Thursday, February 26, 2009

Unemployed.

Well, fair readers, I am officially one of the approximately 11.6 million unemployed people in this country. Long story short, department needs changed, my job changed, I was no longer qualified, and now I'm out of a job.

I am receiving a few weeks' pay as a sort of severance, and I'll be applying for unemployment as soon as I receive my last check next week (learned this morning that I can't file for unemployment without that last check, darn!). Luckily, I have a decent emergency fund that will help supplement the unemployment checks until I find a job. It should also help pay for new tires on my car that I'll be needing soon (it's almost time for my next check-up, and the last time I was told "well, next time it'll be time for new tires" - eek!). An emergency fund is one of those things you never think you'll need, but you build it up anyway...and well, now I know why!

I am trying to just stay positive, apply for jobs and use this "time off" to reflect, think, and do some of the things I've been wanting to do but haven't had the time for. In fact, I've made a list. I call it the "No Excuses - You're Unemployed" list. Ta-Da.
  • deep-clean the bathroom - it needs to happen.
  • (finally) sort through the box under my keyboard - it's been there as a junk box since I moved in. a year and a half ago.
  • give myself a pedicure - my $15/month splurges may have to be on hold for a while.
  • READ - I just renewed my library card, and I plan to use it!
  • bake bread - I want to experiment with new kinds like rosemary or olive
  • watch more Food Network and try new recipes - I want to go to farmer's markets and Berkeley Bowl, buy cheapish produce and try something new!
  • fix my broken shoe rack - instead of purchasing a new one, I'm going to hammer it back together and duct tape it. Duct tape fixes everything, right?
  • deal with my "office" area - I've gotten some good responses from my post to Apartment Therapy, and I think it's about time I figure out how to make use of this corner of my bedroom.
  • go through and get rid of some books - my bookshelves are overflowing, and a lot of the books are ones that I don't read, or don't like, or otherwise just don't really need to have around.
  • empty the bag-o-snacks - I have a big bag in my apartment filled with trail mix, crackers, and other kinds of snacks...time to unpack it and find places for all these miscellaneous food items.
  • put away bags in living room - there are a few random bags hanging out in the living room that I should really just go through and put away already.
  • earthquake straps - I've had these for longer than I care to admit, and I need to attach them to my tall bookshelf and dvd/vhs shelves.
  • wash sheets, towels/bathmat, duvet cover - this kind of laundry is the stuff I procrastinate doing because it involves unmaking and making the bed...not really sure why I procrastinate the towels/bathmat. But I should stop.
  • re-pot plants - I have two plants right now that are currently in need of re-potting. Once the rain lets up (well, it's sunny right now, but this is my obligatory "sit on the couch and maybe do dishes" day), I'm all over it.
  • take my laptop to the Apple store - it's been slowing down a lot lately, and I want to know if it's something easily fixable (aka not "oh yeah, you need a new hard drive).
the burritos i've been eating all day, made from leftovers a friend left here on Saturday

So that's my list...so far. I'm afraid to say it, but I am actually kind of looking forward to this. I've been extremely lucky in employment ever since I started as a babysitter at age 12, and I've never actually been in a situation where my time is 100% my own. Not in my teen/adult life anyway. No classes, no work, no real obligations except finding a job...which I understand is a job in and of itself, but still. There is something freeing about not having your days mandated.

So yeah. I'm trying to stay positive and look at this as a chance for me to learn something and to focus on myself and read a lot, and maybe try some new knitting, and take walks, and make smoothies, and watch some Ellen* and sell merch at Sara's upcoming shows at Cafe du Nord, and spend time with my other unemployed friends, and hang out with my cousin in the city, and be taken out for a meal or two, and well, we'll see. Hopefully this unemployed thing doesn't last too long, but I'm going to try to enjoy it at least. No sense in moping around feeling sorry for myself!

*Portia de Rossi is going to be on Ellen in a few weeks. That should be fun. The Bird and The Bee is on today - very exciting (Inara was my movement teacher at Shakespeare camp, like, 10 years ago). I recognize some of the girls in her backup band as Theatricum girls - that's always fun. Oh, and Neil Patrick Harris will be on on Monday. Yay!

