Oddity of the Day

As many of my regular readers know, I tend to be kind of odd. One of these oddities is my fascination with dryer lint. I'm always excited to see what color it will be when the dryer is done. I don't know why, but I've liked the stuff for years. Today I managed to stumble upon a picture on Flickr where someone had collected a year's worth of lint and taken a picture of it. At least I don't save it.

Bringing Nature Indoors

My daily inspiration from Apartment Therapy. I waver back and forth on my feelings regarding painted accent walls, but this is such a nice transition from the color to the white. And despite my feelings towards actual live ginkgo trees, I love them as a design element.

(Photo Courtesy of Apartment Therapy)

Project Round-up

My Mom's birthday is right around Mother's day, so the two usually get lumped together. Don't feel too bad though, as I've got it worse (Birthday/Christmas), so it's only fair I do it back to her. So this year she requested me to put my creative powers to use and come up with a unique and handmade gift. As with anything unique and handmade by me, this means it was a week late, but more about that later.

Boyfriend is fascinated by making things he previously didn't think could be made at home - in this case, lotion. A couple of weeks ago he went on a kick where he researched up a storm on lotion-making, and decided to set up his own lotion lab in his kitchen. I think in his head he's doing a massive chemistry experiment, but that works for me. So far we have made two batches, citrus basil and grapefruit, so the first part of my Mom's present was grapefruit lotion and body creme.

My new thing is making bags, so I thought I would make my mom a bag as well. I cut it all out and was doing fine sewing away, until my bobbin ran out of thread. Now, normally it's not a huge deal to put more thread on the bobbin. But my sewing machine and I have an interesting relationship. I haven't used it terribly much since I got it for Christmas a couple of years ago, mostly because it's so time-consuming for me to sew (about twice as long as the normal person, as I feel I don't need to use patterns). I also managed to lose the foot about 3 or 4 months ago, so that put a damper on sewing. I noticed a shiny silver thing on the floor one day, picked it up and though, hmm, this looks kinda like my sewing machine foot, and put it somewhere, and didn't find it again until a week or two ago. And that was after I had already bought a replacement foot. Anyways, I digress. So the particular issue with threading the bobbin involves the fact that I have sewed a whole lot more using my Mom's sewing machine which has a key difference. In order to thread the bobbin, you have to unscrew a knob, which I could not get for the life of me. I thought I had broken it. So I had boyfriend come over the next day to try and unscrew it. He couldn't get it either. Finally, after quite a while, I had the brilliant idea to look at the owner's manual. Sure enough, you have to twist the knob the opposite direction, which is different than it is on my Mom's. So there, you only have your own sewing machine to blame for your late present, Mom. :)

Fire Bush

I have no idea what this bush is, but I'm in love.

The People You Meet In DC

It's not every day that you happen to run into Abraham Lincoln on your way to work. I'm not really sure why he was hanging out downtown, but honest Abe of the Nationals Racing Presidents was making a publicity appearance, and despite my long-time aversion to high-fives, I gave him a high-five. Who can resist a 12 foot tall former president?

(Photo courtesy of www.about.com)

Laura's Travels: Philly Edition No. 4

So I figured I would finally get around to finishing up my Philly posts, but alas I still have a few pictures at home, so this is the second-to-last post full of random pictures.

Betsy Ross' House




I personally think that the DC Chinatown Arch is nicer, but I have to admit I'm a bit biased.

Stay tuned for other miscellaneous pictures and way too many pictures of graffiti!

I'm back!

Ok kids - the public meetings and the rest of the craziness that was last week was over, and it's back to business. To answer Bromeliad's question about the type of meeting they were - They were actually just public information meetings, not to the public hearing stage yet. Fortunately those won't come until the next planning project, which I won't have anything to do with. :) And they weren't even particularly informative meetings at that - for all of three meetings with about 20 staff at each, we had about 20 public members total. Somehow a meeting telling people how we're going to add some buses isn't quite as exciting as saying we're going to toll everyone oodles of money (those public meetings were much more fun).

