Weekends and Fur Elise

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Happy Monday friends! I am slowly on the mend, and I did get out of the house quite a bit despite feeling cruddy because a girl can only take so much of sitting 'round in her jammies. Right? So Friday after seeing my doc and getting antibiotics, I took the Noodle to a park and then a movie (darling by the way).

Saturday was my father-in-law's birthday and we met at his alma mater, Cal, for lunch. Afterwards, we meandered over to Jack London Square in Oakland and while we couldn't rent a motorboat as requested by our enthusiastic little sailor boy, we did find a place to rent kayaks. Surprisingly, I am the only one in the family with previous kayaking experience! I was quite proud of that actually. The wind was a bit much for me, so I got dropped off fairly early.


Yesterday was a lovely day spent at home in warm sunshine. I made lemonade with lemons from a friend's tree, and served it to my little guy and our neighbor's son (same age) out front in their clubhouse. You had to be invited, and then you had to sign in to their club in order to enter and then finally you were allowed to decipher the club's name. I helped them write in a cipher*, a most basic substitution kind, which we learned from the Dangerous Book for Boys. I would tell you the name, but then you know what would have to happen. Heh heh!

But none of this is the point of this post. This video is the point of this post:


Rather, the soundtrack to this video is the point of this post (but I thought the video was pretty enough to share, how about that sun flare at the very end?! Love!) While everyone was out swimming yesterday in the late afternoon, I took it upon myself to start trying to learn Fur Elise on the piano keyboard!

This has been a dream of mine since 2003! I have learned the first two bars, is that what they're called? I got stuck because I didn't know where G# was but I have figured it out the sharp (and flat) keys this morning. So back to the keyboard I go after posting this. When I have successfully learned the entire song, I promise to make my own video and share it here on the blog.

How was your weekend?


* Another dream of mine? To be a spy. :)

Sweet Links

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It may have taken me all day long to gather these but I do think these are some sweet, spring-time links.

I am loving this Abici bike and excited to feel better soon and take my own cruiser out for a spin (via Holiday Matinee).


Big Sur is extra beautiful through the lens of Ryan Tatar. I really want Polaroid transfers to be in my future somehow.



I can't get this darling post about vintage Fisher Price toys out of my mind (via Modern Kiddo).


Yesterday, HulaSeventy went and tweeted about these concept cameras. Now I'm obsessed with them but they don't really exist. Sigh. But I just had to share the love with you. ;)


I can't get this catchy Train song out of my head, hopefully I am not the only one. "The way you walk ain't fair you know!"


What about this amazing macro photograph of a clementine? Does everyone drop everything to stare at it and then go prowling on BorrowLenses for macro lenses or is that just me? (via scoutie girl)



I'll wrap up this edition of Sweet Links with this truly amazing and inspiring entry to Blog It Forward. This is CreateGirl's Great Aunt Mary and what a great woman! Please take a few moments to read about this trail-blazing Sicilian! She was light years ahead of her time and lived to an amazing 107! 

What sweet links have you found lately -- any great recipes, tutorials, art, music, photograhy? Please share them with me in the comments.



P.S. I'm truly honored to be seen in two sweet places today: on Simply Hue and as part of Scoutie Girl's cherry blossom festival. Thanks for having me on your inspiring blogs today!

100 Photos: No. 12

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It's spring break around here and I've come down with some kind of bug so all of my plans have gone right out the window. And those were my Plan B plans because my Plan A was a road trip to Portland which got postponed. So now it's Plan C which means more screen time for the Noodle than I generally prefer and a lot of moping. "Boo hiss!" as my friend said when she found out I was sick.

At least I have a Polaroid that I took recently when it was warm and sunny to remind me that sometimes life is glorious.

Tutu's Tree

This amazing tree lives in my in-laws front yard. They have sold the house after more than 15 years there and are moving to the next chapter of their lives. Now we can always remember this tree in all its spring glory.

Birthday Boy

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Today is my sweet husband's birthday, and we celebrated with his parents yesterday. The birthday boy requested lunch at his favorite sandwich shop and his mom made his favorite lemon poppyseed cake. The Noodle did all the decorating at home. There was a birthday banner and crepe paper streamers hung from each blade of the ceiling fan, which was promptly turned on in turbo mode (of course).


Daddy was a good sport about wearing the hat, don't you think?

