New Look, Old Friends

Well Blog, I've revamped you. Now that I've finally made you public once again, I decided you needed a bit of a facelift. You know, just in case someone comes across you and decides to actually read you. I actually put a little bit of thought into how you look today and got some super sweet international permission from my good friend Carly Swenson who currently is residing in the Portuguese islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean known as the Azores. She has so graciously allowed me to use a bit of her art as your background. It of course is just barely seen on the edges, but the whole piece looks a little bit like this:

And by a "little bit" I mean "actually".

 That art right there was a big deal for me last year at this time when I found myself turning my life around on a dime... or a hundred bucks... however you want to look at it. It's as if Carlis herself (yes, I call her Carlis from time to time; a nickname for the nickname "Carlis of the O'Clare Kind" that I somehow came up with in college) knew from even thousands of miles away that the little phrase "I'm feeling better every day" was exactly what I needed to hear, see, and believe. Plus I think the colors she used in this one are really pretty.

Carly is the reason I met the Englishman. She actually met him before I ever did. She's the reason I learned about Death Cab for Cutie and Eddie Izzard in college and was the first person who ever told me that blue and brown go together (I'm artistically inept if you haven't noticed). She taught me how to effectively shop at a thrift store and would make massive amounts of this delicious vegetarian chili that I should really try and get the recipe for one of these days. She hasn't lived in the states for the past four of five years due to her free-feminist-spirit-self ironically marrying a straight-laced (or so we think) guy who happens to be in the Air Force, but she's one of my closest friends. Despite the vast distance that is always between us, we've managed to see each other on a somewhat regular basis. It actually is making me sadder than I thought it would to think that this December will be a year since I've seen her and I don't have any current plans to visit. Turns out the Azores aren't the easiest islands to get to. But I'm hoping that come late winter or early spring I will be able to make the trek to the middle of the Atlantic to spend a week or two occupying a tiny Portuguese island with her and laughing about whatever ridiculousness we happen to come up with.

You know you've got a good friend when you can take incredible absences from one another and go massive distances to each other and it's as if you never left the comfort of your own dorm room on the third floor of the B wing in Maple Hall.

Are we in Minnesota? Are we in England? Does it even matter?

To the .00004 % who actually came across, took the time to read, and made it this far into my blog, you can learn more about Carly and her art at her very own blog where she writes about how she's trying to be creative on tiny islands in the Atlantic.