Dear Weblog,

Here are things I love:

1. puppy paws, dog paws, cat paws
2. white wine
3. shaved legs on flannel sheets
4. honeycrisp apples
5. purring
6. answering the phone when the caller says "hey, gorgeous"
7. burning candles
8. the skyline of my town
9. Tres Chicas
10. finding something I thought I had forgotten
11. seat warmers

it's good to be home . . .

because I'm obsessed:

Buff Beauty
Champney's Pink Cluster
Cramoisi Superieur for front hedge
Hansa Rugosa
Lady Hillingdon

Weekend highlights:

1. drank a milkshake with a hot boy

2. made horrible waffles verifying that Thad and I are the worst cooks in the world and should not be allowed to make food together

3. planted 2 roses, 8 lillies, and transplanted what I think are about 1,000,000 irises of unknown description

4. played a prayer bowl at the "Indiana Jones Store"

5. danced for roughly 5 hours including at an unidentified after hours bar in the City

6. ate ginger altoids which actually make your mouth feel hotter and dirtier

7. walked for days while ranging from slightly to very hung over and back again to see the installation at the Adobe bookstore, totally worth it! (f0rgot my camera, seriously)

8. embarked on a crochet project, remember when I used to be crafty?

Apparently I have won the Lead Belly of 2004 award! I am so honored, but really it was nothing.

Hey, like my new color scheme? If you scroll down (or click here) you can see that my new background matches my bathrobe exactly. Trippy, huh?

Want to know who the 40 best bands in America are right now? Information Leafblower has compiled a list according to a bunch of cool music webloggers. Here's the list my favorite music weblogger, Largehearted Boy, submitted.

Oh Love!

I just thought of the perfect place to put aVeilchenblau rambler rose! In front of the house I have one of those ugly green pencil looking shrubs (I have so many icky shrubberies I don't know how I will ever get rid of them all) . My idea is to train the rambler as a pillar around the tall skinny green shrubbery? What do you think? should work, right? Very nearby I am putting a yellow carolina jasmine vine on another undesirable shrubbery. It looks so beautiful in my mind's eye, I hope it will be beautiful in real life.

p.s. fall evenings are the best: fog, apple crisp, hot cocoa, slippers, a mass of yellow leaves on the tree out front and the driveway thick with orange ones.

Why haven't I had a fire yet this year?

I am lucky enough to have professional (i.e. motherly) people who cook Thanksgiving and invite me to eat it. If you are not so fortunate Bookslut has started a food magazine review and this month all of the magazines are about cooking Thanksgiving dinner. Check it out if you want to know which one could really help you.

Plus: Jessa is very funny and insightful, and she used to work at Planned Parenthood, my favorite!

My favorite roses from Antique Rose Emporium (that I don't already have):

Trier
Cherokee Rose
Alberic Barbier for white garden
Jacote
Veilchenblau blue rose
Lady Waterlow
Applejack
Max Graff pink and yellow ground cover

I haven't been able to figure out the differences between the types of roses yet, but don't Bourbon roses sound so enchantingly gothic?

One thing I love about the www is that the dorkier (i.e. smart, fun, silly, unpretentious, talented, interesting) you are, the more attention you get. Conversely, the cooler you are in the high school sense, the lamer you seem. Enter Oh My God It Burns and their recent experimentation filtering cheap vodka through a Brita filter. 6 times!!! This is definitely something my friends and I would have tried but we would've been drunk as skunks by the first filtratation and would never have had the discipline for the scientific method. Bravo, gentlemen.

link via not martha

p.s. someone has documented the occasion and I am so jealous, but I can't look yet. I'm going this weekend!

woo hoo! My lillies have shipped and should be here Friday! I am very broke now but everything I have ordered in the past few weeks should pretty much all arrive this week. Lucky me! One thing is an antique climbing rose called Reve d'Or for the front of the house by the front door. Here's what Antique Rose Emporium has to say about it:

Reve d’Or
Noisette
1869
French for "dream of gold", this lovely, graceful climber lives up to its name with ease. Nearly thornless it is useful in close quarters. It is especially recommended for use on porch pillars, where the pendulous, globular flowers can be seen and appreciated more easily. Once trained up and established ‘Rêve d’Or’ will display for its admirers a wealth of large, loosely double, buff yellow roses with a rich Noisette perfume. It blooms all season, but we enjoy its fall performance best.

Garden dork is in full effect, Boyeee!

In other news, I saw the Megan Slankard Band on the weekend. Her voice is beautiful and sort of reminded me of both Ani DiFranco and Jewel by turns, if you can believe that. See her live if you can.

p.s. two shrubberies were also removed on the weekend using only my bare hands. Well, and a shovel. And I was wearing gloves.