Happy birthday Mister Blue Eyes!

Artist Profile: Yangyang Pan

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Y'all! I saw this image on the Fey Handmade blog recently and I cannot get it out of my mind. I had to know more about the artist.


Listen to this: "Her current work focus is specifically to the natural world’s beauty and cruelty, its hostility and hospitality." I am positive this piece of art made its way to me this week for a reason. 

My heart has been very heavy and distracted from pretty things because my old friend has been told there is nothing more the doctors can do for his precious daughter Lauren. I have been driving through my town, I have been seeing nature bursting with beauty every which way, and all the while something so cruel and unfair is happening to an innocent child.

I am in love with this piece of art. 

It is like winterwinterwinterwinter----->SPRING. 
It's like insomniainsomniainsomniainsomnia-----> SLEEP. 
It's like toobusytoobusytoobusytoobusy----->A FREE DAY. 

My wish is that there is some miraculous, colorful burst coming my friend's way that can't even be imagined right now.

View more of Yangyang's work in her website, Etsy shop and Flickr.

88 Howard Street, San Francisco

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I apologize for being MIA yesterday, I had my little guy home again and I chose to be the devoted mama instead of being present here. He wasn't very sick, a low fever with no other symptoms so it was not the worst illness to deal with by any means. We even went out to the market and stopped along the way for a long walk in the spring sunshine.

I'm here now to share the rest of the photos of where I lived with my dad back in 1990-92. Let's start off right with the amazing view from our apartment and the tower that we lived in.



Pretty sweet, huh? I knew enough at 21 to enjoy it as much as possible. I remember saying to myself regularly, "I may never have an eight-block commute again in my lifetime." Here are some of the things I saw every single day: looking up, walking in, walking by and shopping in.






I had a lot of classic adventures from my home base at Howard Street. You could find me clothes shopping at The Embarcadero on the way home with a fresh paycheck in my pocket, eating and drinking margaritas on Fridays at TGIF or Chevy's with friends, eating lunch either at the Far East Cafe around the corner from my office or a sandwich on the steps of Old St. Mary's. Trust me, margaritas at Chevy's were just the appetizer for someone who just turned 21 and lived in San Francisco! (Am I right Lyn?) 

I would regularly give all the cash I had on me to almost all the homeless people I passed. Usually small amounts but once I gave $40 to one man and he proposed to me in return. When I told my dad about that one, he gave me a little talk in a slightly exasperated way as if he couldn't believe how UN-street smart I was coming from a hardened New Yawker like him. I would take Bart all around, thrilled by the way the ticket got sucked in by the turnstile. I gleefully ran any and all errands needed by the law firm that I worked for and I especially loved visiting the library and Superior Court. 

I have nothing but fond memories of my time in San Francisco. Thank you for letting me share some of them with you. Please, I would truly love for you to leave a comment with your favorite memory of San Francisco on this post!

100 Photos: No. 10 & No. 11

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Hello friends! I have a sick wee one at home so I am going to split my big post into two parts. Today is the Polaroid part and tomorrow will be the Canon part of my trip to San Francisco last week. The special place I visited is the last place that I lived with my dad: Rincon Towers at 88 Howard Street.

No. 10, Howard Street
This was the last exposure in the pack, and it got stuck coming out.
But I quite like it.

When I went off to college at Cal State Long Beach, my dad almost immediately left the suburbs of San Jose for city life in San Francisco. He chose Rincon Towers as his re-entry point after 17 years away from a city. He was a native New Yorker, and while he didn't want to raise me there, it had been quite a sacrifice for him to leave and live in suburbs all that time. I always thought that was a mistake but hey, I was the kid right?

I struggled quite a bit at CSULB, and after two years, came crawling home. I joined my dad at Rincon Towers and got a full-time job in a law firm. I lived there with him for almost 1.5 years before I went back to college in southern California. We didn't last long in his one-bedroom, so we switched towers and moved to a two-bedroom on the 22nd floor facing the water.

No. 11, The Embarcadero

We each had a short commute to work and we would often walk in together with our espresso coffees from the cafe in the plaza of our apartment towers. My office was on California Street and his was on Montgomery. Some days, it was very windy and I would hop on the cable car for the last couple of blocks.

