i guess i can forget pretty manicures until we’re done with yard work, huh?

I wish this could be one of those posts where I’m like “ok this is our front yard, it’s gross. But LOOK! Now it’s pretty”. Wrong. Not going to happen even a little bit. This weekend showed me how much time and effort it’s going to take to add a little curb appeal to our house. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

The story on our front yard is, we live on a semi-main street. Basically we’re off of a main street and our street is one of two streets that lead into our neighborhood. We have  white picket fence that is totally peeling. We have weeds taking over the world. We have the ugliest rocks in our planter area. We have dogs. Four dogs that do their biz-nasty all up in our front yard. It’s just not pretty to look at or represent our home that we love so much. And friends, this is why I’ve never invited you over. I am SO embarrassed about this first impression of our house. It sounds so silly, but it’s true.

Over the weekend we found out that we’re FINALLY (fingers crossed) going to be able to get the rest of the fence boards we’ve been waiting for from a different source. We’ve made some sacrifices to get it DONE and have high hopes that by next weekend we’ll be mostly done, or at least working on it. Once that’s done the dogs can go back there and we can work on de-ghettofying our front yard. And worry less that Mila is going to bite someones face off when they walk by. She’s fiesty if you’re on the other side of the fence, but as soon as you come into the yard it’s kisses all around. Until you yell at her because you can’t possibly be any more slobbery. For real. Annnnd I’m off topic.

On Sunday I started weeding the front yard and holy crap. That’s going to take forEVER. This is how far I got after sitting in dirt pulling weeds for an hour. An HOUR.

You see the first picture and think, that’s not too bad. Second picture looks like a LOT of weeds. And then you look at the bottom photo below. Here’s what it used to look like and you’ll see that the part I got done is just the bottom left of the photo.

Yep, this is going to take a while. I’m going to get sweaty, sunburned and I’m going to get a lot of dirt under my nails, but it’s going to happen. Meanwhile Blaine’s job is to finish the fence and get those grey rocks out of the planter so we can put something nicer in there along with a couple of plants that will hopefully be immune to my black thumb. Then eventually we’ll put in some sod. I’m trying to convince Blaine to get fake grass. I’m half serious because I can’t kill fake grass by overwatering or underwatering or just being it’s presence.

Basically getting all of this done is going to be our life goal for the next couple of weeks because after that it’s going to be WAY too hot to deal with it. Well, for me at least. If it’s over 80 degrees I’m over it.

But I’m so excited to hopefully have a nice front yard we can hang out in on cool nights. Once we’re done with this we’re focusing on the back yard which is even worse so I think we’ll soak in a nice front yard for a long time before we’re done with that.

I’m starting to rethink this whole plan that our next house will have even more land unless we hire a gardener, which Blaine is totally against.

What about you? Have you been working in the yard/garden lately?

I know this sound like another “simplify!”, “get rid of your crap!”, “less is more!” post, but I promise it’s not. Not in the same sense, at least. I’m focusing this week on clearing out the cutter, but not in the physical sense. I’m talking the mundane, everyday stuff you do, but could do without. I’m talking about those tasks I do, without fail, on a daily basis that aren’t really that important whether it’s to feel busy, our of distraction or to procrastinate doing the really important work. I’m talking about the email that goes to my phone that I check 10+ times a day or the email that’s open in my browser all day, distracting me.

At the end of each day, if you would ask me what I did that day, what would I say? “I was super busy all day, I checked emails all day, I did some design work, packed up orders, and other little day to day tasks”. Pretty much everyday. I can promise I spent half my day doing things that weren’t that important, like starting to write an email then having a thought and getting lost in google for 20 minutes.

My plan is to check email twice a day. Take email off my phone completely (it can wait, promise). Have a notepad where I can jot down ideas/reminders so I don’t feel the need to CTRL+T (open a new tab) and put it there to remind me (aka distract me) later on.

I could call it time management. I could call it productivity. I’m going to call it cleaning out the clutter and only tackling the important tasks because doing things like checking my email five times a day for just five minutes? 9125 minutes per year. That’s 6.3 days a year. And I spend way more time than that in email and doing other irrelevant things to waste time. I’d rather go to Hawaii.

