I made the hundredth sale in my Etsy shop yesterday and I noticed that Lauren did the same. I wasn’t sure that this would ever happen, so I’m pretty happy/relieved. Congrats to Lauren and my hundredth buyer, who will – of course – receive an extra gift. :)

This has been a rather scattered Friday so I don’t have enough time for the post I had planned. Instead, I think I will scheme (and sort photos) over the weekend and see if I can have something nice to show you on Monday. A new set of prints arrived today, which means that I also need to find time to snap a batch of photos. Oh, and I can’t forget to visit the Sing and Shout Crafts booth at the Moscow Farmer’s Market: I opted out this year, but it sounds as though the selection will be better than ever. Make sure to stop by and say hello to the Sing ’n’ Shout girls if you’re downtown on Saturday!

I realized that I’ve neglected to post photos of the Spring Gala last weekend. It was really fun! To sum it up, a friend of ours decided to turn his house into an art gallery for two days and invite a bunch of local authors and bands to perform. Husband gave a really excellent short story reading, and I was very impressed by my friends’ musical prowess.

Have a good weekend, all!

(Oil paintings by Nate Stevenson)

(My gouache paintings and gocco)

Hello, my name is Paula and I am a photoholic.

This would (perhaps) not be such a bad problem if it didn’t involve heaps and heaps of photos. I mean, it’s not like it’s particularly bad for me — or you — or that it’s an addiction that can’t be broken: I have smoothly made the transition from film to digital, although I do mourn for my old Nikon sometimes. Nope, the main problem is that my years of photo-taking have generated this. And this simply cannot be shipped in its entirety to Pensacola.

I apologize that the photo is lousy and that it doesn’t do justice to the mismatched towers of books, albums, boxes, photos and negatives piled on my dining room table. The stacks are quite high, and this is compounded by the problem that they are also quite dense — each album is chock full of memories, and I am now trying to decide which of those memories I don’t need to hang onto anymore.

Initially, I found this problem to be quite upsetting. Without my photos, how will I ever remember all these things? It will be as if they never happened! Once I got over the big lump in my throat and sat down to business, however, I realized that it’s not quite as bad as that. Sure, I will toss some images of mystery cities and cathedrals, but they aren’t really necessary to preserve forever, anyway — I think that I kept those photos out of a clutching, I-don’t-want-to-forget-any-part-of-that-time-in-my-life sentiment. This is not a particularly good sentiment to encourage, since there are plenty of times in my life that I don’t need or want to wallow in again. I mean, if you get wade through a swamp and find a lovely meadow on the other side, why bring complete documentation of the swamp with you?

Instead of keeping a photo of everything, then, I am trying to keep just the good ones. And by good I don’t just mean artistic, since I have come to the humbling realization that I am rather a worse photographer than I had thought (there are some really ugly pics in those stacks!). No, I mean the photos that show smiling faces and happy family birthday parties and cousins splashing in the lake. Some of these are pretty, and some are kind of grainy and off-kilter. But when I look at them, I remember that my life has been good and the God has blessed me very much.

I have provided myself with the incentive of four (okay, maybe five) shiny new albums to fill. But no more than that, since photos are really quite heavy.

Now I just need to condense this mess into four (or five) albums.

Wish me luck.

Today is my birthday. I am now 28 years old.

As I have been sorting through piles and piles of photos in the evening, I have been trying to remember what I projected my 28th year would be like when I was younger.

When I was 12, I wanted to be veterinarian. Or an author, looking at a pile of books with my name on them.

At 18, “artist” came into the picture — in the future I would surely have a studio filled with big canvasses.

At 22, a Ph.D. in history seemed moderately likely.

Last year, I wanted 28 to involve a new job for Josh, some illustration projects, and some things that haven’t happened yet.

You know the really fabulous thing, though? Nothing I’d imagined was as good as what I got. I’d trade an art studio for our little apartment any day, and I’m so glad that I’m not wading through a thesis on medieval history right now. My younger self couldn’t even imagine a husband who stayed up late to pack a special birthday lunch (and even stuck in a dollar bill for a soda).

