Organization

Ok so I am usually pretty good about organization, keep things neat and tidy is an other thing, but the organization I usually have down. I am a bit stumped now though. So CNY is still sleeping in our room, occasionally he sleeps in "his"room at night, but its usually just falling asleep there, and he is always there for napping. The thing is I really want "his" room/the spare room to feel more like it is his room and not a spare room that he sleeps in during the day. The BIG problem is space, as anyone in Israel knows there is not so much space to store stuff, we don't have a machsan (storage closet) and so the spare room is kind of our place to store things so we have a large wall mounted shelving unit and two tall shelving units in there and no closet. I want to put a hanging rod in between the two tall units and hang from that a hanging shelf thing for CNY's clothes, his clothes are also in our room. I want to find a solution that the higher tops shelves can still store our things and the bottom will have his stuff, AND everything will look nice and neat and organized and not look like a garage or attic. Wish me luck and please please give me suggestions if you have them!

magical garden

On Friday I was looking at my "wee little garden gnome" and thinking how he might just belong in my herb box above the kitchen sink. I didn't ended up putting him there but after what happened Friday night, I think even more he belongs in there!

My herb box was only full of mint, that was from the centerpieces from our wedding and has been thriving for months now. After all the other herbs one by one died and I thought the mint was alos on its way out, it miraculously came back and has been thriving ever since. So what happened on Friday night you may be asking yourself now? We had just come home from a wonderful meal at our friend's house followed by a great game of bananagrams, and I was getting ready for bed, when Y screamed to me from the kitchen to "come here and look at this"! He told me to look at the flowers, so I looked at my small plant with purple flowers next to the herb box expecting to find some crazy looking spider, but then he said, "what you don't see it? Look at the mint!" So I look at the mint....and what do I discover a bunch of crazy looking yellow mushrooms.
I told him they were definitely not there earlier that day when I watered the mint and was contemplating the wee little gnomes potential new home. They just popped up.

So when Shabbat was over on Saturday night we as carefully as could be picked them out and then tried to do a little research on them on the internet. So it turns out they are called Leucocoprinus birnbaumii ofcourse named after a Jew. They apparently grow in house plants and are pretty common. They won't harm the plant or people, unless we eat them. I like mushrooms, but these ones, yuck! They might come back and I guess if they do I will definitley have to put my wee little gnome in with them!

sukkah

Sukkot has come and gone. I had so many ideas for sukkah decorations this year but in the end only had time to make a few. Y and I sat up late the night before sukkot began finishing up a few decorations.

My inspiration came from:

The Modern Baby Shower


Ribbon Mobile

Felted Bird Mobile

And these last three came from Creative Jewish Mom!

But as you can see I only really ended up using ideas from Creative Jewish Mom. Here are a few shots of what our sukkah looked like.

plastic bottles, plastic bottles, and more plastic bottles

I have found my new obsession, plastic bottles!

So many plastic bottles are wasted and thrown away, some recycled, but mostly thrown away. I recently started to cut them in half and use the bottom halves as planters to transplant my growing jalapeno plants. I was saving the tops and have come up with a few ideas of uses for them like:

• tea light lanterns...filling them with and and putting a tea light in them and hanging them in my back patio
• cutting them up and turning them into hanging deocrations
• cutting them in shapes and and creating mobiles

I began to search for what other ideas are out there and came across all these cool sites...

Re-Nest
Crafting Green World
Dollar Store Crafts

Enjoy!!!

Reduse, Reuse, Recycle

Green Thumb

Recently I have been really working on growing plants around my house.

My neighbors have created a garden and a few weeks ago I went out with the wife to have a tour of their garden and she gave me a bunch of her plants to see if I can get them to grow in front of my house. I started with keeping them in water to get their roots to grown before planting them.


I really liked the way they looked so I started picking a bunch and putting them in various size and shaped vases and glasses. And they looked so great on my recylced plastic bottle green tablecoth and infront of our window covered in passion fruit vines.

I am also keeping fresh lavendar flowers in jars around the house. And am also attempting for the second time to grow my own lavendar. Along with the lavendar are tons of organic jalapeno sprouts that I really need to transplant into a bigger container, I can't wait for them to started growing peppers!!

I started giving them away I have so many seedlings. I am now searching for cute pots to put some of the seedlings in to give as gifts.

Lupin has her plants potted in great ways, if I could only find vintage pots like her.

