I got rid of all my magazines before we moved, but I just realized I forgot something — I meant to clip out the Seattle and Vancouver shopping maps from Lucky magazine. (I think they covered both of those cities.) If, by any chance, someone has one or both of those I would be thrilled to trade something for some photocopies of those pages. Anyone?

Of course, I would love any suggestions on where to go for cheery happy eye candy.

One of the things I have learned from renting apartments is that I don’t like crevices. Our last place had tile kitchen countertops, tile bathroom floor, and and all tile shower stall*. Cleaning it inspired some creative forms of procrastination. I even got so tired of scrubbing I used an old battery powered spinning toothbrush to get at the grout. Tile may be nice, but it is really a pain as your main kitchen work surface. Another apartment made me never want to get up on a ladder to dust picture rails again. (I know they make dust mops with extendable handles, we were too poor to buy one at the time, and the place was so tiny we couldn’t fit one more thing into it.)

In this temporary housing we have a coffee table with a decorative ridge running around the edge on the top. It’s pretty, but after previous occupants and our habit of eating dinner in front of the tv the ridge is filled with all sorts of mysterious dirt. Whoever designed this thing obviously lived a very proper life devoid of things like crumbs and dust.

Right now my dream house is filled with smooth, seamless plastic surfaces, which can be easily replaced, say snap in perhaps? You could change the colors every few years! Or maybe spray on, kind of the opposite of that rubber tool dip? Who do I talk to in order to make sure this is part of the house of the future? And ideally cleaning the house would only involve a garden hose.

* This is a reminder to myself to talk about how much I loved having a shower stall, and about the shower curtain set up in this place which works well.

Trip report: Archie McPhee

I have been getting the catalog since high school, and have to admit that I’m going to be all fuddy that it was better back in the day, before Accoutrements perhaps? The store was fun, and packed full of the stuff you see in the catalog, but the best parts stuff was in the back, the random stuff. Full of medical waste bags, miscellaneous plastic containers, parts of things which where never turned into other things and racks and racks of a weakness of mine: small pastic toys. It was difficult not leave without buying something.

My newest scary obession is with my hair – I think I’m losing my hair. Now, I haven’t been gifted with the best of hair genes, my mother has superfine wispy hair which she frets about constantly, and my dad is a (now bald) redhead. I’m all too aware of the fact that redheads have fewer hairs per square inch, of course they usually have the thick curly colorful hair to make up for it. Not me, I just get fewer fine limp brown hairs per square inch. My cousins, they all got the curly, full, bright red hair. I just get the folicle challenges, pale skin, pale eyebrows and tendancy to gain weight.

Back to my fear that I’m going to be bald on top by my mid-thirties. I know that everyone looses 100 hairs per day, blah blah blah. But seriously, we’re talking handfuls in the shower when I’m putting in the conditioner, hairs on the bathroom floor, and most recently and most horribly, hairs on my pillow* when I wake up. All those female Rogain commercials aren’t exactly helping. Everytime one comes on I whine to Scott “Seeeeee? My hair is falling oooooooout!! I’m going to be baaaaaaaaald!”

I’m at the age when my metabolism has begun to slow, an my skin has begun to wrinkle, but why does my hair have to leave me so abruptly? Who do I ask about this, a regular doctor or a dermatologist?

*This may or may not have something to do with the fact that while I’m living in temporary housing for the next few weeks, I’m also using a temporary white pillowcase instead of the charcoal grey.

Find Clarence The parents of this little girl are looking for a replacement of a purple and pink and orange stuffed giraffe, the original was lost of unfortunate circumstances. I’m a little late coming to this — this follow up post talks about who else is picking up on the story.

On the way through Oregon we stopped to visit with some friends, one of whom knits, so we checked out a local shop – Robin and Russ Handweavers in McMinnville. They are all about handweaving and have a limited amount of yarn good for knitting, but the yarns and equipment for weaving was mighty impressive.

We are living in temporary housing for a couple of weeks until we can move into our new place, so I have some free time to explore. Tell me, where are all the yarn shops in and around Seattle?

W sent me this list (thank you! and thank you W’s mom!). Are there any additions or new shops?

This weekend I popped into Nancy’s Sewing Basket (Queen Anne) and the Hilltop Yarn Shop across the street, both were great. The yarn shop was gorgeously laid out in a house with lots of cozy nooks to have a seat and knit in. And Nancy’s is just fabulous.

new things: I bought some Dr. Browns celery soda (Cel-Ray) hoping it would be all light and green tasting, but it was more like fizzy V-8. Oh well. A mall around here has one of the mythical Hollister stores, I’ll report back if the jeans have the same fit as the Abercrombie ones — despite how much I hate the Beautiful People marketing Abercrombie jeans fit me better than any other brand I’ve tried so far. For the record Hollister is a younger cousin of Abercrombie, with more of a Southern California beach town theme. Also for the record the actual Hollister, CA, is a landlocked rural town south of Gilroy.

Trip report: Hands of the Hills on Mercer Island, Seattle area

I found this recommended as a bead shop in one of the guide books I have. They have lots and lots of beads and beading materials, but they also have jewelry, handmade clothing, decorative home goods, Thai and Burmese silk fabrics, Kaffe Fasset cotton prints, wooden buttons, Obi fabrics, hemp fabrics in very good solid colors, and sewing patterns. They offer classes and are very friendly.

The latest Budget Living magazine has a thing on the slew of new candy flavored lip balms available, I want to get my hands on some Junior Mints, yummers.

They also have an article about a toy I got at Christmas, Atari games in the old joystick, you just plug it into your TV and it’s just like the old days. I played Adventure, seriously, for hours.

How to choose the right pasta shape via The Morning News

I can get my webmail, but I cannot reach my old messages to hit the Reply button, so excuse me for a moment while I talk to a few people:

Tracy and eveyone at the BBC stitch and bitch: I will miss you guys! Sorry I couldn’t make it one last time, however I’ll be in town after not too long and I’ll check in to say hi!

Hovey Lee: I saw you quoted in an article in the Palo Alto Weekly on what it’s like to live near an Ikea!

I’m on the road, stealing bandwidth from the Haugheys to say hello. Hello! I like living out of suitcases (until you realize the batteries to power the iPod are somewhere at the bottom of the pile and there is no hope of retrieving them). Will be in Seattle soon, but I don’t know when we’ll find wireless next. Oregon is nice, wish you were here!

I have been researching Seattle fabric stores and so far have come across Nancy’s Sewing Basket, Tina’s On Madison, Lijepo for buttons, and Madame & Co. for ribbon. Reprodepot is moving out just as I am moving in (they closed thier store to retail traffic long ago so I suppose it’s not too terrible a loss, but still, sniff). Are there other places (not Hancock or Joanns, pretty please) which I should check out? I’m willing to drive an hour to get there (however, with any luck it will not be the equivalent of driving up 880 to Poppy, something which always took a day and stiff drink to recover from). I hear wonderful things about Fabric Depot in Portland, which I will make a trip to.

Things to check out – Erica Mulherin’s utterly adorable comic, and Brandy’s amazing quilt and guestbook, Shannon’s hand made shower curtain, and Whitney’s embroidered handkerchiefs and martini tea towel.

Blogathon produced some really great stuff, one that I love is Chocolatada, 24 hours of talking about chocolate. Yum. Who knew dark chocolate had so many more anti-oxidants than broccoli? There is a chocolate blog from last year as well. So much information about chocolate! yay!

Congrats to all the nominees for Blogathon awards, did you see that the Blogathon raised over $100,000 this year? wow.