kelsey in a chair

it is with sad fingers i report last week's passing of mappycamper's sweet, smart, calm, submissive, beautiful, faithful companion kelsey dog of goleta.

she lived a FULL 15.5 years and gave much joy and peace to all those who met her. she was a princess but not fussy. she sat in chairs and observed while the riff raff sniffed butts.

2010 was a tough year for furry friends. i believe kelsey is now running through a heavenly field with holden and yoshi. according to the very wise trevor garrod of tea leaf green, if that's what makes you happy, it doesn't matter if it's true.

at the same time, i have to welcome to the world SO MANY new babies! there have been 6 new arrivals in the past 2 months, and all the babies are healthy and thriving and adorable. and all the moms are healthy and thriving and adorable too.

i love the sweet unusual girls' names my friends have used - there's twins keira and marla leen, leila sacks, and selah raleigh. aren't they just lyrical wonders?

then there's the boys - emmitt glidewell and yesterday's addition jack radey. maybe not as lyrical, but definitely catchy. and catchy names correspond to success in life.

the forest glen inn

the forest glen inn was my house.

i was 9 years old and had been living in new york - huntington, long island, for about 2 years and we had many many visitors friends and family from rhode island stay in the guest room during that time.

it was mainly my grandparents - flops & drez - and the revens. 

i painted a wooden sign and put it in the driveway when guests were coming. i made that flyer on print shop and colored it in. i made comment sheets and did turndown service. this was the first comment sheet that i typed on my dad's old real typewriter.

drezza easter weekend 1986:

after this, i typed one and my dad brought it to work and made copies for me.

revens 1987:

at this point i seem to have charged my grandma for some lavender crap someone gave me: 

i never worked in a real hotel

don't call what you're wearin an outfit

in honor of "day in the life of one girl" and all her cute, creative outfits - here is what i wear on a daily basis during the winter. 30 year old hoodies, 10 year old sweatpants. usually for 2 days at a time. and usually matching the banner of this website.

i feel clammed up about things to post here lately, so instead i'll direct your attention to other sites i find fun to visit.

betsylife has good recipes and upbeat musings from sun diego. also cute dogs.

the bugg blog has dramatic heartfelt posts about local asheville bloggers and politicos. also cute dogs.

the blue blog has descriptive and insightful posts about friends on a journey adventure from santa barbara to find their place in the pacific northwest. i am living vicariously through tyler's words as i also entertain the notion of moving to portland, seattle, and bellingham during some future era of my life. 

hyperbole and a half is completely freakin hilarious. that's not hyperbolic. 

here's a link to the drive-by truckers song "outfit" - link

You want to grow up to paint houses like me, a trailer in my yard till you're 23
You want to be old after 42 years, keep dropping the hammer and grinding the gears


Well, I used to go out in a Mustang, a 302 Mach One in green.
Me and your Mama made you in the back and I sold it to buy her a ring.
And I learned not to say much of nothing and I figured you already know
but in case you don’t or maybe forgot, I’ll lay it out real nice and slow


Don’t call what your wearing an outfit. Don’t ever say your car is broke.
Don’t worry about losing your accent, a Southern Man tells better jokes.
Have fun but stay clear of the needle. Call home on your sister’s birthday.
Don’t tell them you’re bigger than Jesus, don’t give it away.


Six months in a St. Florian foundry, they call it Industrial Park.
Then hospital maintenance and Tech School just to memorize Frigidaire parts.
But I got to missing your Mama and I got to missing you too.
So I went back to painting for my old man and I guess that’s what I’ll always do


So don’t try to change who you are boy, and don’t try to be who you ain’t.
And don’t let me catch you in Kendale with a bucket of wealthy-man’s paint.


Don’t call what your wearing an outfit. Don’t ever say your car is broke.
Don’t sing with a fake British accent. Don’t act like your family’s a joke.
Have fun, but stay clear of the needle, call home on your sister’s birthday.
Don’t tell them you’re bigger than Jesus, Don’t give it away.


