MAY

May was so crazy! Here's a sad little rundown (sans pictures) :

Cody and I spent Mother's day with my mom. We all cooked her a good meal and surprised her with an iPod and a Snuggie (the snuggie of course was a gag gift. She LOVED it!).

It was a youngest brother's month of festivities too with senimary and high school graduation.

Cody's family came down to hang with us over Memorial weekend. It was a blast having them here. They are so much fun.

Watched ALL KINDS of movies including Star Trek, Terminator, Wolverine, Empire in the Sun, Willow, and Undercover Brother, just for kicks and to name a few. haha

Decided that SUU is STILL where we need to be. (whether we like it or not).

Finished Harry Potter 6.

Got called to be a Relief Society teacher :S

Thoroughly enjoyed "The Giver".

Working steadily on a commissioned book.... :D

Enduring to the end---at work. Lazy summer days can be SO tempting.

Succumbing to Lego Batman (crazy addicting).

AND..............I finally completed my portfolio Web site! clarecampbelldesign.com  . All and all, plus all the gaps and breaks it took about a year. It was built completely from scratch, tailoring the code to whatever I was doing. I am pleased with the outcome, but really cannot believe it is really done. I sort of consider it as a graphic designer's ' rite of passage'. What will I do with myself now? I'm sure some new, awesome project is in store.  It never seems to end, and I'm just fine with that. 

I'm not sure if I mentioned this earlier, but a year ago I stumbled on a blog that talked about the author's lifelong goal to read as many books as possible from this list called 'The Best 100 Novels. ' Supposedly, it's one of the better collections of the world's best books. So, I have also taken it on, and it's been so fun and enriching. You can check it out here.  If you love to read, or just like goals, this is one I definitely recommend. 

Well, life is good. Things are going so well for us, and we are so happy. It's monotonous, but in a good way. June will be rather interesting. We'll see how it plays out. :)

Hagoone Siikis. 

Quimby the Mouse

Because.... It's interesting.

Quimby The Mouse from This American Life on Vimeo.

Two spring beauties

Emmaline

This rather beautiful and exciting book is a long stitch book I experimented with last weekend. It was more difficult that past books, but very fun to try to figure out. I think I will be making these for a long time. (but they are blurry?? :( oh well I guess. )

Ferrah

Yet another ribbon-bound book. ha. They are so classy and simple. I had problems giving this one up. But, the owner quite liked it. 

Hopefully more to come :]

The bottom of the barrel. haha

What's new these days? Good question. 

While a lot has happened, I feel like there isn't much to tell. But, I'll try to make this exciting :]

First, CHOFFY. 

Cody and I stumbled on this by accident while on a brief trip to SLC. In this same trip we went to the Draper Temple open house with Cody's family. If you like/love the smell of coffee or even consume it, this is a GREAT alternative to it. Basically, it's brewed chocolate. It sounds odd, but it is so good. It is also really good for you too. If you want to look into it more, check out drinkchoffy.com.  We bought some on a whim, along with a coffee brewer, and have enjoyed it nearly everyday since. 

My birthday came and went too. It was an awesome day. LearnKey threw me a great party in conjunction with St.Patty's day. After a great day of festivities, my brother Michael came up and went to dinner with Cody and I at The Garden House (LOVE). We watched a movie at home and just took it easy. It was a great day. 

Other than that, life is just moving along. We are blessed to still have our jobs, and excelling at what we do. This weekend Cody is out of town on a business trip. I was asked to head a custom project at LK, which is basically a creative director-type position. It's been tough, but I am learning a lot. 

We are happy, life has been good.  We hope things are good for everyone else. :]

B I R D + S L C = U F O R I A.

Ahhhhhhhh. There's nothing like a great concert to make you feel completely renewed.  On Wednesday, my coworker Chad and I ventured up to SLC to go to this show. There was a little confusion on where the show actually was, but we made it, and were like the 4th and 5th people in line. haha This of course, led us to have FRONT AND CENTER standing room. It was unreal. We probably were standing a total of 6 hours when it was all said and done, and we weren't feeling our best afterward, but it was SO SO worth it! The opening band was Loney Dear, who was really good. When Andrew Bird came on, the place went crazy. He came out, adjusted his stuff, smiled at us, and went on to say "Something just isn't right".  He took off his shoes, said "there we go!" and played the whole concert shoeless. What a guy. 

He played a great set of songs, old and new and played all of my favorites :D!!! I always forget how great live music is. Bird was SO into everything he was doing, so focused and so charming. Mid-song he would switch from guitar to violin, back to guitar, whistle, sing, play the xylophone, everything. It was pretty much a one man bad, within a band.



It was SO fun and so worth it. I went away in absolute awe and full of love. haha The world isn't such a bad place afterall. It was really really late when we got back to Cedar. The day after we were zombies at work, but it was so cool. But, despite the zombie-ness, I was totally on cloud nine. It's amazing what a thing like a concert can do to lift the world's troubles. Clearly, i don't get out much. I don't get into many things, so it was really special. haha I was even so excited I even spiffed up a few to share.






Love.




Aside from that, life is Grrreat. Work is getting more exciting, and the weather steadily warmer. Cody is out of town this weekend on another installing job, this time in San Jose. I hope things do well for him. Los Campbell indeed. :)

V-day: Success.

Valentines day this year was really fun. I'm usually not that big of a fan of the commercial demand that we must LOVE and find love to spend it with, but this year was pretty good. It all started at Learnkey.....

