Okay all you Trading Spaces

Okay all you Trading Spaces fans (we all know what you were doing Memorial Day Weekend.) Do you remember Hildi's "Orange Episode" where she wanted to dye the carpet orange and her team REFUSED to comply and thus the design was compromised? Rumor has it that Hildi e-mailed Todd Dominey and told him it was exactly what she had in mind and THANK YOU! Personally - I agree with Hildi. It's looks great. In other TS news - here's a review site that's sure to fill all your TS needs and then some.

Speaking of orange ... You may find this terribly boring but I found it fascinating and will file it under the "It's a small small world" category:

I was at the grocery store the other day trying to fulfill a request from the missus for "something different" in the beverage dept. Standing the soda (that would be "pop" for you Midwesterners) aisle, I was shocked to stumbled upon a new package design for part of the Shasta line. As some of you know, I worked at Michael Osborne Design and the first client I was assigned to was National Beverage for a complete overhaul of the entire Shasta line, all 270 SKUs, my primary contribution being the bar line (tonic, ginger ale et al.) 2 years of work. I still get a kick when I'm at someone's house and they're serving MY tonic.

It turns out that this new Shasta "retro look" is a short term promotion/collectors edition in response to the discovery of what they refer to as "Miracle Art." So I went to the url on the can and here's where the story gets weird - for me at least. This "Miracle Art" was discovered on the side of the David Hewes Building at 995 Market St. after a strong wind storm came through and removed half of the billboard on the side of the building.

995 Market St houses the offices of my former company Gay.com and in the photos on the Shasta site, you can see my office window on the corner. In fact, I used to stand right there on the roof several times a day smoking (against the rules - but so are a lot of things in this world) surveying my domain - San Francisco. It was a great view, but there were moments when I was tempted to jump. (Okay, not really, but you get the idea.)

So here I sit, far far away from my old life in SF ... Shasta Orange Soda can in hand ... Looking at the past 10 years of my work life.

According to the Shasta site, there was some miscommunication with building management and the "Miracle Art" has been whitewashed over ... Much like we tend to do with our pasts.