Do Fun Stuff Vol. 1 & my trigger happy purchase finger

Well, for a week now our baby has been able to hear things and I'm doing that weird, play music for the baby thing. Turns out, quite a bit of my music isn't really kid friendly, and some of it even drives me nuts so I don't blame the kid for not loving it and punching me in the stomach when I turn it on because I've started feeling that now too. So I started looking for kid music that didn't make me feel crazy but that the kid could listen to for years to come. Mainly, because jamming out to Sesame Street and Alvin and the Chipmunks in our new super sweet Mazda 6 makes me want to barf.

I've been reading Pacing The Panic Room for awhile (courtesy of Kathleen) and love what this guy writes about and he's also an incredibly talented photographer and artist. He compiled this charity album to help benefit an organizations that researches SMS, a disease which his wife's son has. I searched for it last week and iTunes released it early, without all the needed band info, but I bought it before I knew that. And after congratulating him on the release via Twitter (because apparently I "tweet" now) I had to keep it quiet for awhile. But it has now been officially released and is for sale on iTunes.

So, basically I was the first person to purchase this album. He thinks so himself. I'm amazing. I guess? And since I've been listening to it for almost a week, I'll let you know, the music is good. My favorites? Morton the Caterpillar, Ladybug, Nothing, Biscuits and Sleep. Oh and the Potty song about made me pee in my pants I was laughing so hard. But according to the song, you don't pee in your pants, you do it in the potty. Glad I got that one figured out. So go buy it. No need to thank me, he did all the work. 

16 down, 24 to go

Well, a few people have asked me what I've been looking like these days and there is most definitely a bump going on but I haven't had the right picture taken yet to advertise to the world. We'll work on that.

My parents came last week and helped us around the house, I will have an entire post about that later.
I picked the nursery paint color, whether boy or girl, and the room has been painted so we don't have to worry about it later. More on this to come too.

Work in the office/new guest room is underway.

Seriously though, have I mentioned I'm showing, and feeling the baby move and it's all a little weird and surreal?

The only thing that really has sounded good to me, because I've been incredibly indifferent about food this pregnancy, has been some Cherry Lambic Sorbet from Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams. Well, Jeni's is in Columbus, OH and that's a little far to go. I mentioned them here. And the closest place to purchase their pints is 7.5 hours away. AND, we looked into shipping six pints to our house but that would cost $100 and as much as it sounds delicious, we cannot afford pints of sorbet that cost $16.67 each.

So we've been mentioning to Jeni on Twitter to get her stuff to some local specialty grocers. I'm hoping she does, that they love it and want to carry it and will purchase cases of the Cherry Lambic just for me. But this is all wishful thinking.

Today, Paul and I went to the Y to get in some exercise and after we were finished he mentioned that we had to meet his co-worker in the alley behind his office to pick something up from her. A gift of sorts. A gift?! We don't know what we're having yet, why is she buying us gifts? So we go to the alley and meet up with her and all the while I have no idea what's going on. To anyone watching, it more than likely looked shady. Because she did not pull out a pink or blue bag with tissue paper in it.

Instead, Heather pulled out an ice chest holding...wait for it...some Jeni's ice cream! Her husband is working in Texas right now and she went down there for the weekend to visit him. Paul sent her a message on Facebox (oh Conan, I miss you) and asked her to stop at a store in Houston and pick some up for me. They didn't have the sorbet but had plenty of other flavors. Tonight we snacked sparingly on the goat cheese and cherries and gravel road. When I say sparingly, I mean sparingly.

Seriously, what a husband.


I've even got him on board for making another batch of the Cherry Lambic since Jeni shared her recipe with Food and Wine. Sorry, sorry. I know my obsession is a little out of control.

the office, and by office, i totally mean junk room

We have decided that it is time to re-do our office, also known now as, the junk room.

We thought we were done with the house changing/work for awhile, I mean, everything was fine, but I changed our minds now that a third human being will be living in this little house with us.

When I was in school and had homework and projects and needed tons of space to work, this room was perfect. I had a drafting table, a table to lay things out on, the printer close by, another table to put together boards and even a dresser full of supplies including everything from my Prisma markers to rolls of trash paper and 3M's mighty glue (Super 77). However, since I graduated, rather since my friend Betsy graduated, this room has lost its need for homework requirements and has become the room that our cats' litter box and food is in. It is also the room that gets the brunt force of "I don't know where to put it, put it in the office." It's a disaster.

View of the office in 2007 before I got a rug, but at its height of usefulness and lack of crap.

Taken around the same time but it shows the wall color more acurately.

The beautiful part about this re-do is there is going to be very little construction involved. Well, the construction that does need to be done is bigger than I'd like to tackle, so we're going to pay someone to do it for us. Therefore, I consider it very little.

