You just don't see the word "toot" in writing often enough.

The other day I got an e-mail from a friend at work. She had just finished a job interview and she said, "you know how I am; I'm no good at tooting my own horn. I did toot it on my thank you note, though." That's been running through my head for days -- "I did toot it." I think of it in that same tone of voice that valley girls use when they say "HATE-d it!": "TOOT-ed it!"

Why in the name of all things holy am I talking about this? See that red door with black hinges in the right column that says "fringelements" on it? This is me tooting my own horn. Well, tooting our horn, really. John and I have been creating blog banners. Before I started my new job, where I am apparently paid to sit and stare out my 38th story window without considering ways to break said window and hurl myself out of my boredom-inflicted misery, I was paid to create, among other less exciting things, document covers using photographs of typically very ugly and boring items. My challenge was to make the ugly, boring, and sometimes even disgusting things (wastewater treatment plants - need I say more?) look dynamic and flashy. I became quite proficient at manipulating images and splashing fonts and lines and dots and any randomness I could think of to take away from the god-awful images I had to work with. Before I was doing that job, nobody I worked with had ever considered trying to make the ugly pictures look NOT UGLY, and so they were thrilled with my work. Every day I would come home and say to John, "hell, imagine what kinds of things we could create with YOUR pictures, instead of this total crap I'm having to work with."

When we started this blog, I decided to do just that - I started playing around with some of John's images to create a banner for the top of our page. Since then, we've created banners for friends and family and a few fellow bloggers. John has a seemingly endless supply of cool pictures for us to choose from, and he's constantly coming home with more. So, if you want a banner for your site, check out the fringelements page for samples and more information. There will always be a button over there on the right. You know, because we like to have our horn tooted.