Balloon Construction and other news

Did you guys hear about this?

That’s right.  The good people of National Geographic actually got a house to float with balloons, just like from the movie UP.  Well, a small (16’x16’) house carried by 300 (three houndred!) LARGE eight foot tall balloons.  So incredible.

[all images courtesy of National Geographic]

Apparently the house flew to an altitude of 10,000 feet and stayed in the air for about an hour.  And, as one commenter on the National Geo blog asked, How’d that thing land?  I guess we’ll have to watch the episode of “How Hard Can it Be” which will air on the National Geographic Channel later this year.  Or you guys can watch it and let me know, since we’ve had a little snafu with our tv-watching recently.  Let’s just say you’ll see me writing about HGTV a  lot less.

In other current events around here,  I’ve been reading this

with great interest.  You may remember it from my holiday gift guide post.  Dr. Jay took the hint and gifted me the two books for my birthday.  A review to come!

And a few weeks ago, this sweet thing arrived from the grandmother fairy:

We love it in Mark’s room, though it’s only temporarily in a frame I had on hand.  I’m thinking it needs a thin black frame with a little sliver of blue mat.

What do you think?

Happy Valentine’s and a little Etsy Love

Just wanted to take the time to let you, dear readers, know how much I love ya and need ya!  Thanks for continuing to read the babbles of this sporadic blogger.  And I want to publicly thank my good friend, Carina, for helping me beautify and clean up my site.  If you haven’t visited lately and are reading this through Reader or some sort of RSS feed, please stop by and check out my new digs.  Carina, of Little Bird Creative, is a wonderful and patient designer who’s been helping me wade through HTML.  She’s really spiffed up the Babble and I am very grateful!

Visit her shop on Etsy to find beautiful, handmade letterpress cards like this one

and this one

She also does custom work, so check her out!

Another Etsy find of late:  the art of Kiki and Polly.  I am in love.  Here are just a few of my favorites.

I kind of really want that last one for Mark’s room.

Hope you are having a day filled with those you love!  I know I am.

And it's 2011

So, to be clear I AM still here. I've had lots of post ideas so far this year, but little time to produce them like I would want to. But I was reminded of Ira Glass and his thoughts on Persistence and Creativity last week in a post from Nicole Balch's Making it Lovely blog and I just had to make sure to share it with you. Thank you, Nicole. Thanks for your blog. I have a big blog-crush on you. If you haven't visited her site, try it out immediately. This girl is impressive. And one heck of a coder. Back to Persistence. I heard Ira Glass give this talk a few years ago when we were living in Austin and it made such an impact on me. Please watch: It was (IS) so great to hear someone like Ira Glass admit that it's okay to be bad at something in the beginning. And years into it. I still make reference to this talk he gave- in fact, I was telling my good friend Brandy about it last fall. It's great to hear those words again and be reminded, with the help of YouTube, that you don't have to have it all figured out in the beginning. Heck, you don't need to be good at whatever it is that you are doing. The important thing is to do what you love and keep doing it. Over and over again. And then some more. It meant a lot to me to be reminded of that last week. The week that I told my former architecture firm that I won't be coming back after maternity leave. I made the decision over our Christmas vacation that my family is what I want to spend my time on for the next couple of years. It was not an easy decision. I had a great job, supportive bosses, and a flexible schedule. It would be nice to have the extra income as we save for a house. But my heart wasn't in it and I didn't feel like I would be doing either job well (architecture or mom) if I split them up right now. I know others that do it really well, but I don't think it's for me right now. So back to persistence. I'm a new parent. I definitely don't always feel good about the job I'm doing. But I'm going to keep it at. It's my full-time job now. And I'm still working on the architecture part. Hopefully it's still a viable career for me in a few years. In the meantime, I'll be here. Parenting and trying to blog and stay current with architecture and design. I might even be able to do a project or two eventually. Just wanted you to know that I'm not giving up. Cue the corny Persistence poster. Hope that wasn't too much over-sharing. But that's what blogs are for, right?