Shake it...

Everyone (everyone locally anyway) is talking about the earthquake today. I was at a taco stand at a carwash (for anyone outside the Los Angeles area it sounds grosser than it is) and all the people working started whooping when the earth started to undulate. Undulate. Not a word I use in daily conversation but really the only one I can think of now that describes the sensation. It's like sitting on a bed that someone else is bouncing up and down on. J heard the cracking sound that often accompanies these things (and in my opinion, is one of the most disconcerting things about an earthquake) but where I was it was silent. Everyone (except the car washers) stopped talking and stared wide eyed at one another silently asking whether they should take cover or not. It's like playing chicken. Who's going to break for cover first during the longest 30 seconds you may ever experience. The quake measured 5.4 (at first they said 5.8 but they downgraded it) and where I was it was pretty uneventful. A little nerve-wracking, but nothing came apart. No fire or cracks in the earth a la Superman. In fact our pictures at home were still straight and nothing fell. So all is well that ends well.

USGS knows more about it than I do. Check it out.

Raise a glass...

One year ago last night (this morning?) at 2am J came to me as I was watching the end of Silent Hill (oy) and said "my water broke". Get out! was my reply but to know J is to know nothing short of the very sheets she's sleeping under catching fire could drive her from her bed at that hour, so I knew that that moment we'd been waiting for so long was finally here. So off we went with bags in hand and, to make a long (long) story short, 20 hours and one c-section later little T came bellowing into our world. Nothing has been the same since. So happy birthday Thomas, we're glad you're here and decided to stay. And every time you smile or laugh or give me the stink eye for suggesting the possibility that the power outlet is not the best place to put your keys, we love you a little more.

this is Chinatown...

They just restored a bunch of the neon in Chinatown and have been lighting it up at night. It's really neat to go down and see it as it was in the 30's I guess. Most of my pix came out blurry but this one I like.

Some new pix of the boy...

My first photo show...

I'm opening my first show at Grace Ellay in Silverlake on August 23rd. Drop on by if you happen to be in the neighborhood.

Listmania!

This may be silly, but it seemed like fun. I noticed another blogger I follow made one of these Amazon lists so I decided to do one to. See what you think.

Get ready to Listmania!!

T visits the Big Boy and gets a balloon.

What else can you say, he LOVED the balloon.

From a recent trip to the west side.

Kul(er) new stuff...

Adobe has a site called kuler that is just color swatches you can download and use in photoshop or illustrator or whatever. I've used it a bit to get color palates for different things (a valentines card and our holiday card for example) and it's super cool on it's own, BUT, they have a new feature where you can create swatches from pictures. Which is what I've been doing this evening. It allows you to find your pix (or anyone's really) on flickr and it picks 5 colors from each to create the swatch. Then you have several choices regarding how it selects them (bright, colorful, muted, you get the point). It's been really fun distilling my images down to 5 colors and interesting to see the results. If you are interested you can go to the site and search for milesdscott. That will bring up my collection. You can even download them and use them in photoshop if you want.