friends, fieldtrips, and why i love my husband

this past friday, i went to olde town arvada for a little friday photo fieldtrip with ronda. steph homburg and little AJ were supposed to join us, but little AJ got little sleep the night before. that meant mom got little sleep as well. we missed you steph, but totally understand the baby sleep thing. steph was here for the week, karl had a conference/class, and since some of steph's dearest friends live here, she thought she'd come along. tthe fact that her dad lives in denver kind of swayed the decision too :) we got to spend thursday cropping with her, it was fun to see her again. but it was even more fun holding this little boy, knowing all his mom and dad went through to get him here!



so anyway, fieldtrip photo fridays started because i want to fall in love with colorado, i want to have things that i LOVE about living here. i want to know where to take friends and family when they come to visit. so i grabbed ronda the last friday in august and said, "we're going to explore lafayette." and we did just that, but we also stopped along the way and took photos of things i've always wanted to stop and take photos of but never felt like i could justify the stop. like this:
and then we went exploring some of the shops along public street and got a few more inspirational ideas like this:


and these:

and humorous stuff that just made me smile, like this:
i mean petunia pickle bottom, how cute is that name? i'm a bit past their target market, but i can still appreciate good design when i see it.

pardon my digression...

back to olde town arvada's friday photo fieldtrip. we were going to hit at least all of grandview avenue, if not more. we decided to start at the east end of the street and work our way west, making sure we stopped at penzey's because i was low on salsa seasoning, hot and sweet curries, and paprika. not sure what ronda was low on, but i know she had a list too.

east end of the street. a yummy candle store called nature's gifts, where ronda got a gift for a friend and i got a metal sign that says "keep it simple." next stop: cute little paint-your-own-pottery place called into the fire. the owner kathy explained the process to us, and since we try really hard to have an agenda that caters to flexibility, we decided to stop and paint our own butter dishes. i'll show you a picture when i get mine back :) but here's some pictures of the wonderful place, how tempting are those shelves full of colorful glaze?


ronda, being cheeky.
my initial design that i was going to paint on my butter dish. i thought better of it and went with a more typographic theme.
it took us a bit longer than planned, although we try not to have time constraints, i had the city inspector coming to sign off on our basement. so we rushed through penzey's, got what we needed and headed home, in a traffic jam. :) missed the inspector by seconds, he pulled out of my street as i was getting ready to pull in. oh well.

and lastly, this is why i love my husband. he's found this very cool place called reSource, it's very close to his new job in boulder and he and a couple of his buddies go there on their friday lunch breaks to explore. he told me about this cool old sink one week. the next week he told me that cool old sink now had a pedestal. he said he wanted to take me there, he thought of me the whole time he was there, how much i would love it. they have old doors, old radiators, old lockers, old bathroom sinks, and even some fairly new stuff (that's another blog post). so this past saturday morning, after a lovely sleep in, he suggested we head out there. well after a bit of washing up, this is what we now have sitting in our back yard. :) it's a standard american pedestal, forged in 1928. it's missing the cold handle, i must begin searching for a replacement online. but really, how cool is that? how cool is it that my husband thinks of me when he goes to a reclamation yard? he said he knows i'm into the reusing thing. for some reason that makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.