For all you Fight Club fans… mischief, mayhem… pure comedy.

I’m sitting in Jittery Joe’s Coffeeshop downtown watching this little girl (whose parent’s are eating at Sullivan’s down the hall i’d guess) play chess… by herself. Adorable. I’d go play a game with her… but parents seem to not take kindly to random, goatee-ed men chatting it up with their 6 year olds.

This is getting out of control. The number of pervs who have visited my site because they’re trying to get their soft porn fix looking for pictures of Lindsay Lohan… now 6 and counting. Come on pervs… is she even legal? And they’re getting more specific… this time someone searched for “lohan in a car showing clevage.” Lohan on the street showing cleavage? No sir, not what i’m after… she’s got to be in a car showing cleavage. Got it? This is what i get for apparently misspelling the word “cleavage” in some post. I am now in referral hell.

I hate the internet sometimes.

To all you gents spending part of your life trying to get off to a picture of a 17 year old with a boob job… you need Jesus. And i’m being 100% serious.

…micah kandros design. he’s so good. for so many reasons.

1. i watched the great american cinematic classic better off dead, which he owns, at his casa last time i was in nashville. a young john cusack, some killer paper boys, and the famous racecar-driving, howard-cosell-talking ree brothers… you can’t go wrong. (except for the bad judgement call of the dancing fast food claymation scene… that was truly unforgivable, even for the 80′s)

2. he’s a great designer. (yep, that simple)

3. he takes pictures that capture great moments. like this one and this one. and so many more.

4. the fact that he and barnes have inhabited the same living space is frighteningly hysterical.

5. the site redesign is so sexy (yep, sexy… no regrets for saying it) that it makes me giddy.

I can’t seem to escape the red, white, and blue lately. We’ll chalk it up to latent design patriotism. (Or just blame Ryan.)

Between Monday and Tuesday, i’ve worked 29 hours this week already. What? Last night, there was a nice little drop-in birthday shindig for Suzanne. A wonderful change of pace for my workaholic-ness. Fun times were had by all… and it was extremely entertaining to watch Shay’s kids pillow fighting for a good twenty minutes. Ken had the new YouWorkForThem dvd Enter the Dragon… silly name, great motion graphic work. Somehow, in the midst of watching said dvd, we (and by “we” i mean “i”) started talking about how cool it would be if your last name was “Karate.” So… the inevitable snowball conversation ensued… and now i have an alter ego.

Josh Karate: Jetsetting Millionaire Ninja™.

Of course, i present to you the first in an extremely limited-edition line of widely-available Josh Karate™ Desktop Wallpapers. I hope against all hope that your co-workers will laugh when they see this gracing your computer… or at least ask you what it means. And since i don’t even really grasp the greatness that is Josh Karate: Jetsetting Millionaire Ninja™… neither do you. This only adds to the humor factor.

Enjoy.

There’s nothing quite like a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch at 4:00am. It’s amazing. CTC, as they call it in the biz, was approximately 67% responsible for helping me to endure my freshman and sophmore years of college, as the cafeteria in my dorm was only able to produce food that could be categorized as tasting like varying degrees of Bland, Gross, Parched Chicken, Grill, or some amalgam of those options. Up until college, i’d never partaken of what I referred to as “sugary cereals” and what you may know as simply “cereal.”

We weren’t tree huggers by any means, but my childhood pantry was full of such classics as Cheerios, Raisin Brand, Kix, and, less notably to a child, Total, Product 19, Special K, and Shredded Wheat. The Blankenship family loved its health. Hippies.

Thus, like any adolescent sheltered from the world’s temptations, my first college solo trip to the grocery store was the epitome of teenage wasteland. It was like I had dated a homely, boring, unremarkable girl for years and, while I had seen the benefit of such a relationship due to my desire for female companionship, no one had told me that there were also beautiful women who painted and played music and loved thrift stores and foreign films and red meat and still smelled nice (hypothetically… there are women like this… right?) Row after row of sugary goodness… Cookie Crisp, Lucky Charms, Golden Grahams, and the aforementioned CTC all made it into my cart (alongside college classics like brownie mix and cheap microwave pizzas) and I felt sinful and shamed for my actions, yet strangely drawn into them with no hope of staying the need for sucrose satisfaction. My love affair with cereal continues unabated even now.

Favorite cereals… comment section. Go.

An awesome little Polaroid Project. What a great concept… i think i’ll be ripping it off the next time i go on a trip anywhere scenic.

So… i got a Gmail account. I’m not sure what all the fuss is about… other than brilliant marketing. Leave it up to Google to create a huge demand for a free product. (Seriously… people are selling invites on Ebay. When you make a free product and create a demand like that… somebody in the marketing dept. better be getting a pat on the back.) I suppose it all goes back to the elementary school fears of getting picked last for the team… who wants to be the last one picked? Sure… it doesn’t really matter… but it does.