At the rate things are going, I think 28 is going to be great.

(Family: the photo at the top is the incredibly dorky one I mentioned at dinner on Sunday. Wow.)

I have begun to sort through piles of belongings in preparation for our mid-May move to Pullman, having learned from experience that it’s best not to leave this for the week before. Along with craft supplies, books, photos, and linens, I’ve begun a little digital de-cluttering as well. Seeing as our digital data storage situation is a bit precarious, I’ve begun uploading some older pics onto my flickr account. Have I mentioned how much I love flickr? I know that I use, like, 5% of its capabilities, but I’ve been really happy with my experience so far. The free version is fine, but since I like to keep high-res files of everything I upgraded to a pro account in January and haven’t looked back.

I found these photos from a few years ago and decided that they are fairly expressive of my thoughts at the moment. Lots of things swirling around.

Have a good weekend, all.

Time got away from me on Friday, so I didn’t get to put up these last few photos (because I know you were dying to see them, right?) and wish you a happy weekend.

I think the name “seaweed” makes much more sense than “starfish,” especially since these do look quite unkempt when they’re lying on the beach. So I try image them floating underwater instead, and then they’re a great deal more attractive.

Husband was still a little under-the-weather last weekend because of his teeth, but he rallied long enough to watch some Season 3 Battlestar Galactica with me and use our gift certificate to a really fabulous local restaurant. This being the 2nd (and probably last) time that we have been to West of Paris, let me just say that, if you are local, it is as good as you think it is. That man is a genius with sauces.

I finished two paintings and some drawings over the weekend, but I’m going to string them out a bit since I’ve got what I think is a really good blog idea in the works and want to put the drawings/paintings in the context of some other thoughts that I’ve had recently. If I can get my act together, Jupiterbuttons might be taking a turn toward the literary for a while. Husband is usually the most prolific author in the family, but every once in a while I find that I have something (or lots of things) to say.

Finally, many thanks to Holly from decor8 for including my Alphabirdybet Poster in her roundup of affordable art for kids on the Real Simple blog, Simply Stated. The print is temporarily sold out since UPS cleverly left my last order sitting on our doorstep and — as you might guess — someone helped themselves to a bunch of prints. But if you’re interested in a print while I’m engaged in an online tussle to get reimbursed, let me know and I can have one shipped to you directly from my printer.

I stayed home today with poor husband, who had all four wisdom teeth taken out this morning. Yuck. I guess there’s a reason why I barely remember my own tooth-removal experience. (For the record, he looks really amusing with a fat lip and has a very good sense of humor while under duress.)

Back to the beach, though. A starfish is always one of the most fun creatures to find because because of his lovely, lovely orange color.

It’s amazing that something in nature can be this bright.

But while I totally understand the “star” part of the name, I have to wonder who came up with the “fish.” What at all seems fish-like about this little guy?

Maybe one of you far-off readers can help me…are sand-dollars a Pacific Northwest kind of species, or do you find them everywhere?

Common or not, I was very please to find a number of sand-dollar shells on the beach. And then one of the girls found something that was (to me) more rare: a bed of living sand-dollars, covered in short grey hairs.

I have no idea whether the hairs help them to move or catch food or what, but they look a little bizarre when compared with the smooth white forms that I’m used to seeing.

Oh, and speaking of dollars (nice segue, hmm?), I just received a very happy and long-awaited bit of news from husband. He has a definite job offer from this school, so we will be moving to Florida in August!

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaay!!

(Apologies to parents, et al. for announcing it this way, but it’s hard to keep the good new in.)

The beach at grandpa’s house is full of barnacles of all shapes and sizes.

Sometimes the creature that lives inside the shell has already died, leaving a little white mountain with a gaping hole in the middle.

The shell usually sticks firmly to the rock for some time afterward, but if it is broken off it leaves a beautiful ghost ring behind.