Even though I have a really fun weekend coming up, I kind of wish I could go see Joanna Newsom's show on Saturday in Cologne, Germany. The modern art museum in Koln behind the Cathedral is probably my favorite place in Germany, having a little euro-fever lately.

highly suggestable:

After reading this entry on Angela's Sacramento Gardening Blog about 8 foot tall Lillies, I decided I needed some too, more than anything. If I got my order in under the deadline, next year I will have these in the flower bed I'm planning near the driveway and these in the back between the pink and yellow garden and the herb garden. It may have been too late, but hopefully they will take pity on me and give me the lillies I so desperately need.

World, last night I removed my old broken kitchen faucet and replaced it with one that works. Watch out World, I can do anything!

next up: shrubberies!

Here's a belated picture from my night of indecency. I'm sitting on the hood of a car in my bathrobe with the Sacramento skyline behind me (which you can't see) and Charr is testing some of her light techniques. It was a very cool experience being outside of what's allowed and yet not evil at all. I guess I don't think nudity should be against the law.

p.s. I don't really have a mullet. Anymore.

p.p.s. In a moment of blog synchronicity, Charr put some of the actual shots up today.

All I have to say today is that my friend Kim and I are excellent at making lip balm and solid perfume and we smelled fantastic last night.

Scratch all that. Tonight I am making lip balm and we have pina colada flavoring. Also if I am very lucky I will get to drink a pina colada while I am making the little lip balms. Get your kissers ready!

Tonight I am dumped for Halo 2. But I don't care because . . . well, I will have to think of something. Oh, I know, I will hang twinkle lights and quilt. That's right, remember once upon a time when I used to be crafty? And maybe I will make apple crisp with the 27 pink lady apples I brought home from Apple Hill.

p.s. and maybe if I am very lucky my internet connection will work and I can post a photo to this blog, wouldn't that be novel!

p.p.s. now that fall is here and the light is dimmer, thinking about twinkle lights always makes me feel better. It's like hot cocoa. Oh, I can make hot cocoa tonight!

Thanks to Tashia for finding my favorite post election website so far: SorryEverybody.com

I would like to submit and will have to think of what I would like to express.

How awesome is this:

For one amazing week in November, Adobe Bookshop in San Francisco has agreed to allow its estimated 20,000 books to be reclassified by color. Shifting from red to orange to yellow to green, the books will follow the spectrum continuously, changing Adobe from a neighborhood bookshop into a magical library—but only for one week.

All I have to say about that is that I'll be there! Finding a book based on color sounds like fate to me.

via Bookslut

I don't think I got enough sleep last night. I'm starting to compose business emails in my head as follows: Dear Foo Foo Face,

The Washington Times has an article out about weblog journaling versus paper journaling (via Largehearted Boy). Here's what my friend Julie says about it, at least the kind that I do: "I finally 'get' the weblog thing. It's kind of like all the random thoughts of the day I send you and my other friends, only your friends get to choose when they want to hear them. It's brilliant!"

My favorite moment on election night: when the NPR correspondent related Obama's wife announcing her husband "and now here's my baby's daddy."

My least favorite moment on election night: pretty much everything else.

"The bible-banging poor vote for the bible-banging rich man who has done nothing to improve their lives over the past four years. In fact, he's done many things to make their lives worse. And now THEY are the ones making MY life worse. Thanks. Thanks a fucking lot." -girlreaction

I know they're just people and they deserve my compassion but why do they have to be so very very stupid?

I was wondering how we would get through. Bookslut posted an Election Month Survival Guide. Check it out in your time of need.

I don't suppose it's possible that Kerry will win by such a large margin as to make reality-phobic Bush concede? We can always hope! Like all those Boston folks keep saying: Believe!

Julie helped me to figure out what I was for Halloween:
I think you were the daughter of a casino owner in Las Vegas, named Eliza. You left school at 15 to become a show girl, but are really an innocent at heart.

Unrelated news: countdown to the OC in T minus two days.

I've owned my house for exactly one year today! I wish I had a photo to post, but I've never taken one, will have to remedy now that we are entering the year of curb appeal for my home (currently a bit/very low in that area so maybe no photo is for the best). Warning: the following lists will only be interesting to me.

1st year changes, chronologically:

1. painted kitchen cabinets and counter
2. painted living areas
3. gussied up light switch plates
4. tiled bathroom, replaced toilet (thanks Paul!)
5. put checkerboard linoleum in kitchen
6. took out three shrubberies
7. tiled back porch
8. planned garden, installation of many key features
9. built new fence for back of backyard (thanks Chris!)
10. painted and installed new light fixture in bathroom

projected 2nd year changes:

1. replant lawn
2. rejuvenate front planter
3. tile kitchen counter and install new sink
4. bust out kitchen and install peninsula cooking station
5. reframe inside doorways between living areas for new traffic pattern
6. redo gutters to match trim and not leak

Kim posted a few pictures from our joint Halloween on her website 1, 2, 3. We had a wonderful time! (just don't ask me what I was supposed to be)

Tomorrow's the big day and so far I know how I'm voting on exactly one question (President). Let's just say I have a lot of reading to do tonight!