This is Rachel Lee Walsh. She’s pretty awesome.

This was the first time it occurred to me to snap photos of our studio. Rob likes to have the microphones just so, and you can tell in the sound quality of my final project. If you need a sound engineer in Brooklyn you should hire him and pay him lots of money. He’s worth it.

Rachel and he were scheming to play together, because she noticed his upright base in the corner of our sound booth and found out that he used to play blue grass. She has a country/folk/blues kind of thing going on. I think they’d rock together.

At one point in the interview I say to her, “Oh, you are of my people” which is a weird thing to say, I know, but the way she writes songs is from the perspective of wanting to tell a human story, and this is the way I do my podcast. Her writing is both clever and simple.

This is Rachel’s guitar strap, and I think it’s SO cool. It’s from Kelly Horrigan.

To listen to our interview, go to the interview page at HeyBrooklyn.com or type Hey Brooklyn into iTunes.

1. My new library cabinet. Two hours before the eBay auction ended, I put in a max bid for $300 and snapped my laptop shut to avoid temptation of over-bidding. Out of 18 bids, mine was the highest, and I snagged it for $225 which is nothing short of completely ridiculous. I could easily turn around and sell this for $500. It took $160 to get it here; I hired two hipster guys off of Craigslist who would have been even cheaper if they didn’t get stuck in traffic. They drove from Brooklyn to Long Island, loaded it up and dropped it off at our apartment. I’m slowly filling the 60 drawers up. (Well, 57. Three of the drawers are still full of the Dewey decimal system cards.) We went to pick it up ourselves, but it didn’t fit in the car. It is way bigger than I realized when I was bidding; five feet tall and three feet wide. We’ll be filling the drawers for years to come.

2. Realizing I know my chocolate chip cookie recipe by heart. I made cookies from scratch this weekend with minimal measuring and entirely from memory. I didn’t get to take photos before they got hoovered.

3. Throwing a party and having lots of people come. My house was filled with new friends this weekend, and older ones, too. We discovered an application called Remote that lets guests request songs in my iTunes library from their iPhones. It made for a cool mix of music all night.

Some of my photos from the party are below. Normally I’m not a “post tons of photos of my friends” kind of blogger, but flipping through I realized that everyone I had photos of are “internety people” (they started a Twitter hashtag for our party, which is so nerdy and fun), so I figured it was fair game. I didn’t get everyone, though! I quit taking pictures early in the night and someone grabbed my camera for part of it, but there are people missing from the photos. If you have links to them, send them to me!

We had people sleeping on our air mattresses and couch. Having overnight guests is a tiny bit stressful (mostly because of the dogs), but I have a religious-like devotion to hosting houseguests. I think it is very important to open one’s home up and share your space with friends in the intimate, overnight-stay sense, even if it disrupts your schedule a bit, and to do it well. The reward is making close friends with people, because you really bond when everyone is sitting around drinking coffee and eating pancakes in their PJs.

PS – Dave, you left your underwear here. Phase one is complete!

This is Annabelle.

She has a home with John; they live in Manhattan.

Annabelle is going to be the face of a fund dedicated to helping Stray from the Heart with vet bills, so she needed a photoshoot.

I have no idea what she’s doing in this picture, but I think it’s pretty funny.

Isn’t she cute?

I’m back to selling photography! See my new store here!

I had a go at selling on Etsy a while back, but didn’t like it. On Etsy you pay a tiny fee per listing. That’s fine – it’s an amount I could cover with the coins dug out of my couch cushions – but it was annoying to pay given the lack of volume of business my store did every month.

I closed up shop and let it sit dormant. My best sellers were my copyright violating P*ep photos, anyway, and I couldn’t continue selling them.*

***

One of the beauties of SxSW is the people you meeting hanging out in the hallways, at the parties, in the bars, and at the dinners. I serendipitously wound up one night at a table full of people who were launching a start-up called “Store Envy” storenvy.com

It’s a similar concept to Etsy; the biggest difference for me is that they don’t have a fee per listing. Like Etsy, it’s free to launch a store, although it’s in private beta now. (They currently have Pro stores available that offer warehousing and shipping for a 15% fee) I requested a free beta store and got one, because they like me.

You can visit it by going to theambershow.storenvy.com Right now I’ve listed nine different 8×10 and 8×12 prints.

