm in this photo. Trust me. And I'm getting DRENCHED watching my favoritist band Common Market. This was the only set during which the sky released copious amounts of water, but hey, I'm a true fan, right?

8. hold my nephew
nope. and maybe not going to happen due to a lack of funds. double boo.

9. start an etsy store selling cool crafty stuff (more on this soon!)
done! now I have two! can you believe that? see here and here (in case you didn't get the memo.)

10. read 10 fascinating books
DONE...check me out on shelfari. Since my birthday, I've read 11 fascinating books. AND, dear reader, I'm STILL READING.

11. learn to bake pastry that rocks
working on it! see here.

12. get my little pooch healthy
getting there. another appointment, another drug. she's eating again, which helps, becuase we've resorted to calling her Skeletor.

13. go on another road trip
jeez. have you seen the price of gas?

14. order moo minicards
done! gavron designs moo cards are in the mail!

15. develop that film from the oktomat...and the leica elise let us borrow...and the shots taken with joe's grandfather's camera
working on it. film development is harder than it seems. you have to a) remember to develop the film, and b) have something on the film to develop. we dropped off three rolls at costco a few weeks ago only to have them tell us that the film was all blank. one of these cameras is not working. but which one? stay tuned...

16. foster friendship and community
working on it. trust me.

17. sew something i actually might want to wear
not so much.

18. take a cake decorating class
not this one either.

19. create a photobook
done! i made a sweet photobook of the garden gnome's travels over christmas for lily's fourth birthday. it was awesome. trust me.

20. convince my boss that i should get paid to blog
haven't done this yet. not sure what my angle will be.

21. plant basil and thyme and cilantro
basil: check (i have three of them. don't ask.)
thyme: check
cilantro: don't check. I opted for sage instead. and a tomato plant. we all make choices.

22. hire my cousin to paint my tiny bathroom (okay...he doesn't know about this yet. but he will soon)
not so much yet. a) i'm broke. b) my cousin isn't in seattle for more than 9 hours at a time. that makes things tricky, thus far.

23. learn to use my camera's three thousand functions
hmm. nope.

24. support the expansion and total garden domination of my hens and chicks
YES! I planted new hens and chicks (one of which is blooming so tall and heavily that it's uprooting itself--see first photo of this posting) AND a small hen and chick garden in a flat planter all their own.


25. scan my photobooth strips now that we have a scanner!
I have done some. I need to do more.

26. go camping by the oyster farm and eat oysters over the campfire (can't remember what the park is named...nor the oyster farm but Joe will know)
didn't go to the one i was thinking of when i originally typed this, but DID go to a camp ground on a beach near an oyster farm and all the rest. I'm going to call this one done.

(see? oysters on the campfire!?!?!)

27. volunteer at kexp
done! see BBQ notes, above (re: live shows and getting drenched.) volunteering is cool. you get free admission, meet cool people, get a cow-spotted wristband, and get free pizza in a secret room. there's nothing bad about that!

28. see at least two parades
saw the solstice day parade. need one more.
29. go hiking someplace new with the dawgs and the neighbors
well, we tried. okay, not with the neighbors, but joe and i went someplace new with the dawgs, and that's when we realized that roxy is really really sick. cuz we took her off her leash and she couldn't keep up with us. boo. will try again now that she's feeling better.

30. print this puppy out and read it every day
doing.

File this one under community

So. I live in the ghetto. There. I said it. And I like the ghetto.

I like the mix of wealthy people who live one block east of me and thus have a Lake Washington view or a waterfront home combined with the people who live on my street and west of me who are a mix of: young people like myself who couldn't afford housing elsewhere in the city, Eritrean and Ethiopian immigrants, Vietnamese people, generalized working class people (read: black because white working class people for some reason appear to prefer the first ring suburbs), middle class people (read: black and white), and a whole bunch of people who practice Orthodox Judaism and walk on shabbat to one of three temples in my neighborhood. It's loud. It's ecclectic. It's diverse (in the real sense of the word--ethnically, religiously, socio-economically, etc.) and it's true (in my mind) CITY living.

