Eeeep! Back to work tomorrow for what is shaping up to be an insane couple of months.

I need to make sure I carve out time to do some me stuff and not stay at SML until some ungodly hour. Also, I need to pretty much immediately return to my lunchtime park reading – this was staggeringly good for my mental health last year.

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I sat down this morning and completed July-December on the 2015 dinners page. This is a somewhat time-consuming process which I’d been putting off.

I don’t know why I dithered because I really like creating datasets and I find it very interesting to see patterns in the repetition of meals and identifying what triggers us to bust out a bunch of new stuff (generally the acquisition of a cook book!), and also to note what may have slipped off the rotation and remedy that.

I’m going to sit down and do some analysis on the weekend – because that is actually my idea of a super-fun time!

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I sat on the floor last night with a cup of tea and my bargain phaidon archive of graphic design¹ .

I’m barely a 10th of the way through and I adore it – this is also my idea of a super-fun time! Best $20 spent this year! At the moment, I’m just grabbing a stack of cards out and reading through them, at some point I’ll file them in some sort of order.

My favourites so far (I seem to have a thing about red white and blue):

paul rand, thoughts on design cover – 1947:

rural electrification administration (economic stimulus project) – 1937

london a-z cover – 1972

I was delighted to learn that the London A-Z was designed by a woman! After losing her way using an elderly ordnance map, Phyllis Pearsall designed and mapped the A-Z by herself (23,000 streets, walking 3,000 miles, working 18 hours per day!) and when publishers rejected it, she had it published herself – in 1936! And it was, of course, a mad success. Go lady!

¹ ZOMG! on sale for AU$20 on the phaidon site – it’s $190 elsewhere)

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Brief pictorial Rye-an update:

Look at those bubbles! I’m pleased I’m waiting until the weekend to turn him into a loaf.