The Big Old Move

I have finally finished moving all the relevant archives from my old blog (RadioGirl Designs) over here, covered the rest of the blog posts over there (I left a lot intact for their comments) with sheets to protect them from dust, and locked the place up. In a manner of speaking.

Now that this is my only blog, I can finally unpack all the boxes, buy some throw rugs, hang pictures on the walls and really get settled in. For a while, anyway. My goal is to get a main site up and running, and publish my blog there, but I'm a big believer in one step at a time, one foot in front of the other.

But in the meantime, can I offer you a cup of tea and some cookies?

There's NO CRYING in baseball.

The Phillies didn't fare so well yesterday. It was a game of almosts... of loaded bases and full counts and missed chances... but it was still fun in a way that only baseball can be fun even when everything is going wrong. I mean, a bad day at the ballpark is better than a good day ... well, I love what I do for a living, but you get the point.

Tonight, they fared even worse, but the season isn't over yet.

So no crying, even though I'm thoroughly convinced that I am bad luck for the Phillies and I must sacrifice my own game-watching pleasure for the good of the team and not watch them anymore, because I think I have "jinx" written across my forehead.

But if worse comes to worse, at least I now have "Schmidt" written across my back (yeah, I know you can't see it, but it's there), so if I never watch another Phillies game again, at least they'll still know I care.

My dad took me out to the ball game. Thanks, Dad!

I consoled myself this evening while watching the Cubs-Mets game (since they don't air many Phillies games here in this neck of the bay) by putting together an Etsy Poster Sketch... and then I scored a Treasury.

So life ain't all bad. Not bad at all.

(Especially since the Cubs have pulled out in front of the Mets in the top of tenth, which makes me feel a little bit better.)

Mailbox Merriness

Remember the mug I won from Kim and Jason's Lemonade Stand? It came in the mail just before I left for Philly yesterday. Such a perfect mug to start any day.

And the whole box is an Adultitis antidote, from the cartoon to the Kool-Aid (awesome bonus!) to the chalk they included in a little gumball machine globe, for "creating hopscotch, foursquare and marbles boundaries on the driveway or perhaps as the medium for creating sidewalk masterpieces."

A box full o' fun... thanks again, Kim and Jason!

A wonderful package to find on your doorstep

The Last Innings

I love baseball. I know very little about the sport, relatively speaking, for such a passionate fan of a sport in which history and statistics are as important as the game in front of you. And I have a terrible memory for players' names, so I'm quite incapable of holding an intelligent discussion about even the game in front of me.

But still, I love the game, I love the history, I love the stadiums, I love the sound of a ball hitting a leather glove, I love sipping a beer on a summer afternoon at the ballpark.

Or on an early fall afternoon, as the case may be: I'm heading on the briefest road trip ever -- 12 hours roundtrip in two days -- to Philadelphia, to see the Phils play the Braves tomorrow (thanks to my Dad, who rocks).

I am extremely superstitious, though -- call me silly, but I can't help it -- and harbor the belief that I am bad luck for them, because it seems whenever I watch the Phillies play, everything falls to pieces and then when I walk away from my seat or from the television, they get it back together. So I'm tempted not to go, because they're so close to the playoffs.

But not that tempted.

Actually, I'm so excited, I can hardly breathe.

Just after Mike Liberthal's grand slam, July 30, 2006.

In other news... I'm not the hating type, but I hate the Yankees, in the, you know, good old sportsmanshiply way of hating a team, mostly because their fans are so smug, although people probably say the same thing about USC fans, and so I know that most Yankees fans are probably nice people, just like most of us USC fans are nice people. (Unless you are a UCLA or Notre Dame fan. But that's neither here nor there.)

My point is that, regardless of how I feel about the Yankees, I am choked up about the last game at Yankee Stadium and not a little bit disappointed that I never made any effort to visit the stadium. Let this be my lesson to see more things, just for the sake of seeing them.

Word Play

I am a big fan of cutting words and pictures out of magazines and gluing them in a notebook, then using them to jog my creativity while making maps... sort of like an art journal, but I don't do any decorating of the pages, I just glue the words in, in random arrangements, to jog the little a-ha parts of my creative brain. It isn't pretty, but it works.

But it's nice to know that if the glue stick runs out, I have other options. Check out Wordles. So pretty, I want to frame them.