Steampunk "Thank-You" present

In anticipation of my trip to Italy, I've made some handmade "thanks for having us" gifts for my hosts. One is a sour-apple green scarf for the signora, and the other is a steampunk treasure box for the signore.

Here's the treasure chest:


In addition to be-gearing and be-jewelling the lid, and fitting the box with one of my tiny, fully functional brass padlocks...



I permanently installed an old pocketwatch and lid chain! I'm pretty excited about how it turned out... the pocket watch, aside from giving this the real steampunk feel, also helps the box to remain upright when open. The gears on the lid make it a bit top-heavy else!

Now if I can just decide what clothes to pack....

Next week: Marcheline Hits the Road

Don't know if you recall the story I told a while back about my searching for and actually finding a long lost friend of my mother's... but in any case, he has invited us to visit his family in Italy, and we are going!

I've never been to Italy before, so this will be pretty darn exciting. My only regret, and a big one, is that Bear can't go with us. He's so new at his job that he has no vacation days to take yet, and so he will be staying home keeping the kitties company. So this will be a "mother/daughter" trip, and we're leaving all the planning to our host. We are staying at his house, and I imagine all the extended family will be coming over and we will be brushing up on our Italian in a big way!

Mamma mia! This is where I will be next week!

Marcheline's Kitchen Dreams

I'm leaning towards a lightly-retro themed kitchen... something sunny and cheerful. I'm thinking about lemon yellow walls, black counter tops, bright white cabinets with glass pulls, and I'm still pondering over flooring possibilities. The photo above is one of the "Rate My Space" HGTV website remodels. If this was mine, the backsplash area would be yellow. I adore the clock.


This is the refrigerator I am lusting after. The "Big Chill" - and it would fit beautifully in my kitchen! This will involve much overtime and much patience to achieve.



More yellow, black, and white loveliness. Not crazy about yellow on the cabinetry, but I love the interplay of these colors. Instead of black and white wallpaper, I'm thinking about black and white curtains on the kitchen window.


The fun in decorating is finding accent pieces that pop. I'd like to find a bright yellow pitcher to hold my wooden spoons and utensils.



A picture of an actual retro kitchen when it wasn't retro! Just looking at the interplay of colors, seeing what could still work today.

More appliance silliness!

Another possibility - yellow and green. Pretty here, but probably not for me as I've already got black appliances and am planning on that big black Big Chill... I think the black yellow and white will be great in our space.

Great thing about dreaming, it doesn't cost a thing!

And the "OMG Artist of the Year" Award goes to....

***

Heather Jansch - for her driftwood horses.

CLICK HERE
to see more of her art

CLICK HERE
for the artist's home page

Marcheline's Movie Review - And A Continued Haunting

Hey, we went to see "9" last night (on 09/09/09) and the movie was FANTASTIC. The graphics were astonishing, the characters were great, and the thing I liked most about it was the thing the critics liked least about it: It doesn't spell everything out for you like you were stupid. You actually have to watch closely, pay attention to the clues and signs, just like the characters, in order to figure out the whole story. It's not a kid's movie, it's not a Disney flick, it's a post-apocalyptic story. In a world where you pay attention and figure it out, or die a gruesome death inflicted by some horrible machine with a dead cat's skull. There now, that got your attention, didn't it?



That being said, I think my old "haunting" is coming back full force.

For some years now - what, fifteen? twenty? I have been haunted by the song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." It literally follows me around. I have heard it in restaurants, elevators, coming out of windows while I was walking on the street. I've heard it in bathrooms, in department stores, and in other people's houses.

But it's not just that. It's not like I just keep hearing the Judy Garland version. No, it's weirder than that. It follows me in different versions - I've heard it in jazz version, folk version, rock and roll version, orchestrated version, electronica version, steel drums version... any version you can imagine, I've heard this song, following me, following me, following me everywhere I go.

And last night? The movie? 9? You guessed it. The stitchpunk characters crank up an old victrola and slap an LP down, and out comes Judy Garland this time, singing THAT SONG. Bear and I looked at each other and laughed... like, ho ho - there it is again.

I kind of forgot about it, as I always try to do, because it freaks me out a little if I think about how often that song shows up in my life. I laughed it off and forgot about it.

Then, tonight, Bear took out some videos he'd brought home from the library. There was "Valkyrie", starring Tom Cruise; "Australia", starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman; "Elegy", starring Ben Kingsley; some Asian film that I can't remember the name of, and one other I can't recall at the moment. As usual, we spread them out on the table to decide which one to watch tonight.

We picked "Australia".

