The Sprague Lab

And now for more catch-up. Whew.

Here’s the pic from yesterday. We decided to make cupcakes, and then realized that we had fresh strawberries AND heavy cream. Oh yeah. Nothing like spontaneous deliciousness to rock your Sunday night, right?

 Jared and I sat and watched an episode of Firefly (which I never saw the first time around - his co-worker loaned us the DVDs), and it was awesome. Firefly is good entertainment if you like .. well.. how to describe? A little Star Wars. A little Star Trek. A little John Wayne. A little Clint Eastwood. A little fantasy mixed in, and it’s good! Fun to sit and watch with my honey. :D

And now, rather than try to recap several days’ worth of fascinating drama, including such hits as sneezing like crazy, going through an entire box of kleenex in one evening, and sleeping as much as possible, I’ll just go for a top 10 5. 

Fluevog Loves Me. And I Love Fluevog. 

1. Last Wednesday I received an email titled, “We love you!” And I was like yeah! Someone loves me! Turns out it was from Fluevog. Remember this post about my new shoes? Turns out someone saw the blog, went to the Fluevog store in San Francisco (ah, be still my heart), and told them that they’d seen it, and anyway, they THANKED ME for buying their shoes. And for spreading the love. Have you ever been emailed by a shoe company? Yeah, me neither. And I wrote back and told them so. :) His reply to that email:

Fluevog is all about peace, love, unity, fellowship, and more! When you wear our shoes you are spreading good vibes out into the world. We all need to make the world a better place.

 

I really enjoyed your website and loved that you got what our shoes are all about! Not just amazing looking shoes but a vehicle for so much more.

 

Hope you are enjoying your Malibrans!

Freaking awesome. And I love this for lots of reasons. I love the spunky, funky attitude that the company has in general. I love the shoes (of course!), and I love that they don’t just say they care - they prove it. And that is so SO cool to me. And now I have extra reasons to buy shoes from them. Hehe. Have you had a great experience with a company lately? Tell me about it!

p.s. For the record, yes, I am enjoying the Malibrans! Next on the list? Perhaps the Pipsqueak,  or the Gloria for summer? Hmmm..

Remember the Milk 

Ali posted a bit ago about her new task manager. Ali is a Mac-head, so I decided to go do some searchin’ of my own on the Windows side. Bleh. There is a lot of weird crap out there. All we wanted was a nice to-do list that wasn’t junk. That’s not too much to ask, right? :D But after a lot of searcing, I found Remember the Milk. It’s free! Gotta love free. Cute name, and after about a week of usage, I can highly recommend! It embeds itself into Gmail, and if you get the Pro version ($25.00 a year) it will work with the iPhone. Best of all, you can share lists with other people. Jared and I now have one shared task list and a grocery list, which we can both see and edit. Awesome. We’re using the free version now, and planning to get the pro so we can see it on our phones.

La-La-La-Lightroom 

I caved and downloaded the 30-day trial of Lightroom. I love batch-processing (and batch-exporting!) photos. The only pics I print in general are ones that are either already in a layout or about to go on a layout, so I’ve been feeling a serious lack of just general photos that you’d stick in an album. You know, a photo album? It takes me so long to make layouts that I won’t really be scrapping even MOST of the pictures I really want to have out and about, and anyway, now I think I need another program. :P

Favorite favorite part of this though? The web galleries feature. A year or so ago I downloaded a program called Simple Viewer, that was anything but. You had to handmake the thumbnails and hand-edit an XML file to get everything to work together right. In Lightroom (which has either licensed or purchased the technology), you make a few clicks, feed it some FTP information, and you have an entire web gallery of pictures from your kids’ adventures in the mudhole made by the rain in the backyard in about 10 minutes’ time. Heck yeah.

I’m still deciding, though, whether the ability to batch photos is worth the price tag to me. I like working with individual photos in Photoshop (love me some actions!), so I’d only use this to fill the imaginary empty photo albums that only exist in my head. Still worth it? I don’t know. But did I mention the web gallery of pics from the muddy backyard?

I did?

Okay.

New Bedding!

And because of the aforementioned week o’ sickness and my increased need and desire to sleep, I’ve been enjoying the heck out of my new comforter and duvet.  In Minnesota, you buy a comforter based on how many inches thick it is. More than 5 is good. Less than 3 means possibly freezing to death, despite wearing socks, gloves, thermal underwear, and a hat to bed. In NC, you buy a comforter based on whether or not you can see through it. We definitely needed a comforter upgrade. Or.. downgrade? And this down-free one fit the bill perfectly. Cover that guy up with this lovely duvet set. I decided that even though we’ve got a queen bed, why not try the king duvet, and it fits great. Just enough drape across the edges of the bed, and the white on the duvet cover brightens up our room nicely with our white sheets.

I learned during our recent Digi: in Deep class, I learned (because of an assignment to take a photo against a white background) that there are LOTS of people who don’t own white sheets. Crazy. We are all-white-sheet people here, and it actually didn’t even occur to me that people don’t sleep on white sheets! Sure, I know they sell non-white sheets, but people don’t actually buy  those, do they? So for you, white sheets, or no white sheets?

See how much has gone on around here? Moment-to-moment action.

Ah, one more thing:

JS.com Birthday Celebration 

JessicaSprague.com is turning ONE in just a few weeks. We are having a cool birthday celebration, including coupons, contests, prizes, new class announcements, and general merriment. We’ll dance to Vanilla Ice, serve Hot Pockets, and there’ll be a keg of Diet Mt. Dew. We’re also relaunching the web site with a brand new look (I’ve been hard at work on this part, in between the sleeping and the aforementioned action, and the trying to keep up with the other schtuff I have already embroiled myself into), so stay tuned for sneak peeks and more info to come. Oh, and mark your calendar for June 4. That’s when the whole thing starts. :D