goodbye july

July has been something of a mixed bag, if I may. As I told Cardo, I'm not wishing away time (oh, definitely not), but I am so ready to move on from this month. I'm not exactly sure why, as I always start new months thinking I'll get more accomplished in the new month and then that never really happens.

I'll be especially happy when autumn rolls around. Autumn is my absolute favorite season. I often wonder if the 'autumn' of my life will be my favorite part of my life also. Hmm. (Yes, I think way too much.)

August will be somewhat momentous for us, if all goes as planned. Please note, I said 'for us.' We are pretty quiet people, so I don't think I'm talking about anything life-changing. (Or, am I?)

We are planning a trip to Disneyland at the end of next year. Right now, I'm thinking either October (before Cardo gets really busy at work) or the end of December (when things start calming down again at Cardo's work). To save money, we are really going to try to reel in our spending. More eating at home, less eating out. Our August challenge is to eat dinner at home all thirty-one days. I know that many people are struggling more than we are and I feel kind of like a jerk saying we are challenging ourselves to eat at home every night for a month, but there you have it. We hope it goes well. If it does, we'll put aside a bit of money toward our trip. I foresee lots of sandwiches and bowls of cereal and oatmeal in the coming weeks.

The biggest change facing our little family is the issue of Pic's schooling. Thoughts of Pic heading off to school have been swirling around my head from about the time she was born. I have particularly obsessed with the topic for the last year. In the last couple of months, we have come to a decision regarding the subject. More on this to come. I'll just say we're excited and a bit nervous.

So, goodbye July and welcome August -- I think I'm ready to face what you'll send my way.

vacation: accomplished

Cardo just went back to work after two weeks of vacation. We are just starting to try to return to a normal (for us) rhythm. Because I have a tendency to never get around to posting about what feels like a big outing, I'll post some highlights from our stops.

Cardo and I planned a series of surprises for Pic. We asked her if she wanted to know where we were going or if she wanted to be surprised and she chose the latter.

So, for our whirlwind vacation (Cardo was off work for two weeks, but we squeezed all of our big activities into one):


On our first day in California, we headed over to Briones Regional Park for a quickish (one hour) walk. There were cows! And cow poop!



Our first big surprise was the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco. I'm glad this was first. Pic wasn't at all thrilled about the guided tour I wanted to go on, so we only stuck around for five minutes. Then, we toured on our own. They provide little booklets with pictures and descriptions of the flora in each room. Pic decided we'd seek out the plants featured in the booklet, which ended up being much more fun.



Just one of the many awesome plants: a tortoise plant.


The highlight of the trip? The San Francisco Zoo. We've been here once before. Pic has been looking forward to a return trip for quite a long time. I enjoyed myself, but I couldn't help but wonder about the whole concept of a zoo. It seemed like the animals were very well cared for, but what effect does it have on animals who "belong" outside of such a structure? The animals are fed, instead of able to hunt for food. They live in very small groups. Hmm. Anyhow...


Surprise! Open your eyes, Pic, we're at the zoo!



Pic's favorite animal: the polar bear. Polar bears, and giraffes, have purple tongues, fyi.


The next day, we visited our second two surprises: the San Francisco children's museum and the Aquarium of the Bay.


At the museum, learning about how much strategy is involved in using the bathroom in outer space.



I was running out of picture-taking steam by the time we got to the aquarium, but I promise we were there.


We went home for a quick minute before heading out again for camping for a couple of days. My camera battery was just about dead, so it was taking forever for the camera to actually capture a picture.


One of the kids made this structure and then all of the kids took turns jumping over it (and all of the adults cringed with every jump, hoping they'd clear the sharp angle).

All right, so those were the highlights! Perhaps I'll post more pictures, but I'm not holding myself to that.

food offerings

Before we headed off for the vacation I might eventually get around to posting about, we went to a barbeque. I got it into my head that I needed to make a bunch of stuff to bring. I get like this. Either I want to make nothing at all or I want to make every recipe that's been persistently stuck in my head.

For that day, I tackled three recipes with varying degrees of success.



