hollywood housewife

friday links - royal wedding edition

Did you watch the Royal Wedding?  As I write this, my alarm is set.  But I'm not sure if I'll make it for the live occasion.  I do embrace the DVR technology.

Update: I stumbled out of bed at 4:30am to watch the Royal Wedding with my dad.  I'm so glad I did.  It was magical. 

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While I barely opened my computer this week, I have a few backlogged links that are worth checking out.  If you can tear yourself away from Royal Wedding coverage, that is.

What a find this blog is!  I especially like this Real + Steal post.  Do you dare me to try the Monistat Chafing Relief Gel as face primer?  (Pretty Life Anonymous)

I'm a documenter, you know?  This is for the person who really wants to document it all:  A book of all your tweets.  Twournal.  (I actually think this is clever.)

I love looking at pictures of other people's homes.  Especially when they are creative people with a pretty perspective.  (Lisa Leonard)

I like how colorful these placemats made from old billboards are, and they're cheap!

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I hope you have beautiful Spring plans.  We're headed back to California and (hopefully) further down the road to recovery.

Happy weekend, HH readers!

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rollin' with the stomach punches

This has not been the week in Oklahoma that I planned.  There were friends to see and good food to eat and family memories to be made.  Not to mention some downtime for the loads of catch-up work I have to do.

I'm working on managing expectations.

A cold, a toddler stomach virus, a mama-to-be stomach virus, and an emotional Easter has had me sidelined for a week.  Sometimes, I would argue, you need to be knocked flat.  You need a perspective check or a moment of rest or whatever.  But after month four of debilitating physical illness, one grows weary.

I'm working on managing expectations.

This morning, the sun is shining bright in my parent's backyard and there are two redbirds playing on the deck just a few feet from my chair.  I'm grateful for many things.  Not for the illness, but for the recovery. 

And for expectations. 

easter weekend

This holiday weekend, in between battling multiple degress of illness, there was a little bit of this.

And a lot of this.

Of course this.

Which led to things like this.

Fine, so there was quite a bit of this.

But I swear it wasn't my fault.  Or my husband's.  Okay, it was probably my husband's fault a little.

It was his skateboard, after all. 

But that's the only blame we're taking. 

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Pigtail and I are in Oklahoma visiting my family, but a virus and allergies seems to have grounded us both.  Thankfully, some rest and a little TLC from my mom are on the schedule. 

I hope you had a wonderful weekend!

 

good friday

Happy Easter to you and yours.  I'll be spending this weekend with family, reflecting on the holiest of days.

-HH

photo by Justin Marty

why i canceled my tabloid subscription and kicked my gossip website habit

The year was 2008.  I knew the names and dating history of every reality show star, regardless of if I had ever watched the television series that made them famous. 

I knew the celebrities fashion designer of choice, and who wore it best. 

And I was far, far, too aware of my own purse and shoe purchases. 

Two things happened simultaneously: I became disgusted at the amount of time I spent reading the weekly magazine that arrived like clockwork, and more disgusted at the quality of people said magazine was covering.  The breaking point came when I read a post on one of the most popular gossip sites (named mockingly after a famous socialite) that called out a poor girl's grandma.  Just like that, I closed the browser and I was done. 

Like any habit, I missed it a little at first.  But I was also surprised at how free it felt.  Somehow along the way I had decided reading these magazines and sites were some sort of duty, like you had to know what was going on in the celebrity world in the same way that one should know what was going on with the government. 

This, my friends, is not true.

And once I took ten steps back, I also realized how disgusting the practices are that keep these sites in business.  Paparazzi are no joke, they disrupt people's lives in much, much worse ways than the general interest requires.  I'm the first to be curious about the famous, but famous does not equal "deserves to be harassed."

(To be fair, the paparazzi question is complicated.  Many times it is a reciprocal relationship.  Let's just leave it at the fact that some are better than others.  You can easily guess which magazines and websites play it dirty and which aren't as bad.)