P.S. Yes, I failed “Blog Everyday in May”. While I loved the idea at the beginning, I ended up feeling like I had to blog about stuff I didn’t care about so I’m back to blogging as regularly as I can, but only about what’s on my mind.

Grease is always in this window, taking in the sun.

Oh hey, remember that blog everyday in may challenge? I fell off the wagon for a few busy days, so let’s play catch up!
 

Day 11, Saturday: Sell yourself in 10 words or less

Creative. Worrier. Compassionate. Silly. Nurturing. Ambitious. Techy. Laid back. Paranoid.
 

Day 12, Sunday: What do you miss? (a person, a thing, a place, a time of your life…)

I’m having trouble choosing. There are so many things I miss. Two are my sister, who just moved back to Tennessee where her husband is stationed, and my childhood! My sister is my bestie, though it took us quite a while to get to that point and we’ve had our rough patche. But she is absolutely my best friend and she’s probably the person that knows me the best out of everyone. There’s something about having someone in your life that lived through your childhood with you. I shamelessly count the days until she and her husband can move closer to us.
 

Day 13, Monday: Issue a public apology. This can be as funny or as serious or as creative as you want it to be.

Oh dear. I am sorry for always posting, talking, tweeting, instagramming about Kintage and business and work at home life. The truth is, I’m obsessed with it. I give my poor husband daily updates as to how many orders I got for Kintage that day. I love what I get to do for a living and I know I kind of over-do it with all the “business talk” sometimes. So… I’m sorry. But really, not sorry.
 

Day 14, Tuesday: Ten things that make you really happy

1. My family2. Adventures with Blaine
3. A clean space (house, office, etc)
4. Packaging up Kintage orders & writing little thank you notes
5. Cooking (! this is recent and I’m happy about it)
6. Sitting in bed with a good book
7. The excitement and love on a dogs face that appears without fail if you so much as glace in their direction
8. Daydreaming about the future
9. Pilates!
10. Sitting in starbucks with my green iced tea and laptop

These photos are pretty much an embarrassing moment.

Is it normal to be asked about your most embarrassing moments and not be able to come up with any? I don’t know if it’s just that I really don’t have any or if they were really so traumatizing that I blocked them from my memory. Ok so I won’t call this my most embarassing moment, but I thought of it the other day because we got some artichokes in our Abundant Harvest box.

We were on a trip with some friends and we were out to dinner. I ordered an artichoke as an appetizer. When it got to the table I just casually picked off a leaf (is that what they’re called?) and went to town. I just threw the whole thing in my mouth without thinking. If you’ve ever had an artichoke you know that’s not how you eat them. I don’t know WHY or what I was thinking. I swear I had like a brain fart and then everyone laughed at me and for some reason I proceeded to pretend that’s how I always eat artichokes. It was one of those moments that you look back on and go “um… why didn’t I just laugh with them? Why did I feel the need to cover for myself?”

I know, that’s kind of a pathetic excuse for an embarrassing moment, but fo’ reals I can’t think of any. This is not me pretending I don’t have one because I don’t want to tell people, I really can’t think of one. I’m sure I’ll think of one within hours of posting, but as of now? That’s all folks!

Blogging & design work while my assistant does some Kintage photography.

]]> http://www.aileenbarker.com/2013/05/a-single-snapshot/feed/ 0 http://www.aileenbarker.com/2013/05/just-go-for-it/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=just-go-for-it http://www.aileenbarker.com/2013/05/just-go-for-it/#comments Wed, 08 May 2013 18:08:03 +0000 Aileen http://www.aileenbarker.com/?p=1440 Blog Everyday in May Day 8: A piece of advice you have for others. Anything at all.

I talked about my fear of failure in my last post. Another fear of mine is waking up one day, looking back on the last 50 miserable years of my life wondering what happened. My mom has always (still does on occasion) pushed me to get into the medical field whether it’s as a nurse, a technician of some sort or whatever stable job I can get. I understand her need for me to always have a reliable job and always be taken care of, I just could never do it. The medical field is not something I am passionate about and it’s definitely something I’d be doing just to have a stable income.

