The latest links

I've had a little less time on the computer lately and it honestly hasn't hurt me, except when I try to make my favorite gateau chocolat that I've never written the recipe down for and I realize my life is a giant crutch held up by little green lights. So I'm being good now that we have slightly better reception and FT (the French internet gurus) have told us they'll replace the lines inside and outside in a few months but first they want to carefully dismantle them and send them to a telecommunication museum because they're older than me and the guy who repaired them combined. The first thing the repairman did when he came in our house the other day was whistle and then he said, "wow those line are really OLD. Those are the GRAY cables from..." "You should have seen the cool rotary phone they were connected to" I said "but my husband threw it out" "we're going to try to bring you back to the 21st century as soon as we can" and like that he replaced two or three wires and then we were back online. But we still have a lot of blips and we still have the gray lines.

I've got a few links to share!!

First of all there's a new favorite blog of mine The Wish Jar by Keri Smith. She's so very amazing and I love all her tips for getting you to see things differently. I'm ordering a copy of Wreck This Journal as soon as I can afford to because I need to break out of my journal anxiety. One of the first exercises is to break the binding of the book, agh! I don't know if I can do that but how fun is that to do all these terrible things to a book. I was telling someone about this book and they were saying "why? why would you want to pour ketchup on a book page and paint with it!?" and I was thinking "oh she really needs this book " because it was written for people exactly like her.

Along the same lines is artist Michael Nobbs blog. He has a great downloadable book or two via Flickr, really fun FREE!!! books, one is called 75 Ways to Draw More. Check them out because they're really clever ways to get you to start sketching and journaling even if you've never drawn anything and you have no skill in art. He also has some of the best daily links on Twitter if you like discovering new artists. I've found most of my favorite sites and blogs through him and his daily Tweets which I think he said he spends a few hours a day researching.

Etsy has a lot of videos on their blog This Handmade Life which are really interesting peeks inside artists homes and workspaces. I particularly like their series called There's No Place Like Here.

This interview with John Lennon was done in 1969 by a kid who snuck into his hotel room. Now that kid all grown up has added images to the sound and along with some help has turned the whole thing into an amazing amazing amazing animated video. It's called I Met The Walrus. Wow.

Then there's food. And so when isn't there food? Well actually lately not a lot because my kitchen is a 10 square meter appetite suppressant. It's a disgusting mess. In spite of this (despite?) I'm really liking Smitten Kitchen lately. I can't believe I never even knew about this blog! It's so good. And it's really funny! It makes reading her even more fun. I really love her disclaimer which is along the lines of she won't make anything with really impossible to find ingredients. Yay! a snoot free cooking blog. I love those type of blogs because there are so many of the opposite type blogs out there. It totally inspires me to throw on an apron when I can identify with the ingedients list. I've cooked five things from her blog in the past few weeks and everything came out wonderfully.

All my other latest links are under Drawing Inspiration. I'll share some more things when my link bag gets full again.