It's also gentrifying. And that's either good (if you're me and you're worried about property values and/or crime) or bad (if you're me and worried about your local Eritrean grocery store getting bought out by some stupid chain who won't sell injera).

I wish that we could all stop talking about gentrification and insisting that it means bulldozing the local Ethiopian restaurant in order to build condos with chi chi boutiques underneath.

What if young, hip, socially conscious (white) people (like me) could move into struggling neighborhoods and help be the change that makes them safe, awesome neighborhoods? What if we clean up the garbage on the streets and call the cops when we hear gun shots instead of just ignoring it like everyone has been doing for years?

I'm not saying I have all the answers, nor that my neighborhood wants me here. But here I am. And behind me are a lot more of me--young hip people who want to live in the city but have been priced out of the more "middle class" (read: white) areas. And frankly, we don't want to live in the white areas anyway--no offense to Ballard and West Seattle, but we're looking to be near to and benefit from the International District and downtown and the lake and the up and coming light rail.

Ahh, the light rail. Opening at the end of 2009, the light rail guarentees the gentrification of my neighborhood. It has nothing to do with me...but I did buy in my neighborhood knowing that i would have access to its shiny rails come 2010.

Blah blah blah. This is beside the point. (tangent, anyone?)

The point is this: someone decided to do something about it. About children being forced to stay inside because our neighborhood isn't safe to play in. About crime on the corner (crack, prostitution, fist fights, gun shots, petty theft and vandalism). This someone's name is CARMEN.

Meet Carmen. She's latina; her mom can COOK; she cares about our community. She grew up here. She was one of the kids on the inside, peeking out between the mini-blinds at the other kids stuck inside.

So, Carmen opened a restaurant called Alcatraz (this means pelican, by the way) on the corner of Othello and Rainier. Carmen's contribution to the community is a family-friendly place to meet and share community. Carmen also waters the flowers in the planters maintained by ROSA, the neighborhood association; she's befriended the local beat cops who have idenitfied a HUGE reduction in crime on that corner since she moved in; AND she's managed to get her landlord to remove the corner pay phone that helps to contribute to area crime (prostitution, drug deals, etc.) that ROSA and my HOA have been trying to get removed for some time now.

So, since Carmen moved into this corner, she's lowered crime, added a place for us to meet our neighbors, and fed us some really amazing mole. The homemade tortillas are spot on. The mole is yummy. The chips are crisp and warm. The taquitos make me swoon. AND this is exactly the type of business our communities need: more family-owned, community-grounded, children-friendly eateries.

SO GO EAT THERE.

[And, if you have $300,000 laying around that you'd like to invest in a small, community-minded business, Carmen could use it to buy out her landlord who is threatening to sell the land to an auto body shop. Boo. But, if you're like me, and you don't have an extra $300k laying around, just go eat at Alcatraz. Try the mole with homemade tortillas. And tell her that I sent you.]

The best meme of all

Loving this mosaic exercise...thanks to Second Sam for posting it!
MOSAIC INSTRUCTIONS
1. Type your answer to each question below, into Flickr Search
2. Using only the first page of results, pick one image.
3. Copy & paste each of the URLs for the images into Big Huge Lab’s Mosaic Maker to create a mosaic of the picture answers.

THE QUESTIONS (and my answers)
1. What is your first name? Heather
2. What is your favorite food? Cupcakes
3. What school did you go to? Osseo Senior High
4. What is your favourite color? Green
5. Who is your latest celebrity crush? Sabzi
6. What is your favorite drink? Coffee
7. What is your dream vacation destination? Morocco
8. What is your favorite dessert? Cupcakes
9. What do you want to be when you grow up? Free
10. What do you love most in life? Surprise
11. What is one word that describes you now? Fun
12. What is your Flickr/Blog name? Dreambird

[I had a heck of a time with the mosaic maker, though, and am unable to credit the delicious photos included. Sorry ya'll!]