The Love Monster

This little guy was the brainchild of Cody and I. For my work party, we had to make a box for people to put valentines in. I originally just wanted to make a monster, a lot like this one, but Cody had the BRILLIANT idea of giving him life and adding monster sounds! So, we got one of those cards where you can record your own message, *somehow* got monster sounds, (that went something line MMMMM! YUM YUM YUM YUM YUM! and then played a silly song.) and attached it to the roof of his mouth. That was phase one. After that, I covered it and went crazy.
It was a hit at the party. I won most creative, and got lots of good laughs. It was awesome. Here are some of the other neat boxes. 




The morning of the party, i go to get everything ready to take over. Inside of the monster's mouth was a card, and an IPOD. It blew me away. Cody is so great, not only for his gnak for surprising me, but he's... just so cute and thoughtful. I am so glad he's my forever valentine. 




On the real valentines day, I woke up to roses and silence. Cody had to work, but it was a pretty good day. When he got off we went to dinner, came home and took it easy. We rented 'Ghost Town' and shared a cheesecake. It was the funniest movie I've seen in a long time. We usually just chuckle here and there, but last night we were dying. I totally recommend it.

Phantom Spouses and Bale outs

So......how's it going? haha There hasn't been much going on lately, just... life I suppose. We still have our jobs, and live in the best little house. This semester, Cody isn't in school due to a lack of classes he needs, so he's working full time. One of the great things of working full time and doing what he does is that he gets to go on installs - or week-long trips to cool places to electronically program the machines that are built where he works. 

So far, he has been to Massachusetts (Plymouth) and Colorado (Boulder). The next trip will be to Canada (Montreal) and California (LA thereabouts). I bring this up because a couple of weeks ago while on in install in Boulder, the usual one week trip slowly tuned into a two week trip. So, I spent a good two weeks trying not to go crazy and socially.....digressed. haha over that time, I made a couple more books and watched A LOT of movies. I learned to be less afraid of the dark, and created a terrible sleeping schedule. go. me.  

The first book I made was a ribbon-bound book, this time with three. I think it was in internal plea for spring to get here. It's bright, fun and compact. I'm calling it May, because I kind of wish it was. 

The second book I made was a mix of ribbon-bound and codex binding. I really like how this one turned out. It has a very classical look, and definitely reflects me, the avid reader. I call this one Huck. 

I was so happy to have Cody back. It was like I was missing something, and was never all the way there. Some of the movies I watched were (I case you want something cool to watch sometime :) The New World, I'm Not There, Equilibrium, The Prestige, The Machinist, The Duchess, and of course, the Chris Nolan Batmans. If you see the pattern here, cool. I owe you a book. If you don't.... well it might be better that way. haha
Anyway, at work his week, since it is valentines day, we were challenged to make boxes for the valentines to go in. I have THE BEST idea, but won't disclose it just yet. It probably sounds like we have a lot of parties at work... (and we prolly do more than the average office), but they are always so fun. Along with the valentines festivities is a soup competition, which be and taste amazing.

Other than that, life is good. We are excelling at our jobs and doing well. Oh yeah, and 17 days til Andrew Bird graces Utah with his presence :)

Hagoone. 

"String string a ding ding string string a ding ding!.... :( Andrew Bird didn't come to my house"

I'm going to see this genius in February. I recommend looking into him. Andrew Bird is my favorite. He's from Chicago and is classically trained in 6 different instruments including  the guitar, violin, glockenspiel and mandolin. He blends many different kinds of music and can't really be labeled in one category or another. The best chill music. 

and yeah, that was him whistling.



I can't wait.

Back.

It's been too long.  Sorry. Where do I even begin?? 

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was really fun. We went over to Blanding and spent some time with Cody's family. I don't have any pictures of that, but it was really relaxing and full of laugher of course. It feels like that was forever ago.  Moving on i guess....

San Diego

The week after Thanksgiving my family took a trip to HOME, or SD. we spend a 4 day weekend seeing the sights and trying to get in everything we can. We spent some time walking around downtown in perfect, moist, 80 degree weather...

After that, we went to the zoo. 

The zoo is in an area of the city called Balboa park. right next to the zoo is a lot of museums. Museums for just about anything one can imagine. Well, every year in the first weekend of December there is an event called Christmas on the Prado. The museums open up for free and there is food and fun galore everywhere. It's really fun but super crowded. 

The next day, Cody, my mom and I went to the SD temple. It was amazing, as always. 

Later that day, we spent some time in Old Town, (old SD...?)

We spent the rest of the day messing around and shopping. The next day we went to the ward us kids grew up in, and it was really neat to see all of our old friends. After that, on the way out of town we went to the beach for a sec. 

After that, it was back to reality :(

Other Things

Since then, the fall semester ended, which was good for Cody. We've been working away, and can't wait for Christmas and New Years, which also has snuck up on us. At Learnkey, we had an all-day party which included a wii boxing tournament. Let's just say i can't move right now. haha. 

I made a little chimpmunk for a white-elephant gift type of thing for it too. 

It also snowed--- A LOT. 




grrreat.

Things are good, and very busy. I'm behind in my projects...a couple of books, a block craft, a tree skirt... you know. i even made a christmas card to send out, but time is just not on my side this year. so, here it is... and consider this your card??? as lame as it is. haha

But, truly have a wonderful Christmas. (or whichever holiday you prefer :)