Posted by shana on Mar 28, 2009 in
Friday Gold Stars! We blew it off last week without any mention. We were out of town, after all. But this week, Friday has come and Friday has gone, and now here we are, on Saturday, and still no post.
Could it be that Mac and Shana just don’t really like or value anyone enough, even in a kind of goofy way, to spend a couple minutes awarding them an imaginary gold star? What selfish, insular people! Keeping all those imaginary gold stars for themselves!
Of course, this is not the case, as we hope you understand. I think everyone here agrees that imaginary gold stars only bring you joy when you give them away.
Neither has it been a problem of having no one in our lives that we like or value; in fact, the problem is quite the opposite! We think and we think and we just can’t decide!
Gold stars to Megan the wedding cake goddess, for the dreamily delicious cake testing all day Saturday?
Gold stars to everyone who’s helped Megan test cake over the past few weeks?
Gold stars to Thia for being so happy to host us in DC and because it was so good to see her?
Gold stars to Jill for changing her flight back to Austin so she could hang out with us?
Gold stars to Catherine, Amanda, and other Bonnies, because they wanted to hang out with us and we couldn’t and we feel bad?
Gold stars to Southwest airlines, for having such cheap flights in and out of Midway?
Gold stars to Rohn and Ammy for not destroying the house while we were gone?
Gold stars to Mike Ditka, for being so manly?
Gold stars to my boss at work for finally giving me a enough hours so now I won’t be kicked off the health insurance? :-\
Gold stars to my health insurance? To health insurance in general? To health? Ahh! How can you give an imaginary gold star to “health”??
Gold stars to whomever we forgot? Are you offended? Oh no!!!
You see, this week, things have gotten out of control. They say that failure to make a decision is a decision in itself, and it seems that they have hit the nail on the head this week. I guess that makes Mac and me the nails. Mac has actually recommended just giving a black star to ourselves for the crappy job we’ve been doing with gold stars.
But no, let the madness stop! There’s enough depressing news out there, no one wants to hear that on top of it all, Mac and Shana were paralyzed with to hand out any imaginary gold stars this week. And so we’ve made a decision, and the winner is:
Threadless, for having a $5 t-shirt sale. Mac got us each a shirt, just for fun and to make us smile – mine says “being vague is almost as much fun as doing this other thing…” and it’s yellow, and Mac’s is a picture of a cop holding hands with a donut with sprinkles and a cup of coffee, and it says “Crime Sucks.”
The t-shirts have made us both very happy, in an “it’s the little things” sort of way. With this in mind, I encourage you all to consider stimulating this depressing economy by spending up to $5 on something little that makes you smile and laugh. A stack of post-it notes shaped by the first letter of your first name? A Reese’s peanut butter cup? Bubbles? Sleeping in? That’s free!
And if you feel like it, let us know what you got. We love love comments. :)
Tags: family, friends, little things
Posted by shana on Mar 25, 2009 in
Wednesday Bites,
wedding (Or, Why You Should Get Married And Have Our Good Friend Megan Bake Your Cake)
You guys.
I said there were a lot of pictures.
(I said it to someone, might not have been you.)
Well.
There are a lot of pictures… though none of them are satisfying my craving for another bite of that wedding cake…
Megan Woods is a wedding cake goddess. Write it down. Goddess.
I tried uploading all the pictures here, to the blog, and it was just too many, too much… and your page would’ve taken forever to load, longer than usual, even. And I would’ve been so stressed by the process that I wouldn’t have had the mental energy for clever comments. We can’t have that! So instead, I threw the pictures on facebook, where it’s easier and where I’d also wanted to put them anyway. And you don’t have to be on facebook to see them, you can just click here: Megan Makes Wedding Cake
You know, there are a lot of decisions to make when you’re getting married, even if it’s just a big old family wedding and you don’t care about swarovski crystals or chair dresses that were shipped in from somewhere fancy to coordinate with your napkins. This was an easy one. Mac and I are trying to stay on top of everything else, and we’re doing pretty well… no, we haven’t registered anywhere, we haven’t reserved a block of rooms at a hotel for our out of town guests, and we haven’t looked at wedding rings… we’ll get on that… next week, I think. In all of this, it feels really good to know that our cake is in such good hands.
Think about how great a wedding cake is. Now think about how even much more great it becomes when it’s made by one of your best friends. What makes Megan a wedding cake goddess is not only her culinary genius, but her happiness at opening up her home and her kitchen while she spends seven hours making cake… for five. Next step: cake for 175. We’ll have to dig up a few more pans… and maybe a few more hours…
Shout out to Jill, who was also there to “help” (see photos) and generally share the love, and to Alex, this guy we just met. He’s a friend of Megan’s so he’s a friends of ours. Mostly, a big bravo to Megan, and a big, big thanks. Can’t wait for August.
Tags: DC, food, friends, photos, wedding news
Posted by shana on Mar 13, 2009 in
Friday Gold Stars!,
making friends I don’t know if we’ve mentioned this before, but Rohn (né Julius) was a rescued cat.
We got him through Feline Friends, a really great cat rescue organization in Chicago with volunteer foster families that take care of the rescued cats until they get adopted. I dare, dare dare you to click on that link and then not get a kitty. They are so cute, so completely, captivatingly, heart-breakingly cute.
