I'm in love...with an ottoman.

This is what I had originally.  For the past three years.

In its place, a new seating area!  With an adorable ottoman.

The view outside my window the other day after a weekend of raining.

Yes, it is true: I am in love.  With a beautiful piece of furniture.  No, not a Turk.  I went to pick it up today from the FedEx office.  Ah.  It's been kind of an adventure to find it and buy it so I'm super psyched to now be able to write this post with my feet firmly propped up by the cutest thing on four legs.  Cuteness!  I feel like my home is complete now too, because I always bemoaned that my apartment did not have room to accommodate guests.  Now that I sold my tv and replaced it with a chair I feel like I have the sitting area I always wanted.  I'm going to host a gathering of friends starting a support group this Sunday so I'll get to try it all out.  Wee!  I feel so grown up.

Go Oakland!

Marimba band!

Si te puedes!

Walking is ok too.

Last weekend was the Oakland Marathon, the first in 25 years.  It's route ran by window, giving me a nice view.  I tried to host a party and only had one friend show up, but it was lovely.  It made me so excited to see the people out and running.  Even though I am not a runner myself, it felt like all of Oakland was doing something together in a way that is kind of rare for Oakland.  It was lovely to look for people I know and cheer on the runners and, even later, walkers.  It was also a neat thing to wake up to the sound of a marimba band outside my window.  Now that is my kind of Sunday.

mostly martha

Before

After

Funky fresh!

These are pics of some lamp shades I made recently.  They don't really capture the hours I spent collecting the bottles for the plastic, or my tracing the patterns and cutting them out, and then the time it took to figure out how to assemble the shapes, and then the constant reassembling to get the right combination of light filtration.  I got a huge bunch of the white jugs from discarded water jugs collected from the water stations for the Oakland Marathon.  The orange is from an orange juice jug and the blue plastic from an easter bin.  At first the white pieces alone were not opaque enough and the bulbs were glaring.  Then the color pieces were too dark.  So it was a bit of experimentation to get the right combination.  Ah, creative reuse is a lot of work, but I like what came out.