Thursday, March 13, 2008

Spring Fever Better than Disco Fever

We've finally had more than 2 days in a row above freezing and that qualifies as Spring in my book. And it couldn't have come any sooner for me. I've been waiting for the snow to melt and dreaming of all my lovely spring projects. New slipcovers for the sun room bench, new pillows for my office, yards and yards of gorgeous Amy Butler fabric just begging to be turned into skirts and bags and belts. And in all that time spent day dreaming, I neglected my blog like a mildly-impaired step child.

I'm constantly snapping photos of things I intend to blog and then don't. The nice thing about a blog is that it's always there whenever you come back, even if the precious few readers I had, aren't.

This is one of those photos I took and said I would blog about later. These are vegetarian/organic stuffed peppers. They were awesome. If you'd like the recipe, let me know and I would be happy to share.

So what's new? Let's see. The photo shoot for Apartment Therapy is set for Saturday. Finally! After postponing due to re-decorating (kitchen, office and 2 bathrooms!) 2 weeks of illness while Mister and I both suffered through the flu and several schedule conflicts later, it's finally happening. For those of you that may be reading for the first time, I sent a few snap shots of our home to AT back in September 2007 to see if they might be interested in sharing them in their Apartment Therapy :: Chicago section, and they were! Just like that! Overnight celebrity status looming in the distance and here I am with white walls. WHITE WALLS! Granted, there were only 4 of them, and they were in the bathroom...but still, white walls? Not in this house. And why stop there? Let's tile the kitchen walls! And I really have been meaning to do something about my office, and then there's my bathroom/dressing room/now ultra-feminine-girly-dress-up room to think about. 5 months later, we're just about ready. I have a few last minute things and pick up. My absolute fav couture florist's, Ashley and Peter are creating gorgeousness with French Tulips that will be ready tomorrow. Ashley and Peter do things with flowers that other people only think about before they chicken out. I'm hoping the dogs don't destroy the house before Saturday and that this beautiful spring weather holds out for just a few more days.

So that's the house. I'm sure some of you are thinking, "yes, that does sound like a lot of work, but we know jenni. That can't be all. It'd take more than that to keep her from her blog!" (i'm shaking my head in shame)

To you, my faithful few, I give you Part II. The baby announcements. No silly! Not my baby announcements, as in, my bun-in-the-oven announcements. I mean my baby announcement(s), as in, I made them myself. Ok, background story, a couple of weeks ago I was looking at the results of my online advertising campaign with Yahoo and I noticed that all of the traffic being routed to my site at Terrapin was coming from searches done for custom invitations, specifically, baby announcements. It made me crazy to think about all the potential clients I was turning away by not having anything to offer. So I designed 12 cards in 4 days. They aren't all gold records, but a few of them turned out to be pretty cute and funny. My favorite is the one below. Nothing like that New Baby Smell!

No sales yet, but there are women getting pregnant everyday, so I have my fingers crossed.

What else, what else? I'm still totally addicted to yoga. Last night I drove out to Naperville and took a class with my old personal trainer Mike Retterer. It was great! He has a great mix of traditional and hybrid poses and he mixes Yin with Vinyasa Flow for a really intense class. It was shorter than I'm used to, but I am actually more sore today then I have been in weeks. I'm trying to organize a day for a few of my girlfriends to get together at my house and do a yoga and breakfast/dinner party. Mike has promised to teach a private class in my red room if I get at least 4 people and I have 3 yes's so far, so it looks like it could happen soon!

A few last things, my amazing mom-in-law Linda had a birthday on Feb. 28. Happy Birthday mom! I hope you and a wonderful day. I'm hand-making your gift and I promise I will get it out to you next week!

My other mom, my mom mom, has just begun to work on several gorgeous pieces of lingerie for her new line, Suggar Britches. I'll be building her an equally yummy site, so stayed tuned for more info on that.

AND... Mister starts his new job on Monday. It's engineering and it's in government labs at Motorola. I could say more, but then I'd have to kill all of you. Just kidding. I honestly don't understand what my husband does for living. I try, but, there's math.

Anyway, I imagine that he slides down a pole every morning into an underground laboratory where they've already invented a flying car and monkeys are as smart as men. Oh... and his shoe is a phone and his pen is a bomb. Or do I have that backwards? I can never keep those little details straight and that's exactly why I'm not allowed to talk about Mister's job in my blog.

It's late and my stupid stinky dog-heads are whining to go to bed. G'nite - jenni