After I returned to college, my dad couldn't really afford that two-bedroom so he moved into a studio. I remember he was very frustrated by three moves in three years, even though he was happy I was going back to school. It was a lot of hassle for him. Parenting, huh? Shortly after that he found a great pad in North Beach and that was the very last place I saw him happy.

Part Two, tomorrow.

100 Photos: No. 9

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I love the simplicity of No. 9 with its pristine blue sky and a single object.

Lamp Post in Walnut Creek

One of my very favorite parts of my Polaroids is that little bit of white near the bottom edge. It doesn't happen every time. I love that for some reason, it's a mystery to me because I'm so new with it all.

Today is a minimum day at school so I have to try to cram as much grown-up stuff into the next hour as humanly possible! Over the weekend, I will prepare a special post for Monday. I went to San Francisco yesterday to pick up some prints and ventured a little out of my way to visit a place from my past. I can't wait to share it with you.

My April Fool's Tutorial for Mac OS X

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Good morning! I wanted to be playful and play a trick on my blog but in the end, I decided to play a trick on my suspecting husband. I say suspecting because my trick was computer oriented and for Mac OS X but when I walked by his laptop this morning, I saw he was booted into Windows which messed up my plans. I was unable to hide my reaction so when I got home from school drop-off, he had kindly rebooted into Mac for me. Ha! What a good sport!

If you want to play this trick on someone on a Mac, this is a really good one. My husband is a web developer/software engineer and he was impressed by my trick! It is a classic screensaver prank but I took it one level deeper than simply replacing his desktop wallpaper. I will do it to myself to show you how to do it.



Step 1. Take a screen shot using apple-shift-3. I named the file "april fool."



Step 2. Open Preferences and make the screen shot the desktop wallpaper.



Step 3. Open the Terminal utility.



Step 4. Hide the real desktop icons

Type the following two lines in your Terminal window: "defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false" and hit enter. Then type "killall Finder" and hit enter again.

This is the key component of this prank. Quit Terminal and what you should have is a desktop that looks just as your victim remembers it, but when they go to click on their folders and icons, nothing will happen! This is the part that impressed my husband. 

Of course, this impressed him because I am not an engineer and he was surprised I could find Terminal, let alone enter some code that would do anything tricky. Also he didn't know this particular code to hide his desktop icons so I got a double score. I have two pieces of advice for this prank to succeed: 1) know thyself and know thy victim; 2) don't let a lot of time lapse between your prank and the discovery if at all possible because the time stamp will give it away. 



Step 5. When the laughs are done, restore the icons. 

Open Terminal again and type "defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true" and enter. Then type "killall Finder" again and hit enter. Don't forget to reset their original desktop image to be polite. I got the instructions for this trick via OSXDaily.

If you're really feeling tricky, maybe just maybe you mess around in the system prefs right after you restore their desktop image. Just sayin' maybe their trackpad is moving at a different speed now?

Happy April Fool's Day!

100 Photos: No. 8

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I did a few other fun things during my time away, including spending some time with Pola. We went to Walnut Creek and Danville so I'm happy to say I have a few images lined up to add to my One Hundred Photos project.

A Fine Spring Day

Here's a little 100 Photos link love: the blog where it all started, the Flickr pool and one of my personal favorite participants, pretty life photography.

Refreshed!

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Good morning friends! I am back and feeling loads lighter and better after a few days of rest.  While I was gone (and a huge part of my stress), I had a PET/CT scan. I'm very relieved and happy to report that it showed that I'm still in remission. Talk about a woohoo moment! We celebrated the great news with a little bubbly last night.

Also while I was away, I finished my first amigurumi. My hunch was correct that it wouldn't take me three years, which makes for a much more gratifying project than that darn three-year blanket. But what made it the MOST gratifying project was my son's reaction when I wrapped it up and presented it to him at bedtime one night.

I'd like you all to meet Sally (or Bun Bun, we're not sure which yet)


He cooed over her and even shed tears of joy! He told me it was "the greatest gift he had ever received." When I stepped away to get my camera, I overheard him singing you are my sunshine to her. I will never forget it. I'm working on the baby bunny already.

Thank you all for the well wishes while I took a few days away. I am happy and inspired to be back and have lots of good posts planned for us this week. How have you all been lately? I missed you!

A Little R&R

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Friends, I'm not feeling very well physically, mentally or emotionally. This photograph is called A Cure for What Ails. For me, this means a little break from my Sweet Eventide to rest & recover. I will be back on Tuesday, and I hope you'll understand.

