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Late last year I committed to becoming better in the kitchen. And when I say better I mean more focused when preparing meals. I’ve masted boiling pasta, sautéing garlic, preparing eggs scrambled and sunny-side up; but those meals get old very, very quickly.

I’ve heard friends mention the Campbell’s Kitchen website. So one Sunday afternoon I ventured to that particular URL to find recipes that looked easy and edible. Pleased and delighted best describe those recipes I found, saved to My Recipe Box, and savored on weeknights when I’m short on time, or Sunday afternoons when the crave to cook is greatest.

I have plenty to learn about food preparation, but the Campbell’s recipes have proven to be a great start for beginners like me. Here are links to a few of my favorites.

• Baked Ziti
• Cheeseburger Pasta
• Super Moist Pork Chops
• Tuna and Pasta Cheddar Melt

Now, what’s your favorite (and easy) dinnertime recipe? Remember, I’m a newbie foodie.

Saturday night I had the wonderful opportunity to learn about the life, loves, and letters of advice columnist Ann Landers from a brilliant, one-woman show at the Omaha Community Playhouse. “The Lady With All The Answers,” which runs through September 19, was an absolute delight. So much so that I wrote about it for this week’s All Around Townley blog.

{Photo courtesy Omaha Community Playhouse}

Saturday night meant a little wardrobe playtime in The Jersey Shore Experiment, followed by Fun with a Sharpie – featuring Steve Gordon (RDQLUS Creative) and Eric Downs (DownsDesign).

An active conversation about freelance creative work across the country is taking place on LinkedIn in the Creative Freelancer Conference group. The group is an offshoot of a new conference blog of the same name that’s picking up steam.

Earlier this week I weighed in on a conversation about the value of printed marketing materials. For Nerdy Thirty, I have had tremendous success with five-by-seven glossy postcards and nifty square stickers. Those two projects – along with the book’s cover – were created by three separate graphic designers: two in Omaha, one in Brooklyn.

Some folks on this particular thread questioned why I didn’t stick with just one graphic designer for the entire Nerdy Thirty marketing project. Initially, I was quite surprised by the question. Some said they felt using multiple designers smacked of disloyalty to the others and jeopardized brand consistency. “Nay,” I said to them:

I live in Omaha. We have a very collaborative creative community. The minute I knew Nerdy Thirty was going to be published, I wanted to “spread the wealth” as much as possible among the graphic designers I knew. The two designers who worked on the book cover and stickers, individually, happen to be very good friends. The woman who designed the postcards is a friend of mine in New York. All three graphic designers played together very, very well, and I was honest and up front with each that I was working with multiple people — again, to give everyone a chance to add a new project to their portfolio. I don’t think my brand suffered by using three graphic designers.

Now, it’s your turn. What are your thoughts on graphic designers and brand consistency?

The minute I saw Melissa Morris Ivone’s birthday invitation posted on Facebook, I … was … speechless. Literally.

Melissa is a lovely (almost) thirty-something living in Philadelphia whom I met through my dear friend and Sticker King RDQLUS Creative (otherwise known to others – and me – as Steve Gordon) earlier this year. Melissa was one of the first non-Nebraska folks who not only inquired about Nerdy Thirty, but also bought a copy. Since then we have had fun conversing on Twitter and Facebook. Then her email landed in my inbox a few weeks ago.

She pitched the idea of hosting a Nerdy Thirty birthday party in late August for her own thirtieth. Flattered and delighted do not begin to describe how I felt; I was so humbled that Melissa not only developed the idea, but had the lovely, lovely courtesy to ask. What a delight! Of course I granted my permission – which is worth precious little – and encouraged Melissa to document the entire affair with photos and a blog post.

And what Melissa provides after her August 28 soirée, I will most certainly share with you.

After traveling nearly 3,500 miles in just seven days, I returned late Saturday night from a whirlwind summer vacation from my humble abode in Omaha to Fresno, California; Yosemite National Park; San Francisco; and back home again. The trip was something my boyfriend, his brother, their parents, and I began talking about back in February, when Nebraska was absolutely desolate under mountains of muddy snow and endlessly dreary skies.

We believed spring – or summer, for that matter – would never come. But July 17 arrived in due time, and we departed for our summer getaway, beginning with an overnight stay at the Radisson Hotel in downtown Fresno.

The next morning we drove about one-hundred miles to Yosemite National Park. The quaint Wawona Hotel would be our home-away-from-home for the next four days. Several guests noted that the Wawona reminded them of the resort featured in the 1987 film Dirty Dancing. (Fast fact: Dirty‘s filmmakers recorded much of the iconic footage at the Mountain Lake Resort near Roanoke, Virginia.)

During our time at Yosemite we rode horses, and took two significant (read: exhausting) hikes: through the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias and the Lower Yosemite Falls. The car rides in our rented Ford Focus to these two destinations were scenic and breathtaking, albeit a bit too winding for my taste. We did a little grocery shopping in the neighboring town of Oakhurst and stumbled upon one patriotic teddy bear near the paper goods aisle. I could barely hold the camera; I was laughing so hard.

Upon arriving in San Francisco late on Thursday we booked a room at the surprisingly chic (and recently renovated) Best Western Americania located downtown in the Mission district. The lobby and room were most certainly retro, with bold prints, bright colors, and lots of clean, crisp, white surfaces, almost as if Apple’s Jonathan Ive designed them himself.

