Living and the Livingstons

A little laugh.

2011-06-19T23:21:00.002-05:00

I tried to put this video I found on here but Blogger is giving me issues... but YOUTUBE isn't!

Check this out and get your 'Ahhhhhhhhh's' ready...

A moment.

2011-06-10T11:56:00.006-05:00

It has been too long since we've posted, but as you well know (and we have now learned), lots of blogging time gets scooped up by a 9 month old...and then a 12 month old...and now a 15 month old, and someday she'll be 30, and we will blog consistently again...though about what, I have no idea.

But for now we update... and with pictures (1,000 words and all).

We've learned how to play 'Orse'. You know she wants to play when she comes up and taps you one the back and clicks her tongue like a horse clomping.

Grandaunt Mary Lo gave Daisy some sweet glasses for Easter.

Easter Sunday, 2011

When she hugs, she just puts the side of her head on the item of affection...in this case, her new Easter Book.

Easter Sunday

Easter Saturday.

We found eggs with the Balsers...or, rather, the Jacobsens.

A Daisy among the Dandelions.

While we always look amazing on the blog, most days it's lying around the house, still looking amazing.

L's mom had some family pictures taken, and we snuck in a few of just our little family.

It has been amazing and wonderful and easy and light and perfect and sweet and...there is more to come...that's right, more.

And after 15 months of (really) bliss, it looks like this little family will be getting a little... less... little...

December 7th, 2010

2010-12-07T23:10:00.004-05:00

Today we went to the court house and told a judge that we would love our sweet Daisy for ever and forever... come to think of it, they were more concerned about until she was 18, but we agreed to do both.

It was a great day. One to remember always.

Our Lawyers have the pictures (they were the only ones who could sneak a camera into the court house). We'll show you when we've got 'em.

~P

Sesame Street:Song: I Love My Hair

2010-10-18T18:11:00.000-05:00

6 then 7 months.

2010-10-07T08:51:00.003-05:00

So, Daisy turned 6 months...then she turned 7 months.

At 6 months we were on the road making the big move!

Luckily we were able to keep the tradition alive at our dear friends house, who had the most amazing nursery that Daisy fit right into!

Such a lady now...then, at 6 months.

Ah, but then, as Maya Angelou says,

~

Your skin like dawn
Mine like musk

One paints the beginning
of a certain end.

The other, the end of a
sure beginning.

Yup, time marches on.

Leaves change and so do outfits.
(I think that's what Maya was really getting at)

At 7 months we were at a cabin in the woods with dear and old friends. (not pictured)

It was lovely.

~P

PS
This one goes out to the ladies in Jersey! Miss you guys!

Sunday Soup

2010-09-11T12:09:00.002-05:00

Lindsay has this book and every time she dips into it is satisfies, if not amazes. Summer is loosing it's battle with fall and there is an breath of sweaters in the air. Yesterday, I took my scooter out, just for a ride, in a cardigan, and I done near froze myself to death. The sun was out and I found myself hoping for red lights so I could stop and bask, like a lizard, and fill up my solar panels before skimming again into the cold air. I should be reading 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' but I am in the middle of 'A Handmaids Tale' and am glad. I never used to reread books, the idea that I was missing out on something new to do whats been done, but even though it's not season specific, it feels like the right book for right now. Maybe it's just the crisp back to school air that tells you, 'read something'.

August gone. And with it Summer.

2010-09-10T21:04:00.005-05:00

So here's the deal. We left NYC/Jersey and now live in Utah.

Lots of reasons: Daisy.

Lindsay has this moment where she has nothing to do but raise our daughter and write a 300 page book....which she can do from any where, so she's doing it from Utah. Daisy can be closer to her grandma's (not too close, we are living in Salt Lake...well, right now we are living in my mothers basement...again...which is wonderful and we are so lucky to have a place to absolutely CRASH which is an apt phrase when used here.)

So we took 13 days and drove our baby girl across America. It was beautiful, terrifying, wonder filled, and worthy of our pride. We took 600 pictures but all of our wires and stuff for putting pictures on blogs are in some box in my parents garage. It's worthy of a whole post anyway. This is just a little post to tell you where we are and that we made it safe and sound.

That's all.

Well, also I bought a scooter.

That's all.

A sweet little silver guy with brown leather seats.