This growing passion really started with the herbs from the centerpieces from our wedding. I have them growing above my sink in the kitchen: parsley, peppermint, nana (spearmint), zatar (hyssop). I've been loving pinching some off and putting it in my cooking.

A few weeks ago i added a few zatar leaves to my hummus I was making and it really added such a great taste!

Next I am hoping to start growing basil and cilantro, I tried cilantro but I think I used the leaves in cooking to soon after transplanting it so it didn't last.

The green around the house is so delightful that I even put plants in the bathroom, bamboo above the sink and 3 small succulents on a shelf in the shower.

LoBot

My brother lives at a place called LoBot. Lobot is this very cool live/work space warehouse in West Oakland. They have a gallery and sometimes have shows. I had been there a few times before my brother even lived in the bay area and some a some bands play. It seemed like a cool place in a not so nice industrial area of Oakland, California. Each person that lives there has their own room, I spent most of the time in my brother's room...

...or in the kitchen. The kitchen ins a big space a with a couple refrigerators and lots of cabinets and a nice big table with lots of fun chairs. Through the doors where it says "enchanted forest" is a fully equipped screen printing studio. I wanted to use it but never got around to it. To the left of the studio is the "hang room" a large space with sofas and games and to the left of that is the "music room" a sound-proofed room full of instruments and equipment where anyone can go in and jam or record or practice or whatever they want to do.

Some of the instruments look like they haven't been touched in a while. There was one guitar covered in dust and had no strings, but don't worry there were plenty of functional instruments. Recently my brother and a couple of his roommates have been playing reggae and one night we stayed up late in the kitchen discussing reggae and ska and if they should be a cover band playing reggae songs or covering songs and turning them into reggae.

When you go past the kitchen you walk back into a long curvy hallway covered in art and posters with various looking doors off to the sides. Sometimes a door is open and you get a peek into one of these doors and get a small glimpse into the life of the person that lives on the other side.

This is my brother's door, I love that it's pink. Above his door to the right is a huge pink painting of Willie Nelson. I'm a sure someone who once lived there made it. All of the people that live there are artists. There are 13 people that live there give or take a few because there are always sub-letters and guests.

A few weeks ago there were so many people staying there that they put up pictures with each persons name, so that everyone knew who was living/staying there. I think this was while this group of Germans part of a German art collective were there. It is not uncommon for them to have visiting artists stay with them, there is even a "visting artist's studio" for them to work and live in that is right of the gallery. While I was there there were two guys from Seattle visiting.

Walking In Berkley

The walk began...

a window display in a bike repair shop

Then I met up with my baby bro and we went to Berkley Bowl!

i loved living in the east bay
i miss living in the east bay

moving...

Moving is a pain. I have moved many times since I started college. No matter how many times a person moves it doesn't necessarily get easier.

The hardest part is deciding what to get rid of. I get kind of attached to some of my things and get all nostalgic.

This move is totally different than any other move because I can't really take anything with me. I just discovered that the cost of shipping things is not worth it. So I will have to get rid of everything and start over. As stressful as this process may be it is very therapeutic to get rid of all of this stuff. Because that is what it is just STUFF! Who needs all this stuff anyways?

All this "stuff" is just clutter. The less clutter the more free one can be and open to all the surprises that life presents. Getting rid of all my belongings is freeing me, liberating! All of these things that I have been accumulating over the last 10 years going on 29 are now going to find new homes.

As my apartment gets more and more empty I am becoming more and more liberated. Now if I can just continue the process of getting rid of things instead of getting new things I am on the right track. Or at least getting rid of more and getting less, doesn't have to mean having zero.

The Event & The Activities

The Event: My Best Friend's Wedding

I of course was late to the wedding, I knew I was going to be late to start out but as I set off in my mom's new Prius I was driving for only 5 minutes when I got pulled over by a cop. I had apparently forgot to turn the lights on. So after the cop handed me my ticket and I said, "This is a great way to say welcome back! Know I know why I moved," I continued on my journey to the wedding. The wedding was great I saw some of my BFF's that I have not seen for almost a year all who of course are married now. It is just so interesting to see all these friends as wives now, to see what has changed and what hasn't.

The event concluded with a back yard barb-q. Apparently they had a whole lamb on a spit, but I only saw a picture and then everyone eating kabobs. There of course was a lot of food, Greek style and friends again. I am so excited for my BFF and her now new hubby, they look so happy and are just beginning this amazing life together. May we all be so lucky to find our soulmates and have the opportunity to gather our friends and family form near and far and feed them!