We spent time in Union Square and North Beach. I found myself dancing at The Saloon, San Francisco’s oldest bar, on Thursday night. As someone who doesn’t fancy herself a dancer, I didn’t mind letting loose in a city full of strangers whose judgment would stay silent. (Want proof? Watch the poorly-lit video. I dare you not to laugh.)

For a more detailed recap of my San Francisco getaway, read this week’s All Around Townley blog posting on the Q98-Five website. And be sure to visit www.flickr.com/wendytownley for more snapshots of our summer vacation to the west and back.

Our approximate mileage breakdown looks something like this, although I’m sure we traveled a few more miles with shorter drives around Yosemite National Park.

• Omaha to Fresno: 1,600
• Fresno to Yosemite National Park: 93
• Yosemite National Park to San Francisco: 191
• San Francisco to Omaha: 1,600

{What did you do for your summer vacation? Consider submitting your experience for the Write Now project.}

Not quite, but I am about to embark on yet another adventure in The Great Outdoors. If you’ve read Nerdy Thirty or recall my blog posting from last year, the wilderness and all its bounty are foreign territory for yours truly. After last year’s adventures on the road to Yellowstone National Park and back, however, I am ready for more.

Here’s saying bon voage and fare thee well to a week at Yosemite National Park in beautiful California. This time I’m leaving my blow dryer at home, but am bringing thick socks and more than just one long-sleeved T-shirt. Last year’s trip taught me a thing or two about what the locals call “roughin’ it” – even though my MacBook is coming along for the ride.

A side note: While reviewing Yosemite’s official website earlier today, I chuckled when stumbling upon the link Yosemite Bear Awareness. Who knew?

{See you soon!}

Le Marché – pronounced “luh mar-shay” – is French for “the market” or “the find.” The store is certainly a lovely find that I discovered three or four years ago in Omaha’s charming Dundee neighborhood. The owners are a dynamic mother/daughter duo who are friendly as the day is long and have absolutely sublime taste when it comes to jewelery and home décor. As many who shop Le Marché have said – and I can eagerly attest to – their store is an absolute vision, and I would count myself lucky if  just one corner of my home shared the same sense of style.

After Le Marché moved to Omaha’s Countryside Village, I happily followed owners Pat and Melanie Nichilo without hesitation. I continue to find the cutest, most clever holiday and birthday gifts for the special ladies in my life (and for myself). So when word of Nerdy Thirty surfaced earlier this year, daughter Melanie asked if Le Marché could sell the book. “Could they?” I enthusiastically thought to myself. “Absolutely!”

Once books went on sale, Melanie followed up with another idea: a Le Marché book signing. It quickly became thick, rich icing on an already delicious cake that allowed Nerdy Thirty to be shared with patrons and friends of Le Marché.

Which brings me to earlier this week and our very special book signing. The store looked precious and was dripping with shelves and stacks of new items: candles, jewelry, picture frames, furniture. The list goes on and on. Near the front windows Pat and Melanie had arranged my book-signing table on a vintage wooden bureau, surrounded by photos from my childhood and adolescent years. Le Marché served free snacks and wine, along with a twenty-percent discount on everything in the store … including Nerdy Thirty.

I floated throughout the store during my three-hour event, chatting with familiar friends and meeting new ones. Le Marché is unmistakably an estrogen-laden experience, so you can imagine why I was over the moon when my boyfriend, Matt, and our friend, Monty, stopped by. They certainly looked out of place, but I couldn’t stop smiling as they ever-so-precariously moved through the store.

To those of you who stopped by Le Marché on Wednesday (especially Steve Gordon, who took most of the photos you see here with the Hipstamatic iPhone app), I thank you! You made a lovely evening even more special.

Matt is my boyfriend and Ben is his brother and anything I likely say about their work on Twister 93.3 or on their new comedy album, Songs for Giants, will most certainly be biased. It just will be. You know that and I know that.

However, I consider myself a rather creative, 31-year-old woman who just happens to fancy a dirty joke every now and again. As such, I find Songs for Giants to be hilarious. The 33-track, 58-minute album is nonstop funny front to back, with Matt and Ben’s signature radio jingles mixed with longer songs they’ve written while squirreled away in the bowels of the well-known KFAB building in Dundee.

The boys have a, well, unique sense of humor, as Matt recently shared with Chris Larkin of Shout! Weekly.

Most of the things on the album, they all seem really weird and obscure, but they all stem from something that happened to us. Flight of the Conchords was a big influence, as far as what we did musically, and as part of the joke of being in a completely failed band, but we went through everything, the most horrible situations you could possibly imagine. Everything in that song, “I’ve Seen Everything In A Band,” really happened to people in our band: getting attacked by an overgrown man dressed as a woman, a water main flooding our hotel at six in the morning, getting booked in hip-hop clubs that they decided not to tell us were hip-hop clubs. Every possible horror situation happened to us, and a lot of this is us being able to laugh at ourselves.

I’m never without a pen and paper in my purse, as Matt’s song ideas surface at sometimes the most unusual of times. When the lyrics begin to bubble, a few notes jotted down can mean the beginning of something quirky and wonderful – or not. But capturing the idea is the first step, regardless of your craft.

Matt and Ben have the unique ability to take seemingly unfunny people and positions in life and transform them into something unusually funny. Some of the songs are so fun that you may just find yourself singing along in your car on a late Saturday night. I certainly have – and Matt will be the first to tell you I’m no singer.

If you haven’t yet experienced Matt and Ben, you’re in luck! They’re performing Friday, July 16 at Louis Bar for the 2010 Omaha Entertainment and Arts Awards Summer Showcase.