Really all.

...

Lindsay wrecked it during the test drive. That's all.

Daisy 5 Months (FIVE!)

2010-07-28T08:45:00.004-05:00

So, you know that we are making this page of this future book (each month a different theme and color story). That's why when you see pictures of Daisy she's all dolled (literally) up and sitting in some bunch of one thing or another. Well, today is no different!

Five months of absolute bliss.

In Mourning

2010-07-25T21:08:00.005-05:00

Our very best friends in the whole wide world moved away today.

Lindsay... who you all remember looks like this:

She took it hard.

But came out looking stunning!

Of course, as she has no other way to look.

Daisy, in the above picture, is now 5 months old but we never posted her 4 month pictures, but they came from far away, so they took some time to get here.

I live with the two most beautiful girls in the world.

3 Months.

2010-05-22T16:29:00.002-05:00

In the garden.

Well... sort of. A garden we made in the kitchen.

I know...it's becoming that blog.

2010-05-06T08:21:00.002-05:00

Last Night.

2010-04-28T08:57:00.003-05:00

2 Months.

2010-04-24T18:56:00.006-05:00

So... I'm not crazy.

Well... Ok. Yes, crazy, but in a loving sorta way.

Our friends take pictures of their girls with little cards that say '1 month,' or '7 months,' and we love them.

Then they made this book, and on one of the pages was all 12 months all in a row. It's lovely.

We couldn't find the cards.

We looked.

And our printer broke.

So I thought I would make these little vignettes every month, and we'll put them in a book.

Now, is that crazy?

Really?!

Nothing but Thyme.

2010-03-30T14:35:00.007-05:00

A few days ago, let's see...I guess, more than a week ago, we planted our two window boxes with herbs. It's a whole thing, one box has 'thirsty' plants, one has 'drier' plants. So anyway, today Daisy Lu and I were kicking it, you know waiting for the laundry and deciding we were not the kind of people who watched 'The View', and I noticed some growth. So I took some pictures of our dirt.

The only one coming in is the thyme. But it's only been a week.

I'm blogging today, because I have been on leave for almost six weeks and Monday I have to go back to work. I do love my job but it's hard to hold a candle to spending my days like this:

But what are you gonna do? I will still have evenings like that...and some mornings...and every Sunday, but it's not enough. I have loved being this kind of Dad, and maybe all dads want to be this kind of dad but someone has to get out there and pay for the ponies. Which, for now, will be me. Luckily Sweet D will be not be alone.

I know, right?! They make quite a pretty pair.

And then there is Scout: Yesterday, L came into the bedroom and found Scout like this:

Take a good look.

She snapped that picture and, taking any chance to pose, he shifted to a more flattering position:

So L said, "Ok, good. Now give me contemplative."

So, it's been a month...

2010-03-26T14:58:00.006-05:00

You know those people who are interesting and witty and blog about themselves and you know it's a bit pompous, but they live far away and maybe they will post a picture or two and you'll be able to see what kind of hair they have now, so you pop in and read the blog every now and then and you see that they are going to have a baby and you think to yourself, 'Well there goes that blog turning into another, 'Look how cute our baby is, she kinda smiled and because we never stop taking pictures of her we caught her smile, which may have just been gas but now it's a perfect smile, 'cause our baby is so happy and we are so happy and everyone is so gosh dern happy that we have to blog about it to our friends and family' blog, which is the only thing worse than a self-indulgent blog in the first place but you wonder if these people, who had previously blogged about how really cool their life without kids was would fall in the the trap of kid blogging so cheezy and overdone that they pull their brother-in-law's curtains off the wall and do glamour shots with the week-old baby, who never asked for such a thing and certainly never asked to have such pictures flung on to the internet for her future employer is pull up and think, 'Well, she does have great qualifications, but there is that naked picture of her in the bath running around the web' and give the job to some guy named Stan, whose parents were strong and moral people who did not believe in exploiting their son's innate good looks from birth on, or, if they did, they showed the courage and character not to give in to such impulses which is why, because of this post, we have a president of the United States named Stan in the year 2053.

Sorry, Daisy.

a couple of friends.

coming home on the plane.

the naked election loosing picture.

