Best Wishes for 2009

My goodness, I just made a little collage to recap the year, and am feeling quite nostalgic for 2008. Poor 08 is going to be remembered as a real speculum poke of a year, but we had a pretty good run personally. A couple big firsts, a few nice trips, a beautiful fall, a new president I'm happy about...things are good. You can tell I've been free to move around town this week, my darkling outlook is banished for now. Honestly, out the back windows you can't see any snow at all! Life is good!
Seriously though, if you haven't already, take a few moments and take a look back at the year. Little things I didn't remember kept springing to mind. That's the whole point of all this isn't it? The blogging, the photos, the scrapbooks. To remember the little things that would otherwise be lost in the shadow of European travel, presidential elections, starting school and birthdays. I keep a wall calendar that I jot a note about the day in the square of each date. Not only am I way obsessed with weird things apparently, but I have a really lovely life. I'm happy and grateful and fulfilled. I hope you all can say the same, or if you can't, you're able to look at the obstacles to that and decide if they are hills worth dying on, or, if they are, you are able to find solutions to them. I'm only making the one resolution this year...to try and live a less consumer-y life. I'm convinced we are doing irrevocable harm for no reason outside of minor convenience and bad habit. Not only to the environment, which is truly gonna suck when we wake up and realize we've blown our one shot, but also to the community that shares it with us. I don't want to raise stupid, bovine people any more. Let's raise thinkers. Let's raise aware, analytical, logical citizens from now on. Ok? Good. That's agreed.
Happy everything in 2009 public. I hope the best of everything is out there for you this year!

A Christmas Miracle!

Oh I kiss the sweet, wet, soggy ground! Bless you, dear darling Pacific Northwest! Welcome back. I was suddenly shocked to realize the total white noise I was hearing, because I hear it so often that it doesn't even register, was rain pounding on my roof. Not the accursed soft drift of snow. Glorious, wet, washing clean, rivuleting, snow destroying, warmer than 32 degrees rain! I may drive my car at some point in the future! I had given it up for lost. Oh thank you thank you thank you! Thank you Jebus!

I hope all of you had as lovely a time as did we the past couple of days. Even being trapped in the house wasn't bad. True was in heaven having mom AND dad at her beck and call. She had a perfectly lovely Christmas I think. As per tradition, she got to open one gift on Christmas Eve. The one she picked was the greatest. A while ago we made a big piece of whiteboard for her and we draw gameboards on it. She gets to make up the rules and the spaces and stuff. She loves it. So Daddy made a rockin awesome box for her to keep stuff in. It has a big whiteboard spinner for the lid and he filled the sections inside with blank cards, dice, little animals for pawns, set pieces...How cool is this guy? She was so excited! When she woke on Christmas morning, she got to open her stocking and then we had a wonderful breakfast of homemade pecan waffles and I kid you not, from-scratch caramel sauce. Huh? Trap me indoors and I become freakin Betty Crocker! She played with her new game box for a while, dad and I got showers in, then the present opening began! Honestly, for how much we tried to instill a "we don't need stuff" instinct, the chick got a ton of swag. Good times, though. As the pop put it, "She's only five once." He makes her a gift every year, and this year it had a theme. She got the game box, and after all the presents were unwrapped, in the tree she found a rolled parchment "For Emma, from the Pirates." It was this wonderfully drawn, aged, burned edge, rolled with a ribbon treasure map leading her to her room where she found her new treasure chest. Ok, toybox. Still. She was so giggly following the clues; the mountain that looked like stairs up one side was my particular favorite. It was a ton of fun. The rest of the day was spent playing and lounging and listening to music and watching the dratted snow beautifully blanket the outside. For dinner we made pizza, True now having a real taste for yeast doughs. She can't get enough of the texture and the smell and the fact that it rises. She loves it. The second shot is daddy and I both trying to catch for posterity her throwing it up in the air on her fists. We were laughing so hard neither of us got a usable picture at all. The last shot is the centerpiece she crafted for the "fancy family dinner" out of the Floam she got for a gift. Nice huh?

So the day after was spent much the same, with her pleading for pizza for dinner again, to no avail. I was thrilled to get an external hard drive for my gift and spent the entire day cataloging, organizing and saving all my digital crap. And holy crap do I have a lot of it! But it is now all safely, securely, neatly, off my computer. Whoo hoo!