Don’t give it away

circle

there was a baby shower/blessingway here yesterday. in the middle of the rainiest day in the past 6 months. onesies were decorated, the 4 directions were called, inspirational cards were shared, champagne was drink drank drunk, babies were fed, wigs were worn, flowers were everywhere, lemon pound cake was eaten, the strength of michelle was reinforced and celebrated.

shrimp & grits

we had a dinner party last night & it was very much fun.

it started with 5 pounds of frozen panama bay shrimp from our good friend bob at shrimppeople.com.

kevin shrimp pierred them up.

i made jalapeno cheese grits.

audra brought fabulously fresh white hydrangeas.


lindsay and josh brought farm and sparrow seeded bread - i've never had better tasting bread.

michelle brought an amazing homecooked handpicked fall fruit crisp.


joey and paige brought the funk.


everybody brought their dogs.

got a text message this morning - "Sorry about the panties in your yard."


success!

bluebells

i had a great labor day weekend in breckenridge colorado.

the weather could not have been nicer - full sun and high 60's.

went on some great hikes - this is from the black powder pass trail in the rockies. it was above the tree line and had outstanding vistas and made my lungs burn but in a good way.

walked around the amazingly beautiful breckenridge golf course and got taken into custody on the 6th green by an overeager player's assistant. it was the closest i've ever been to being arrested. i was soon freed from golf prison and had to ride around the rest of the holes in a cart. i found a dozen balls in the grass along the fairways.

met a super nice yellow lab named pivo. i wanted to dognap him.

played a bunch of ipad scrabble, and a game of real life scrabble in teams. badly lost the ipad games, we soundly won the real life one.

hung out with an incredibly kind and generous family i am lucky to know, including a really sweet 3 year old named piper. how cute is that name?

glad to be back safely in asheville with nacho & eli & cooler fallish weather on the way.

 

almost

RIP Vintage Vantage (2001-2010)

it's a sad day over here.


the vintage vantage death announcement was published this morning, announcing an everything must go liquidation sale, all shirts are half price or less. the 40% off coupon code 'skippyhaha' still works, on top of the discount.


it has been a wild ride full of chaos and chuckles.


vintagevantage started as lone ebay seller john keddie selling vintage t-shirts out of a tiny garage in ocean beach san diego california in 2001.


in 2002 i was about to graduate law school in chapel hill and selling vintage myself on ebay for some money, and emailed vintagevantage fanmail because I thought they were doing a great job.


one email led to another and i met up with john a month later at a widespread panic festival in colorado. we couldn’t find camping and set up tent in a taco bell, were woken up by the Denver sheriff who ran our licenses and let us stay.

2 months later he moved to charlotte where i just started working for a law firm uptown. we came up with 'we be illin' sacred hear

t children's hospital'  and urban outfitters ordered 5,000 of them, along with 'get high on yourself,' and we were off.

1 month later i quit my job and we moved to ventura california, driving nonstop for 2 days with holden on the passenger's lap.




we sold mounds of dirty old t-shirts on ebay, and modeled every one of them. we started coming up with more and more 'originals' and working with factories to make supersoft t-shirts in flattering cuts. that was a shitty process, i didn’t really deal with it.




we got recognized by strangers at music festivals and on the streets. i didn’t like that.


we got married.


we got nacho.

American eagle outfitters copied our ‘

detroit is for lovers’ shirt and we sued them and settled. It was awesome. 

people asked heather. 

we hired happymexicansock, aka socky, to stuff packages.


we moved to pacific beach san diego.


we met a bunch of awesome people across the street.


we hired matt duerr to manage the growing warehouse and do sales.


we made up the ‘voting is for old people’ shirt and caused quite a stir, Russell Simmons hated it, MTV hated it, the san diego news came to our house.  it was awesome.

we had an online dating contest for matt (get fresh with mateo), won by none other than kid D, and flew her out to san diego from oklahoma for a weekend. It was awesome.


we moved to hillcrest for a couple months, and then moved to encinitas, where we had a pool and a living room full of trampolines and a bitchin 80’s homecoming dance.

we outfitted the kitshickers.

and the kitshakers -

we had a contest and took 8 people to amsterdam for 4 days to film 'vintage vantage and the disappearing corn dog.'  there was a lot of footage but no movie came out of that trip. yet. i peed myself on the street in amsterdam laughing so hard, at what i have no idea.

we got divorced.


Matt quit for a more stable job, and John moved the warehouse and operations up to San Francisco.