Random exciting thing I found out today - So a while ago I posted a photo I had taken in Seattle a few years ago of a cool drain pipe. I was looking at Apartment Therapy and found out it's part of an installation of down-spout gardens, which are part of the Growing Vine Street Project.

Yes, Mother, I Am Alive

I just thought I would drop a little note to say I really haven't gone MIA, but last week and this week are crazy hectic, so don't expect much from me. Gotta love having to go to public meetings and getting home at 11 or 12 at night every night. At some point I promise I will finish posting my Philly pictures (yes, there are more), as well as other random pics I've been taking (cool bugs, Embassy open houses, etc). Stay tuned for my reemergence into society!

Fancy Meeting You Here, Lucy

So I was trolling around in Blog land, and stumbled upon this picture on desire to inspire, from photographer Rodolphe Foucher.

It may be hard to spot immediately, but someone else has my dressmaker's form (otherwise known as Lucy)! I got Lucy at a garage sale sometime back in high school for like $1, and have loved her ever since. I just recently hit upon the idea of putting her on my nightstand, but it turns out I'm not the first.

(Top photo courtesy of Rodolphe Foucher via desire to inspire)

This Just In - It's Not Cool to Reuse Anymore

That's right kids, it's no longer good enough to just reuse something. To be really cool and trendy, you must upcycle something. I don't know about you, but I've been doing this for years, and have been perfectly content to call it what it is, reuse. Yeah, sure, you can take an old sweater from Goodwill, which someone could still wear, and make a trendy bag out of it, but I don't think you're any cooler than if you would have worn the sweater. Sorry, I just got annoyed and had to get it out. End Rant.

Food Edition: Lamp Chops

It's been way to long since I've done a food post, so here goes. A while ago, boyfriend and I made a delicious dinner of mustard-glazed pork chops, roasted red potatoes with olive oil and mint (surprising sweet), and a colorful salad. I was going to start posting recipes, but unfortunately, boyfriend doesn't actually ever use recipes, but just looks at like seven different recipes and then makes up his own. But I did make the potatoes, so here is the pseudo recipe for those:

Roasted Red Potatoes with Mint:

Wash and slice several baby red potatoes into wedges. Place them on a baking sheet and drizzle with olive oil. Shred up several mint leaves and sprinkle on top along with some salt. Bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes or until soft.

I know, it's really simple and anyone could come up with it by themselves, but it's all I have at the moment. :) I normally make them with paprika instead of the mint, but the mint really does give a unique sweet flavor to the potatoes.

Laura's Travels: Philly Edition, No. 3

Continuing on our historical search of Philadelphia, the next stop was Christ Church, which unfortunately was closed for a wedding. A guy did tell us though that the bell in the church tower was created at the same place as the Liberty Bell and is the same age, so that's pretty sweet. They've had continuous services at Christ Church for the past 314 years, which is quite the feat, when you think about it.

I really like how the window frames are painted a strawberry color. It just makes me happy for some reason.

One of the things that came up in my google search of things to do in Philly was Elfreth's Alley. I didn't really know what it was, but boyfriend's aunt knew about it, so she took us there. Apparently it's the oldest residental street in the U.S. Philly is full of the oldest of everything, so that title came to lose it's cache by the end of the day.

Tight spaces are a great place to play with my fisheye.






Another interesting factoid - apparently it was uncouth back in the day to look out your windows at what people are doing, so these little mirror gadgets allowed the genteel ladies to look out without having to show themselves.

Next up: Miscellaneous wanderings through Philly

The Father of the Navy

After a ridiculous conversation with bushwoman (that's your blog name, and there's nothing you can do about), about Commodore Barry, I decided to do some investigation into who exactly he was. Turns out he was an Irish immigrant who was instrumental in the early U.S. Navy, and did many important things back in the day. When I was reading this, the Irish part in conjunction with the name Barry rung a bell, and I remembered from my walking tour of Logan Circle that there is a statue of him like 3 blocks from my apartment, in Franklin Square.