Fantastic Cat by Takako Minekawa

This is a very cute song. I've been listening to it first thing in the morning after I drag myself reluctantly out of bed, and it's helping!
I can't believe that just a year ago I had a job where I started work, across town, at 7:00 am, and I was so accustomed to it that it didn't seem like any big deal. Now my start time is 9:00 and I have the hardest time getting up at 7:00!

Andy Goldsworthy - The Spire

I'm fortunate to have Andy Goldsworthy's sculpture, "The Spire" near my home. I went on a recent tour/hike to The Spire. They said that in time, the small cypress trees nearby will grow taller than the sculpture and obscure it, but unlike most of Andy Goldsworthy's ephemeral art, The Spire has structural engineering components holding it together on the inside; it's just not visible on the outside.
It's pretty cool and amazing. When you get up close to it you realize how tall it is. It's such a graceful object that from a distance it's very unimposing, and some may say unimpressive (someone at my work complained that it was just a pile of sticks that anyone could have put together). When you get close enough to be staring straight up at it, dwarfed by it, you get the full understanding of how beautiful and special it is. Here I am in shadows near The Spire. The tour group is around the base of the sculpture.

Kinokuniya

I got a handful of Easter-candy colored notebooks at Kinokuniya bookstore in Japantown...I like them because the paper is very smooth. I use them for writing my journal entries.

Balmshell Lipgloss

Well, enough ranting about my dumb day job. The only good thing about it is it pays a salary, and, I suppose, that for now it still exists, seeing as more and more people are being laid off. I could possibly make an offshoot blog and put all my work woes there, but that would be boring indeed.

Back to the Regularly Scheduled Programming...

Here's a very cool product; Balmshell lipgloss. ($20) Apparently they sell this item at Sephora, so it's hardly a newly-discovered secret, but I bought it online and I didn't see it in my local Sephora store. The fun thing about it is that the applicator end is one of those slidey-liquid things like those pens from the 70's. For some reason, when I was a kid I had one with a pinup girl on it, and when you turned the pen upside down, her bathing suit fell off.

They offer several colors, but the one I got is called "You Give Me Fever" and is described as a sheer rosy pink. The illustration features a blonde woman with peach cheeks... when you turn the applicator, a pink heart fills with color and slides over and fills her cheeks with pink. (Click the photo for a larger version.) Pretty cute, although it gets points deducted for not featuring some women of color. (Stila Cosmetics is now featuring illustrations of women of color.) The product comes with a little threaded keychain end cap, so you can take the cute part of the lipgloss off after you finish the gloss and make a keychain out of it. It combines "lipstick" with "toy". In addition to all this design cleverness, the gloss itself is pretty, non-sticky, and smells pleasant! I was pleasantly surprised.

Supposedly, when the economy goes south, lipstick sales remain strong or even increase. They say that a new lipstick is still an affordable luxury that women will treat themselves to while cutting back on other frivolities. So maybe Balmshell has a chance. I plan to get a few more.

International Postage - It Takes a Genius

One of the many stimulating and creative things I had to do today was address and stamp 28 envelopes and stick a self addressed, stamped envelope inside each one. One of my coworkers, who is someone I actually have hung out with outside of work and consider a friend (although today's events make me wonder) was given the task of taking the same address list and just plugging the address of each person into a form letter. I gave her this task when she started pestering me about her letters this morning, by messaging me to ask if there was anything she could do to "help" with the letters. When people say stuff like that at my workplace, it means "Can you hurry up with that thing you are supposed to do for me today?" So I hurried up, as I was passive-aggressively requested to do by this woman, and addressed and stamped her envelopes. There was one letter going to Australia and one to Switzerland, and I put the appropriate postage on them. Later this person instant messages me to say she noticed I put the appropriate postage on the two international-bound letters. She followed this up with a "You're awesome!" and a line or two telling me if it had been her she wouldn't have realized this till she was already at the Post Office.

Um. Can you say patronizing? I replied that I have several years of administrative work behind me and that my arms are an accurate postal scale and my eyes can penetrate a toner cartridge from across the room and know how much ink is inside. Is it because I wear lipstick and I refuse to wear shoes shaped like baked potatoes that she thinks I have no brain whatsoever? Like I wouldn't put the correct postage on a letter, so I need to be praised when I do?

I hate people.