Author: avery

Stay in an Unusual Spot… Without Costing a Lot

testing the excerpt

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CrownhillFort2

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Ian and I are kicking around the idea of going to England late this summer or this fall. We’d spend a few days in London, and then get outside the city a bit to explore. While researching places to go and places to stay, I read about the Landmark Trust – a charity that “rescues buildings that would otherwise be lost” and turns them into places you can stay overnight. We’re talking castles, literary landmarks, and unusual spots (like prisons, rectories, mine towers, and gatehouses). The properties are in England, Wales, Scotland, France and Italy, and the best part is… they’re totally inexpensive.  There’s a 4-night stay minimum, and some properties are as low as £90 for all 4 nights. That’s crazy.

The website is pretty great – you can read about the history of each property, its features, get a floor plan, and learn about the local area. We’re totally going to book one… now we just have to decide which.

[images above of the Holiday at Crownhill Fort in Plymouth, where you stay in the Officer’s Quarters and have free run of the fort once the gates close in the evening. SO COOL.]

Google Street View Lets You Go Back in Time

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Whoa, this is cool. Google Street view now allows you to select a time period, so you can see the same view over a few years (depending on how long Google has been indexing that location).  I was able to look at my house and neighbourhood from 2007, before we moved in.  It’s crazy how much has changed. Check out the photos above of the Ceili Cottage, my neighbourhood local, and how it changed from an auto-body shop in 2009 to the awesome pub it is now.

Read about Google Street view’s time travel feature, or watch the marketing video explaining it.

The Best Book I’ve Read in Years

goldfinch

Seriously. The best book I’ve read in years is The Goldfinch. Obviously I’m not alone in my opinion – author Donna Tartt won the Pulitzer yesterday for it.  At almost 800 pages, it’s taken me a while to get through the book (I started it on vacation in February, and I’m just at the end now), but it’s worth it.

I’m not going to tell you anything about the book, because I didn’t know anything about it myself before reading it. I had just heard that it was good, so I dove right in. I recommend you do the same. Enjoy!

Get Things Done Like a Boss

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This isn’t the kind of thing I usually share on my blog (I don’t tend to talk about work stuff here all that much), but I wanted to tell you all about this online course I took on SkillShare, called Get Stuff Done Like a Boss.  It’s a class built around the Getting Things Done methodology.

For the past year or so, I’ve been trying to figure out better tools to help me stay on top of my workload and manage my email inbox (the amount of emails I receive every day is totally overwhelming).  I tried a number of great email tricks, but I never really got to the root of the problem – things were sitting in my email inbox, instead of being filtered out into actions or saved as resources.

Also, I was often thinking about things that needed to be done, but wasn’t consistently writing them down, so my to-do list plagued my brain.  I got quite stressy at times, and thought I had finally found my limit and needed to dial back the amount of work I was doing.

NOT TRUE!  I can totally handle all my stuff, I just needed more reliable systems in place to collect, process, and do it all. It’s been about 3 weeks since I started the Get Stuff Done Like a Boss class (which consists of short video lessons and some PDF resources) and I’m a total convert to the Getting Things Done method.

I’m now much more productive than before, and I’m honestly less stressed.  I get more done in less time.  Of course, it took a while to learn and adopt the methodology, but it really did make a difference.

If you want to try it out, I have a $10 off link for new SkillShare learners. The Getting Things Done class is normally $29, but if you click this link and then sign up, you’ll get it for $19.

(This is not a sponsored post – I honestly just love this class and wanted to share it with you)

Design As A Gameshow?

Sagmeister Walsh gameshow

Adobe recently asked a bunch of creative types “to express what Adobe means to them through their work. We asked them to play, experiment, hack, make, socialize, datafy, dimensionalize, illustrate, and mashup our logo any way they see fit as part of the Adobe logo remix.”

They called it the AdobeRemix Project, and posted the results on Behance (which is an Adobe product, of course).

That’s all fine and good, but the interesting part is how design agency Sagmeister & Walsh participated. Instead of submitting artwork, they decided to turn the challenge into a game – literally. Sagmeister and Walsh face off against each other on a gameshow, complete with cheesy host, judges, and ridiculous contraints. You can watch it all online.

I love these two and how they bring elements of play and fun to their work. Don’t they seem like they’re having the best time?

PS – Did you follow along with Jessica Walsh’s 40 Days of Dating project (with Timothy Goodman)? I was totally engrossed. It’s being made into a book. And a movie.

What Does Your Home Office Look Like?

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My regular readers know that I’m always mixing things up in my home office. Remember the new chalkboard wall I painted in September?  And last week I reconfigured my desk so I could have my second screen (aka my laptop) running with the Olympics feed from CBC’s website (pictured above).

If you’re looking for home office inspiration, or you just like checking out other people’s setups, have a look at this post on Design*Sponge. Posted yesterday, it features 13 Creative and Clever Home Offices.  I love the variety of spaces, from a small desk in the corner of a room to a huge double-workspace table with a butcher paper roll.

Best Idea Ever: Toronto Grilled Cheese Festival

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Next weekend there’s a Grilled Cheese Festival at Roy Thomson Hall.  A $40 ticket gets you all-you-can-eat grilled cheese, gourmet soup and 3 beer samples. Check out the menu of different grilled cheese sandwiches… I would love the Tatooed Chicked (with oka-style cheese, chicken, bacon, herbed tomato and garlic mayo)  or the Bacon Avocado (cheddar cheese, monterey jack cheese, bacon, avocado, spinach, red onion, tomato and garlic mayo).

Of course tickets for the festival are sold out… I didn’t hear about it early enough (boo).  But if you want to put your name on a waiting list, you can do so on the Grilled Cheese Fest website.  Or, be like me and have your own mini-grilled cheese festival at home.  Best idea I’ve had all day.