I found one unattached shell that is large enough to wear as a ring around my finger.

There are other barnacles (those closer to the water) that are still alive and closed up tightly against the air. If you go to an aquarium, you can watch through the glass as the shell opens and the barnacle waves its lacy tongue through the water to catch plankton.

We always leave the rocks with live barnacles behind.

I kept this one as a paperweight since all the shells are empty, and I plan to draw it soon. Aren’t the shapes just begging to be turned into lines?

So, we’re back from vacation! I add the exclamation point because we’re actually glad to be back — it really was a lovely week, but both husband and I felt quite content to walk into to our little apartment on Saturday night. I’m going to save details regarding the job interview until we know for sure, but it’s definitely looking good at the moment. :)

As always, vacation turned out to go a little differently than I had planned. I spent a lot less time drawing/painting and a lot more time hanging out with the two high school girls that came with us, which was definitely a fair trade. (Aren’t they cute?) Highlights included going downtown Seattle, lots of shopping, looking for treasures at the beach, and watching old episodes of Lost every evening. Mmm, doesn’t that sound nice?

I didn’t pack my camera downtown but I did take it to the beach. If you’re lucky enough to live somewhere with a white sand and blue waves, it might surprise you to see what the Puget Sound beaches look like. No swimming here! Lots of rocks + barnacles + pinchy crabs + cold water means that everyone keeps their shoes on and walks gingerly along, trying to look for pretty shells while not slipping on seaweed. (I almost lost a shoe in some sticky sand when when tide was low, so the rocks looked pretty good afterward.)

So, in honor of the fact that I took lots and lots of photos of the beach and not much else, I’m going to go ahead and say that this is Beach Week here on Jupiterbuttons.

Got any photos you want to share? Leave a comment with a link, and we’ll hop over to see what your beach looks like!

(We can’t go on vacation without The Beans, of course….

…even if she wishes that she never had to see cousin Pip again.) 

I wish I could say that this week has sped by, but that hasn’t really been the case. Dragged or plodded, maybe?

Next week will be entirely different, though. Husband got a long-awaited phone call yesterday telling him that he’s been invited to Florida for an interview. Hooray!! Unfortunately I don’t get to go, but he will get to meet a lot of people and bring back the scoop (and *hopefully* an offer letter). Instead, I get to spend the time here with mum & grandpa, which is always something to be looked forward to.

Since I can’t guarantee computer access and all that jazz, I’m going to be taking a little blog break next week. I feel like I’ve been doing an awful lot of that, haven’t I? It seems better to go ahead and decide that in advance, though, then to put up one little post and a few bad photos.

Plus, I think I just need to step away from the internet for a while. Am I the only one who sometimes thinks that life would be simpler if I had never discovered the world of blogs? Not better, perhaps, but definitely simpler. Imagine what it would be like to not know that there are a thousand art + craft blogs out there, daily beckoning you to visit them for new ideas and content. To not be influenced by the hundreds of other styles and subjects that seem better or more marketable than yours. To not worry about how to make your house, photographs, yard, cooking, etc. look as nice as hers. 

So next week, I’m going to settle down with a sketchbook and a couple of picture books to do a little exploration and re-evaluation — but no blog-hopping. Will let you know how it turns out. :)

The dishes I saved for last are a couple of pieces that most of my friends own because they’re just so darn cute.

I mean, how can you resist that chipper little sugar & creamer set? (Alisha couldn’t…see her flickr page for another really lovely photo of this set.)

And then there are these lovely Japanese bowls, which can be found at thriftstores everywhere for about 50 cents apiece. They’re so delicate and have the best shape…who says that pretty dishes have to be expensive?

Thanks for showing your dishes and admiring mine this week. And don’t forget that we are hopefully moving next summer, so a lot of these may appear at the Gibbs Mega Moving Sale sometime in May…and I’d so much rather that they go to someone I know!

Have a good weekend + week, all.