I moved to Asheville.


Things quieted down, but we kept coming up with newer better funnier t-shirts, and selling the best real vintage from the 70s and 80s online. We started making t-shirts for bands – ALO, Tea Leaf Green, Guadalajara Joe…awesome shirts for awesome bands.


The inventory was hugely swollen and the sales were down. We are not good business people. The economy went to crap. We didn’t adjust. The interest on a loan from Bank of America ate all our profits. No good offers to buy the business materialized and now we have to liquidate.


I plan on selling vintage t-shirts on my own, on ebay and on etsy, possibly on the vintagevantage.com website if I can arrange that in the next few months. And I’ll keep making peanut butter stash safes.


John is starting a new t-shirt company with a well-established LA partner and their future looks bright.


Nacho will continue hopping through life like an arctic bunny.


All is well.






Some of my favorite t-shirts over the years have been:

Solar power turns me on -

Let’s hear it for sign language -

the pantychrist -

Fork my life -

Duluth, Duluth Duluth is on fire (burn Minnesota burn) -

Minivan Mega Fun

Polite as fuck -

Jesus loves immigrants

I’m not fat husky-

French canadien

Made a shirt with my dad on it -

And one with holden on it -

it was a good ride. keep it fresh, amigos.

weekend with leo

leo is half golden retriever, half shar pei. he has the soft wrinkled face of a shar pei and the sweet goofiness of a golden. he's only 1.5 years old but acts more mature. he's staying here for the weekend and nacho and i couldn't be happier. game on!

my hippo

speaking of hippos, check out lindsay's little hippo ethan! he's only 6 months old. nothing cuter than a chubby baby. (other than a chubby puppy).

rapids

may be going tubing this weekend. may be going on the la zoom purple bus tour. may be filling the kiddie pool with ice cubes and snorkeling in it. may be eating genuine alaskan moose burgers. will be fun.

shrimp people

went down to spartanburg yesterday to see neil young solo. i'd never seen him live and was struck by how he made his instruments sound like 2 or 3 people were playing at once.

the tailgate before the show was the best tailgate i've ever been to. my dad gave us a box of frozen shrimp to carry on to the plane back in march and kevin made shrimp pierre and they were completely scrumptious and completely gone by the end of the night.

thank you shrimppeople.com!

shrimp pierre recipe:

party nach

happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me.
beautiful weather today here in asheville, about to go for a hike and then later for some dinner and drinks. can't beat it!

could a puppy be cuter than nacho?

florida trip

had a great time in florida for a few days last weekend. flew into weather so bad they closed the PNS airport and turned off the lights and had to use the light of my cell phone to use the bathroom. after that it was very sunny and very windy all weekend. stayed at a very nice place called watersound in santa rosa. the sand was like powdered sugar and the whole area was deserted. lovely! this was the waking up view.

and here are two pelicans about to do it.

and here is a 2 year old in a coffee table.

and here is the beautiful drive home.

also they charge $11 for a watered down well bloody mary at the CLT airport, with NO olives. obscene!

the story of holden: a slideshow

here are some of the highlights of holden's 12 years with me.

he was born a poor black child at a fancy kennel in raleigh, nc. there were two left from his litter, and another litter of 7 week old pups available, so he was massively discounted, considered 'old' at 3 months.

i named him skippy. his first dad named him holden, and since he paid for him, i let it go. it wasn't after holden caulfield, or holden oversoul, it was for the redneck place on the nc coast - holden beach.

holden's first dad lived in a fraternity house, so holden lived with me from day 1, and i always knew he was my dog.

when he was a year old his first dad broke into my email and read that i thought a guy at school was cute so he threw my computer in the road and ran it over with his car and moved out of the house we were living in and stole holden. i was in law school, a couple weeks away from my first exams. after some wrangling, and a couple days, i got holden back, and then he was all mine for good.

he ate an indigo girls cd and a 50 yd spool of mint dental floss, and those made it through on their own.

he had his first intestinal surgery at age 2 when he ate a pair of my roomate jill's tights and an underwire bra, and they got tangled up and made him very sick.

he ate 30 lbs. from a 40 lb. bin of kibbles and had to be physically pulled away trying to scarf the rest. he assploded for a week.