Stable income? What’s that? Call me what you want: a dreamer, a flake, an entrepreneur, a lazyass who can’t keep a job. The longest real job I held was at 24 fitness for exactly one year, part time. I have a terrible resume. You probably wouldn’t hire me. What’s more important to me is doing something I love and/or believe in. I believe in a full life. Full of failures? Maybe. But that’s still a life full of experiences. Sitting at a desk 40 hours a week working for someone else and feeling bad taking my week of vacation each year is not ever going to work for me.

So maybe I’ll make it with the current dream or maybe I’ll have to jump on the next one. All I know is I’ll regret it more if I don’t try.

My advice? Whatever it is, just go for it. If you have a dream, chase it. Trying and failing is better than regretting what could have been.

No one really likes to talk about their fears. I pretty much fear everything, as I’ve mentioned before. My family knows (and jokes about) how we’re not really allowed to talk in depth about space, the ocean, etc. unless they want me to start getting anxious. When we ride along PCH with the ocean on one side and a mountain on the other all I can think “Dear god, what if there’s a tsunami right now?”. Let’s just call me completely ridiculous and move on.

Out of all the crazy things I fear there are two things that I am the most afraid of, death and failure. I’m pretty sure we’re all a little afraid of both. When I say  I’m afraid of death, I’m less afraid of being dead (still scary though!) than I am scared of being without my family or my family members being alone when they die. So maybe my fear is more loneliness.

Although my mom is catholic and we used to attend church on occasion when I was little, I don’t consider myself to be a part of any religion. There are times, though, that I wish I did have some sort of faith just to be able to find some way to cope with the idea of dying. That maybe there’s something there after and it’ll all be ok because of whatever I believe in. I won’t be alone, my family members won’t be alone. But then I jump back to reality and know that religion is just not for me, personally.

When it comes to my fear of failure, it might seem odd when you consider my life. I never graduated college. I haven’t held a “real” job for more than a year. But the older I get, the more I look like an lazy, ambitious housewife the more I fear that I might fail at life. What if Kintage never makes it after thousands of hours of effort? What if after that I have no degree and nothing to fall back on? What if we don’t have kids and I hate myself later? What if we do have kids and I hate my life later?

But when it comes down to it, none of the things I’m afraid of are really genuine “fail at life” material. I try to be a decent person and I think that automatically erases any “fail at life” titles. But we all have our fears and those are just a couple of the long list of mine.

Blog Everyday in May Day 6: If you couldn’t answer with your job, how would you answer the question, ‘what do you do’?

Even when I am able to answer with my job, I have a hard time telling people what I “do”. “I design blogs and websites and own an online boutique” is usually the answer, but I still haven’t built up the self confidence to resist from following up with how they’re both pretty small right now, etc because it sounds a lot more impressive than it is.

If I couldn’t answer with my job I would tell you that I create, dream and brainstorm everyday. I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was a teenager and I don’t think it’s something I’ll ever grow out of.

I take care and give love to a plethora of animals, my children, that let me live in the house with them. My day wouldn’t be complete without annoying, obnoxious meowing for food when I haven’t even had a chance to feed myself yet or without having to let the dogs out for half a dozen potty breaks.

I love to learn, but not in the academic sense that I associate with the word “learn”. I learned HTML and created my first (ugly as hell) website (about Hanson) when I was about 10. I read books on business and gardening because those are the things I am interested in learning about now.

I spend my time on all of the above and when I’m not, I’m trying to spend some quality time with my husband and family.

P.S. Happy Monday! I always say this, but I just really LOVE Mondays!

I remember the day that Leonora at Yellow Heart Art and I became besties like it was yesterday. Oh wait…

It was totally yesterday. The more I stalk this pretty lady for this post about my bloggy bff the more I think… WAIT. I think we were besties before we even knew we were. Need some evidence?? I got your evidence…

Bam. We have the same pants. Even better? We were both too cheap to pay regular price and we both got them on clearance. Cheap ass twinsies.

But for real, she’s pretty awesome and even though we’ve only been besties for 24 hours, I think we can make it for the long haul. I mean, how can you not love someone who sells the best prints on etsy? I wonder if she thinks I’m creepy yet.

I’m doing my best to work on myself, to work on my fears and to work on how I live life. I can easily get caught up in fear, laziness, busy-ness and forget that I can’t repeat today. If I have the opportunity to do something amazing and fun, then maybe I should just say “screw work today” and just go. I can always make up for “work time”, but I won’t always be able to find the same amazing opportunities.