labor day

heading to vermont this weekend... so you next week!

the mount

a few quick shots from our weekend trip out to western mass. where we made our only non-wedding stop at "the mount", the one-time home of author edith wharton (of house of mirth, age of innocence fame). here, we walked her former grounds dreaming of life during the gilded age: sumptuous terrace parties, afternoon teas, and playing lawn tennis with our chaps.

mazeltov!

congratulations to friends nurit and ali who tied the knot over the weekend!



we can't help but love weddings in the berkshires (of course, we're a little biased having had our own nuptials in the same neck of the woods)...







... not to mention, balloon artists...







... and cupcakes.



mazeltov ladies -- here's to your new life together!

bottomless cornucopia

get a load of this giant head... of cauliflower:

no, we didn't inject the cauliflower with cheddar. it's of the yellow variety.

zucchini, green tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes, red potatoes, purple potatoes, blue berries, cantaloupe, cauliflower, corn, squash, eggplant, peppers, basil, and some veggies we don't even recognize... our weekly farm co-op is obviously at its growing season climax or perhaps on steroids.

we're struggling to keep up with the supply. out of sheer necessity, we had yet another cooking marathon resulting in salsa, cauliflower-potato soup, corn griddlecakes, peach cobbler, and apple cobbler. our freezer is bursting with its arsenal of tupperware.

anyone wanna come over for dinner?

new item: snap wallets!

mogo's line of snap cases just keeps growing! this snap wallet is our biggest and baddest yet; it's got four pockets for cards and still plenty of room for cash.

so far, they're only available in our custom-made "foosball" fabric. for more info, click here.

mogo in shojo beat

shojo beat, a manga magazine for teenage girls, features mogo snap cases on its september back-to-school hot list. look who is #1!

click to embiggen:

don't fence me in

mark my words; i am never doing this again - recently, we took on the bigger-than-expected job of replacing the backyard fences for ourselves and five of our neighbors. we live in the city with postage stamp sized backyards, so it seemed like a pretty easy thing to do. (no, dabney and i didn't actually get back there and tear the crap down or dig any holes.) we just made the appropriate phone calls, got the estimates, visited lumber yards, negotiated, negotiated, went through three iterations of excel spreadsheets and made more calls.

but in the end, it was worth it. the impetus for the project was the 20+ year old rickety number that had been there about 15 years longer than it should have been.




it was growing moldy even. after each rain, it would turn this vibrant crazy green. ignore the handsome man in the chair and check out that moss. euw.




that old fence had seen some good times though: beer parties, bbqs, evening soirees, knitting, sunday paper rituals, naps even.



but it was time.

here, without further adue, the new backyard...

renegade handmade

this is a belated congratulations to sue and kathleen, the organizers of renegade craft fair (the mother of hipster craft fairs), on their new venture, renegade handmade. purveyors of all things cool, vintage, and/or made by hand, including mogo goods, this brick and mortar store recently opened on division street in chicago's wicker park neighborhood.

here's a recent write-up in apartment therapy. if you take a close look, you can see a cameo appearance by our very own craft cases.



this september, we plan to take a look for ourselves when we head to the midwest for RCF chicago. holiday shopping, be done!

for more information, check out www.renegadehandmade.com.

the stork works overtime these days (part 2)

say hello to roan, adorable son of meghan and michael of louisiana fame. congratulations, mom and dad!





we can't help but notice that cuter-than-cute roan appears to have a slight oral fixation... doesn't his big blue eyes just kill ya?

the stork works overtime these days

congratulations go out to our left coast crafter friends, sumana and caleb, who recently gave birth to a beautiful bouncing baby girl. welcome to the world, lena - our new favorite california girl!

now that you know all about ann...

here are my eight random things:

1. i have appeared in the pages of both golf and flying magazines.

2. I love seeing my name in print. my best guess as to why is because, growing up, i could never find mugs or tiny license plates for sale with my name already on them, at totally awesome places like spencer gifts.

3. my first big concert was sister sledge, in my parents' friend's nightclub in orlando, florida.

4. i used to play the clarinet. i used to play the clarinet very, very badly. then i played the bass clarinet. and then i played the bass clarinet very, very badly.

5. my greatest ambition these days is to appear on cash cab.

6. i share a theater award with daphne zuniga, of melrose place fame.

7. i hate feet, and especially hate when people wear shoes that are so small that their toes hang over the sides. i call it toe hang. i have been known to take surreptitious photos of people with toe hang with my cell phone, and then post them on flickr.

8. when I was 10, my brother convinced me to name my new hamster "fink." she was "fink" for two weeks until I changed her name to "valentine."

8 random things meme

tagged by tomoko, we thought we'd approach this separately - versus our normal we/us tendency.

8 random things about me (ann):

1. i have a nut allergy, but for some reason, i'm able to eat peanuts, macadamias, and almonds. go figure. if anyone can tell me what these three have in common, you'll have a friend for life.

2. i can't do cartwheels. i blame my short legs and long torso that causes my unusually lower-than-low center of gravity.

3. i once participated in the world's longest chorus line according to the guinness book of world records. the record has since been broken unfortunately.

4. proud former member of the rick springfield fan club (1985-86)

5. i am often one of those annoying people to sit by in that i can't keep my knees still. i call it bouncy leg syndrome.

6. i once had a giant farm hog for a roommate. he was not a pet, because he had his own room.

7. i once mistook a ticket taker at movie theater as a former student of mine. trying to decipher his puzzled reaction to my greeting, i realized after i took my seat that i had unknowingly recognized him from mtv's road rules.

8. okay, i am saying it here for the first time publicly; my middle name is "princess." no cracks, please.

dog chapel

dabney and i always said that after "the pooper" passed we'd do a little pilgrimage to stephen huneck's dog chapel in st. johnsbury, vermont to pay homage.

this past weekend, we got our opportunity to do this in solace.

in this case, pictures speak louder than words.

check the blue section

last week, while dabney and wilhelm were simultaneously surfing the 'net on the couch in the living room, my ocd flared up, as it has a tendency to do - especially when i am bored. right then and there, despite the late hour of 11:30 pm, i decided our bookshelves needed an overhaul.

i pulled every book out of its dusty little nook and began stacking them on the floor around the two computer nerds. i discovered we have a lot of books that date back farther than i really want to admit. in fact, both dabney's and my high school, college, and graduate school careers could be tracked through the collection; homeric greek, religion 101, feminist theory, film criticism, statistics...

inspired by a picture i had seen in dwell magazine a couple of months ago, i decided that the books should be arranged by color: whites, yellows, orange, green, blue, black, silver... looking for the inferno? why, that would be in the red section!

here is the 1/2 of the result, after final primping by dabney.