he loved doing taste tests when jill would put a cheese ball on one side of the room, and a munch em on the other.

i made him a vest from an old navy doggy raincoat, stenciled on it 'guiding eyes for the blind - dog in training' and he wore that to go to UNC baseball games with me and sat in the grass.

jill and i put him in the vest and went to harris teeter one night wearing sunglasses and holding the white stick from horizontal blinds and let holden off the leash hoping he would go run through the aisles to the meat counter, but he just sat down at the automatic doors and looked at us like we were crazy.

on vacation in charleston, he ate an entire cheese cake off the counter.

he had lots of dog friends, he never humped any of them.

when i was studying for the bar exam i listened to the lectures on a walkman walking around chapel hill for 3 hours at a time, it was so hot in the summer i often went late at night and always felt safe walking with him.

at night, he slept right next to me using me as a bolster.

he moved cross country in a 42-hour non-stop drive, the car was so packed he had to sit the whole time on the passenger's lap.

he was an excellent vintage t-shirt model, especially liked wearing track jackets.

he couldn't believe it when we got nacho. what had he done to deserve such an indignity?

he and nacho crossed garnet st. in pacific beach san diego - a very busy 4 lane highway at rush hour and made it to the safety of a shell station.

they pulled a pyrex dish off the counter, and it shattered and they ate the casserole-crusted shards. the vet suggested feeding them a loaf of white bread soaked in milk to help pass the glass. it worked great. he loved it.

he jumped off a terrace in the backyard and impaled his chest on a metal stake and needed dozens of stitches.

he an nacho got into a case of pop rocks candy and couldn't stop eating them even though the explosions on their whiskers scared them.

he ate socks, socks, and more socks - the little ones made it through, a couple of the bigger ones required surgery, some of the lucky ones required a shot of amorphine to make him throw them up before they got to his intestines.

he ate an entire cow rib bone and needed surgery to get that out.

he ate a giant bowl of trail mix and needed an amorphine shot to throw that up.

he had a few lipoma fat balls removed, one the size of an orange.

he had one myxosarcoma that they didn't remove all the way and was going to grow back.

he loved to go swimming, but wouldn't go in a pool because he was scared he couldn't get out.

he didn't like going up or down wooden stairs because his paws would slip.

he loved running around the yard looking for dead things to eat.

he loved riding in the car with his head out the window.

he loved sitting next people on a couch, curled up in a ball.



here are pictures from his first day on the ride home from the kennel, to 4 days before he died on a hike near the blue ridge parkway.


warning: after kevin watched this he said he wanted to hang himself.

don't touch til november

spring is here and it feels like summer. full sun and low 80s. i want to do cartwheels.

i went to the dentist this morning and i have one baby tooth and in that baby tooth lives a cavity. i was expecting at least 4 cavities, so i'll take one.

no congrats from me to the men's basketball team which shall not be named but rhymes with puke.

in a fun small world situation, my friend michelle is good friends from alaska with jason the mandolin from bearfoot, who will be playing on my friend daniel's radio show in arkansas tonight:

Hello! Wanted to let you know about a live band playing on my radio show tonite (Tuesday) for your calendar and listening enjoyment. Spread the word to anyone who would be interested in a young bluegrass band featuring 3 women and 2 guys, acoustic instruments and vocal harmonies.

Bearfoot 4-6-2010 Honest Tunes Radio Webcast:
http://dgold.info/radio/webcast2010/music519

Bearfoot bluegrass band live in-studio, plus more Honest Tunes 8pm to 10pm Central on KXUA Fayetteville.

Go to www.dgold.info/radio to listen to the live webcast stream – at Showtime

moving tomorrow

i seriously couldn't be more thrilled and grateful to be moving back to asheville though all the chaos and disorder and fear that comes with moving do take a toll when you do it more times than years you have been alive and i am looking forward to staying happily in this next place for at least 15 months which is the lease length.

holden is so excited he's crapped twice on the floor.

after looking unsuccessfully for non-skid stair treads my fantastic roommate went to lowes and found a roll of gym floor matting and cut it in strips and holden will now tentatively go up and down the stairs by himself which is extremely promising since the new place has 4 staircases. it's a canine miracle! onward! forward march! westward ho!