Hasta La Ideas

Greetings from Salt Lake City, Utah. I left home around 5:30am with plenty of time to get through customs and such. Unfortunately, due to the extremely cold weather (-30 degrees celcius plus wind chill), the plane’s computer system was non functioning and required rebooting. The flight was delayed a few hours, and thus my connection to Salt Lake via San Francisco was lost. So after landing in SFO, I had enough time to grab a sandwich before boarding to Pheonix, Arizona. Wearing my winter boots and lugging around my coat and sweaters!

Landing in Arizona and seeing palm trees was really strange. Not where I imagined I’d be today! After another delay in getting the third plane out to the runway, at last it was take off to Salt Lake. I arrived about 15 hours after I began, which is actually a bit longer than it would take to drive from Calgary to Utah!

My bags are still in San Francisco, but I guess I’ll see them in the morning. Good thing I have a whole extra day tomorrow to take it easy. The Grand America Hotel is incredibly grand indeed! My suite is big enough to host a mini party right here. And once my bags arrive (which are full of party supplies and camera equipment for this Friday’s Squarespace + UPPERCASE mini party with my clothing used like packing peanuts) we actually could.

Nighty night from Utah!

This was our Wednesday morning.

(Speaking of mornings, wouldn’t be great if Calgary had its own Creative Mornings?)

I am happy to be featured on today’s Mom Inc Daily, Cat Seto’s blog. “Mom Inc Daily is a creative and business sanctuary for moms. Cat and her community of “Designing Moms” share their daily posts about their love for motherhood, design and the intricacies of running a creative business.” Thanks, Cat and Annie, for asking me to be part of it.

I decided to provide a true-to-life snapshot of our living room. Although it is fun escapism to see perfectly presented homes, wouldn’t you rather see what things are really like? I know I get frustrated by seeing “family” homes with nothing out of place, no clutter, no books, no mess. We certainly don’t live like that!

It is a major triumph when I find/make time to sew something. Here is Finley’s first Hallowe’en costume. It was fun to put together… I just made a vest that is large enough to fit over his winter jacket (it snowed this morning) and made some wings. The materials are remnant pieces I took from my mom’s stash of leftover suiting material as well as some cut-up trousers from Glen. There’s some French General linen that was part of a table centrepiece at The Creative Connection and some Fog Linen swatches that were part of an issue of Selvedge magazine. The brown ribbon is leftover from my wedding decorations and I think the piece of gold fabric was my grandma’s. It’s nice to have a variety pile of fabric on hand because if I had had to go out and buy this stuff I don’t think the project would have happened at all. Hoo hoo hooray for all of us packrats!

instagram pic by Karyn ValinoI’m still waiting for the truck to arrive with my many hundreds of pounds of magazines. But many of the fine stockists have already received their shipments, like the workroom in Toronto. (Thanks, Karyn, for the instagram pic!)

I had planned on taking my own instagram pics and twitter about the new issue but my technology is not cooperating. My iphone has worked a-ok for a couple of years, but this morning I dropped off Glen’s phone at the repair shop (alas, his met its match with a muddy puddle). After exiting the repair shop, I checked my phone for the time and proceeded on my way. Twenty minutes later, I got to my office and tried to use my phone and it doesn’t even turn on! I’ve tried to restart it to no avail. My first thought was that the repair shop is an evil genius that can transmit “no-workie” signals to unsuspecting phones so that they need repair. It had a full charge this morning.

The frustrating thing is that learning from Glen’s unfortunate incident, I was all set to sync my phone on my work computer so that I would have all the videos and pictures of Finley safe and sound. Now what should I do? I don’t want to lose anything! The more I think about the pictures on my phone, the sicker I feel. Anyone have recommendations on recovering an iphone 3G without erasing images?

Looks like I’ll be heading back to the repair shop on my walk home. ugh!!!