Just discovered some ants in my laundry room, sneaking in through a tiny hole near the floor. Time to go get a cheap ant trap, I suppose...my skin is crawling with the thought of ants. Gross.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Oscars

So far, the Oscars are really wonderful. They always say it's going to be new and different - but for the first time, I really do think they've changed the event. It truly is a celebration of the art of filmmaking, and of the collaboration that is so necessary in creating great films.

Hilarious presenters (which I'm very glad they kept secret - Tina Fey and Steve Martin was a tremendous surprise!), a wonderful new concept for the design (both music and sets, which harken back to the nightclubs of the 1940's, including wonderful new arrangements of classic film themes), and starting the night off with 5 wonderful women presenting the award that they all had once won, and welcoming a new member into the club of women who have won Best Supporting Actress...Ah. Now this is what Hollywood should be.

WONDERFUL.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Momversations

I am not a mom, but I find most of these "momversations" highly entertaining - I think mostly because the women in the videos are (mostly) really funny bloggers. If you're a mom, or even if you're not, check them out at www.momversation.com.

I snapped this screenshot watching the episode about homeschooling because omigod I was so in love with that couch/pillow I had to share. Not the most flattering picture, but it's harder to hit pause and catch a good facial expression than you would think.

Obviously, I think this is amazing

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Best Post Ever? No.

I am having one of those days where all I want to do is go home and take a hot shower. And it's not even raining. I just want a nice, hot shower. Makes me wish I had some of those aromatherapy shower fizzie things; that would probably be awesome...oh well. Counting down the minutes 'till showertime!

Some pictures of bathrooms that are not mine:

This. Bathtub. Looks. Amazing.

This looks totally ritzy, and way not my style, but OMG fireplace in the bathroom?


And my bathroom (totally not as awesome, but it does the trick for me):
See you soon...yes, I am talking to my bathroom.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Valentine's Day wrap-up!


I had a very, very nice Valentine's Day weekend. The Boy and I don't usually do much for Valentine's Day, but this year we actually had quite a lovely time. Some photos below...

When we were in Kauai back in October, we ate papaya every morning, and we haven't had it since...so I made a little Hawaiian brunch. I found real Hawaiian Papaya (as opposed to Mexican Papaya) at Berkeley Bowl, and cut up some fresh lemon and lime. I had purchased some yummy pastries the day before, and put frozen pineapple (that we had bought on our trip) in our OJ. I set up the computer to play a slideshow of pictures from our trip, and we just ate and talked about how much fun it was :-) Very nice way to start the day, if I do say so myself, and The Boy was surprised and happy about the papaya!

Tucked inside a brand new silicon oven mitt (I had been complaining about my right-hand-only cloth one) was this super cute card and box of chocolates that he had hand-selected. Fancy pants chocolates that include pomegranate-caramel and port-chocolate. Mmmmm. He's good at surprising me...he had hung the oven mitt on the fridge next to the one I already had, and I didn't even notice it there at first when I stood there looking at the fridge in the morning making my grocery list - he had put it there in the middle of the night, and I discovered it right before brunch when I was putting away an old, cheap potholder. He's good, this one.

The rest of the day was lots of fun - we went to the Cal/Stanford men's basketball game, which was exciting and turned out very well for the California Golden Bears! We also got to go to a free Mexican luncheon where we heard the coaches give speeches about the team. Back to my place for Zachary's Pizza and watching the women's game with some friends.

The next morning, he surprised me with brunch at Angeline's, where we had been meaning to go for a long time (he really was quite sneaky, telling me we were going downtown to pick up a book he had ordered). We stuffed ourselves on gumbo and buttermilk fried chicken and more, with the fluffiest beignets ever for dessert.