I have not given up all interest in the tabloid world.  Occassionally when I fly or when I have a particular interest in what's inside, I'll pick one up.  I love to look at the fashion pictures and most big news (weddings, babies, etc.) will show up on the regular news or I'll hear it through the grapevine.  But this magazine junkie now fills those hours with home and special interest articles or longform journalism & essays. 

And my self-esteem thanks me for it.

silkscreen party invitations

This post was originally published on my former blog in October of 2008, back when I didn't take quite so many detailed pictures.  But it was a fun project and I hope it serves as inspiration for Do It Yourself invitations.

After I took a silkscreen class, I was anxious to try out the method on something official.  I got my opportunity when I co-hosted a engagement party in San Diego for one of my college sorority sisters and her darling fiance.

Since this was my first independent project, I wasn't going to tackle a complicated multi-color design.  I laid out the basic information in Word, with a little help from Mac Fonts 2 for the Asian-y font for their name. I printed it out and drew a simple tree-like design around the wording using a marker and a pen.

Sticking with a single color ink means I needed to spice it up in some way.  Genevieve and James are a very modern couple and the party was planned for The Pearl, a retro hotel in San Diego.  I decided the best way to make the invitation interesting was to print on dark paper, appropriate for the season and something you don't usually see. 

I choose a deep midnight blue flat card from Paper Source called "night."  Paper Source has good quality paper and is reasonably priced.  At the screen printing supply store, the manager helped me choose a nice quality white ink.  I wanted it to appear really opaque against the blue paper.

The final preparation was to get the screen made.  In class, I learned how to burn my own silk screens using emulsion and a photo lamp, but it's time-intensive and complicated enough that a mess-up means you have to start over. 

Feeling it out with fellow artsy friends brought me to downtown Los Angeles, where a place called the Screen Depot will burn them for you for $20, and that includes the price of the screen!  Definitely worth my time.  Since my design involved a hand drawing, they charged me an extra $10 to scan it to a computer in order to darken all the blacks and turn it into a transparency.  Obviously I could have done this step at home with a scanner and transparency paper.  So now I'll know for next time.  So in total, getting the screen made cost me $30.

I set aside a full Saturday to print the invitations.  We were only mailing forty, but I wanted to give myself a healthy learning curve.  Weeks ago, in preparation for all my new projects, I arranged the garage as a work space.  The space you need for the actual printing is pretty small - I used a small desk - but you need a large area to lay the pieces out to dry. 

Silkscreen printing is so satisfying.  With one flood stroke and one print stroke, you're done!  It's so fun to see your design glistening wet ink on the paper.  Or maybe I'm just a geek like that.  I printed all forty invitations in one sitting, and it took me a little over two hours.  Your arms get tired, but overall the time flies by.  I took my time and was careful with each card.  I was using a grid to line up the cards in the right spot before printing, but one of the things that is special about silkscreening is that each print is unique and therefore might be a little "off."  On a more casual project, it would be fun to experiment with that. 

I learned quite a bit doing these invitations, mainly how I would do it differently next time.  The white ink wasn't as opaque as I was envisioning, so next time I will probably take a paper sample to the supply store and test the different brands.  I was enormously thankful for the wooden brace I bought from my teacher that holds the screen in place so nothing slips as you print.  There is nothing fancy about it, but it makes all the difference in the world. 

I got a bit sticky towards the end by not being careful enough when I was loading new ink into the screen, so next time I should have have a wet hand towel ready for quick clean-ups.  All of those things were relatively minor.  All in all, it was a great first project experience.  And the party was fun, too, as you can see.

If you're interested in silkscreen screen printing, here is a quick video tutorial that shows the process.  If you're lazy like me and have the screen made for you, you can skip all those steps and go directly from creating the design to actual printing. 

You can screen print on paper, fabric, anything.  The possibilities are endless.

every pregnancy is different, they say

Last week I announced that I am pregnant with our second child.  So now Mommy Mondays have a whole new dimension.