I know.... but what?!
~p

Waiting for Daisy

2010-02-06T08:24:00.002-05:00

So. We may have stepped over the line of crazy in our waiting. It's been a week, and the rush of utter excitement has given over to the paralyzing fear attached to adoption, to the euphoria of commerce, to fury over shipping companies, to the numb of the under prepared, the sweet sense that we know her, to the rush of utter excitement... needless to say, I made her a bunny. {pictured above}

...by the way...this is P... not L.

L is making all the bedding and has done a INCREDIBLE {I am not kidding} job. One of the best things about L is this: you know that little button in your head that goes off when you think about doing something you probably can't? Yeah, she doesn't have that. She does it in cooking, she does it in sewing, she does it in PhDs, she has no fear and truly believes, "What one person can do, another can do." I love that about her and it is proving, not only frugal in our current endeavor but adorable! {No, there are no pictures yet and won't be until we are all safe and home.}

Back to the bunny. I was off work and home alone and L's sewing stuff was everywhere all over the house {our friend said it looked like a beautiful sweatshop}. I was literally pacing the living room thinking about every thing that needs to happen and everything that can happen and every thing I do not want to happen. And I had a little feeling, 'Put your hands to work.' So, without much of a plan and with L's fearlessness, I started making Daisy a bunny. She {the bunny} took a few hours, and right when she was done L came home and I had someone to talk to...eliminating the need to make more bunnies.

~P

This is a good post.

2010-01-31T08:43:00.005-05:00

Soooo..... it's happened...or, at least, it's happening. We were matched with a birth mother who is due on February 24th! So, what does that mean? Well, so far it means we walk around with glossy eyes and slanted grins, bumping into things. So far, it means we whip up a nursery following our new and simple mantra: '9 months of nesting crammed into 3 weeks!' Truthfully, we wouldn't want it any other way; the waiting is the hardest part. There are lots of things that can happen, we know, but this is an amazing time of planning and thinking and picturing and wondering and choosing and guessing and smiling; it won't be spent worrying about all the 'what ifs'. So, there you have it: our biggest adventure, by far! She will be born in Missouri and we will get a call saying, 'the birth mother is in labor, come out now!' and we'll drive like crazies across some of America and pick her up.

Yup, she' s a her.

We'll name her Daisy.

~P

Let's pretend this never happened.

2010-01-03T08:44:00.004-05:00

So...What? What can we say? We haven't posted in a long while and then the fact that we didn't post made us not want to post and have to say, "Sorry we haven't posted in a while, we're real busy, there's stuff we're doing and it makes it so we don't so this. So blah blah we'll never do it again." But then I went out and read your blogs and it made me want to blog and some of you haven't posted in WAY longer then us so...I may not post for 10 months after this but today, this Sunday morning, I am.

...So they moved our church to 2:00. I know. It's an Abrahamic Sacrifice that we swap every year with the Spanish ward. One ward gets the 10:00 slot for a year and the other trudges on into the dark evening hours plastic smiles on their faces when arriving to see the other ward, happy and full of promise of a Sunday afternoon, filing out still singing (as a reminder to those coming in) 'Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel, Push Along.' Luckily our ward is WAY worth it. We have been churching with them for, what, 5 years? And they...or, rather, we, continue to surprise. The other day, someone referenced the 'bishop sleep'-- you know, when the bishop and/or councilors doze off a bit on the stand, and my first thought was, 'Our bishop is literally sitting on the edge of his seat in case he has to rip the microphone out of some blasphemer's hand'. It would be hard to fully illustrate what I'm talking about, but here are a few of my favorite quotes from Fast and Testimony meeting, AKA "open mic night":

"Brothers and sisters, we need to kick Satan where the sun don't shine."

"I know the bishop is gonna get mad at me for saying this, but I think I need to...but the bishop's not going like it if I say it from up here, but I think...wait, I think the bishop's not going to like this at all, but here goes..." At which point, the bishop got up and whispered in the bearer's ear, "If I'm not going to like it, maybe we should save it for later."

And my very favorite:

"I took a bite of the banana and thought, 'Oh my God...it's fast Sunday.'"