Back home to veg out, and I did some cleaning around the house. After a nice little dinner of leftover pizza, we headed out to his hockey game, which his team proceeded to win 2-0! And he scored a goal! While he had scored several goals in other games, this was the first time I saw it happen, and it was pretty awesome. :-)

A bit out of order, but this is the carmelized pineapple sundae I made on Saturday night (using more pineapple from our trip to Kauai). Mmmmm steamy hot carmelized pineapple with vanilla bean ice cream and chocolate sauce! :-)

As I said, we don't usually do anything special for Valentine's Day, but we definitely had a great time this year! I hope all of your Valentine's Days were lovely, whether you spent it with a loved one or pampered yourself or just spent the day getting things done!

Linen Closet!


I wish I had taken a "before" picture, but here's the after. You'll just have to trust me that it was a big, big mess. It's looking a lot nicer now, and it's more organized. Everything fits nicely, and it's easier to access everything when I need to.

I realized that I have a LOT of travel-size toiletries, and I think I'm going to donate the ones that haven't been used. I hear that women's shelters always need these types of donations to go in the hygiene kits they give out, and that would be a much better use for them than sitting on my shelf!

That is all...the picture is pretty much self-explanatory. I fought the super-tiredness I was feeling on Sunday and made it happen. Good for me. Pat on my back. Toot my own horn. Yay.

Rain, Again.

I left my camera-to-computer connector at home again, so you're just going to get another rain update. Yep. It's still raining. Only today we have thunder, lightning and hail. Wheee!

Here's a cheery picture to liven your day. I think we might need an ark around here pretty soon! Ok, maybe not. But there has been reported flooding!

Monday, February 16, 2009

Hallelujah!

I see a tiny patch of blue sky! The rain has temporarily ceased! I'm sure it will pick up again soon, but for now, I'll just revel in the joy that is a tiny bit of blue sky :)

Seriously, Rain.

It has been raining for days. Literally. It rained every other day last week, but starting on Friday, it has been raining nonstop. Sure, little let-ups here and there, but I don't think I have seen the sun in 4 days. And that makes me sad. I'm surprised I was as productive as I was this weekend (lots of fun plans AND got a drying rack at Target, AND organized the linen closet), considering the downpour. I keep thinking the sun is out (there's a skylight in our office), but it turns out it's just really bright clouds. Maybe the sun is out there somewhere...on top of the clouds. I know there are people out there in places like Washington where the sun hardly ever shines, and blah blah blah poor me with my 4 days (well, it'll be 6 if the rain continues on as predicted) without sunshine. But I'm a California girl. And I like my sun.

Anyway, I don't have the day off, but Happy Presidents Day to those of you who do.

I'll post about the lovely weekend I had later, when I can find a cable to connect my camera to the computer.

Grrrrrrrain.

Friday, February 13, 2009

More Cupcake Mosaic

"I'm using cupcakes so that everyone can come and be part of the celebration...you gotta have cake at a party, right?" (referencing Lincoln's birthday and Obama's inauguration and Valentine's Day)

More pictures of the Cupcake Mosaic Awesomeness (it's on an 11'x17' table, to give you an idea of size, and uses around 5,900 cupcakes), in case you aren't able to watch it live (in which case you missed overhearing amazing 4 and 5 year olds talking about how they want to eat cupcakes in the background). Overkill? Perhaps. But I like documenting things.

11:58pm

12:00pm

12:12pm

12:35pm
12:49pm

12:56pm

1:10pm

1:38pm, fixing a mistake on Obama's forehead

2:00pm, the mistake was bigger than they realized (drama! only not at all.)

watch out for the crack as you fix obama's head...

the finished product! 2:30pm

the assembly crew, eating cupcakes to celebrate completion. 2:35pm

PS - The Obama cupcakes are chocolate and the Lincoln cupcakes are vanilla. Yeah.

Otters


Ok, I'm shocked to see that I haven't actually written many blogs about how much I love otters (except this short bit in a vacation-related post). I think they are my favorite animal. Ever. I mean, they're just so damn cute.

I love them. So much. At the end of Knocked Up, when they play that song "That's My Daughter In The Water," I always sing "That's My Otter In The Water." Yeah, I love otters.

I mean, look at that little otter face!

If you haven't read this story yet, check it out. A man rescues an otter in Scotland and carries her around in a mailbag until he returns home. Where he feeds her kitten milk through the tube of a ballpoint pen.