The show last night went well. Many thanks to the multitude of locals who showed up to support… always a pleasure to be your entertainment (code word for “background music”) for an evening in the city. Also, McD backed over his guitar yesterday afternoon prior to the show. You know… bring your gear out to your vehicle, realize you forgot something, go back in the house, walk out… start the car… hit reverse… …curse yourself for being born. Poor Leo Kottke. He’s got a not-so-nice five inch crack along the side now. The most humorous part of the entire situation? I’ve done this before as well. In college… i backed over two guitars at the same time. We are officially both idiots. We need stupid insurance. At least we brought the mid-tempo folk rock last night. We’ve seen a million faces… and we’ve rocked them all.

Tonight… my “surprise” party.

Well, Scott Hansen is just the man. Not only does he do some great design stuff via ISO50 (i wish i could get all his custom photoshop brushes… oh the fun that could be) he also makes great music under the name Tycho. The new album sounds (and looks) great. Also in the realm of electronic music, i seemingly cannot get enough of the new Sasha album. Track 5… on repeat… all day long.

A little something about me… i like being up this early… i hate actually getting up this early.

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday dear me…

happy birthday to me.

OH… MY… CRAP…

Ian Thornley is back… rocking… so… visciously.

Anyone up for a trip to Charlotte to see them open for Finger Eleven in July?

Pretty please?

The capital campaign identity and print pieces are coming along well. Letterhead and envelopes are done (pending approval, of course) as well as the name tags and half of the invitation and the commitment card. That’s all of the pieces that are due to our printer on Monday. You really have to love deadlines… and working on Saturday… and working tomorrow. But to be honest… this doesn’t feel like work. “Go make some art.” What am i going to say to that? No? Very doubtful.

As for other creative endeavors, this site works in every browser i’ve tested so far except for IE Mac. I got a few of the main issues with that particular browser’s quirks fixed so far… which aren’t because it’s a bad browser, but moreso because it’s so standards compliant that it’s forcing me to write better css. How annoyingly wonderful. Of course, i’d wager that within a year, IE Mac will be a dead browser. After all, Safari rules you… so hard. The constant redesigns of this site (due to my “somewhat beneficial form of design ADD” as Blaine puts it) are certainly the driving force behind me learning things about web design and problem-solving, so i welcome the challenge and the newness of not quite knowing what i’m doing.

Of course, i think Inman might be on to something… if someone will just write a virus that would delete Internet Explorer, install Mozilla, and transfer all of the user’s bookmarks over… the world would be a better place. I’m so for serious. Someone get on that train.

An awesome little Polaroid Project. What a great concept… i think i’ll be ripping it off the next time i go on a trip anywhere scenic.

So… i got a Gmail account. I’m not sure what all the fuss is about… other than brilliant marketing. Leave it up to Google to create a huge demand for a free product. (Seriously… people are selling invites on Ebay. When you make a free product and create a demand like that… somebody in the marketing dept. better be getting a pat on the back.) I suppose it all goes back to the elementary school fears of getting picked last for the team… who wants to be the last one picked? Sure… it doesn’t really matter… but it does.

The show last night went well. Many thanks to the multitude of locals who showed up to support… always a pleasure to be your entertainment (code word for “background music”) for an evening in the city. Also, McD backed over his guitar yesterday afternoon prior to the show. You know… bring your gear out to your vehicle, realize you forgot something, go back in the house, walk out… start the car… hit reverse… …curse yourself for being born. Poor Leo Kottke. He’s got a not-so-nice five inch crack along the side now. The most humorous part of the entire situation? I’ve done this before as well. In college… i backed over two guitars at the same time. We are officially both idiots. We need stupid insurance. At least we brought the mid-tempo folk rock last night. We’ve seen a million faces… and we’ve rocked them all.

Tonight… my “surprise” party.

Instead of the Demon Hunter show last night, i opted for rest… and the first half of Owning Mahowney… before i fell asleep. It was a good call. Brown didn’t get done with whatever he was doing until 10:30ish (he and McD really need to learn the art of saying “no” to doing things at night) and by that point… i wasn’t driving anywhere to see anything. No worries… resting was nice.

McD and i are off to Greenville tonight to do the coffeehouse gig thing. I haven’t played a show in over three months… it might be a little shaky. But who really cares? I’m glad i don’t have to earn a living doing music… which is hysterical considering how much i wanted to do music for so long. I just get to write songs and have a few friends listen in… which is really quite a wonderful experience. And it involves absolutely zero attempts at being something i’m not. Lucky me.