If I seem condescending, please know that I deeply love this ward and all the people in it and we are loved by them. I was co-vice president in charge of the Christmas program (those are the callings up for grabs here in Jersey) and we put together a pretty nice little program, and the morning came to perform it, and it had snowed all night and the streets were a mess and it really is hard for lots of our members to get to church; we take the bus or the train or depend on someone to share a ride, and so a big snow storm can wipe out early morning church with one cold breath. So, we were up, looking out the windows and thinking, 'there is no way this thing is going down today.' but my phone buzzed and we got the text... "Church is still on!" (just like pioneer times, I'm sure), so we packed our Honda hand cart and made the exodus to the building (and by "building," I mean the second story over a 99-cent store). At 10:00, there were about 5 people who did not come in our car sitting in the seats. But more came, and we worked our numbers up to 50, maybe 75, and we did our Christmas program and it was really lovely, and the spirit was there; even for so few of us, the spirit was there. Lindsay (who was one of the narrators) said at one point she looked out at the people who were there and they were people like us, who are far from family or have made this ward their family and who thought, 'Snow or no snow, I have to be to church this morning' and we were all quiet and we all listened and everyone wanted to be there. And Thurman, an 8-year-old who stood up and sang 'Were you There?' with no music in his hand, only his dad to stand and sing behind him, may have had to close his eyes to forget that we were all there looking at him, but even with his eyes closed, we were all still there, and it was wonderful.

~P

Here's us.

2009-12-23T12:44:00.000-05:00

The Cob Web.

2009-08-13T17:53:00.005-05:00

Where have we been you ask? Well, this is usually our big time off, the summer. Lindsay is not teaching and I'm playing hooky. But this year, this year is different. Lindsay has her last exam before she begins writing her dissertation {A huge undertaking taking over a year and a half to prep for} and I have been clawing my way to the top of the career latter. {I've been promoted to Store Manager in a small store in New Jersey} Life has been great but busy! There have been lazy days at the beach and trips into the middle of America but they have been few and far between...and they took up any blogging time to live them.

While we have not adopted anything yet, we have bought a car...so that's something.

Things are wrapping up but there is more to come, Lindsay has a conference in Puerto Rico and she said I could come.

I hate to leave you with out a recent picture of us but I looked...and I don't come out that great so here are pictures of our kitchen instead.

~p

Jazz Party.

2009-06-17T16:34:00.004-05:00

We were invited to a Jazz-Age Lawn Party on Governor's Island last week. It was divine. I whipped up a quick video tell all, but it is missing the most important part...the party we came with! It seems that Lindsay, Haylee (her sister), and Me just came and took pictures of ourselves. Huh. That seems out of character.

Well, enjoy, but know we did not do any of this on our own. How could we? Thank you to the Sheens, who take us to such places, and the Reeves, who come along.

~P

We're Changing Our Name.

2009-05-11T15:25:00.003-05:00

We no longer live on Garden Street and have been on the hunt for a new name. This weekend, we headed down to Washington, D.C. to see Katie in her new play called Giant. Katie was wonderful and that was the best part of the trip, but we also went to the Smithsonian Museum of Art and saw some beautiful things there.

We came upon this iron work of a Crane and a Peacock and Lindsay and I started talking about which one of us was which... then we argued about it.

What do you think?

'The Crane Aloft surveys the world-- The Earthbound Peacock struts and boasts.'

Who is who?

Although we had heavy discussions, it was apparent that we were they, these two vibrant birds seeing the world in different ways. And so we stole a picture and brought it here to its new home:

'The Crane Aloft and the Earthbound Peacock'

Welcome.

I was thinking.

2009-05-08T08:19:00.003-05:00

So we are thinking a lot about adoption, which is just like thinking about having a baby and it's fun and I like the thoughts.

And so we think about baby names (and we have some doozies), but when you think about baby names, you consider every person you talk to as a possible donor. And so I thought of this good question to ask you.

I work retail, and there are about 75 people who work at my store: there are about 6 boys, whose names are Patrick, Jason, Nik, Nicholas, Marc, Sean. Two Nicks out of 6. So, the rest are girls (I called the boys 'boys,' so it's not demeaning to call them 'girls').

Here is my question:

How many of the 69 women who work with me are named the following?:

Jennifer (Jen, Jenny):

Tiffany:

Lauren:

Jessica:

Lindsay (ey):

Sara (h):

Jamie:

So, just for fun I'll tell you that for one of these names, the answer is zero, but the rest have at least one...which is the least you can have without crossing in to negatives... which I don't.

