amberdawn

As pretty much everyone (especially if they’ve ever been in contact with my mom) knows, I’m pregnant (!), and have figured that I should probably try to start documenting it since I am beginning my 14th week now and no longer have to spend every second of the day convincing myself that I’m not going to throw up. I’ve only really ever been successful writing about things that aren’t all about myself and writing very short entries, so we’ll see how this works out. Considering that I started my first new post with a run on sentence and TWO sets of parentheses and am somehow managing not to rewrite it makes me think that maybe I’ll be able to post this time without taking an hour or more to write things.

I started a new blog with wordpress, since I’ve always used mt and decided it was time to see what all the fuss was about. So far it’s been pretty easy, but everything is always pretty easy before I decide that I want to start customizing it, so we’ll see how that goes.

ps - I have two urine covered sticks that I am SAVING. Does everyone do this? I keep looking at them and thinking - but they’re covered in piss! But they’re the first news you got that you were pregnant! But they’re COVERED IN PISS!!!!

For Andre.

Four Jobs I’ve Had

1. “Talent” - at Knott’s Scary Farm. I was a zombie in the Ghosttown Dead and Breakfast maze, which featured scenes from A Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, Alien, and some random zombie movie that i can’t remember the title of. I had a huge crush on/brief fling with a punk rock boy with huge green bi-hawks who played drums in a band called iconoclast - he played Freddy Kruger in the maze. Other highlights included scaring an ENORMOUS MAN so badly that he fell on his ass, getting discounted Knott’s chicken strips and all the boysenberry punch that I could possibly drink (free refills all night!), and the freedom to roam around the park after my shift was over. The worst part - getting my makeup done early and then being spotted by young kids. Some of them would laugh, which was fun, but other ones… well… let’s just say that the other ones weren’t so happy about it.

2. Everyones Bitch - I was some sort of weird mix of a payment collecting, print ad delivering, envelope addressing, spreadsheet making, copying, just do what everybody tells you, make minumium wage and shut up, bitch for a local little yellow pages book. The company consisted of a family - a husband and wife who fought CONSTANTLY, the wifes very sweet mother, and their son who had recently “quit” a job in the “fashion industry” because the industry was just “too crazy and snarky and face paced and stressful!!!”. For all of the stupid crazy shit that they made me do to save money (like asking me to try and only fill my gas tank up enough for the driving that I was going to do that day, or giving me a pager and asking me to call them from pay phones when I was on the road so that they didn’t have to pay my cell phone bill) I still owe them immensely because that was the first real exposure to graphic design that I had and it started the whole thing with making pictures for the internet thing.

3. A team member at Mervyn’s - Actually not as bad as you would think. A lot of the people I worked with were really nice and after a couple of months I got to spend a lot of time just working the trucks in the back instead of dealing with the INSANE people who shop there. I did have to work on Christmas Eve, and wound up having nightmares about the sound of a cash register opening off and on for months afterwards.

4. Designer/Production Artist/Html Person - My very first web job, that I got right after learning Photoshop. I worked for a man named Ray Champagne who ran a company called Virtual Publisher. We worked in an enormous apartment complex in Corona, which wasn’t really technically live/work space. The story was that Ray was trying to open up a Southern California office, because he thought he needed it in addition to his office in Napa, so the apartment gave him somewhere to work AND sleep. He also had a personal assistant/chef who made us spinach dip and all sort of tasty things. Everybody was a little bit crazy, but I really didn’t care because I got to work on things like Willy Works and get paid for it. God I loved embossing back then.

Four Movies I Can Watch Over And Over

1. Amelie

2. Titus - it’s just so pretty! And violent! And pretty!

3. A Philadelphia Story

4. Murder By Death

Four Five Places I’ve Lived

1. Norco, CA - Born and raised, it’s a scary scary place. They recently painted red, white, and blue stripes for street dividers down the main street. Don’t even get me started about the horses and the hitching posts and the bars.

2. Redondo Beach, CA - The most perfect weather on earth

3. Los Angeles, CA - For six whole months!

4. Long Beach, CA - Back to my roots

5. San Francisco, CA - Pretty, but cold. I honestly feel like this is the first time I’ve ever lived in a city and I’m still trying to decide if I really like it or not.

