December 31, 2011

Eloise (the dachshund!) at the Beach

Here's what we did on Christmas. And yes, we do live in New Jersey. When Eloise started getting cold she kept trying to run back to the car. 









December 26, 2011

Mid Century Monday


The Vogue Theater, Broad Ripple, Indianapolis, IN

December 2, 2011

Not Thrifty! The Christmas Hedgie

I have been collecting seasonally-themed Not Thrifty! items. This little guy was at a Goodwill in San Antonio back in September. I really do like when thrift stores have holiday stuff organized, because you know that they get a lot of it, and if you do want to buy Christmas stuff, you appreciate it all being in one place. Conversely, if you are not trying to buy a creeper Noel hedgehog, you also appreciate not coming across him without warning.

This is kind of the face that I picture on Varys from Song of Ice and Fire.
Also, please note the bras on hangers in the background. Ew.

November 7, 2011

Mid Century Monday






































Smitty's Grocery Store, Lebanon, MT

I like the typography, I could do without the stupid Toyota

October 22, 2011

Bull Planter

How cool is this guy??? 
On the store




With some lithops!

With an air plant!





October 11, 2011

Dream Car/Zanesville, OH

So when I was driving to New Jersey from Texas, I stopped in Zanesville, OH. Why did I do that, you might ask? Well, BESIDES the standard offerings of every thriving metropolis in the coal belt, Zanesville was also the location of McCoy pottery, and I think also some other Ohio potteries of the same time period. So I wanted to stop and go to thrift stores in hopes of finding some pottery. It was kind of underwhelming. Google maps said there were three Goodwills and one other charity-related thrift store in Zanesville, but if there were, I could not find them. There were, respectively, a CVS, an empty lot, and an apartment building where three of the four were supposed to be. 1 for 4 is not such a good ratio, Google maps.
At the Goodwill that actually existed, there was a little bit of pottery but nothing crazy. I also was there at 4 p.m. on a Sunday, i.e., THE WORST time to go to a thrift store, in my opinion. I got one little green planter from Ungemach Pottery(UPCO) with a kind of cactus-y pattern. I like the green, and I think the pattern will look really nice with a cactus planted in it.





























After that, while I was driving to the supposed Goodwill that is actually a CVS, I drove past a used car lot with an AWESOME car in it. For those that do not know, one of my life goals is to own a cruck at some point. Probably an El Camino, because they are pretty much the defining vehicle of the style, but I am open to other crucks with similarly desert/ Southwestern-themed names. Also, I love the color orange.




At that point I was pretty frustrated and still had a 7 hour drive in front of me, so I headed back towards the highway. On the way I saw this awesome sign next to a church:






























The thing about any event of significance is that you HAVE to create hype. That shit had better be exclusive. If you wake up on October 27 and are like, "you know what I would really like for lunch today? Saurkraut," TOO BAD. You should have thought ahead and bought advanced tickets, because they aren't taking just anyone who shows up. Maybe if you know the bouncer or are really hot you'll be alright, I don't know.

While I was in Zanesville, I definitely did not see anyone who had used meth in the past week. Definitely not. Also did not see anyone pushing a broken push mower down the street while drinking Mountain Dew and chirping on a push-to-talk phone. Nope.

October 10, 2011

Growing Lithops: Week 7

So, I'm going to go ahead and add "putting them in your car and moving across the country" to my list of Things Not to Do With Lithops Seedlings. Of course, I knew I was going to be doing this before I planted them, and I wanted to just try it out and see what happened.

They actually did OK, and by "OK," I mean some of them survived the drive. I feel like I am not growing them in optimal conditions. They probably would like it a little warmer and more sunlight. I put them out of the balcony for a day and half when I got here so they could get some more direct sun, but then it got cold and rainy so I brought them inside.


I am viewing this first pot of seedlings as a trial run. I still have a bunch of the seeds left over from my adult plants, and I am going to order some optica rubra seeds, and maybe some other varieties, and also get some pumice to plant them in. And maybe a grow light.

                                                   Via Flickr
On a positive note though, one of my adult Lithops is getting ready to bloom! I got the pot out of its spot in the car and it has a nice little stalk starting!




