Weekly Obsession: Pinterest

Helping a friend plan her wedding is difficult.  Helping a friend plan her wedding from 5665.32 miles away is damn near impossible. Well it would have been impossible prior to Al Gore inventing the internet (insert snicker snicker here). Now there are fabulous sites such as Pinterest that are making this a nearly do-able task.



Pinterest is a database of visual bookmarks. How many times have you been  wasting time  spending a productive day browsing the internet and come across a recipe, or an outfit, or an idea for your apartment, and thought I need to remember this. If you are like me, then you add the link to the bottomless pit that is your bookmark list, never to be remembered or looked at again. Pinterest has been a huge timesaver for me. I don't spend a ton of time re-looking for things that I swear I saw before, or maybe I just had a dream about it? Damn someone should really make that. There is a "Pin It" button that can be installed on your web browser and then while browsing the internet, when you come across that tattooed-stuffed-merman that you absolutely have to remember for a gag list, you can pin-it, put it on your "things that make you go ha-ha" board (not a standard board, one I renamed myself...you can copy) and you can later see it all in one place.

As maybe you have gleened by now, I am not an organized person. I know, I know, shocking. So for me, Pinterest has been helpful when I am looking to help my friend plan her wedding. We have an 8 hour time difference between us, so when I am doing the majority of my online browsing, she is asleep, and vice versa-- but now I can do all of the browsing I want, label things as potential bouquets, bridesmaid dresses, grooms outfits, Pin them, and she can view them all in one place (rather than waking up to 10 disconjointed email streams of thought that can be easily misfiled or deleted) she can also comment on them, pick what she likes, and repin them to her board. This has been a helpful communication tool for us. There are so many uses for Pinterest, that I know the potential has barely been tapped. Are you going to begin pinning?

The Perils of Gluten: Weekly Obsession

Well, I really had planned on having another post before it came around for Friday Obsession again, but I just got lazy. Hopefully I will be posting a tutorial on hanging pictures, expat decorating, and/or another letter to my (still) unadopted child. I have been really busy lately you guys. Mainly I have been moving apartments, online shopping, and deciding if I am more excited to see my friends, eat at real restaurants with free water refills, or shop during my upcoming trip home to Tampa. Also I have been maid-of-honor-ing for my oldest friend in Florida, and I take my duties of online dress, jewelery, venue, photographer, DJ, baker, and florist shopping seriously. So enough excuses, my point is: don't get too excited. No peeing of the pants necessary.

One of my latest obsessions lately has been the perils of Gluten. Give a man a loaf of bread and he eats for a day, give me a loaf of bread and you'll get a lifetime lecture on the perils of Gluten. That was a recent facebook status from my husband. I've been breaking out a little on my face. I am 29, I never thought battling acne and fine lines would coincide. We are talking civil war here you guys. Since I was a teenager, the acne has been an issue, with brief bouts of relief and hope in between. I was on antibiotics and creams for year. I never tried accutane, because my acne issues were never that serious from a medical standpoint, just from an uhhhhhh my god why is this shit still on my face standpoint. About a year ago when my obsession over this issue kicked in I found out about a drug called Spirnolactone and asked my dermatologist for a script. He obliged me, and it was like a magic cure...for a time. Then I got some melasma on my face and found out that was a commong side effect of this drug. Great, robbing Peter to pay Paul. Deciding between two evils. I wish I had the lucury of being low maintenance. I also wish I could get my blogger our of what ever language it is set on to that does not allow my spell check to work properly. Such is life. So I stopped taking the Spirnolactone, had a mild breakout, and took to the web with my grabby hands for a new solution. Enter the great Gluten debate. I came across this solution quite accidently while reading one of the foodie websites that I regularly check in with, Bon Apetit. I read about a chef in NYC who opened her own business catering to dietary specifications and treating food like medicine. One of the things she mentioned in the article was that for her clients who suffer from acne, she puts them on a wheat free diet. I did some further digging, research, and googling on this topic, and found a lot of evidence to support what I wanted it to support, that adult acne can in fact be cured. I found that Gluten causes a myriad of issues for people who are insensitive, intolerant or allergic.