I won't be gone altogether though. You can find me at the Green Phone Booth tomorrow for my regularly scheduled guest post, and I'll be there again on Monday with a bonus post.


P.S. In the meantime, do visit Gigi's photostream and blog, The Magpie's Fancy. She has such lovely images and she's a very kind Flickr friend to me.

Super Spirograph

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I scored a giant hit of happiness at the school rummage sale this weekend. Remember my swirly designs from last year? I am going to be taking it up a notch now with my vintage Kenner Super Spirograph set.

...feeling like an 8-year-old again.







I am making myself a map of sorts of which wheels make which patterns, so pardon my scribbled notes. Also I need to learn how to use my scanner too, parts are cut off and the "red" is clearly orange in real life. But I want to spiro everything now (and so does my Noodle) and I have blank kraft Moleskins that need decorating. :)

The Winner!

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Good morning! I have just clicked my winner! Random.org chose number 3, Gina from Hettle of ruffled pillow fame. Congratulations sweet friend!


I really enjoyed Gina's comment for the giveaway and would like to share it here.
She described the essence of what keeps me so connected to my camera when she said her favorite post was... "your SF post, b/c it reminds me of why I truly enjoy your photography, it has a found along the way kind of beauty in the little things..." I tried to describe this idea in an interview that was published yesterday on the Art Wall blog, but I think Gina summarized my style much more succinctly than I did.


I want to thank all of my sweet readers for coming to keep me company five days a week here at Sweet Eventide. Putting together pretty posts for you truly brings me joy. I look forward to another year together!

100 Photos: No. 7

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Good day friends! I am thrilled to announce I discovered my Polaroid package in my mailbox a few minutes ago. I've been waiting for this package and guess what? It was in my mailbox since Thursday and I was clueless! I have a P.O. Box where I receive most of my mail and I guess I thought they would leave the package on my porch.

I am very happy that my 100 Photos project is back in business. I think this is a great birthday gift for my blog, don't you?

a surprise Easter treat: Canel's chewing gum (like Chiclets)


Apparently the Easter bunny came with the Polaroid bunny to visit my mailbox. Look what I found inside with my two packs of Polaroid 600: yummy gum and a cute bunny postcard from a sweet friend. This empty white shelf is an awesome score from our school rummage sale over the weekend. I got so many goodies you wouldn't believe it. The school raised an astonishing $31,000!

Don't forget to enter the blog birthday giveaway, I found a special goody at the rummage sale that is going in the package as a bonus. But you have to trust me because it's going to be a secret for now, although I will give you a hint: I have mentioned it here on the blog in the past six months.

Blog Birthday!

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Happy Friday! I just realized that Sweet Eventide was born one year ago tomorrow. To celebrate the birthday and the arrival of spring, I've decided to have a spontaneous party.



I am going to give away one of my photographs. To enter, please leave a comment with a link to your favorite post of mine from the past year (archives are to your left) as well as which image you would like from my shop. Edited: If you don't see something in the shop that you like, but you've seen a photo on my blog or Flickr that you want, let me know and I'll make it happen. The print will be either an 8x12 or 8x8 (if you choose a Polaroid). 

You can enter until midnight on Monday, March 22, 2010. I will pick the winner using Random.org. Good luck!

Sometimes I am a Girly Girl

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I know I said last week that my eye is not naturally drawn to purple, but while I was out taking purple photos, a pair of purple sandals did catch my eye. And they have not left my mind since so I am dedicating a post to them. I am unleashing my girly girl.




1. drifting by dress, Anthro
2. gabrielle purple hair clip, Just Josie's Etsy shop
3. flirty girl lip gloss Philosophy
4. purple crinkle flower t-straps, Gap

Okay now I am off to skip down a sidewalk and meet a friend for a glass of chardonnay! ;)
Have you gotten your mind stuck on any spring pretties right now?

I Smile for Sun Flares

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I saw this photo yesterday on kris atomic, and I cannot get it out of my mind's eye. Between the sudden weather shift here and the way it has elevated my mood, it all seems to come together in this image.

"sunset" © Saga

Aren't you smiling too now?

By the way, I am the teensiest bit obsessed with sun flares lately. It all started with this post on Michael Bailey Gates, remember that one? Did you notice that I experimented with them in SF? I wonder how long this phase will last. :)