I got my new craft apron from dirty laundry today (check out the etsy shop). I loaded it up with my scrapbook tools and Zach took a few pictures of me wearing it. I looooove it!

And now I’m off to do some scrapping!

Another list of things I’m digging:

• Items decorated with cherries – if you’ve known me for any length of time you’ll know that this isn’t anything new, but I’ve seen a couple of things lately that have rekindled my love of cherries. Allison’s curtains are rocking my world. And look at this beauty craft apron I found on Etsy.com! I’m trying to figure out a justification for buying it.
• Freezer cooking — I’ve been doing this in fits and starts for a while now. I assemble a bunch of ingredients for different meals and freeze them all at once for us to have later. Then the night before I want to cook something, I pull it out of the freezer and by the time I’m home from work it’s all thawed and ready to cook. My favorite source of recipes for this is Saving Dinner but there are a bunch of sites on the web with free recipes too.
• Little boys who willingly brush their teeth — they’re hard to come by around here, but sometimes we luck out.
• Spam filters — Zach set me up with a new spam filter and now the amount of spam I get has gone from about 150 messages a day to 1 or 2. (If you send me an email and I don’t respond, let me know.)
• Lots of pretty new paper and photos to play with — I just got a Shutterfly order of 100+ new photos today and I’ve been picking up new paper here and there too. It’s about time for some scrapbooking, I think.

I went to Brushstrokes tonight with some women I work with. Brushstrokes is one of those places where you pick out a piece of unglazed pottery and then paint it. I painted a bowl blue and put darker blue swirls all over it. I’ll be sure to post some pictures when I get it back next week. It was great to sit around chatting with the ladies while working on a crafty project. Usually when I’m doing my creative activities I’m all alone and I forgot how fun it can be to see what everyone else is doing and get ideas from them.

After our painting adventure, Cris, Ellen, Asia and I hit T-Rex BBQ for some ribs and cornbread. These are the same people who I sometimes play games with at lunch-time. For a long time we played Blockus, but lately we’ve been playing a lot of Boggle and Rummikube. We’re thinking about doing a standing dinner night every month now, and I hope we get it together to make that happen.

Did you get a haircut? No, I got ‘em all cut!

I never get sick of that joke, but I bet Zach does.

So I got my first haircut in something like 3 years today. Yeah, I know. Somehow I turned into one of those crazy no-haircut ladies like Crystal Gale. I didn’t mean too, I swear — I’m just lazy. I’ve been meaning to get my hair cut for a long time now, but I was never sure where to go and I was all busy and whatnot. I also was scarred by some pretty terrible haircuts in junior high and one really bad one in my early 20’s, and I fear the stylist (see this post).

So for Mother’s Day, Zach got me a gift certificate to the fancy hair salon Erin goes to, Artbeat. Her stylist, Tracy, is awesome! I went in with a really terrible idea of what I wanted. This is what I told her:

“Um, I want it shorter. Like cut the damaged parts off for sure and then…I guess I could go shorter than that. Or not. We could leave it longer too. And I want it to look a little more grown-up too. But not too boring. I don’t know…what do you think?”

What are the chances that someone could give me a hair cut I liked with that little information? Like 1 in 497? But she did! I tell you Internet — she is awesome.

Here is my before picture. I’m serious and my hair is long:

And here is my new haircut! Both my hair and I are sassy as all get out.

It won’t this straight usually because she blew it dry so we’ll have to see what it looks like tomorrow when it curls up. Also, you can’t really see it because of the lighting in this picture, but I got highlights too.

So I am in San Jose. I’m here for work for a week and I’m staying in a hotel. That means not seeing my guys for a bunch of nights in a row. We’re talking on the phone of course, but it’s just not the same. I was doing OK until tonight and then I started getting lonesome for them. I could tell it was getting bad when I started telling my co-workers Wyatt stories non-stop over our sushi dinner tonight. Lucky for me, they are good natured fellas with kids of their own so they indulged me.

I’m here to take a class on the new content management system (CMS) Nolo just purchased for our redesign. The class has been OK so far. We had a few technical difficulties yesterday and now we’re scrambling a bit to catch up so class is starting a half hour early tomorrow.

I’m eating too much junk food. One of the strategies people employ to keep you alert in technical training environments is to give you unlimited access to coffee, candy, cookies, chips and soda. I don’t even want that stuff half the time, but it’s hard to resist when I’m tired and we’re heading into the seventh hour of CMS configuration exercises.

Um…what else? I bought some pretty paper yesterday. Check these out:

Night Cream Flowers
White Blue Red Flowers
Polka Dots Origami

The prettiest sheet of flat paper I bought was this flowery, swirly print with gold shimmery stuff on it, but I couldn’t find it on the Paper Source web site which is really too bad because I swear, even if you’re usually indifferent to paper you would fall down on your knees and worship this particular piece of paper if you saw it.

Hey, look at me! I just finished a crossword puzzle. Of course, I had access to an answer key when I got stuck, but I did get most of it on my own. Maybe I’m not as dumb as I thought….