Outdoor rugs are made of plastic for a reason: And that reason is MOLD.
This is what three days’ worth of rain quickly made of this natural fiber rug (World Market, 2006).
Do yourself a favor and if you’re going to decorate a patio, either paint a design straight on the concrete or purchase an outdoor rug. If you do so, you may spare yourself the loss of an old rug friend.
I have alluded to it a little, but I’m going to take this time to elaborate on my “other” job. As you might know, I’m working retail at Sur La Table, which is a lot of fun but not a full-time gig. To pick up a bit of the slack from not working a 40-hour week I have been working with my mom formatting manuscripts for authors who are interested in self-publishing.
What does that even mean?
First let me show you the book-making machine:
This machine will print the cover and the pages, affix the pages to the spine, wrap the cover around, then chop them into a perfect softcover custom book. All in a matter of minutes.
Amazing, right?
My mom had been working with this program, called Flash Books, for quite a while before leaving to take a full-time load of coursework for her graduate program. The popularity of the book-making machine has increased since then, and because she left on good terms, they have been offloading some of the formatting work onto us. Basically I take the manuscript and change all the settings so it will print properly on the book machine. I will also adjust font, add page numbers, table of contents, headers and footers–anything it takes to get the book ready to print. I have two projects under my belt now and after holding the finished copy in my hands I am so excited to take on more clients!
Getting picked up by a major publishing house is really hard, since they are really selective. This makes it easy for any author to realize the dream of holding their own book in their hands. Some authors write memoirs and print them to pass along to children, grandchildren, or other relatives. Others sell them for $10-$15 at book fairs and make a minor profit (it costs $8 to print a book). Some who do want to get published by a large company print their book through Flash Books in hopes of getting it picked up.
It is enjoyable for me since I have always been a formatting freak–often obsessing about the appearance of my college papers and essays rather than the content. Whoops! It has also been a great opportunity to learn more about what the newest version of what Microsoft Word has to offer–which is a lot!
Here is a cool article the area newspaper ran about the DIY Book Program last summer.
Overall this has been a cool opportunity and I can’t wait to help more clients!
I really like decorating for Christmas, in fact I was begging to put the tree up since Halloween ended, but at the same time I am not one to go all-out, over the top with seasonal decor. The halls have been decked, though, very merrily and I’m pretty sure I want to keep our Christmas tree up until April.
Of course we have the requisite Christmas tree, our third size in as many years. Maybe someday we’ll reuse one of our Christmas trees. That’s the whole point of buying faux, right?
Since our tree was much larger (6′ as opposed to 4′) last year, we have a lot of ornaments that didn’t make it up this year. However, it was not for lack of space–in fact I love a really crammed full tree, but we simply could not find our ornament hangers (and were out of paperclips, the cheater’s way to hang ornaments). So, truth be told, as soon as we ran out of hangers, we were done hanging.
We may be fickle when it comes to the main tree, but every year since 2010, I have reused this cute little Christmas tree that I inherited from a friend when I moved into my first Kansas apartment. (Just thinking about how cold that winter was has got me shivering–9° the night I moved in!) Isn’t this little tree adorable? The new candle holder is from Crate & Barrel… you will see its large counterpart on the sideboard in the next shot.
My Friend Staci 