Sorry about my unplanned hiatus! I was hoping to blog weeks ago, but I was stuck in a rut. It’s been difficult trying to push myself do anything lately; blogging, doing schoolwork, returning comments, going outside, doing anything remotely productive—meh!

The great weather is making it all better though. I’m finally getting back into the groove of things and on the road to being ultra productive…I hope!

Stuff that happened while I wasn’t blogging

I watched The September Issue a while ago and my first thoughts after finishing it were: “Man! I had no idea making a magazine was so much hard work!” and “Those editorials are so pretty!!11!1! squeeeee!” and let’s not forget, “Grace Coddington! What a talented woman! I WANT TO BE HERRRRRR”

So Imagine my surprise when I found the 840-page issue that was featured in the film under our coffee table I decided to carefully extract my faves from the huge volume and hang it up on my bedroom wall to create an “inspiration wall” of sorts.

The first four from the left is from Vogue and the last three is from H&M magazine. I’m thinking of replacing that painting below with another row of prints.

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It’s been a little quiet here for the past 2 weeks don’t you think? February is upon us and the unit 9 target date has just passed (there are 18 units in total for each of my courses), signaling the second half of the school year. So as of late, I’ve been frantically rushing around to finish SOMETHING. Yes, something, because it feels like NOTHING is getting done around here. I know I’m going to kick myself in the face when I end up in summer school—YET AGAIN! Why didn’t I just go to a normal high school? OH, BECAUSE I’M AN IDIOT.

Oh and because I can’t leave my friends. Did I mention that I have a friend who just made it into the Trinidad & Tobago FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup national team? Meaning she’s going to play for Trinidad & Tobago in September. For FIFA. On TV. I HAVE THE COOLEST FRIENDS EVER!!

Wait—what was I talking about again? Right, school. On Friday, our school semi-formal happened. The theme was “Bright Lights, Big City” so each table represented a city (ours was Madrid). As you would expect in a high school dance, most of the girls wore dresses with butt-cheek–skimming hemlines and high high heels that pierced everyone else’s feet. Some boys had badly-fitted suits and many looked like they were trying too hard. The food was just meh and the DJ played too much reggae. The dancing comprised of the usual grinding, sweating, jumping, screaming, boy-on-girl humping, and even girl-on-girl humping. (I bet they regretted that in the morning!)

Sounds like I’m just ranting about what I bad night I had, but I honestly had fun! Even though the concept of personal space was practically non-existent, everyone smelled, and although it was almost 20 degrees below zero outside, it was still nice seeing all my friends in their fancy dresses and, well, dancing!

Don’t think I’ll shell out $40 next year though… gotta save up for prom!

Before I end it off, there’s another thing I wanted to cover in this post—the new Feb. 2010 J.Crew Catalog! It sucks that there are no stores here in Canada, but that doesn’t stop me from drooling over these beauties:

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It’s been live since Monday so I’m breaking the news a little late here—but I have a new layout!

Give me a chance to go all “web-design-nerd” on you and let explain why I wanted a new look:

• For one, I thought the last layout was too crowded. I noticed that the sidebar was distracting the eye from the actual blog posts and the whole thing didn’t look clean. Looking at all the minimalistic designs at SiteInspire made me want to try an all-white layout for myself—so I did!
• The previous version didn’t have any personality. I mean sure, there were little bursts of colors here and there, but it was very meh and I don’t think it really screamed THIS IS HAZEL’S BLOG!!!
• I wanted to incorporate a photograph into the new design. Even back when I still had a sub-domain and when my internet alias was still Lena, I never ever used a photograph in any of my layouts (probably only when I was just starting out and I was still using iframes—blegh!). It’s just been one of my big personal rules to never use an image on my layout that I did not take myself.
  And back then, my photography skills were non-existent, so the idea of taking a picture with my own camera to paste on my website never occurred to me.
• I don’t think I ever had a typical layout with just a header image on top before (I’m usually really obsessed about making my layouts ‘unique’) so I wanted to take a shot at it.

Putting a photo of hazelnuts on the header since my name’s Hazel—I don’t I could get any more personal than that! hahaha~

(notice how I can just keep going on and on and on about website nonsense. I am such a geek! )

Unrelated: On Thursday my art class had life-drawing sessions again (we did it last year too). Meaning a NUDE MODEL came to our class, stood in different poses, and we had to draw her. Unlike last year’s, this one was a lot skinnier—but still equally hairy And this lady kept on bending down in front of us!

Now I find that drawing a voluptuous model is much easier than drawing a thinner one. I guess for me, it’s more natural to draw curves? I dunno.

I’m curious: has any of you that took/takes art in high school had life-drawing lessons in class? I don’t reckon it’s allowed in many schools…