Four TV Shows I Love

1. Six Feet Under

2. Sex in the City

3. Manor House

4. Black Adder

Four Places I’ve Vacationed

1. Algerho, Italy - So very pretty. I really wish we wouldn’t have been so damn jet lagged that we slept through the entire day that we were planning on using to rent a car and drive all over Sardinia. Lots of neat run down farms and fields and all different styles of houses. What Andre said about MTV is particulary funny since I was sitting in the airport the day before we got there talking about how great it was going to be not hearing american music for a couple of weeks. I really didn’t want to believe him when he told me that I probably wasn’t going to be that lucky, but goddamnit, he was right.

2. Rome, Italy - Simply mindblowing. Going to Rome was the first time as an adult that I got the OMG I’M EIGHT YEARS OLD AND I’M GOING TO DISNEYLAND feeling. Then we got caught in a hailstorm.

3. Venice, Italy - Beautiful, and not as smelly as everyone said. Great muesums, my favorite was the Doge’s Palace.

4. Bisbee, Arizona - I was only there for a brief trip with my parents, but I would love to go back, especially with my Dad. My Great Grandfather got a job in bisbee working in the mines to get the family out of Ireland, and my Grandfather worked at the Copper Queen as a busboy when he was a teenager shortly before hitching a ride on a train and becoming a waiter at the Mission Inn in Riverside. I just found out while writing this that both my Great Grandfather and Grandmother are buried somewhere in the Evergreen Cementery there, in the Loyal Order of the Moose, a.k.a Moose plots. They’re also in the Ellis Island Registery.

Four of My Favorite Dishes

1. My favorite dish ever was the toasted bread, bree and prosciutto combination that Andre had waiting for me after I came back from my parents house after thanksgiving.

2. Any of the roasted meat that they have in Rome. Oh my god do those people ever know what to do with meat. Actually any of the meat that they have anywhere in Italy is pretty much just fantasic.

3. The fish soup I had in Venice

4. Any of the rolls from Sushisaurus. Oh Stinky Tuna Roll how I miss thee.

Four sites I Visit Daily

1. fipilele

2. flickr

3. sadly, myspace. all my friends are on it!

4. andre’s notes

Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now

1. Anywhere in Europe with Andre

2. Anywhere, period with my friend Barb. I miss her so much.

3. Disneyland

4. Scuba Diving in Hawaii

Four People I Want To Do This

1. Lori

2. Barb

3. Missy

4. Lisey

Finally a flash site that does SOMETHING ELSE besides just making shit animate insanely oddly or plays videos at every turn. BustoBot is an awesome flash popup book. Then again, I may be biased, I love popup books (I got two for Christmas this year) and I love Keegan.

Today while I was in borders (picking up ANOTHER actionscripting book) I saw the new issue of Flaunt with Sam Weber’s art on the cover and instantly HAD. TO. HAVE. IT. Flaunt is my favorite magazine sheerly because of the content, but after they published an issue last year with Tiffany Bozic’s work on the cover (who is one of my favorite artists EVER), I’ve become even more of a fan.

I liked the cover art, a lot, especially since it’s embossed and good embossing = drooling in my case, but once I saw the above sketch on the inside article about the cover artist I knew I was going to have to go and look at his portfolio as soon as I got home. Dear god - I’m a big big fan of texture, and the layering of textures and color in his work blows me away. So much of it is also so damn creepy without trying to hard to be so.

I love what flaunt did in leau of a “coming soon” type of page - go here and click on store. For me this is up there with the Mule 404 page. Just because something is neccessary does not mean it has to be boring.

I’ve been working on extending my knowledge of actionscript and css at the same time, which can be SUPER ANNOYING because I wind up formatting my css like my actionscript, with the closing brackets all the way over to the right, which looks retarded in a stylesheet. Actionscript is messing with my little mind, although it’s interesting learning it (in the very watered down - you’re a designer not a programmer - way that i am) and looking at javascript. They both use a lot of if statements and functions, and I’m suddenly sort of understanding what’s going on in those scripts that I’ve been stealing from other peoples sites for years.