It's almost too much to bear.

The Boy just said "I wish I could get you a baby otter for valentines" - So do I, honey. So do I.

Cupcake Mosaic

Live video feed of the creation of a cupcake mosaic at the Smithsonian, orchestrated by Zilly Cakes, who also made this Obama mosaic. I'm planning to just have this window open in a tiny corner of my computer screen all day...

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/smithsonian-on-ustream.tv

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Kittens Inspired By Kittens!

I can't believe it took me until now to watch this video...for some reason I thought it was going to be a video of cats looking at other cats or something. Anyway, it's been making the rounds on Google Reader, mailing lists at work, Facebook, you name it. And for good reason.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

I Love This House

This house is like the grown-up version of my apartment. I love it. LOVE it. Some pictures below, full slideshow here. From Sunset magazine.



Saturday, February 7, 2009

Washer/Dryer: Running!

Well! After all that...it's finally up and running! I have done 3 loads of laundry already tonight, and it's awesome! It didn't go as smoothly as I had hoped it would, but it's working great now and I am tackling the massive pile of laundry that was this:

I know, it's bad. The result of *really* needing to do my laundry, and putting it off because I was going to buy a machine (and because the delivery/install day was later than I had planned). Regardless, now I can tackle the pile.

A little memory of what the "laundry room" looked like before...


during...
and after!
I love it! I think it needs a name. But I think a lot of things need names, so don't listen to me. I love my little laundry center!


Also purchased and set up today: the kitchen cart. Check out a picture of it in all its glory below. It involved reorganizing my "dining room" area a bit, and I rather like the new setup!


I'm rather worn out, since I've been alert and active since 8:30am, and a good part of the day was spent hanging out with my 2 year old "niece" - throwing around a 35 pound wiggle worm all day will work a girl's muscles! I don't know how her mom does it, but she tells me that's how she is suddenly so strong. Go figure. Anyway, the kid now thinks I am the awesome and fun Auntie Kim, who lets her color and gives her pickles and picks her up and throws her in the air. Several times today, she said "Kim, I show you!" and grabbed my hand to show me something (usually the refrigerator), and when she would look up at me, arms outstretched, fingers wiggling, I mean, what was I supposed to do? Not pick her up because I was tired? You just try to resist those dimples!

At the end of a long day, I am a happy but tired Kim.

Friday, February 6, 2009

Really?


Are acid-wash jeans back in style?
Nobody told me.
And I don't like it.

I said I would do it...

I said I would do it, and I did it. Presenting...cute little stuffed animals atop cute little printer!



Cutest. Printer. Ever.

Ok, so I am about to cement in your minds just what a huge dork I am. But I don't care.

I was tasked with printing magnets at work today, and oh-em-gee it was so much fun. I know, I am a huge dork. That's ok. I "designed" the magnets (which were basically boxes with words in them, nothing fancy, but I did get to make some of them have colors. oooh.), and then printed them on magnet sheets. Using the Cutest. Printer. Ever.

I know. It's ridiculous to get this excited about a printer. But it's so tiny! And cute! And precious! It's barely over 12" wide, and seriously, if you could see this thing you would know how cute it is. I am seriously tempted to take a picture of it with a little stuffed animal perched on it to prove and enhance the cuteness. No joke. It's that cute. Plus, it printed super-high quality magnets very quickly. Love it. I want to print more magnets! All magnets all the time! I'm a magnet printing machine! No wait, this printer is actually the magnet printing machine. But I might just be in love.

That is all.

I love you, little printer.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Sara on Leno, Again

A new look for Miss B with the sparkly dress and straight hair, but "Gravity" still gets me misty eyed.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Analytics Update!

I've decided to check in a little more often with my Analytics. It's fun for me - I like finding out vaguely where you all come from and speculating how many of you found me at random. I don't get a ton of comments on this blog, so the Analytics gives me an idea of how many people are actually reading this thing.