One more question:
Do you think that the mothers who named these names--keep in mind, I'm married to a Lindsay and I think it's the most wonderful name in the English language--did that mother think she was being unique, and then lots of other moms were equally unique, or was she striving to have her new baby fit right in from the get-sgo...and then, which is better?

How far out is too far?
Apple? (Gwenyth)
Moxie Crimefighter? (Penn from Penn and Teller)

And, finally, when have you seen it done right? The right balance of oneness without alienating the child. Or am I thinking too much about this?

A Poem.

2009-04-24T22:09:00.003-05:00

My good friend, and manager at work, is leaving. I really have loved working with her and on her last meeting in the store I gave her this poem I wrote. I like it; however, it turned out a little gayer than I had set out for. But, it is sincere.

A Leaving Poem.

And so you click your heels
and set off back home,

but just for a bit.

Then to Maine,

and not Kansas.

And we are left,
those you picked up along
the way.

But what do we do? Those left.

You brought us together:
These lions.
These poppies.

What do we do with the space

where our courage should be?
where our brains should be?
our hearts?

So take your shoes

and leave us

couraged

brained

hearted.

We are the changed
for the better;
left,
but in color.
Technicolor.

As you say goodbyes, one by one,
remember.
whereever your next tornado takes you,

I will miss you most of all.

Jazzercise - Move your Boogie Body 1982

2009-04-06T20:12:00.003-05:00

Let's get to it!!!!

Jazzercize - Sweet Georgia Brown 1982

2009-04-06T20:12:00.001-05:00

This is the real thing.

BIG, FAT, GIGANTIC NEWS!

2009-03-25T20:27:00.003-05:00

We're live on the adoption site! So now, anyone can choose us... and thus the waiting begins. Go check out our profile, and, please, spread the word that we're on the prowl for a little one! I mean, c'mon, don't you think this picture is missing a little something (other than Scout)?

Our profile: Patrick and Lindsay

A little something to watch.

2009-03-21T10:58:00.001-05:00

So, I haven't posted in a long while and I'm not really posting today but I watched this and thought of you.

~p

Snow Day

2009-03-02T10:03:00.002-05:00

So, overnight we were hit by what the tv weatherman is calling a "classic nor'easter," and it is in the process of dumping around a foot of snow on us. In March! I mean, really, I was just getting ready to write a post about spring, and the loveliness of winter finally being over. Ah well. Our friend Shiaffu says there's always two days of snow in March around here, and then it turns to spring, so let's hope yesterday and today count as the two days.

In happier news, I have the day off because of the snow! Yipee! I love unexpected days off. My regular days off are filled with the scheduled flotsam and jetsam of my existence: exam prep, laundry, grading papers, doing the dishes. Unexpected days off seem full of such promise and the possibility I'll have some time to do something I wouldn't have otherwise (like blog!). So, as I sit here listening to the symphony of hisses, tweets, and knocks emanating from our radiators, I wish you all a happy March 2nd: may yours be pleasantly unexpected as well!

{Photo from Flickr}

Getting to Know You

2009-02-19T22:32:00.011-05:00

We are currently working on our online profile for our adoption, and as part of that, we have to fill out a rather run-of-the-mill questionnaire meant to help our prospective birth mother "get to know" us. In case you were wondering, it's really hard to sum yourself up in a few lines in response to the question "A smell that makes me pause is." Patrick said that the wafting aroma of honeysuckle transports him, à la Ratatouille, to the memory-drenched pavement of his Northern California mission where, presumably, the gentle scent of honeysuckle was one of the highlights of interminable days otherwise monopolized by a film loop of bike riding and door knocking. I, regrettably, have not settled on a smell that makes me pause; sadly, the only olfactory impressions I can bring to mind are, to put it gently, less appropriate for that particular forum.

I tend to be somewhat overly concerned about exercises like this one. I want to say just the right thing; I've always liked having the correct answer, giving my [teacher/coach/friend/husband] a reason to think I'm smart and on top of things. I don't even really like to do Facebook quizzes or status updates because the pressure to be hip and sparkling is just a little too much for me.