The ceiling in this room has detached itself in one area from the ceiling joists. We were just going to try and screw it back up, tape and mud it but I'd rather fix it the right way and if something is causing it to seperate, I want to find it. So Phil, our new handy dandy fix-it guy, is going to replace it for us.

We're also adding white quarter round to the perimeter of the room, because at some point, someone felt the need to remove it and never replace it.

This room is not only getting a ceiling lift and some trim, but is going to change in function too. Since I'm obviously not putting together color boards until 2 in the morning at home now (I have an office for that...) we need to re-evaluate and purge. This room will become our guest room/work space. Having laptops makes it easy for Paul and I to move wherever we want to but we still need a place for our files and printer.

We also don't entertain a lot of overnight guests, mainly our parents. Well, Paul's parents. My mom is so highly allergic to our cats that the moment she lays down to sleep, she can't breathe. She's fine walking around, having dinner, sitting on the furniture, but the moment she's laying flat, the wheezing and coughing and inhaler start. I hate that they can't sleep in our house but I'd rather her not die. So, that leaves mainly Paul's mom and dad. The number one issue with this space becoming a guest room is that this is the only place we've been able to make our cat litter situation work. 

Our cats are strictly indoor cats and with every room in our house having a very set purpose with no small nook or closet of unknown territory, there just isn't a convienient, out of sight spot for their boxes. We have a back porch that could work, but only if we had it enclosed better. Currently it's a screen door with screened windows and would need a more permanent window system to keep out fleas and other cats that have found their way to our back door. This would also require us to put in a cat door, which just the thought of that makes my eyes roll.

So, we're going to bite the bullet and let the cats keep this as their room too, when guests come, we'll figure out a temporary solution of relocating them but we'll just keep the litter cleaner than ever for now since this has become more of a "living space".

There will be new paint on the walls, trim and ceilings and the window treatments are due for a major overhaul. The current roman shades were already installed when we moved in and were from IKEA and are dingy and needing to be replaced. Oh and there will be a change in wall decor, which will also knock a few things off my life list (thankfully, because I haven't knocked anything off that sucker in awhile).

I'll keep ya posted.

the ugly cry

Last night, it struck again. The “Christa-wont-ever-sleep-a-full-8-hours-again” bug.

I was furious.

I had been reading in hopes that it would make me tired and it had a little bit. As soon as it happened, I felt my eyes drooping and words blurring together, I snapped my book shut and ran into the room to fall asleep. The moment I walked into the room with Paul though my head started swimming with to-do lists and wants and wishes and what-ifs. I laid there in the pitch black darkness for twenty minutes before I decided it wasn’t going to happen and I’d go into the living room and read another chapter of my book.

One chapter didn’t do it. So I went on to read a second, and then a third and then it would have been stupid to not have just finished the last chapter of the book. By this time I was drowsy, the book was finished so I headed back to bed. Where I laid awake for another hour secretly crying because I was terrified something was going to happen to Paul in the next six months and I’d be left alone to raise a child I am all of a sudden terrified of.

Paul could hear me sniffing after a while and I told him it was nothing, I was done crying so I started talking slowly to make sure the fear was gone and then these words came out of my mouth:

“It’s weird; I can’t really explain it to you. I feel different about everything. I think differently about everything. I worry about things I’ve never worried about before, and worries I have had before are a thousand times more scary now that a child is involved. Even stuff that is not worry worthy, like where to buy our freaking rocking chair from seems to be racking my brain for hours on end.”

And the second the last word came out of my mouth I started doing the ugly cry (that’s what Jodi and I call it). You know the one, where you’re heaving and choking and your face is hot and sopping wet, you can’t breathe and you knew if someone was filming you it would most definitely not be cinematic worthy and people would look away because it was so awkward to watch? Yea, that’s the cry I had at 1:00 this morning. I was hysterical. I couldn’t even figure out why I was crying.

I was sitting up in our bed and Paul gently asked what he could do to help and I knew there was nothing. I told him I just had to cry it out. Cry it out? Cry what out?! Why the hell was I crying?! (I get that my pregnant hormones are crazy now but something had to have set me off…).

I started going through the things that I thought might have triggered it but couldn’t find the one in order to rationalize the fit I was now indulging in and so I could try to calm myself down. Instead, every time I thought of something that would have been pregnancy cry worthy, I just sobbed harder knowing it wasn’t the start of my heaving cry but was now in my head and was worth crying about too. Stress at work. I sobbed harder. Fear of losing my job after I come back from maternity leave. Sobbing harder. Dominican Republic. We’re talking hysterical here. It was unbelievable the things my body wanted to get out. I sat there upright in bed for 5 minutes after I was done, thinking about how very tired I was and furious at how hard it was for me to fall asleep. I leaned back and thought for a bit and then stopped remembering anything at all. Finally I was asleep.