They say that every pregnancy is different, but until you have two you can't compare them.  Since I've spent a lot of time flat on my back the past two months, I've had lots of time to analyze and contrast my 2009 pregnancy with Pigtail and my current baby-growing state.

Things That Are The Same:

* I literally got pregnant almost the same week of the year both times.  This seems like this fact might be inconsequential but it's actually been sort of handy in terms of planning how the journey will go.  

* Vomiting in the bushes.  Two years ago, it was a McDonald's parking lot and an In-N-Out bathroom that got to see my insides.  This time (so far) it has been the Taco Bell bushes and an apartment builiding's hedges.  My puke-o-meter knows no bounds.  

* Dr. Pepper aversion.  My beloved favorite drink, one of the things I love most in this world, is just too sweet for me.  It's disconcerting when something that usually brings me comfort now brings me a sour face.  (Coke Classic has currently replaced DP as my breakfast caffeine of choice.)

Things That Are Different:

I have been a walking pregnancy cliche this time around.  Every joke about pregnant women craving weird things to eat and crying at the drop of a hat has been true in my little corner of Los Angeles.

* Medication.  After my first-trimester misery, I swore I wasn't going to do it the same way again.  As soon as I was able, this time I got a prescription for Zofran and there were several weeks when I couldn't make it through the day without it.  The side effects of Zofran are brutal in an entirely different way, though, so it's better to go without it if at all possible.

* Eating.  The first time I was pregnant, I could barely eat for months.  The only things my sensitive stomach could handle were french fries and sprite.  This time, while I've had my share of french fries, Sprite won't stay down more than two minutes.  And even when I'm nauseous I want weird things within reach: celery, for example.  And lemonade.     

* Crying.  I never really got the hormonal fragility until the very end of my pregnancy with Pigtail (and then of course during the first month or so of her life).  These days even the mildest sappy commercial sends me into a meltdown.  This is, in general, inconvenient. 

* Emotional Connection to the baby.  I didn't realize it at the time, but my entire first pregnancy was tinged with anxiety and fear.  Now that I understand my body and the process better, not to mention how wonderful the package is at the end, I'm much more excited and tender towards the baby that's growing inside me. 

I thought that I was doing much better, but I'll be honest that last week and parts of this weekend were pretty darn rough.  Sometimes you just have to endure it, but there are a few things that help my pregnancy nausea:

* Vitamin B6.  I take these before I go to bed and I they help me immensely.

* Small, hard candy.  In my pockets and in my purse I constantly carry mini packages of Sweet Tarts, Sprees, Sour Patch Kids, and Red Hots.  Don't ask me why this helps, but it does.  

* Very cold anything.  Ice cream, ice chips, cold apples.  These help me get something in my stomach without setting off my gag reflex.  

While I moaned and groaned my way through March (poor Gorilla!), I never for one moment take this pregnancy for granted.  I wish that it was possible for my body and the developing baby to get along a little better, but at least this time around I understand that this period is finite.

Share your pregnancy stories.  Do you have suggestions for the sickness I haven't tried yet?  Were your pregnancies different from one another?    

friday links

Friends, I have been so humbled and appreciative of your messages, tweets, and comments of support after my announcement.  I won't go too sappy on you, but know that you have made my life better.  You are a gift.

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This week we went to dinner at a friend's house.  It wasn't impromptu - it was planned about a week in advance.  Three couples, a gorgeous view of the city.  And Italian take out. 

It was a wonderful, interesting evening.  I've been very tired in the evenings and I told The Gorilla before we left that I didn't want to stay out late.  We finally crawled into bed at midnight, and I could have kept chatting with our friends for hours. 

It reminded me that every dinner party doesn't have to be an overly planned, formal affair.  The food doesn't have to be perfect, there doesn't have to be fresh flowers.  All you really need for a meaningful evening are good company and a little sustenance. 