So while most of us enjoy the season of brotherhood and community, the RNC was busy hatemongering. My goodness, have you seen this? I was shocked at how blatant this is. I can't believe it. Check out hater to see what CNN says about it. Apparently this guy sent CDs to all his crony pals and says, "What? It's a joke. Can't you take a joke?" For the love of mice, the title of the sucker is "We Hate the USA." Why would one political party choose to make this their rallying cry? How out of ideas do you have to be for your entire platform to consist of "the other guy hates your country?" It's all these songs making fun of liberals, which is fine, go to town. But why use that angle on it? Who does that help? They are song parodies about John Edwards, Wright, immigrants and, the capper, that made it national news, "Barack the Magic Negro." I am not making this up. If you can still say you are republican in public, you have bigger balls than I do. Use your voice, tell your party you are tired of their shit and take back your integrity! GO NOW!

Last thing. Last night, while putting True to bed, we talked about how much vacation was left and she says, "I don't want to go back to school. I don't like it." We talked about it, discussed why, what she doesn't like all the stuff we always do. One cute point, she was saying how all they ever do is sit down, they just "sit sit sit and listen." I said, "Well, honey, she has a lot of important things to tell you about." She goes, "Well, why can't she tell us while we're doing art?" Heh heh. So we talked about having free choice every day and it sounds like her biggest problem is that she doesn't have a relationship like she had at the CDC and doesn't feel secure. She has a few friends she hangs out with most of the time but not always, and she doesn't understand how the other kids interact. She says "They only want to do their way. I say, 'Let's do both ways together' but they won't." Or she says they won't take turns. She has had this skillset banged into her about how you act in group of children and the others don't follow those rules. She doesn't know how to cope. I certainly don't want her to say, You've been hogging that game the whole time, let someone else play! but I don't know what to tell her to do. I don't want her to tell the teacher, but I don't know how to teach her to fix it herself. In my room, I always watched out for those little conflicts because I wanted to head them off before kids learned to tattle, but I don't know how her teacher's way of handling it. I'm not blaming, if a kid is really struggling, but is quiet about it, it's hard to pick up on. The noisy ones take so much of your attention! We did some role playing and brain-storming and in the end she said, "Mom, will you talk to her about it please?" Oh dear. Poor sweet thing. I just hate to think of her not wanting to be there, and having to grit her teeth every single day and "face" another school day instead of being so glad to be there. dammit!

La patisserie

I did it. We made two lovely french baguettes today. The miracle is that I haven't eaten them both. They are magnifique! True loved working the dough, and wanted to keep playing with it. She liked the texture. Me too. And the smell. You're lucky we aren't sharing with any y'all as she kept pressing it almost to her face and pulling huge lungfulls of yeasty essence in. I don't guarantee there ain't a touch of Trueby in there.

A friend sent me this picture in an email a few days ago. I was so struck by how different our kitchen is! I took another shot from the same place to compare, check this out. And look at True! She's as tall as the little platform her dad built for her at one. That was funny too. It was so she could help in the kitchen without me always being worried she'd topple off a chair. Notice the wheels on the bottom. That sucker was aces!

Again, totally off topic, but what the hell is the deal with the "liberal" media? After eight years of no coverage whatsoever on the most secretive and criminal administration ever, they are now falling over themselves trying to be "investigative reporters" about a connection between Blagojevich and Obama. For crying out loud!

Alright, if you, like me, are trapped in the house and need something to kill time, try out any of these. This one is rockin awesome, the commentary is as funny as the pics. This one is high-larious and just feels good, especially his face when you kak him. This one is more traditional holiday, but interesting nonetheless. Yep, good stuff.

A Bowl of Red

Oh my god, kill me now. I have been reduced to documenting my cooking. And not fancy cooking. Chili my friends. A little backstory. We usually only make chili for company, because come on, a pot of it feeds 60 people for a month. However, a few years ago I was so unwise as to break either the crock or the pot, what...you don't know which it is either...of a CrockPot my mom gave me. We just got a new one, for 20 bucks, baby! a little while ago and I've been pining to CrockPot something. So, being trapped in the house for days on end, and it being a regular Jack Frost theme park outside, chili seemed a good idea. You always have the stuff, right? And if you don't, you substitute. This has led, at my house as well as your own, I'm sure, to pots of chili that make heavenly choruses sing from on high. And one time, when we still used meat, I swear I stumbled on Nalley's recipe. I kid you not, it would be impossible in a blind taste test to tell them apart. This has also led to chili disasters of course. I once tossed an entire pot it was so bad. Absolutely irretrievable. And we swore to never use whatever we had used that biffed it up so badly. Ask me what it was. I don't remember. I'll let you know when it seems like a good idea again and I toss a whole pot and think, "Oh yeah." So here's what it entailed today.
That huge steaming pot of onions, shallot and garlic is my absolute favorite part of the entire enterprise. Followed closely by True keeping herself busy by dancing with the Wii. That is some funny stuff, if you ever get a chance to see it. Also, interesting (not really) anecdote...I am physically incapable of eating cornbread. Really. It's one of my gag-reflex foods. I honestly cannot get it down. So at a friend's house once, I steeled my gullet to force down the proffered corn bread out of dread of offending, and surprise! It was like cake! No problem at all. Turns out this one brand of mix is the only, and I do mean only, kind my body won't reject. Violently. And it's great with chili! Woo hoo! So tomorrow, I think I'm going to make bread. Just kill me now.