We spent a lot of time looking at this website, and Mac spent a lot of time on the phone with Toni from Feline Friends (they’re pretty much bffs now), to find not only the perfect cat, but the perfect match for our little family.
And we found him:
Those eyes, that face… and when we met him in person, we knew, because wow, what a personality. And over the last two months he has proven to be exactly everything we ever hoped for. Even Amarok would have to agree…
buddies
We’ve often wondered, though, about Rohn’s past. Amarok is also from the streets, and was rescued as a very tiny kitty at a very very young age – we’ve often thought of this as a good bonding point for the two boys. Unfortunately though, we don’t get in on these conversations, and we’re left to wonder, Where did our little Rohny come from? How did he come to be abandoned? How was he rescued? What was he like, in those early days?
So imagine our surprise and our delight when we awoke this morning to an e-mail from Catherine, our new friend and Rohn’s Choice for this week’s Gold Star… because Catherine was Rohn’s rescuer.
In a brief e-mail, she told us how, with a just-rescued dog already in the car one day on the West Side, she first spotted Rohn:
Yep. That’s sounds just exactly like our little guy.
In fact, it sounds so much like him, that we’ve already adopted that phrase for every day use. For example, “What? I jumped in the sink!” Or, “What? I’m playing with pink feathers!”
Yes, the Gold Star this Friday goes overwhelmingly to Catherine, both for rescuing Rohn so that he could eventually come to be part of our family, and for sending us this e-mail so that we can know a little more about our little guy.
This post is a glut of pictures of Rohn in honor of her receiving this prestigious award. Congratulations! 
Tags: cats, friends, photos
Posted by shana on Mar 6, 2009 in
Friday Gold Stars! It’s finally, here, that most anticipated day of the week, Friday! And what better way to celebrate our happiness than to recognize someone else who makes us happy by bestowing upon them the most honorable of all honors: an imaginary gold star.
We know you’ve been waiting eagerly all week to hear who the first recipient will be, and Mac and I have considered the issue carefully. We’ve decided that as much as we’d like to give gold stars to each other (ha), and as much as we’d like to give gold stars to both of our cats (though they’ve been kind of high maintenance drama queens lately, they put up with all the picture taking pretty well), that that would be a poor decision for our first awarding of Friday Gold Stars. We’ve decided instead to award Gold Star two others, yes, two, who also feature prominently on our blog, though not because we post funny pictures of them every other day.
This week’s Gold Stars go to…
Jim/Dad, and
“Cowboy’s Mom,”
for being the only ones to ever comment on our blog.
Congratulations!!!
And thanks! We love getting comments! It makes us feel special and appreciated. :)
Should this post inspire all the rest of you to start leaving comments as well (you don’t have to be one of our parents to do it!) you just need to click on the little yellow posty note by the title of the post and have at it.
Happy Friday!
Tags: friends
So, you leave the house and text public to 80289. You’re out for some coffee/tea. As you arrive at Argo, you text @argo to the same number. You then receive a text saying that there are two others at your location. !hello fellow argo people, you text. Both of the other users at the argo immediately get texts on there phones. You get to chatting a little and decide that one of these people, hipster123, is really cool and the other, douchebag123, is annoying. You text block douchebag123 … send, and then … m hipster123 omg, douchebag123 is a real douchebag. You and hipster lol a bit about it all and decide you’re friends. friend hipster123 …
What’s going on!?!?
You’re using brightkite–a location-based social networking service.
Here’s what just happened above. First, you changed your visibility on the network by texting public to the brightkite shortcode 80289. You can always go private again by texting, you guessed it, private. Next, you had the keyword argo setup in your “placemarks” so it knew where to check you in. If you hadn’t had this placemark setup you’d get a text back asking you which argo you wanted to checkin at — 3135 N Broadway or 2485 N Clark. I suggest setting up placemarks for places you frequent. If you don’t, it’ll always be guessing and while it’s guessing is supposed to be based on your last checkin location it’s not perfect–it thought I was in CA when I told it @melrose yesterday. So, back to the above story, you had “nearby notifications” turned on, so that’s why you received the text about the other brightkite users at your location. Turn on nearby notifications by texting nn on to the bright kite number. You change your nearby notification settings quite easily via texts … text nn friends to receive only info about friends near by or text nn all for info about any bright kite users near by. The radius of these notifications can be changed with the following commands: nn close, nn block, nn neighborhood, nn area. If you don’t like having the nearby notifications turned on, you can always manually check to see who’s near your location by texting who. So, anyhoo, you then posted a message to the location — !hello fellow argo people. If you’d felt like it you could have also taken a photo and posted it the location (instructions for that are on your account settings page — different for every user, or text postphoto to get instructions texted to your phone). Back with our story above, you blocked douchebag123 (block username) and then directly messaged hipster123. (m username message). friend username sent a friend request. There are other things too that you could have done which are fun–For instance, want to see everyone who’s ever been to that Argo? Or see if any photos or messages have been left there? Text pastvisitors and find out.
Pwhew. Yeah–alot to remember but there’s a nitfy little pocketguide if you want it: http://brightkite.com/brightkite_pocket_reference.pdf
Tags: friends, technology