One thing I’m going to do in the near future is offer custom-cut mats. The problem with the way I (and a lot of people) shoot is that we compose our images in 2×3.  That’s normally a 4×6″ photo, and if you blow it up again, 8×12″.   Most frames, of course, come in 8×10″. There would be a HUGE market for anyone who starts making reasonably-priced frames for 8×12″ prints, as many of us are loathe to cut off those two inches for many of our favorite pictures when we blow them up.

Since no one has thought to make millions doing this yet, custom matting is the solution, but Hello! Expensive! So I’m going to start offering custom mats (bought in bulk), sized to fit both 11×14″ frames (a standard size frame you can find anywhere) and 11.75×15.75″ frames, the size of the most common RIBBA frame from IKEA, and frame of choice for cheap people everywhere.

Go check out my shop and pass it along to your friends, if you would. I’d appreciate it so much. If you have a suggestion for me, please share. Currently, 100% of the profits from the sale of every $10 print will be going directly to getting these little guys off the beach and into a good home.  They are puppies born recently to a dog called Patches that some of my Puerto Rican dog rescue friends have noticed on the beach.  We really don’t want them to languish in the filth they’re in, but there is currently zero dinero to help them with.  Since I’ve gotten a handful of emails asking whether some of my prints were for sale over the past few months, this seemed like a good move all around.

*For you newer readers: I got a cease-and-desist letter from the maker of P*eps, telling me I couldn’t use their image for commercial purposes. If you’d like one, I still have a few of both “Godzilla vs. P*ep” and “4 P*eps” available, yours free with a $10+ donation to Manos Por Patas. Just forward your receipt to me with your address and I’ll send it along.

Yesterday we went to Connecticut to continue dealing with the basement of my grandma’s house. The second it was legally ours we emptied our storage space and deposited half our earthly possessions down there. A lot of my things were already there from when I lived with her before, from ‘02 to ‘04, and now it’s all a mix of stuff that we don’t really need but can’t quite throw away. What’s the word for that? There has to be one.

Junk, probably.

We took the dogs with us. Every time we go they are absolutely thrilled with the huge grassy backyard full of new smells to roll in. We found a partially deflated ball in the woods, probably from a neighbor, and Tino played with that. Grandma found Matty an old tennis ball in the garage and threw it for him.

The cool thing about my dogs is that they know better than to poop on the nice grass. They all politely trotted to the wooded area to hide themselves, and pooped in the piles of decaying leaves. They don’t know not to roll in animal pee, though.

Needless to say we didn’t get as much work done as we could have, but that was fine. It’s been ages since I “went out to play”, and it seemed much more important to goof off in the fresh air.

Rob found the handle of a paint roller in the garage, and we played a round of stickball. Matty was both infield and outfield, trying to get his tennis ball back. We tried to make Leeloo and Tino in on the game, too, but they just blinked at us when we called them, and then went back to zoning out in the sunshine.

It was a really good day.

“There’s a special on flowers for Valentine’s Day!” said the local florist. We were walking by his shop, going home from the subway, and he was standing in the doorway. “$65 for a dozen roses!” he crowed, as if that was a great bargain. “Maybe I’ll see him in here for Valentine’s.”

Rob smiled and said, “Maybe,” and then when we were out of earshot, “You would kill me if I came home with $65 flowers!”

“I really would.” I said, and I wrapped my arm around him. I’m so glad he “gets it”.

Even if I had all the money in the world, I wouldn’t be down with spending that kind of money on something that will die in a week, and besides, roses are way too easy. I do love flowers, but not roses, really; I’ll take my flowers quirky, unique, wild and un-sprayed with pesticides.  Cellophane-free.  Real, natural grown, and not given out of obligation.  Inexpensive, always, and presented with love.  Like these.

photo by abby. $11  buy a print of this and other beautiful photo prints by her here.

photo by sarah norris, $30 for a set of four mini-prints. buy here.

This cute program takes a digital image and converts it into a faux Polaroid. It’s kind of cheating, but the results are really pretty.  It makes a genuine Polaroid camera noise and then takes a few minutes for the picture to appear.  While it’s “developing”, you can shake it!

I used the program to convert a cell phone photo my friend Carissa snapped and sent to me.  The bracket is from Anthropologie, and the a lamp shade and cord are both from Ikea.  She strung the cord through the bracket and made herself a charming, inexpensive, zero-footprint light, perfect for a her tiny apartment bedroom.  So cute!