Wildfires

A firestorm has engulfed Southern California. We are in San Diego County where the Harris Fire is trying to make its way from the east county out to the beach. It hasn't come our direction yet, and hopefully it won't. We have friends evacuating their home and coming to ours. The smoke is rising above the horizon and looks pretty scary.

I'll take more photos throughout the day.

A crisis of mass proportion

Pop!

"Uh, what was that?"

A sad reply, "It was the TV."

The light bulb in our television burned out. I didn't realize that our TV had a light bulb but apparently it does. This light bulb is the life-giving entity of our TV. Without it, THERE IS NO TV.

Now this might not seem like a crisis to you, but you are not Thomas. He was so sad within fifteen minutes of this occurrence he couldn't focus on anything else. Within two hours he was throwing himself across the sofa in dramatic, unrelenting seizures of emotion. OK, maybe it wasn't that extreme, but it was pretty bad.

He loves his TV. If the US allowed marriages between anything other than a man and a woman, I might be in trouble. He spends excessive amounts of time with his television. In the two years and four months he has had with his television that light bulb gifted him 5,276 hours of enjoyment. That's 219 days of television, straight.

But do not worry, the $130 replacement light bulb arrived in the mail. We replaced the bulb and all is well.

It's a rough life

I really don't know how she gets through the day.

See that tan pillow at the base of the bed? That's hers. I sewed it for her when she we picked her out at the shelter. She sleeps on it if something else is in her way on our bed, like us.

Cables and so much more...

Always on the lookout for something interesting, Thomas came across a Flexible Joints Camera Tripod and ordered it for me. He wanted an extra cable for his iPhone and somehow I ended up with this oddly exciting new piece of gadgetry.

It's a pretty nifty little tripod that you can bend in any direction. He thought it would be good for uneven surfaces in the garden or at dog beach.

Thomas orders cables and odds and ends from a website called DealExtreme.com. I always remember the name because their shipping packages are extreme. It ships from Hong Kong and always has something silly on the customs label, like LED FLASHLIGHTS. For a while there he was ordering quite a few items from DealExtreme, and I'd happily go out to get the mail only to be greeted by the mailman saying, "Gee, Tom sure likes flashlights. Does he know he could get this stuff at the grocery store and save us all a lot of trouble?"

I would take the package inside, "Here hon, more flashlights for you." But I never visited the website. It's no wonder I end up with new stuff when he needs something as mundane as a cable. That website is insane!

You can purchase everything from useful items, like cables and tripods, to more unique items like this adorable LED Piggy Flashlight:

Next time he orders he better get me one of these, an Invisible Ink Pen.

Or you could even pick up one of these very curious, um, Water Pipes.

New stuff! Heather Ink business cards

Finally, after months of deciding whether to get a 'real' job or work freelance, I decided to design some business cards and give the world of freelancing a try.

Conceptually I wanted my business cards to reflect my company as a graphic design studio that focuses on print design. Whenever I begin a project I list all the things I can about a topic. So for print design, let's see, type, printing, color, ink, crop marks, color bars, printing press, ink, misprints, etc. Then I focus on combining some if not all of those things into the logo.

The colors weren't hard, black and pink. So then I started to play around with print bars and ink splots trying to see what looked best together. I tried different fonts some with serifs and some without. I even got a little crazy and did a gradient on Heather.

I started to see something I liked. Black type with magenta ink splatter as the dot above the "i" was really starting to grow on me.

Next came business cards. Originally I thought I wanted an over-sized card, maybe 3 inches square. They passed, but I wasn't in love with them. Something was missing, they needed more excitement.

I went back and looked at my original ideas about printing and print design. What about crop marks or registration marks? What if the printer 'messed up' my cards? How would they look?

I moved it sideways, upside down, backwards. None of those ideas worked. What if the card was cut out crooked? Perfect.

I landed some registration marks, the printer bars, an ink splot for good measure and made sure they were pretty off center.

I love them, hopefully they bring in some business!