Also… Lanna was apparently unable to wait until my birthday to give me my present… which was AWESOME. For those faithful YourCreativityDollarsAtWork™ readers who aren’t around me on a regular basis, you’re most likely completely unaware of how fond i am of the bird. That’s right… the middle finger, the American highway salute. I love it. I use it frequently with those i love. It stems from growing up in a family with an extremely odd sense of humor… and we left the bird fly freely. So… having gotten over the shock of me using the bird, my circle of friends has come to associate this gesture with me… and therefor… i present to you one of the most well-thought-out birthday presents i have ever received:

The one and only Field Guide to the North American Bird. The cover alone is worth the price of admission. Love, love, love my friends. Especially when they pay attention.

i’ve been spending the majority of the time in the majority of my days… and some of my nights at my desk. (The new desktop wallpapers were the inspiration for this redesign… oh, and there is a PC hiding over on the left side of my desk.) The time i’m all nuzzled up to this desk will only increase in the coming months. We’re thankfully redesigning newspring.cc soon… and most likely using a huge managment backend database designed by Fellowship Church via Fellowship Technologies. It must be nice to have Microsoft developers just going to your church…. i’m sure it helps out when you have a little IT problem… like how to manage 20,000 weekend attenders. Whatever the case, the fact that we might be using their technology helps to make the redesign process a bit easier on me. All i have to do is make it look pretty. I can handle pretty.

But more pressing than the web is the capital funds campaign we’re starting in August to raise the money for buying the land we have under contract and beginning the process of building our church. (Meeting at a college is nice and all… but four-plus years of unloading trailers every weekend starts to take it’s toll… and there’s only so many services we can add before we just can’t grow anymore.) This means approximately 10 pieces of print work centered around the campaign theme. Fun… yes. Deadlines… soon.

My desk… always it seems. Sometimes… just sometimes… i’m glad i’m otherwise romantically-unattached.

Sometimes.

After the initial redesign, the site looks (and works) in Safari and IE PC. Mozilla is doing a strange little 20 pixel shift of all the main content. I’ll try to figure that one out tonight. Don’t even bother trying to look at it in IE Mac. It looks wretched in IE Mac… however, in defense of the fact that i’m not planning to fix that wretchedness, and although we’ve already covered this ground, if you’re using a Mac and you don’t use Safari or Mozilla… you’re clearly insane. Microsoft is not your friend.

Stupid web browsers will be the death of me.

Welcome to the summer of newness, ladies and gentlemen. I got bored last night (and didn’t want to have other sites i designed showing up my own site… you understand?) therefor… a new look. So sorry, dial-up kids… i’m guessing it’ll take about 15-20 seconds for this guy to load now. I’m working on figuring out ways to get that time down, but we’ll see if that works…

Going to listen to Demon Hunter tonight with Brown. I haven’t been to a good metal show (family aside) in awhile, so it should be fun. Mainly i’m going to finally meet Ryan and Don Clark who, in addition to bringing the metal thunder, run Asterik Studio in Seattle which is one of my favorite design studios of late. Hopefully contact and love will be shared.

Also… there are those among you who are plotting some sort of birthday shindig covert op on saturday night. You know who you are… i am looking forward to be pleasantly surprised. Carry on.

I’m going to try to start using correct capitalization around here. We’ll see how long that lasts… but my lack of correct grammar is starting to annoy me.

The… greatest… avatar… ever. Thank you Anthony for making me choke on my beverage at work.

New shows for the five of you who enjoy coming out to hear me sing and play. This Friday at Carpenter’s Cellar in downtown Greenville at 8:00 with McD opening up. I’ll be back there on July 23 with someone good to open. Also, though i keep swearing i’m not driving to Columbia any more… Randy keeps drawing me out by bringing in good musicians. I’ll be opening for Trent Monk & Michael Neagle (who are going by the ever-so-creative title… Monk & Neagle these days) on Tuesday, July 13 at Jammin Java in downtown Cola. Monk has a tendency to write ridiculously catchy songs (but never… ever… listen to his first album) and i think Ed Cash produced their new deal, so it might be worth the drive, groupies.

i finished up ken’s blog redesign early this morning. i also threw up a few times this morning… but those things are completely unrelated. (i hope?) all hoying aside… i give you the nerdery that is… the AV Club. it was a fun little project and i learned a few coding things just from playing around that i didn’t know yet. (wow… who am i calling a nerd?)

this morning i was playing around with some photoshop stuff when i first got to work…. which actually led to me designing a whole new look and feel for ken’s blog. (which somehow counts as work, because i’m in major need of learning anything and everything about css web design i can for New Spring’s ensuing redesign.) i should be able to get Ken up and running fairly soon… it’s a super-simple, clean design. (and now, i’m sure michaela will kill me because i haven’t finished her redesign yet. not because i’m lazy… but moreso because i’ve apparently found an IE-PC bug in css that no one can tell me how to fix. it is a mountain… i will climb it… and on the top i will put my flag to mark what i have conquered… or something.) all that to say, it was nice to get carried away with the creative process today and just make something… no stress, no worries, just creating.

had dinner with Gizz last night… he’s one of the coolest humans i know. we’re both crap at keeping up non-convenient friendships… but i think last night reinforced how much we appreciate each other and how i need to be so intentional about seeking out time with my friends.

and tonight? movie night with my first round of Netflix gloriousness.

awesome, awesome, awesome.

shudder… the new David Hasselhoff video? too weird for words. silly germans.