Hello,

Who doesn’t like to hear the words, “I am so proud of you!” For my friend Mallika’s birthday, I made her this self-affirming piece to read to herself everyday.

Here’s me bearing the gift at the Impressionist exhibit at the de Young Museum on her birthday (which was great!) and here it is the next day hanging at her desk at work.

Today is the first anniversary of the blog™. I turned a year older a few days ago as well. It was a great golden birthday, rich with sweet baby James and good friends.

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A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF J2F

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Refer to picture # if you wanna say something. Comments are fun.

I’d known Kelly since 2nd grade when she was secretly my creative rival in art class. Come 3rd grade, we got close when we were seated at the same desk pod with 2 other boys. We had these fantastic slumber parties at each others’ house. We used to make friendship bracelets that went all the way up our arms. She had embroidery floss in a special little case in every color you can imagine. I was bummed when Fall soccer started and I had to cut them all off. My whole forearm was bare and noticeably less tan than the rest of me.

We started writing a lot of notes to each other during class and the boys were always sneaking glances at what we were writing. I had a big crush on one of the boys for years through grade school, and it was crucial he not see what the notes said. So Kelly and I invented a secret code and wrote all our notes in it. I can still write in it fluently, and I’ll bet that she can too.

In September of 2007, I was Googling people I knew in elementary school and learned that Kelly also went on to do graphic designer. Neat.

I got this idea:

I made the font in Illustrator… and that was all. It turned out so Soviet. I always remember her birthday is Groundhog’s day, so this year when it rolled around, I lurked her again and found her mailing address. I sent her this.

She loved it. Now we’re friends on Facebook. Neat!