I am feeling inspired by alotta things lately. All I want to do is sew and cook and organize and do aerobics in the living room. Let me tell you about a few of the things I have been up to...

I made the pillow case in the first photo out of a huge amazing table cloth or some other sort of thick, nubby household fabric that I bought at an antique store in Georgia a long time ago. This is significant because a) I have been wanting to cover some naked couch pillows for a long time using this tutorial (it really did only take twenty minutes) and b) because the fabric from the antique store was just sitting prettily in a basket for a year instead of being useful.

Bought a yoga mat yesterday and intend on doing headstands on it everyday, forever. My sister is doing this handstand challenge and since we used to have the best time doing gymnastics for hours in the backyard on a makeshift balance beam, I wanted in on it. So I spent yesterday afternoon doing this.

We decided to switch our current garage, which houses all the water heaters for our apartment building and flooded the first month we were here, to an empty one in our building with a beautiful concrete floor that just needs a little cleaning. Soon it will be a studio where I intend to have some fun getting messy with paint and tools and I am even going to eventually make all my dreams come true and buy a potters wheel. 

Summer arrived this weekend. Used book sale perusing, sewing, thrifting, coffee and cinnamon rolls with girl friends, Friday night drinks where our friend tends bar, porch dining, cleaning, car washing, iced lattes every morning, and a Thai dinner date night a few blocks from our house.

I haven't yet had a Californian summer. I arrived when the end was so close, the beaches were not crowded and there were only a few more weeks of shorts weather. I like seeing the season in the beginning stages, when there is some shift in everyone's personalities and daily lives that just makes me want to read in a hammock all day long with a layer of salt always on my arms.

Everyday life is looking like...

Foggy mornings that make the drive to work ten times more beautiful. 
Becoming best friends with the St. Bernard I work with (pictured: helping me sort clothing donations and zonked in front of the open office door).
Thrifting on my way home from work. Because Jeff can't spend more than five minutes in a thrift store and I could spend hours.
Eating bananas foster on friends' back porch.
Preparing for Easter sunrise church service and brunch with friends after.
Spending the weekends outside just because the weather is too perfect to stay inside.  

The view from the car is much different here. Eastern North Carolina and Savannah were filled with roads flanked by tall tall pines or grassy swamps, flat for as far as the eye could see. Just roads and forests. Roads and fields and swamps. In California from the road you can see something far below or high above at all times. You feel in the middle, surrounded. Even the interstates have pretty views of bodies of water that lap right up to hills, always with mountains in the distance. I can't imagine getting bored with the surroundings here; turn a corner and the landscape changes. I'm still getting used to all this beauty. I have to remind myself it is going to be just as beautiful tomorrow and the next day. 

p.s. The beach is the best place to get free pebbles for succulent drainage. Go at dusk and you're likely to see pelicans in flight, sailboats on the horizon, and old couples in love. 

bears at the zoo. doin' what bears do.