Average Jane

Average Jane's Bathroom Windowsill Still Life

One of the most charming things my cleaning lady does is to take anything tiny that I've left on the bathroom counter and line it up on the narrow windowsill.

Do I have any mixed feelings about hiring someone to clean my house? Absolutely not! It costs me $50 per visit, she comes every other week, and it's worth every penny. I still need to deep clean semi-annually yearly a few times per decade, but just having someone clean the bathrooms, floors, countertops and ceiling fan blades regularly is well worth the expense.

Average Jane's Contribution to Art

I spent some time this morning loading photos to Flickr and noticed a note from Flickr user The hills are alive that she'd used one of my photos in a montage.

Here's my original photo, taken last year at the annual White Cloud, Kansas flea market:

And here's her artwork:

Pretty cool, don't you think?

Average Jane Is Ready for Thanksgiving

This is actually the kids' table from last Christmas, but it seemed like a good illustration for this post.

Last Thanksgiving I put together a PDF of recipes that you could use to make a complete Thanksgiving dinner from appetizers to dessert. Click here to download it.

This year I'll be making dinner at my house for seven people. For years, the electrical system in our house wasn't up for anything that involved turning on more than two stove burners at a time. Now that we've fixed that problem, I'm all set to turn out multiple Thanksgiving dishes at once.

There is one little problem: I don't have a dining room. The photo above was taken at my sister's house. I'm planning on bringing up the long plastic utility table in my basement (I'll clear off all the laundry baskets) and surrounding it with every folding chair in the house. I foresee a trip to Marshall's or Tuesday Morning in my immediate future so at least I can get a decent-looking tablecloth.

Naturally, I'll be shutting all the cats in the basement for the duration of the event. They can't be trusted not to stroll around on the table in front of the guests. People who don't have menageries aren't always very understanding about that sort of thing.

So that's my plan for next Thursday. What are you doing?

Average Jane's Sunday Afternoon

Here are some photos I took at my aunt and uncle's house this afternoon. It was a gorgeous autumn day and we had a lovely time sitting outside with all their animals. You can see more of today's photos here.

 

 

 

 

Average Jane's New Band Photos

Here's one of my favorites of the band photos that Cate Bennett took for us recently. Click to enlarge.

Typepad is being a pain about letting me upload photos today, so if you'd like to see a few more, try Flickr or our Facebook fan page.

Average Jane Buys Artwork

I went to a casino night and silent auction for charity held by the Kansas City Ad Club last night. They had some really great auction items and I ended up getting two framed art photographs. 

Here's one of them. It's by Lyndon Wade.

The print I have is even more vivid than the image looks on your monitor.

The other was a collage-like black and white photo by Aaron Newell. I couldn't find it on his website, but it's a blurred image of a woman bathing in a stream with fallen trees on the bank behind her. 

Now I get to decide where to put them! I think the first one may end up in our bathroom, simply because the colors complement our turquoise walls so nicely. The other will probably go on our living room wall.

Best of all, I managed to double my gambling chips from the $25 they handed me when I walked in to $50, so I saved that much off the purchases. Oh, and I won three pizzas from Wheat State Pizza in a raffle. All in all, quite a nice evening.

It's Picture Day for Average Jane

Today we're having band photos taken so that our lead guitarist and bass player will exist in our marketing materials. Our last photos only included four out of five band members because of the band photos curse. Now one of those four people is gone, too.

Our photographer will be local blogger Waldo Oiseau, and we're heading to the West Bottoms in search of gritty, industrial settings.

Today is photo day on my blog according to my NaBloPoMo schedule. This week I've been to a Halloween party, a burlesque show, and a pet adoption event at a home show. Did I take photos of any of those things? Why, no.

So here's a photo of the enormous oak tree in my backyard. Its fall colors are especially beautiful this year.

Average Jane's Photo Wednesday

In with the new, out with the old.

A little research suggests that this is a type of honeysuckle bush, which makes sense considering how much honeysuckle has invaded my fence line over the past several years. I also saw a lot of these berries out on the walking trail at Unity Village over the weekend.

My favorite plant of the year. I'd never planted elephant ears before, but this particular one grew like mad. Even though it's a pain to dig them up to winter the bulbs, I think it'll be worth it.

My husband and I put together a plexiglas drum shield over the weekend. As you can see, peeling off the protective plastic produced a lot of static electricity.

Average Jane's Favorite Photo

This photo was taken of me and my cat, Boo Boo Kitty, when I was in my late teens or maybe 20. By then, Boo Boo was already rather old (which you might guess, considering that I named him when I was a nine-year-old "Laverne and Shirley" fan).

My boyfriend at the time was taking a college photography class and the assignment theme for the week was "Security." We decided that this was a good representation of the concept, and today I still have a number of prints of this photo of my young, blonde self cuddling my first cat.

We lived in the country on 13 acres, so all of our cats lived in the barn. Boo Boo was a third generation barn cat; we still had his grandmother, Pastel, and his mother, Wonder, throughout most of his life. He was a large cat, no doubt because the tom cats who wandered through to sire kittens each spring had to be big and tough to find their way to our property in the first place.

I'd chosen Boo Boo from his litter to be my cat, marking an early preference for black cats that has continued to this day. He got to come into the house more often than most of our cats because he'd paid his dues putting up with being dressed in doll clothes when my sister and I were younger.

When I moved out on my own, I had always planned to take him with me (which was probably a bad idea on many fronts), but he developed diabetes and died from the first insulin shot the vet gave him.

Kato, the black cat who came after him, was a gift from the same boyfriend who took this photo.

Wow, time sure flies.

Average Jane's Tackiest Possession

We have an enormous room above our garage that is now a recording studio but began its life as a rec room. It was built in 1978, and back when it still bore all of the hideous decorating sensibilities of that era, my husband and I used to make a point of buying the ugliest '70s decor items we could find.

Even though I still have a gigantic, dusty, mite-infested macrame wall-hanging shaped like a tree, this is truly the cheesiest objet d'art we possess:

If you don't recognize it, perhaps this will jog your memory:

My wooden version is so crudely rendered that I originally assumed it was some high school kid's shop project. However, there's a price tag on the bottom that suggests it was made as a tourist souvenir. That makes it even funnier, I think.

Here's your challenge: photograph and post your ugliest home decor item. It doesn't have to be something you actually display in your house - that horrible lump of glazed ceramic from your grandma counts, too. Be sure to comment to let me know when your post is up. I'll start a list within this post so everyone can visit you to point and laugh.