Not twenty minutes into the movie, Nicole Kidman's character is trying to cheer up a small Aboriginal boy whose mother has just died. She decides to tell him a story, and she picks up a newspaper off the ground and sees an advertisement for "The Wizard of Oz". The child asks her to sing him a song.

I don't really have to say anything more, do I?

And not only does Nicole Kidman butcher the song completely, but later in the movie we get to hear Judy Garland sing it as the boy watches his first motion picture, and even later on in the movie we get to hear THAT SONG played on a harmonica and harmonized by a choir of Aboriginal boys.

That's three new versions of that song IN ONE NIGHT, plus the old Judy standard.

I keep wondering... why??? Why????? Why??????????

Starting again at the bottom

Last night was a particularly depressing and demoralizing shift at work. I was made aware of a mistake I made in handling a flight, which I own completely. But it was insinuated that I made the mistake because I was distracted or too lazy to pay attention to what I was doing. This was not the case. It was an honest mistake - as in, when I did what I did, I had complete faith that I was doing the right thing. I was actually wrong, but now that I know what I did wrong, I can just do it right next time. It was not a situation where I said, "Hey, I don't really feel like doing this the right way, I'll just slack off and do it the wrong way".

This little tete-a-tete happened with the training supervisor during the first five minutes of my shift, leaving me the rest of the whole, long, interminable night praying for midnight to come so I could get the hell out of dodge. The shift supervisor that reported me to management is one of the biggest gossips in the place, so I'm pretty sure everyone on the floor was getting the dirt on me while I was in "the fishtank" getting the bad news. The whole shift, I felt like a flea under a microscope.

Happily, I am off today. When I woke up, I thought it might be good for my body and soul to start doing yoga again. Since our old television died and we had to revamp our whole entertainment system, we no longer have a vhs player hooked up. Of course, the yoga workout I used to do all the time is on vhs. I only have two yoga dvds - one has three short sessions that focus on specific areas of the body (lower body, abs, upper body). The other is a 75 minute session that I'd never tried before. Feeling ambitious, I unrolled my yoga mat and popped in the long session dvd.

Within three minutes, I found out that I am starting at the very bottom of the fitness mountain again. My flexibility has gone completely out the window, and the strength in my arms and wrists, combined with my over-weight, made me unable to hold myself up in the plank position and upward and downward facing dog positions for more than a few seconds.

This was not the moral uplift that I had hoped for, but it has shown me where I am and where I need to be. Flexibility comes back fairly quickly as long as you stretch every day, and since I was so flexible in my youth that I was nicknamed "Gumby" in phys-ed, my muscles have the memory of what it's like to stretch. They will respond, as long as I am diligent.

The arm strength and weight issues are going to be harder to achieve. But if Babar can do it, then I suppose so can I.

Tomorrow: 09/09/09 .... NINE IS COMING!

I'm very excited to see the new movie, "9", coming out tomorrow... Tim Burton, Elijah Wood, and Jennifer Connolly, among others, are part of this project. It looks AMAZING.

CLICK HERE to see the review on IMDB!

Marcheline's reviews to follow after the big premiere!

HGTV - Inspirational in so many ways!

Lately I have been watching a lot of HGTV. As in, to the point where if Bear walks in the house and I am not perched on the edge of the sofa, leaning toward the television to see "the big reveal", he heads off to the medicine cabinet to get me something, as I am obviously ill.

Since becoming addicted, I have put up shelving in my storage room, re-arranged all the pictures hanging in my living room, bought a new chrome dish drainer and chrome goose-necked kitchen faucet, and I have been to Lowe's and Home Depot several times to get faux-paint how-to pamphlets and color charts.

So you see, it has its productive side, my addiction. But, as with most good things, there is (bum-bum-BUMMMMMMMM!!!!) a dark side. There are other, insidious things that motivate the addictions of all women between 30 and 55 to this home improvement, Do It Yourself Haven that is HGTV... and I have proof!

Vern Yip, of
"Deserving Design"

David Bromstad, of
"Color Splash"

Scott McGillivray, of
"Income Property"

Marc Bartolomeo, of
"Save My Bath"

Emmanuel Belliveau, of
"My Parents' House"

And don't tell me that they're gay, because honey, it just doesn't matter. They're fun to watch, they sometimes screw up projects just like we do, they're hysterically funny, and most of them have really tender hearts... they make over rooms for people in need, or people who have spent their lives giving to others.

I often get a tear in my eye watching them get kids involved in projects to give their parents a beautiful bedroom that they would never spend the money on for themselves, or seeing a couple that spends their lives working in non-profit charity organizations and existing on granola and a few kernels of corn get a new living room. It's so damn touching!

Very touching.... touching... sorry, got distracted there for a moment.