I made blueberry cornbread and a side of honey butter. The cornbread recipe is from one of the Moosewood cookbooks. (I'm never sure which Moosewood cookbook I've gotten a recipe from, because, alas, I own none of them -- I check them out from the library.) I loved the idea of this, but the middle was completely mushy. Il Fornaio and I were on the outs, it seems, at least regarding this dish. The baked parts were good, though. (For the honey butter, I just mixed honey and butter. I know this sounds like a total 'duh' thing, but I sometimes takes things too literally. For an entire summer, I was making honey mustard dressing that was just honey and mustard whisked together. Recently, I found out that people make that dressing with oil and vinegar and honey and mustard and probably some other stuff. Eh, mine worked for me.)

I also made the fabulous Catherine Newman's Gingery Napa Slaw. I'm not a mayonnaise fan, so I usually steer clear of cole slaw. But, guess what, this recipe has no mayonnaise. Perfect. Oddly, though, it still smells like more traditional cole slaw to me. This is such a quick recipe, and the dressing is good for two slaws. I used the rest of the dressing for a second head of cabbage while we were camping. (I just realized that I forgot the almonds on the camping trip. Oops. I think Cardo ate them all anyhow.) Please, please see Catherine's blog (linked through the recipe) for a much more appealing picture of this.

Finally, for dessert, I made the intensely chocolate brownies from my How to Cook Everything cookbook. I have since read that Bittman's sweet recipes aren't as successful as his savory ones, but I liked these. I have been moving farther and farther (further and further? none of those look like words to me right now) toward the darker end of the chocolate spectrum, so I prefer a strong chocolate flavor to a milky chocolate flavor. These were deeply, darkly chocolately. J pointed out that this was probably a good thing because one would be less inclined to eat the entire pan of brownies at once, but I would definitely not put it past me.

papercrafting (and a bit more)

In an effort to add more crafting to our lives, I recently checked out Papercrafts Around the World by Phyllis Fiarotta and Noel Fiarotta. I am absolutely in love with this book and the possibilities it presents, which is great because I've never been particularly interested in papercrafts before. I think I checked out the book before we went on vacation and that means it's due very soon. I'll either be checking this out again (and again and again) or I'll be searching for a used copy online (I'm not really in a position to be buying new books at the moment, and I have mixed feelings about this...I'll get into it another time).

I started out by making a list of the projects I might be interested in doing in this book, but I was writing down every single project. I kind of hope making the projects in this book will be a long-term deal for us.

Today, Pic and I started out very simply. I wasn't feeling so hot and I really just wanted to go back to bed and sleep. Our first project? Tangrams*:



According to the Fiarottas (the Fiarotte), tangrams are Chinese puzzles in which seven specific geometric shapes (the tans) are cut from a square and are then used to create pictures. Traditionally, the pieces are red, but I went with green and Pic went with black, her favorite color. The shapes from the book are a square, five triangles (of various sizes) and a rhombus. Hello, geometry discussion. I'm not sure if the shapes are traditionally always the same.

I arranged my tans to create some of the animals pictured in the book. I also made something that might have been a lantern and might have been a houseboat. Pic made a fox with a skirt (with an added rectangle left over from my paper) and promptly taped it together to hang on her bulletin board. She made one set of tans and I made three, so although her pieces can't be rearranged, there are still plenty of pieces to play with.

I recently bought a roll of magnetic paper stuff for us to cut up into geometric shapes for mosaics. I was thinking this could be great for road trips. We could bring the pieces and a baking sheet and we could create pictures on our drives. Tracing shapes and then cutting and coloring them will be a nice project to follow our tangrams.

Now, for the 'bit more'. This past weekend, Pic chose a hula hoop at a yard sale. She and I are at the exact same aptitude level with the thing: we can hoop for about 3.5 seconds. I am predicting lots and lots of practice in our future. Wish us luck with that endeavor.



Other than a post-rain/post-hail walk today, we didn't do too much around these parts. We spent about five minutes painting the previously-unpainted parts of our pinch pots and paperweights. Nothing much seemed to hold my interest for too long today. Well, until I went on something of a baking trip beginning well after it should have, but I'll write more about that later.