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Good reads for the weekend:

I know it's early, but I'm already thinking about the baby nursery.  Here's a sweet one.  (Life In The Fun Lane)

On that note, I had tears on my cheeks from laughter when Megan sent me these Awkward Pregnancy Photos.  (Pregnant Chicken)

I thought this was an interesting post about the dynamics in a marriage when two people respond to a situation differently.  It didn't go where I thought it would go.  (The Little Hen House)

People who don't blog or don't regularly read blogs seem to have a problem understanding the complexities of the relationship between the blogger and the reader.  Years in, and I still don't understand it myself.  But this post explains a few things: The Blog As A Spiritual Auditorium? (Extraordinary Ordinary)

And this one really sums it up: I Know We'd Be Friends. (Moosh In Indy)

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We're hosting houseguests from across the country the next few days.  What about you?

Happy weekend, HH readers!

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probably the stupidest thing i've ever done

Sometimes I tell stories.  This one is always on my mind during Spring Break season.

My junior year of college I wasn't able to take a Spring Break trip for reasons that escape me now.  Instead, a small group of my sorority sisters and I decided to take a trip the week after Finals.  The destination was Mexico.  The theme was freedom. 

The second night of vacation we donned short little dresses and signed up for a booze cruise, which was less a cruise and more a big yellow school bus hauling intoxicated twenty-somethings from crowded bar to crowded bar.  During one of the transports, I met a boy named Rocky.  He was Australian, and also with a group of college friends.   

Fascinated by anything with an accent, I batted my eyes and giggled nervously.  He was cute, and I was in the phase of life when even the most passing encounter holds hope for a great romance.  We met up with Rocky and his friends the next night and the next.  He asked me to take a walk with him on the beach and I accepted.  It was the first time we'd been alone, and we departed from my hotel room with nothing but a casual wave and wink from my friends. 

The walk was uneventful.  I think we held hands and I'm almost sure I asked inane questions about kangaroos.  We weren't gone more than an hour, and at the top of the hotel steps he gave me a sweet but brief kiss. 

The whole episode wasn't memorable enough to hold onto until years later when the Natalie Holloway case became international news.  I remember sitting in my tiny office in Los Angeles and reading her story on the internet and coming close to tears over the heartbreak of it.  I watched the eye rolls when she was referred to as a "good girl," and I was furious when anyone expressed anything other than sadness at the situation.

Just weeks away from turning twenty-one, that trip to Mexico was the first time I had consumed alcohol.  I wasn't the quintessential "good girl," but I was mostly so.  I did not party in college, I steered clear of many of the bad decisions that I could have made during that impressionable age.  The night I took the walk alone with a stranger in a foreign country, I had not had a single drink. 

People do stupid stuff.  Sometimes they regret it the rest of their lives and sometimes they experience waves of relief that there turned out to be nothing to regret.  I'm lucky that in this situation it was the latter, but I'm always aware of how easily this story could have had a different ending.  

Go easy on yourself.  Take care of your friends.  Teach your daughters to do the same. 

yellow production signs

Driving around Los Angeles, there is something you'll notice besides palm trees and BMWs: yellow production signs. 

These bright yellow plastic signs litter lamp posts all over town, directing a crew on location where to park or where to report.  They are always printed in bold black with the name a mirror image of itself and an arrow in the middle, making them easy to use and easy to spot. 

I took these pictures out of my car window, and coincidentally they both have the names of actual shows on them.  Never in my life have I worked on a production where the signs used the actual name of the shoot.  Usually it's something cleverly disguised and the crew knows the code word.  On one show all of our signs read "Daisy," after the producer's dog. 

You can imagine that if the signs said what they were (Glee! or Superman!) that a potential fan mob might appear.  So, in general, they read like "Cupcake" or "Orchid" or some such. 

As many as there are around, I'm not oblivious to the yellow production signs.  I'll usually peek around to see where they appear to be shooting, how many talent trailers they have, if it appears to be a day shoot or a semi-permanent location. 

Old habits die hard, I guess.

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I worked in the entertainment industry for seven years and my husband still does.  For more entertainment posts and explanations, click here.