Stir Crazy

Captains Log. Stardate 12.19.08. We have been trapped in the house for three straight days now. Supplies are running low and tempers are short. Entertainment is hitting an all-time low as video is taken of various crew members doing ridiculous things that are funny at first, but upon watching, are simply sad. However, Lt. True has impressed the captain with her literary skills. Her class is given little readers to take home and read at their own pace, exchanging the books when they are competent with reading them. Ok, they memorize them. But the first time or two is genuine reading. Lt. True is on book 6 after just two weeks and is quite honestly blazing through the suckers. Perhaps because they are mind-numbingly boring and she just wants to get it over with. Her reasons are her own. Here is documentation.

Cool, huh? Especially the poor posture and belly exposure. Not to mention bad lighting and grainy video. Really gives it a "reality" look, yeah?

So yesterday I made a break for it. We were running out of food and I was actually going nuts, so I made the hike down the hill to the mailboxes and the little store. It's a little over 5 miles round trip and I can't tell you the carnage I witnessed! There were more cars off the road than I've ever seen. I think people were having my same problem and just HAD to get out. Not good. The bad part was there was hardly ever just one car in the ditch. It almost always had two or three plowed into it. The corners are just hellish. Today, all the hills are closed. ALL of them! Look at the pile-up on our table on the deck. There is so much snow out here! I think I can see Russia from my house! I tried desperately, and ineffectively, to get shots of the sky for you, public. Couldn't do it. My eye far outreaches my photography talent. It was this gorgeous seashell rainbow, with down at the horizon the heavy gray of snowstorm clouds, then a layer of pastel pink sunset tinged cloud, and at the very top, a baby blue sky, pretending for all the world it was a spring morning and it had no idea what was going on below. When I came up the last hill, there was an amber pink pool of light on the snow from the sky. I couldn't even come close to capturing it, though I did manage a little better snow shots by wiggling with my exposure. I'm learning to take pictures by trial and error. There is probably a system for everything I do that takes a third the time and 1/1000 the tries to get the shot I try to get. Most of my pretty ones are total accidents! Dude, that hike back up sucked rocks. It was so slick, every other step my boot would slide backward so you couldn't push off with your feet, it was this weird flat-footed climb that took forever and I almost stroked out. Bleah!

If any of you are out there still dithering if climate change is a myth or not...bite me!

Bring the funny

Honestly, how many things do you know that were funny 30 years ago and are still funny now? Here is one of the very very very few.

Monty Python - Airplane Pilots - watch more funny videos

Funny is my top spot. I love funny. Today, I'm looking at another day housebound, and I would LOVE to have the Monty Python collection to just spool throughout the day. It's one of those things that is A) just plain hilarious all the time, and B) nostalgic for me because it was a big deal with the crowd I ran with in high school...we had "watching parties" before there were DVDs or Tivo. If someone found out PBS was going to run some we hustled to get everyone together and it was like harmonic convergence for us. A total, unexpected windfall from heaven.
So why, you may ask, am I waxing nostalgic about the 30 year old work of five British geniuses and their American friend, though I never really got the animations, too violent for me, Terry Gilliam is a mega-talented director. Ooee, ignore that last grammatical quagmire. Well, outside of it being the wee hours of the morning when I've been up all night stressing about whether or not I'll be able to go to work today and how my kids were so glad I was there yesterday and they were so sweet about missing me on Monday...yet another good thing about the switching classes thing: I have not 25 but 75 kids saying nice things to me at once. Lovely. Anyway....I just finished listening to Michael Palin's audiobook of his diaries during the Python years. What a gig. This guy is having the world thrown at his head, being told on a daily basis that he is the greatest thing walking the planet except for maybe John Cleese, and he writes about how he almost cried when he came home after shooting for so long and saw his 3-year old son "cleaning his teeth with no trouser bottoms on. I just missed them so much." He is, hands down, my favorite Python. Have you seen his travel shows? They're called things like Michael Palin Pole to Pole. He just goes out into the world. I love it. Ewan McGregor and his buddy Charlie Boorman have two series (Long Way Round and Long Way Down) where they document their motorcycle trips around the globe and top to bottom. They're good to watch because Ewan is flipping gorgeous and they're both really funny. But Michael Palin's stuff is funny and makes me want to leap from the house and into the world. It ignites wanderlust. Well, maybe not lust, since I've never done anything about it, but a definite single eyebrow raise and a "hmmmm." Do that yourself right now and you'll know what I mean.
Monty Python is all over YouTube and the net. If you haven't seen any for a while, treat yourself to a couple sketches. You'll be quoting and giggling all day...I guarantee!