These fits can’t happen often. I’ll drive poor Paul loco. Oh, and I’ll make myself fat (you know, with the cheddar bites from Sonic I had today as a consolation prize for being exhausted).

insomnia: 1 christa: 0

Saturday night I was exhausted. I went to bed at 9:00 pm and didn't wake up until 8:00 the next morning.

Then I took a nap in the car on the way back to OKC, about an hour long.

Last night we had dinner with some friends from church at Earl's where I proceeded to scarf down my chopped brisket sandwich, french fries and okra with no problem. Oh and a coke to top it off.

I paid dearly for the fact that I had slept 12 hours and had enough acid producing food to give a rhinoceros heart burn.

At 10:00 last night when Paul was exhausted from his weekend of golf playing and running around in the heat, I wasn't even close to ready for bed. So I read a chapter of Harry Potter hoping it would make my eyes tired and I would tucker out.

Wrong.

Apparently when you're pregnant, you start not sleeping early.

I read and read and read. I stared at the wall in the living room. I stared at the cat laying on my lap. Nothing worked to make me tired. I finally just bit the bullet and crawled into bed at 1:00 and pushed Paul off my side of the bed for another hour before I think I feel asleep.

Today, I'm a little cranky.

I wish I was taking a nap, but since I'm not...

Considering that this is how I feel today, I am going to link/and post an article Paul sent me this morning. Side note: I snapped this photo a few nights ago while laying on the couch. Paul and I were talking and had the TV on and our cat had apparently had enough of our excitement. She plopped down, stuck her face in the couch and took a nap. A face planted nap sounds wonderful doesn't it?

If you are not an interior designer, you probably will have no desire to continue reading this post. I'll be on my soap box for a moment.

Since I started college I have found that "interior design" bashing is quite fun for some people. There's the standard jokes about fluffing pillows and picking paint colors and people rarely realize what an actual, educated, licensed designer does. In fact, I've never "fluffed" or specified a pillow in my entire career. Yes we pick finishes and furniture and accessories, but we do much more than that.

We're given a building shell, and we make the interior what it is. We help determine, or sometimes just determine without help where walls are to be placed, how large rooms need to be, we have to follow the same codes and regulations that architects have to follow. We design ceilings, lighting, millwork, etc. We are more than capable to work on buildings. Most states require you to be registered after you've been educated and passed an examination, just like an architect, or a doctor or any other profession where the health, safety and welfare of people are at stake.

So, when Paul sent me this post this morning written by IIDA HQ about OSU Professor Drab's research stating that some of the problem comes from ourselves and the words we use and that our publications use to describe projects and our process, it made sense.

That Elephant is...umm...Big

Judging by the overwhelming response to the blog post “10 Reasons Interior Designers Matter,” I think it’s safe to say that there are a lot of misconceptions about interior design and its practitioners. And you’re a little sick of it. Ok, very sick of it.

Well, turns out the design community and their publications may not be doing justice to the profession, at least in the printed word. Research at Oklahoma State University over the last decade analyzed the language used by writers of design periodicals and interior design practitioners when describing the activities of interior designers (Drab, p. 543), and what they found may surprise you.

Researchers found that verbs such as “love” and “like” and adjectives such as “beautiful” and “simple” rank among the most used in design publications and by design practitioners. To me, this is like calling an elephant big. It doesn’t do the creature justice. Big is a relative term; that is, it doesn’t take on meaning until the audience interprets the word — and because every audience member’s world of experience is different, it means something different to each individual. To one person, big might mean the size of a house. To another, it might mean a pair of pants she wishes she didn’t have to buy.

Using an objective term to describe the elephant helps standardize the vision; for instance, “that elephant weighs 2 tons.” The same issue applies to defining interior design. “Love,” “like,” “beautiful” and “simple” are emotional words. The emotional context of these words contributes to the misunderstanding of the business discipline and the art of interior design. These words don’t provide the audience with a very complex view of the talents of the designer or the merits of the project.

Since most of you aren’t editors of design publications, your audience will most likely be a client, a friend or an acquaintance. When describing your projects, why not use words that describe how you followed a systematic process when designing the space? Take the time to explain how you researched design solutions to increase efficiency or safety in the workplace. Your work isn’t lazy or one-dimensional, so your words shouldn’t be either.

Lucky for you, NCIDQ provides a multi-faceted definition of interior design on their website. These words and descriptions do more for the elevation of the profession than an emotional outpouring could ever do. And in combination, they’re targeted. If we want the world to take seriously the profession of design, shouldn’t we use serious words?