I'm not sure what I should do after it blooms though... stop watering the whole pot? Try to keep watering the other ones? When I saw the blossom starting I gave the whole pot quite a bit of water in hopes that the other ones might start blooming too. I guess this is why it's a good idea to only grow one variety per pot.

Mid Century Monday


Glendale Tower, Indianapolis, IN
1968

October 6, 2011

Plant Present!

People at work got me the nicest plant friends as a going away present! With little plastic creatures in it! There is an Old Man of the Andes cactus and an Old Lady cactus, and some other cactus that looks like an octopus! I love it!

October 2, 2011

Weekend Thrift Review

I had a pretty successful weekend at the thrift stores. Once I get to New Jersey (next week yay!), I'm going to get my Etsy store set up, so I am trying to put together a decent amount of stuff to list.


Friday:
My successful stop on Friday was at the Goodwill on 410 by the North Star mall. I got two cute ceramic planters. One is an unmarked white cylinder planter. I like white planters and they are surprisingly hard to find, so whenever I find one I like I usually buy it.
The second one is an orange drip glaze planter from Jenkins Ceramics. I couldn't really find out much about Jenkins Ceramics, except that it was a pottery in California in probably the 50s or 60s, and they made this shape of planter in a bunch or different sizes.  


Saturday:
On Saturday I got the third planter in the picture from the Goodwill on Fredericksburg Rd. Brass planters like this are always kind of appealing to me, but I really liked the pattern of shapes stamped into this one.

At the Goodwill I also got a set of Georges Briard "Florette" plates, 4 bread plates (or salad plates? I need to look it up) and 4 dinner plates.


Also made some good pickups at Texas Thrift Store: Two Autumn Harvest Pyrex bowls, a Pyrex serving dish,  and also some funny divided plates that I have been looking at every time I go in there for a few weeks. 



The plates are this really cool mustard/sand color with an almost-matte glaze that I really like. I think we'll be keeping the plates, and the Pyrex will go up on the store. 

Sunday:
On Sunday I had other things to do besides just go to thrift stores, but I did go back to Goodwill to pick up this fiber art wall hanging that I saw on Friday. I was kind of reluctant about trying to fit it into my car to drive to New Jersey, but I just couldn't pass it up. I definitely don't have a place for it in the apartment, but this is exactly the kind of look I want to go for in the store- sort of med-century desert modern- so I thought this would be great for my first round of items. I love that it has the original tag and is from El Paso.




September 30, 2011

Growing Lithops: Week 5

They seem to be doing alright. A few more seedlings died, but for the most part they seem to be growing pretty well. 


I was looking at the Lithops grow along on You Grow Girl, and some of them look so good! I am jealous of these, I think they are about 4 weeks old. Why don't mine look like that? : (
I think not enough light and the wrong soil mix. Bah. 

September 28, 2011

Oh Sorry

I guess Mom and Dad don't love you anymore, seeing as they are getting rid of this beautiful anniversary gift.



Also, please note that this item is being sold AS IS, so don't expect any refunds if it doesn't meet you expectations. Of being a ceramic marsupial. That you can plant things in.

September 27, 2011

Atomic Bomb

So far, these are my observations about New Jersey:
1) It fucking sucks to drive here, GPS does not know about jughandles.
2) The thrift stores are pretty cool, and they are simultaneously much more and less organized than thrift stores in TX.

This weekend I hit up a few of the thrift stores near our apartment. I went to two Goodwills, another Goodwill that turned out to just be a distribution office, and some one-off (I think) called Village Thrift.

The first Goodwill we went to on Saturday is less than a mile from our apartment. It featured middle aged women in line buying candles because they smoke in their house (based not on conjecture but on the conversation they were having), and also a beat Dansk Kobenstyle pan. I was very tempted to buy it, because I have been on the lookout for old Dansk stuff forever, but the enamel really was pretty badly chipped. In any case I was very encouraged to find it in the first NJ thrift store I walked into, because I'm hoping that means that I will just stumble upon pristine Scandinavian enamelware left and right from now on.
We got this creamer with little atomic starbursts on it, made by Mayer China in PA. I don't think that it's worth a whole lot, but I like the white starbursts on the pale pink background.

