All the Same Size

September 2025

Fall is just around the corner, I can feel it in the cool morning air and see it in the fading light. My brain is already wandering to cold rainy days, sweaters, and soup – but I'm trying to hold onto summer just a little bit longer. We technically have two weeks of summer left, and I don't want to say goodbye yet. I want to sit in my backyard with the sun on my skin a few more times.

Somehow, it's September; the last 8 weeks have gone by too fast. I can remember sitting at a baseball game on the 4th of July, and the bike ride I did on Sauvie’s Island a couple of days later. I know we had Nick's mom in town, and then his dad, and we took the dogs to the new park by our house. We tried a new Italian place and also went to our favorite sushi restaurant. We went on the boat with my parents a couple of times, too.

Mt. Jefferson at sunset from our campground at Lake Billy Chinook

We spent a lot of time playing with the dogs in the pool, and I also worked on a mural. We went on a hike with friends, and the weekend after, we flew to Chicago and met our new niece. After that, I went to New York for work and got to spend multiple days with the talented bunch of designers who all work for What Else.

At some point, I got our yard officially "backyard habitat certified"; my neighbor, the volunteer who does that certifying, came over and took my photo. We went on a float for Nick's birthday and got drinks with his motorcycle buddies. Throughout all of this, I went to a lot of doctor appointments.

We went camping with my family, and then our friends visited from San Francisco. After that, our bathroom remodel began, and we moved to our basement. Last week, I had the incredible experience of attending an art camp in the mountains of Wyoming, where I spent an entire week soaking up the best of summer, swimming, hiking, and making art with new friends. I found myself most drawn to playing music, which surprised me because I had plans to fill so many sketchbook pages with drawings, but found myself using the pages for lyrics and chords instead.

I painted a mural for a friend’s nursery. You can hire me to paint murals!

One of the projects that I'm most proud of is a collaborative music video that I made with six other women (Kika, Tala, LJ, Hanna, Melissa, and Joy). There were fourteen of us total at camp, and on one morning, we broke into teams. Each team gave the other team a prompt, and our prompt was a verse from a poem. When we read the poem out loud (after deciding it wasn't an encoded message), we all agreed it sounded like a song and set off to write one.

It came together so quickly. Kika played the ukulele, and I tried to follow her with the guitar. A few of us freestyled some verses. We did three takes, and on the third take, we called it good and set out to make it into a video. Tala insisted on masks, so we made them. Then, she filmed us being silly while Kika worked on some fun animations to go over the footage.

Everyone was yelling out ideas and being silly, and finally, Tala edited it all together for us. It turned out so cute; I genuinely love it and feel lucky to have collaborated with such talented, creative, and kind humans. You can watch it below:

I came home and decided my studio needed a refresh, so I cleaned it out and moved my desks around. I haven't fully figured out how to capture the creative energy I felt at camp and translate it into my creative practice at home, but I have some ideas. More on that in the following newsletter I write, I promise.

One thing that's been keeping me on track lately is timers. I give myself a certain amount of time to work on something, and I'm not allowed to task shift until the timer goes off. It really helps. If I need to Google something or do something else, I write it down and wait until the timer lets me go. I know there's something more profound I could say about this, wax poetic about time like I usually do, but instead I'll leave it at that. My 20-minute timer just went off, and I’m off to work on my next thing.

See you soon.
AJ