I’m almost going to be done kinda sorta soon with red table studio. I’m pretty excited about it, but also pretty damn excited to get another project of mine going over at we heart prints.

San Francisco is still beautiful, interesting and cold. I miss all of you in lalaland, and think about you when it’s pouring rain and I’ve just walked four blocks, just to stand outside for fifteen minutes getting soaked, waiting for the #&@!!! train to come.

“So make sure you call us when you leave.”

“I will.”

“And maybe halfway through the trip if you feel like you need too.”

“Ok.”

“And right before you get here would be good too.”

“Mom I really don’t think I need to call you three times. It’s only a 7 hour drive.”

…

“Do you have a car charger for your cell phone?”

My posed accordian shot., originally uploaded by Amber Dawn.

This was me at around ten. Not only am I POSING with my accordian ON PURPOSE, i am also wearing velour, in BURGUNDY, with billowy capped sleeves,AND I have ginormous glasses.

My parents were so damn proud of me and my dorky clothes and accordion. I believe this was taken shortly after I had won fourth place in my age group at the Accordian Federation of North America’s yearly competition for my spectacular performance of Little Brown Jug.

candy + period = uh oh

Andre gets super excited about handing out Halloween candy to kids. I find this absolutely adorable and encourage it, which leads to us getting loads of candy for Halloween every year, always more then we can possibly hand out in one night. This equals lots of leftovers.

Today, the day after Halloween, when the house is full of leftover chocolates, my body decided that I needed to start my period. This frightens me somewhat as my sweet tooth is bad enough that i can actually easily consume half a box of those crazy sweet grocery store sugar cookies with something like a pound of frosting on the top in a bit under 5 minutes. Being able to accomplish this wondrous feat was not a problem for me until somewhere around 23 when I started to notice that laying in bed and reading while eating a package of cookie dough and drinking a beer actually made my body grow in ways I didn’t it to grow*. Since then I’ve been controlling my sweet tooth by not having candy in my house. We have candy in the house. I am so screwed.

*Proof that there is no god - I am not able to direct my extra body fat into areas where I actually want more of it. Instead it all goes to the parts where I don’t NEED any more.

Another reason to love this city

This morning I saw a pretty heavy guy jogging wearing tiger print black and white pants, a shirt that said something really INSANELY funny that made me want to write about him that I can’t even remember now, which I’m hoping I’ll remember and be able to update this with later, and a rasta colored sweatband around his insanely curly frizzy hair that he had teased out into a fizzy as hell fro.

I don’t care what anybody says - that shit just doesn’t happen in Los Angeles. In Los Angeles he would have at the very least had the American Apparel Velour Track Suit® with a coordinated headband.

Another reason I am going to hell

Today in Whole Foods I noticed a woman at the checkout wearing a really cute outfit before I noticed that she had a cane. I looked down and then noticed that she only had one leg, but FIRST I noticed how great her boots were. This made me spend the next ten minutes not wondering about what had happened to the poor girl, or thinking about how easily and well she handled herself despite her handicap. Oh no. I spent the next ten minutes wondering what the hell she does with all the extra shoes. Does she still keep them lined up in a pair but just take one of the shoes out everyday? That seems depressing. Does she keep the extra left shoes and stack them all up in the corner of her closet? Still depressing. Does she just throw them away? If she just threw them out did she feel ripped off every time she bought shoes because she was paying for two shoes when she would only use one?

My boyfriend, forever the optimist, said “Maybe she knows someone who only has a left leg and they trade!”

Step 1:

Boggle at the sheer size of the taco. Two San Francisco tacos at a mexican fast food place = at LEAST four tacos at a Los Angeles mexican fast food place. Prepare to make an enormous mess.

Step 2:

Try desperately to keep as much of the tacos innards inside of the taco while eating. Fail miserably and reduce the taco to the size of a manageable Los Angeles taco.

Step 3:

Scoop up the exposed innards with a chip. Finish off most of the innards using this method, then feel disgusted and slightly nauseous from eating so much.