Without further ado, the Analytics for January 4-February 3:
  • The Numbers: Short and sweet, here's the numerical overview of last month's activity (click to enlarge).
  • How You Found Me: It's a pretty even 3-way split. 40.46% of you are "Direct Traffic" which I think means you typed in the URL or clicked the link in your bookmarks or whatever. 38.7% were referred from other sites - so hooray and thanks, people, for linking to me in your sidebars and such...and thanks to the readers on those sites for clicking through to my blog when I leave comments and whatnot! 24.67% of you found me through search engines. Thanks to Grad Girl, Miss Jane, and Le Blog D'Adrienne for referring the most people!
  • Where You Come From: You hail from all corners of the earth, oh lovely readers of mine! This map (click to enlarge) shows the overview...the darker the green, the more visitors from that country. Hi, Thailand! Hello, Denmark! Yo, Germany! Bonjour, France! Y'all came from 24 different countries - including the U.S. Naturally, California (and LA and the Bay Area specifically) has the greatest density of visitors, since most of the people I know are in CA...but hey there, Illinois! Way to come in second place for number of visitors last month! You beat out New York, where I'm sure I know more people! So whomever is out there in Illinois reading my blog (Erin?), way to be! :-)
  • How Many You Are: Last month, I officially had 304 visits, with 216 of those being "absolute unique visitors" (aka different people on different computers). That sounds like a lot to me. Out of those 304 total visits, 61.84% were new visitors, with 38.16% being returners to the blog. Fancy graph (click to enlarge)!

  • Do You Bounce: The bounce rate is 75%, which I just learned means that 75% of you are "bouncing" away to other sites, rather than clicking to sites within my blog. That makes sense I guess, since most of my new content is right on the main page, and you wouldn't really need to click through to other pages of mine to find information if you're just coming for the most recent post. Feel free to use the list of labels on the left to look up posts by topic and such though...or use the search box in the upper left corner to search for specific terms and phrases. Average time spent looking at the site is 1 minute 12 seconds. Longer than it was the last time I checked, so maybe I'm writing longer or more interesting posts? Maybe folks are coming to visit less frequently so it takes them longer to catch up on all the new posts? Who knows?
  • Loyalty: Well, 61.84% of readers out there only visited my blog once last month. I'm guessing these are the people who found it by accident and then realized it wasn't what they wanted. Or maybe some of my friends out there only came to visit once over the course of the month. Whatevs. 7.89% of you visited twice, 5.26% visited three times, 7.57% of you visited 15-25 times, and 6.58% of you visited a whopping 51-100 times! I don't know who you are, you 20 people who read my little blog 51-100 times last month, but gee thanks!!! That was a lot of numbers.

So thanks, one and all for coming to visit my little blog here. If you like, you can check out all my Shared Items (links and comments about what I have been reading and liking on the internet) - I'm always sharing stuff there, way more frequently than I write full blog posts, and it's easy to subscribe to it via a feed reader (ie Google Reader). And please don't be shy - leave me comments or email me at kimskitchensink [at] gmail [dot] com. :-)

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Homebody Kim

As I mentioned before, I'm undergoing a bit of a home redesign (reorg?). I keep wanting to call it a remodel, but I'm not demolishing anything, and I think somehow in order to be a remodel you have to knock down walls or something. I am, however, rearranging furniture, bringing new stuff in, moving things around, *hopefully* getting rid of clutter, and sort of reinventing my little happy home. Now if I could just get someone to help me get my butt in gear on the "getting rid of things" process...

You can see my place in many various stages here (back when I still used Flickr as my main online photo storage place - these pictures only go up through Nov. 2007 so they're a bit outdated) and here, and I've included a few choice selections to illustrate the transformations my place has undergone below. This weekend, I hope to post a lovely photo-laden blog with pictures of the new kitchen cart thing and the washer/dryer! I've created a new label ("homebody") where I'll start putting things relating to the home and my dorkiness therein.

Taken pretty soon after I moved in. It looks so empty in retrospect!


With the addition of a couch and a new behind-the-couch shelf situation.

The current incarnation of behind-the-couch situation. Apologies for the recycling of pictures from previous posts.

The bedroom, before it had any style.