I researched all food containing gluten. This website was very helpful. And I set off on my pasta, bread and soy-sauce free way. Sure there are pastas and breads and soy sauces that do not contain gluten, but I live in Russia and can not read all most labels, so like I said, off I went. Because we do not eat at restaurants frequently, it has not been that difficult. It has been 3 weeks now and I feel better and my skin has mostly seemed to clear up. I can't be sure yet if the two are related, but my obsession is sure, for now, until it is not.



Weekly Obsession: Travel Shadow Boxes

Travel Shadow Boxes

When we moved to Moscow,  I packed like I was off to Girl Scout Camp. I am surprised I didn't find a box of thin mints and a green baret in my shipment. I don't know if I thought we were moving in to a tent, but I did not pack any of my wall decorations, or personalized decorations. Just the basics, you know like three closets worth of clothes and shoes, a lifetime supply of tampons, and 3 industrial sized jars of peanutbutter. No room for framed pictures, dishes, or plates, but sure lets have a mini cosco in our back room. Excellent work, ROBIN. So I have been insanely jealous of every home-y apartment I enter here in a quest since we moved in to get some personalized art on our walls so we can stop living in a bare walled white assylum while paying homage to a hideous striped couch.  I did manage to take some things to a frame shop last week, I should probably make that a post all by itself. I think I will, so moving on...I came across THIS:

while I was working sifting trough the web for some design ideas. Holy hell. New obsession. I need to make these immediately. Click here for more indepth pictures. Anyone who travels needs to do these. How amazing. I am slightly dissapointed because it would be much better going in to a trip with this idea so you can make sure to collect all of those little trinkets. I used to do that. However, in an effort to fight my lazy packrat nature, I have stopped filling my pockets with stuff because I thought to myself, really, why are you saving this hotel key, what are you going to do with it? Become a hoarder? Is that what you want to do? There are easier ways to get on TV. I do not want to end up living in a one bedroom apartment surrounded by 47 cats, a ferret, and fesces. I just will not have it. I won't allow this to happen to anyone I know, so you are welcome in advance. As long as I have a use for the stuff though, I will be more than happy to save boarding passes, keys, money, gum wrappers, used napkins and what not to make personalized art. My favorite thing about these frames is they give me justifaction for packrat tendancies I love so many of my photos when I come back from a trip, but it would be monotonous to frame and display 10+ photos from the same week/destination, and this project really offers a solution for that. What else are you going to do with all of those sunset pictures? Your friends do not care. They do not want to see them again. Trust me.

This is my best take at the project so far:

Don't be too jealous. I wasted a lot of time on this, because now I will have to scour my apartment (which we are in the process of packing up and moving) and any purse and the pockets of any pair of pants that went with me on the trip for memorabilia in order to bring my vision to life. Or I will have to find suitable stand ins because OH I AM MAKING THIS HAPPEN.

I used Photoshop CS5 to do the letter cut outs. It was quite easy, but tedious. Click Here for a great tutorial on how to do cut out letters. I used one picture per letter, saved each one as a separate JPG, and then placed them in Adobe inDesign CS5 to make the poster. My next steps (after the scouring and possible fraud) are to find some shallow shadow box frames here (you know because it's not like I live in Russia where it is impossible to find normal items), then depending on what size the frames are, I will resize my inDesign graphic, and assemble. It will only take me like a year month.

Will you be single-white(no disrespect)-female-ing this project? I am not worried, it's not like I actually thought of it.

I Don't Believe in Moderation: Weekly Obsession

It isn't that I don't believe in the existence of moderation. I know it exists. I have seen other people exercise an average amount of time on a regular basis, I have noticed people who eat normally, and you know, I even once new a girl who never listened to the same song 46 times in one day on her iPod. The problem is, that girl is not me. I live in the over/under doing it phase. I notice, become interested, become obsessed, proselytize, grow disillusioned, burn out, and retreat. To not interupt inertia, I chase and jump on another bandwagon. It is not that I am easily influenced. I am not. I do not jump on fads or trends, or even upcoming ones. Often, I become obsessed with very obscure things, get so excited my head explodes and in an effort to spread the wealth (and avoid having my head explode) I sell the obsession to my friends, family, coworkers, and strangers on the subway. Now, I am going to begin sharing my obsessions weekly with you. Fridays I will start posting what I am currently most obsessed with. At least I plan to, afterall that is a high expecation and the chances of me sticking with it and not growing bored are high, so go ahead, brace yourself to the obsession storm, and know that this too may very well pass.