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* I swear that I have vacuumed that rug since the last time I posted a picture of it. I'm not sure why I bother, though.

it's a date

Yesterday, Cardo and I did a bit of anniversary celebrating. (Our wedding anniversary just past and the anniversary of us as an 'us' is upcoming very shortly.) This was a bit of impromptu celebrating: we were browsing the RN&R in the morning and saw a screenshot of part of Inception. I told Cardo that a few people had mentioned that they liked the movie and he said he was interested in seeing it. Pic took one look at the picture, in which two characters are brandishing guns, and informed us, 'You want to watch a scary movie. I will stay at Ms F's.' Cardo and I were fortunate in that Ms F promptly agreed to host Pic for the night. Spontaneous date night! Awesome!

I should mention that Cardo and I are completely inept when it comes to picking out movies to view in the theatre. This always leaves me especially disappointed for several reasons. I don't like to spend money on movie tickets and I like it even less when I don't even enjoy the film. I don't like the smell (or the taste) of (incredibly, fantastically overpriced) movie theatre popcorn. Movie theatres are eardrum-assultingly loud. I could be reading rather than watching He's Just Not That Into You. I don't like to not talk during a movie; in fact, I'm not capable of not talking during a movie. Wow. Don't you just want to invite me to see a movie now? Yeah, thought not.

I think last night's movie worked out well for a couple of reasons. It was such an unexpected date night that it had a kind of surreal and wonderful quality to it. I was bound to enjoy myself. Also, I knew absolutely nothing about the movie, except that Leonardo DiCaprio and Joseph Gordon-Levitt were in it. (This was neutral information. I don't have strong feelings about either actor.) While we were looking at the RN&R earlier that morning, I only incredibly briefly scanned Inception's review and I noticed their names. I didn't even look at the picture closely. I liked having almost no expectations of the movie. I just knew a few other people I know had liked it. Enough for me. I'll watch this again at some point. I think it deserves more than one viewing. I'm going to remain vague about the movie and leave it at that.

In somewhat unrelated otherness, I am on a reinvigorated Beatles kick. I have been wanting to listen to all Beatles all the time here. And, this leads me to want to see Across the Universe for a second time. I was hoping it'd still be available on Netflix's instant play thing. Alas, no. In the meantime, I'll sate this craving with bits and clips from youtube.

What else would you recommend I see? Any other movies worthy of a couple of hours of (kind of) undivided attention?

'you can't always get what you want...

...but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.'

The chorus to this song has been stuck in my head a lot in the last week. Definitely not the whole song because, really, it's strange (at least to me). I often do this with songs: find a lyric or two that resonates with me and then dismiss the rest of the song.*

Cardo has always told me that one of the things he likes about me is that I know what I want. I haven't been so sure about that lately. Or, maybe I'm wrong. I do know what I want, ultimately. It's just that I keep going back and forth on how I'm going to get there.

I think I'm nervous about the upcoming couple of months and how they will shape a good chunk of our lives to come. I want to know that everything will work out for the best. I want to just jump into something without having to stop and analyze the situation to death first. (Hey, look at that, I do know what I want. And, because life is uncertain and messy, I won't be getting what I want. Ah, well.)

So, for now, I'm filled with a bit of uncertainty. It seems to me that to embrace certain opportunities is to disallow** myself other opportunities. I know that this is the way things work, but that doesn't mean that I have to be in love with the process right now, right? Right. At the same time that I love to see the evolution of our lives and our plans for our future progress, I am also constantly scared by this change. O, to be a brave soul...

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* I am definteily not the only one who does this. Just think about the whole 'I Will Always Love You'-as-wedding-song phenomenon.

** 'disallow' is a word, right? I am kind of exhausted at the moment, but it sounds okay.

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'The Rolling Stones - You Can't Always Get What You Want (Live 1969)(The Flying Dutchman)'
[The audiovisual quality isn't great, but I felt compelled to post the song.]

no score and seven years ago...

On Monday, Cardo and I reached our seventh wedding anniversary. We're continually marveling that we've made it this far and we're also continually making plans for many, many more years together.

I am truly thankful that we chose each other.