You can get a feel for the bedroom changes here (headboard, wall art...oooh)

I included this one just for ambiance-sake. I love the feeling it gives me.

The floorplan I made for that Apartment Therapy contest. I didn't really enjoy the contest, but I liked making the floorplan.

A Real Celebrity Now

Celebrity Blogger Perez Hilton wrote the following about Sara's new video:

Sooooo Pretty!

CLICK HERE to watch Sara Bareilles' just-released video for Gravity.

Pretty pretty pretty!!!!!!!!!


I guess she's a real-live celebrity now, if Perez is writing about her. Kind of insane. The video is gorgeous (albeit low-quality). To watch the high-quality version, buy it for $1.99 on iTunes!

Monday, February 2, 2009

Mind-dump

It's been quite a weekend, and I'm going to do a brief mind-dump sort of recap, in the style of my early blogging...a list.
  1. The lovely Rachel stayed with me beginning on Wednesday night, crashing on my couch during the Bay Area leg of her book tour. She is a delightful houseguest, and it was nice having a little girl time. The book event I went to at Mrs. Dalloway's in Berkeley was also quite fun, and she was my buddy on The Great Washer/Dryer Purchase of 2009.
  2. I won $7.50 at the Super Bowl party on Sunday...I picked the 3rd quarter score! "Picked" is the overstatement of the century though, since all I did was pick a random assortment of boxes on a grid, paying $0.50 per box (or more accurately, The Boy paid). Someone randomly picked numbers to correspond with the X and Y axes of the grid, and if (for example) the score was 13 to 7 Cardinals, the person who had picked the 3 box in the Cardinals row and the 7 box in the Steelers column would win the prize money. The winnings were $7.50 for 1st and 3rd quarter, $10 for halftime and $25 for the final score (as if predicting the final score was somehow more challenging than selecting the score for the 3rd quarter? I don't get it really...). Anyway, like I said, I won $7.50 ($3 of which was immediately gone, paying back a friend who had helped to cover part of my pedicure that morning). A new member of our group won BOTH halftime and final score, going home with $35. Now that's some luck, if you ask me. And oh yeah, there were deep fried Milky Way bars. Sadly, we didn't end up deep frying pickles, but the Milky Ways were kind of life-changing.
  3. Rachel and I came up with a new dessert: Double Mint Ice Cream Sandwiches. Trader Joe's mint chip ice cream sandwiched between two Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies. Mmmmm. The Boy and I are eating them for dessert in just a few minutes.
  4. I made Trader Joe's marinated Ahi Tuna steaks with Trader Joe's rice pilaf tonight. Yes, it's a big night for TJ's at Chez Kim, but it's delicious, not totally unhealthy, helps us get some fish into our diets (I rarely cook fish even though I know I should), and is also quick and cheap! Love it!
  5. Finally starting to settle into the new job...I can't believe it's been a full month already!
  6. I am doing a bit of home re-design/re-arranging. I'm very excited about it, and I hope I'll do a really good job of getting rid of things in preparation. I'm buying this awesome kitchen cart for $130 from someone at work, except the top is an even better butcher block top (like in this picture).
  7. I got a call from Sears today, which ended up leading to them sending me a check for $99.99. Apparently I was not supposed to be charged for the delivery/installation, or I they charged me for the wrong kind of delivery/installation or something. The manager, because I had to deal with their error (which really, wasn't much of a problem for me - they called me and told me they were sending me a refund check and that was about it), said that rather than charging me whatever it was they were supposed to charge me, they were just going to give me a refund. Sounds good to me!
  8. I finally got my camera back from Best Buy. They had it for a month - but everything seems to be fixed, and it was all covered under the warranty. Bonus: I got to fill out a customer service survey, where I could provide feedback about how the service itself was good, but it took way too long. I really like surveys. And no, I will not be doing that "25 things" thing on Facebook.
Pictures below...

Display for the book event...I love that they were displayed next to one of my favorite books ever.

And a close-up of the display

Rachel, testing out a lawnmower of sorts outside Sears.

The most ingenious dessert. Pardon the poor photo quality. It was taken on my phone.