Iconic.

“Neutral colors for walls like taupes and grays are also reminiscent of a factory or a loft, which are both considered very iconic masculine environments.”

–Interior and set designer interior and set designer Kyle Schuneman, Dwell Magazine interview

It should be called the word of the year since I don’t do a word of the day. Just ran across this sentence while researching for an article and enjoyed the word.

Sky–I thought you’d enjoy these.

For everyone else–I’m having a blast painting! Excuse the bad quality–I’m not sure how to get the photos right.

I’ve been doing everything possible lately to avoid writing articles, which I find boring. I’ve started making pizzas from scratch (yum!) and am learning how to bake fresh bread. My family is getting spoiled! So spoiled, that no one has really noticed that I’m not really working all that much…hmm. For money, anyway. I want to find something else to do. I’m contemplating painting decorative furniture.

Sage and I had a blast yesterday making these zendoodles. The first two are mine–the last one is his. I like the really spontaneous quality his has.

We’ve been making beaded hemp bracelets as well. Good thing he’s in Boy Scouts or he’d be turning into a total hippie–I am!

This weekend, Sage and Greg went backpacking with the Scouts in the Sabine Wilderness Area. They are walking ten miles today, camping, and walking two tomorrow. I took pics, but they turned out all blurry. I am enjoying the time to myself, especially after putting up with Greg stressing out trying to get everything perfectly ready for this trip the past two days. There is a party today that I really should go to, lest I seem antisocial, but I am antisocial, so I’ll probably just stay right here with my dogs and do whatever.

I figured out how to create color palettes from photos that I like. I can think of a lot of potential uses for this! Here’s one I made from a beach photo I like.

On the reading front, I’ve just finished reading Invisible China: A Journey Through Ethnic Borderlands, which was written by two young guys who learned Chinese and then went backpacking for months all around the edges of China, learning about ethnic Chinese, who as it turns out, are not very similar to Han Chinese at all, other than shared humanity. Even better than learning about the cultures (who knew you could eat pig that has been stuffed with butter and stored in the living room for seven years?!) was learning how the people really see the Chinese government. Greg read it too, and said that the rest of the world should definitely not refer to it as The People’s Republic of China! It’s not that the information was all that surprising–just that you don’t hear about how it really is much–especially since China is Number One US trading partner.