Be well and do good work.

One thing I love about my job is that I get to experiment with new design ideas!  Sometimes its stressful, but mostly its just a great chance to be creative and improve my skills.  Here's one I made recently, using one of the great textures I mentioned in a previous post!

Another thing I love about my job is the quality of speakers we bring to campus.  This is a pretty good lineup!

Oh WOW.

Most, if not all of my few dear readers may not care about this at all, but I  just stumbled upon Lost and Taken, a wonderful blog that gives away tons of images of TEXTURES.  As I continue to take tentative steps into the design world, I find myself often pulled to use cool textures as backgrounds.  I have taken pictures of wrinkled brown paper, masking tape, bark, and so on to get these backgrounds, and now this website can supply tons more options for FREE DOWNLOAD!  So yea, I am pumped.  Maybe you don't do design, but you might want to choose one of these for your screen background or something. ;)

Walks are Good.

A few weeks ago a few friends and I took a nice walk in the Oakland Mountanview Cemetery--it was so beautiful!  You might think its weird to walk about a cemetery, but this place is gorgeous.  There are tons of old and ornate headstones, and the views across the bay to San Francisco are great.  Here are some closeups I snapped.

Lovely, lovely

I've been searching for stock photos and illustrations about herbs for a design project I'm doing class, and I found this gorgeous thing.  I love the intricacy and yet the simplicity of just white and green. 

It reminds me how much I also love block prints! 

Let there be Legs

Most mornings, I'm tired and cold and just throw on my tried and true dress pants and a shirt for work.  But I've got lots of pretty little dresses and skirts that are hardly worn in the winter!  And I live in CALIFORNIA, where the winter is mild, so what am I thinking?!?  I've challenged myself to wear a skirt at least once a week.  If only I had this pretty thing from Little Ocean Clothing on Etsy to start off with...

 

Or this one on OSweetJoy...

Front Porch

A couple of shots from a lovely, sunshine-y Sunday afternoon on our front porch.  Its an underutilized part of our wonderful house, so it was fun to sit outside and read with my housemates for a bit!  

Body of Light

I'm lucky.  I work at a really cool place where we have art exhibits every semester!  We have just installed a new show by Jean-Paul Bourdier, a professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley.  His work is truly amazing.  If you are in the Bay Area, come to the opening next Thursday!  If not, enjoy these, some of my personal favorites from the exhibit.  I think it would be rad to a picture of myself like this...but could I be bold enough to go into the desert with my naked body completely painted?!?

 

 

I'll Meet You There

 At the gracious invitation of my friend Catherine, I went to a piano concert by Sarah Cahill last weekend at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.  Hosted by the American Friends Service Committee, the whole night was about peace rather than war.  A number of the songs incorporated text, with Sarah speaking or doing vocal percussion.  One of them used a quote from Rumi, and it keeps running through my head this week:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. 

I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about,
ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make sense."

What a wonderful way to talk about peace.  I love the idea of my soul laying down in the grass, of many souls laying in the grass and no longer being able to distinguish between "each other"....

New Sounds

This week I've been listening to Charlott'e Gainsbourg's new cd, IRM, nonstop! 

I love some of the unique sounds she's got going on, and its the kind of thing 
that keeps me going when I am doing design homework. 

Check out one of my faves