Winter Bummerland

Yeah, that's right. That IS the street in front of my house. Or rather, the ice-rink in front of my house. You'll notice I'm posting at noon on Monday. Would I rather be at work right now? Hmmmm, I have one week before break, a test scheduled on Wednesday, three projects unfinished, 75 kids in the grips of Vacation Crazy...nah. Trapped in my house is way better. I'm not stressed AT ALL! Aaargh! Honest to Frank, I'm ready to walk to work!!
Tempering that ulcer-inducing cabin fever is the grin on my kid's face when she goes thundering past on a skim of plastic over a sheet of ice. Check this out:

The part that is amazing...did you see how long that run is? I kid you not, that is 50 seconds of flying. How the shite am I ever going to get to work? It's negative two right now with wind chill. NEGATIVE TWO!! That ain't ice melting temperature my friends. Sweet crap in a basket. I'm screwed!

Sing it Sister!

Day-um we liberals are funny mo-fos.

"Prop 8 - The Musical" starring Jack Black, John C. Reilly, and many more... by Jack Black

Guess what I did yesterday? I took 75 ten-year olds to downtown Seattle to sit through a two hour ballet. Stupid? You'd think so wouldn't you. But this is such a great trip! Ok, there was a ton of help, really, a ton! Parents love this trip. But the kids adore being in the big city, and the PNB's Nutcracker is cool-looking enough to even overcome fifth-grade boys' opinions of no dialogue poncy dancing. This is my third time going and I enjoyed it the most this time. The first was all so new and I was really nervous with all the kids. The second dragged for me, but this time it just flew. I saw things I hadn't before, and was really taken by the beauty of it.I was beat tired too. The night before we had dinner with the girl's two best friends. This is picture is of them shopping in the living room. Get this. Is it possible for a shot to more completely capture these three? You have the one in the princess get-up, which she came downstairs in IMMEDIATELEY upon arrival to the house. Then there's the cutie with the glasses on the head, she was a little more surreal customer. Last, True. All business. When you play shopping, you shop for crying out loud. By the book!

Let me close with this shot.

Remember a little while ago I took that picture of White Horse Mountain? Which, incidentally, someone thinks is not White Horse Mountain. You'll never know! Anyway, this is the same place. The mountains are behind that huge cloud bank. As was the moon. I'm driving along, and from out behind that little arm of cloud, this gigantic round ball just hove into view. Seriously, do not drive near me. I am not safe.

Oh my word!

You have to help me out here. I don't know if this is as funny as I think it is, or if I just burst my spleen because I think Simon Pegg is currently the funniest man on the planet. He did a movie a while ago, Run Fatboy Run. Cute. Not spectacular, but funny. Especially if you are working through a very serious crush. This is from the press junket, some dude crashed, "on behalf of fatboys everywhere" and Simon and David Schwimmer, who directed, seriously seem unable to tell if he's for real or not. Now granted, they are actors by profession, but I seriously think they don't know what the hell is going on! I LOVE random humor. If I were in the middle of 14 hours of answering the exact same questions ad infinitum, I would pray for some crazy running fatboy to shake my tree! Their reactions as they try desperately not to offend while clearly not wanting to be suckered...gold, baby

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Wanna see somethin cool?

Have your eyes been drawn upward over the last week? We've had these crazy cool deep blue skies at sunset, with vivid purple and magenta horizons. Then a high beam bright crescent moon shining in crisp glory. For a while, right next to the white slice of lunar brilliance, these two spotlights of glimmer. Jupiter and Venus have been making themselves known around these parts a bit. The first time I saw it, I thought it had to be satellites or something like that, they were that bright. And huddled right close together. It's one of those things that just screams out what is whizzing and flaring and, most awe-inspiring to me, floating in massive silent vastness just out of sight. I adore the night sky. It's one of the shiver inducing, perspective jarring, "Wake up!!!" things I can never get enough of. Love it. Unfortunately, the light show is almost over, sinking below our horizon, separating from each other until another meeting in the night three years from now. Not even a blink in the time tables of these two.

As exciting to my girl, the tree is up! Let the festivities begin. We've had the ritual live sacrifice to the altar of shopping on Wal-Mart's doorstep, holiday sales are reportedly up despite the brutal economy...let's do this thing!