This year there were lots of great Christmas goodies! Everybody got cool things this year (I mean, we usually do, but this year seemed extra cool). Brandon got clothes he wanted (from me, but also the Sock Santa presented him with a berzillion pairs of tube socks), and a food processor and the best cook book ever: Anyone Can Cook (its not affiliated with the book of the same name as in Ratatouille, but we like to pronounce it with a french accent). We’ve already made two things from it, both good, and perhaps I will be doing a bit less of the dinner cooking, which will be great, cause I know how to make maybe 10 things.
Brandon painted my brother Peter a portrait of Marcus and Bailey, the family dogs. Peter is our computer guy, hes in charge of making our computers faster (and bought us a processor for Christmas to make our desktop like 1.7 times faster than it is now), and loans Brandon games. The painting is shown below, you have no idea how hard it was to get those dogs to sit on that pile of skulls with helmets on! And Marcus kept dropping the flag…
For Christmas I got the aforementioned processor, a Powell’s gift certificate (yay), a Norstrom gc (double yay, got an adorable red plaid girly wool coat I’d been coveting with it), Sock Monkey PJ’s (red and comfy), and this really, really cute ice cream painting by a local artist named Ryan Dobrowski. Brandon saw it at a show on first Thursday and thought I’d like it. Yay for art for presents!
The day after Christmas we decided to go to IKEA and get some actual, workable shelving for Brandon’s drawing studio at home. He’s not really allowed to have oil paints at home (by me, he gets them on everything) so he draws or paints in watercolors on his easel at home. I had bought him a small shelf a while ago, but it never really worked. All his stuff was piled up and he could never find anything. So whilst trolling the IKEA catalog I came across the TROFAST system in the kids section. Its basically a tall shelf like thing with no shelves, but little notches where the edges of the plastic bins fit. We got a couple different sizes of bins for all his stuff and now he can find everything. And it looks good, which makes me happy.
We also put up a couple lights (also IKEA, is there anything they don’t make?) so he can see while drawing too.
So its kinda like a little Christmas present to ourselves. He got a working studio (the best drawing studio hes ever had, he says) and I got a nice looking corner for the living room (previously I pretended that corner didn’t exist). And now I can find the colored pencils or pastels when I want use them…
Well, back to getting ready for the trade shows. The first one is next Saturday. I’m feeling pretty good about where I’m at, but there are still a million little details to work out. I finished the sewing yesterday (the table coverings) and am happy with how they turned out. I had to hold back a bit on the ball fringe , which is hard for me. but I think I managed to not make it look like Gypsy’s are camping there!
And if I forget to say it, Happy New Year everybody!