It’s never a bad idea to double check ourselves before we exclaim over how “beautiful that room is” or “how we love the simplicity of that design.” This isn’t to say that the emotional component of design isn’t important, because it is. That’s the art of design. Just remember to include the business discipline as well. Because while the art of it may be fairly evident to the observer, the discipline may not be. Your job is to explain what about the project’s beauty or simplicity makes it the work of a professional. And then the public will begin to develop the vocabulary for design from both perspectives.

When Google can start to get weird...

When I first started thinking about posting about our pregnancy, my intial thought was to do a funny post to announce it to the world. So I Googled "i'm having a baby" and looked at Google Images to find things to post about. Bad, bad idea. I highly recommend against that. However, some funny stuff did pop up (that I'm obviously blogging about). Like the duct taped baby:

Really? You duct taped your child to the wall and to keep her happy added the duck? At some point I can see the duck not being able to console her any longer and then you're just stuck with a hysterical baby on a wall that will later be ruined by duct tape residue. Yea, smart thinking. Oh internet world, you amuse me.

12 down 28 to go...

Baby Ryckbost (via Paul and Christa) will be making a debut in February of 2011 and we are EXCITED!

Hello world changing.

Hello maternity jeans.

I've been waiting for this for awhile. Well, not the maternity jeans part but the baby part, and the shouting it from the rooftops part. However, all of a sudden I'm having a really hard time deciding what to shout - other than "we're having a baby!".

Some days I feel like things have already moved so quickly and that the next 28 weeks is going to be gone before I know it but then other days I feel like it is going to take years to get here.

The days where I'm thinking about refinishing the wood floors, and fixing up the back two rooms, and doing this and doing that are the days I am grasping at what little time I feel like we have to get prepared. Especially since the month of Decemeber, Paul and I will only be in our house for 10 or 12 days.

But the days where I'm thinking about seeing our baby for the first time and what it will be like to be a family of three (because there's only one in there in case you were wondering...) I feel like it is going to take forever for 2011 to arrive.

We are so blessed and so excited we can barely contain it. Paul tells me goodbye every morning, kisses my forehead (because I have a cold) and then tells the baby goodbye too. I love that he's excited. I like seeing him with kids and I know I'm going to love him more as a dad.

dumpster diving anyone?

A few weeks ago a co-worker of mine threw away a couple of large tiles that we didn't need for a project any longer into our large trash can. The next morning, the tiles were all out on our flat files. It was a little twilight zone-ish. Someone had taken them out of the trash and we all laughed about it, she grabbed them, threw them into her desk trash can and went on about her day. The next morning she came in to find them on her desk again. The people who collect our trash after hours apparently thought that those tiles really were worth something and they were not going to be a part of throwing them away.

Here's the deal...we order thousands of samples. THOUSANDS. Tile, carpet tile, laminate pieces, fabrics, solid surface counter pieces, wood door samples, you name it, we order it for meetings with clients and for colorboards. For as sustainable as we are and we make buildings to be, we are typically, as a profession, very wasteful. We have to be, it's part of our job. And we have a library FULL of materials and samples. So full in fact, it's dangerous. We keep as much as we can but at some point we just have to throw things out when we are done with them.

We also try and re-use what we can. Carpet tiles are huge and people love them for the garages, back porches, to cut up and use on shelves, etc. So we have huge carpet giveaways in our office. We also have a co-worker who takes the all of our larger tiles to Peru once a year where she does a lot of mission work to use as grave markers in their small cemetery. I'm not bragging about that, just stating that we try and re-use what we can within reason.

Here's my real story:

Yesterday I was purging my desk of old samples that never got used (that I knew we had a book in the library of) and threw some tile in the trash. I started cleaning out drawers and found a scarf I had bought at H&M for no more than $10.00 that I tore a hole in last winter and decided that it wasn't worth holding onto any longer, especially at my desk. So I chunked it. There's a hole in it.

Well, apparently they pilfered through our trash again last night and pulled out a few of the 5" tiles and the scarf and left them on my desk for me, like I had made a mistake.

They're men by the way the people who take our trash. I've never had a lady take my trash from under my desk when I've been working late.

Well, I'd like to know what this guy thinks I'm going to use a single 5" slate tile for. I can understand if I had a box of them, I could do a table or something, but really, just one?

And the scarf, if you don't think I should throw it away, I obviously don't want it and if the hole doesn't bother you, take it.

Goodwill and Salvation Army won't even want it, in case I haven't mentioned it, it's GOT A HOLE IN IT. 

I moved the tile to a different trash can in hopes it gets pitched and amd I'm still staring at the scarf.

robberson steel co., oklahoma city

We found this steel company while driving around parts of Oklahoma City we had never been in before a few weeks ago. We do that a lot. Around 2:00 pm on a Saturday afternoon, we get fidgety, so we go to Sonic for happy hour priced drinks and then we explore until we find things like this.