On Sunday I went to a different Goodwill. So far my observation is that Goodwills here are generally a little less organized, but they do bag sets of glasses, plates, etc together, so that makes things easy. Also, based on my limited sample size, they are much more poorly lit than the thrift stores I go to in Texas, which makes them look dingy and disorganized.
I picked up these two Corning coffee carafes which also feature an atomic starburst pattern, but these are gold. I think they're going to go on the Etsy store, once I get it set up.


After an unsuccessful attempt to go to another Goodwill that was not, in fact, a retail location, and having to turn around like 47 times, I went to Village Thrift in north Camden. This place is quite something. First of all, it is next to a gigantic English Pub that may or may not sort of be a club, judging by the size of their building. It was probably a bank or something in the 50s or 60s, and has some funny modern detailing, but they have all these old English crests stuck all over the building in an attempt to make it look oldy-tymey. I think the aesthetic they were going for might be renaissance faire meets British mod? Not successful.
At some point I need to go back and take pictures of the actual building, but I didn't really feel like getting out of my car to get a decent angle, and besides it was overcast. 


Then village thrift has quite a building in its own right. The whole awning is covered in rotting wood shingles, and I kind of wondered what I was getting myself into. The inside was the most organized of any thrift store I've ever been in. Like, I don't know who has the time and the OCD to organize 1 million toys into little bags and hang them from retail-style racks. I found myself getting annoyed by how organized it was.
They don't really have a furniture section, but they do have a pretty big kitchen/ home stuff section. 
Where I found....More Early American Pyrex!
Actually just the bowl. The divided serving dish was from the Goodwill. I have never seen any of this pattern in a thrift store, and I got two in one day! So exciting! The bowl is a little beat, but the covered dish is IMACULATE. Yay. 

I also almost bought a J. Crew corduroy pencil skirt, but then I remembered that I don't buy clothes from thrift stores because I am scared of bedbugs. 

September 22, 2011

House Stalking

So yesterday I parked my car by the park in Oak Hills and walked around taking pictures of houses. When you are walking a dog, you can pretend that you are not a creeper who walks around taking pictures of other people's houses, and you are just doing a legitimate and wholesome activity. I feel like people might get bummed out, regardless of how innocuous and architecturally-admiring my intentions might be, so I try to not be completely obvious. 

I discovered part of this neighborhood right after we moved to San Antonio, when I accidentally took Eloise for a 3 mile walk because there was a giant country club where I thought there would be a road, so my loop ended up being much longer than I intended. I walked across Callaghan road through Oak Hills, but I never went into the main section of the neighborhood until this year, when I became intrigued by a house with a butterfly roof and decided to drive up Winnetka road and see what that was all about. What Oak Hills is all about, it turns out, is having a whole bunch of great mid-century houses. Some of them have had really bizarre additions or been updated, but the majority seem to relatively original. We have gone and driven around several times, and this is one of my favorite houses. Really, it had me at the teal door, but look at those windows! You can see through the house! I love it! 
Also please note the limestone exterior panelling? Trulia says it was built in 1959. 




The whole back of the house is floor-to-ceiling windows. And, oh, is that just a kidney pool in the back yard? Yup. Are those some teal butterfly chairs? Yup. Do I know this because I walked into the empty lot next to their house and took this picture through a crack in the fence? OBVIOUSLY. 


I was never really a big fan of butterfly chairs until the past year. I had one in my dorm room in college, and it was too big for the space and always in the way, and also always covered in crumbs, and I think it really soured me on the whole idea. However The Brick House and her lovely leather chair covers have changed my mind. 

                          Via The Brick House

Now all I need to do is find frames, and chair covers that are made from heavy duty vegan fake leather that gets nice wear marks, and are also very affordable. That exists in the world, right?

Speaking of The Brick House, today she posted on there about this:
It's basically a thing where you decorate a dollhouse before December 15 and post pictures of your progress. I'm thinking about doing it, and given my recent infatuation, I was thinking about using the Oak Hills house as a basis for my design. We shall see.