Of course, this particular aperçu also has the added pressure of trying to be charming and appealing while simultaneously making me seem like a good-time disciplinarian who will provide your child with the idyllic existence that you [birth mother], for whatever reason, don't think you can. And do you [blog reader] have any idea how difficult it is to be airily witty next to Patrick? Seriously, folks...do you? I know, I know...I'm the intelligent one, he's the funny one. But everyone likes the class clown more than the nerd.

The other, shall we say, hindrance I've run in to is that my tastes in entertainment tend toward the somewhat embarrassing or unmentionable. No, I don't mean porn or anything, but my favorite book is a novel called The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. It is a brilliant, stunningly crafted book (if I could write any book, this would undoubtedly be it) and has won a gaggle of awards. It is not a favorite book to be embarrassed of. But really -- should you ever put the word "assassin" on a page encouraging a birth mother to entrust their unborn child to you? So do I make up a favorite book? Go for one of my lesser favorites? Tell me truly, dear readers...do I just choke back the rising bile and put down Twilight?

And what about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? If you know me even a little, you know that once, long ago, Amberly got me hooked on this little gem, and it has been my favorite television program ever since. I usually rewatch the entire series (which I have on DVD) every other year or so. Is that too much to ask of a birth mother? On a side note, if I love Buffy so much, do I really have any right to dislike Twilight so?* I suppose I could just write down what show I'm watching right now, but that's Big Love, and, somehow, I don't think that will go over too well with the particular crowd to whom I am pitching myself.

Certainly you can understand my conundrum. Please, dear readers, enlighten me. If your house was burning down and you could only rescue three things, what would they be? I'm afraid I might rescue my dog, my photos, and my Buffy DVDs.

~L

*If you said no, then I think you need to rewatch Buffy. And then reread Twilight. One of these cultural artifacts is clever, joyous, and "zeitgeisty." One of them is corpulent, bombastic, and, weirdly, also "zeitgeisty." Just because they both have vampires does not mean they are playing ball in even the same state, let alone the same field.

**Also, is anyone out there watching True Blood? Should I? I do like vampires, after all.

***Okay, last note, I promise. Did anyone catch the premiere of Dollhouse? I'm feeling a little conflicted. In one column, it's Joss, and I would do just about anything to get inside another Whedonverse. In the other, it's Faith being different people every week. It just feels wrong. She's a slayer. She'll always be a slayer. I eagerly await your opinions (I'm looking your way, Josh).

Coming Soon.

2009-02-13T10:29:00.003-05:00

Our new chair.

Our new view.

More coming soon.

~L

Update

2009-01-08T10:30:00.002-05:00

Dear gentle readers,

Please forgive us our blogging absence over the last few weeks. Life on Garden Street has been a little, well, harried (and soon will be from Garden Street no more!). January--what's left of it--is shaping up to be a big month for us, and so we must beg your pardon as we disappear for just a little longer.

On the docket this month:

* Finish our adoption application.
* Move (up by the Balsers - yahoo!).
* Host and entertain Patrick's parents.
* Start another semester.
* Finish various and sundry writing projects.

So, this is a bit of a send off. We'll write when we can, but no later than February, and soon we'll have a fantastic home makeover to blog about! Thanks for a terrific 2008, and here's to an even better new year, with babies and books and houses for all!

~L

{photo from flickr}

Christmas Craft: Quilted Stockings

2008-12-27T12:53:00.008-05:00

So I made these (I think) really adorable stockings. I was most pleased with how they turned out! We went to our favorite fabric store, Purl Soho, a few weeks ago and picked out fabric for our stockings and for the Balsers' (for their Christmas present). Then I drew a pattern (using some fancy Anthro tights as a guide) and got to work. Below are the results.

Look, quilted!
And, at P's request, monogrammed. I think the letters turned out quite lovely (although cursive sewing is not easy).

We made them for the Balsers as well, and left them on the sofa filled with goodies on Christmas morning.
Their fabric is of a different palette, and the girls' stockings feature some lovely adornment, but the pattern is the same.This picture of the stockings is a little like an "I Spy" page. Find the picture of the Seminarios. Find a button. Find a goose. Go on, try it!

Merry Christmas, all! Okay, okay, it's a few days after Christmas, I know. But did you know that the twelve days of Christmas actually begin on the 25th and go from there? So, really, I'm just preserving the traditional way of celebrating.

~L

Not Much to Say...

2008-12-24T12:46:00.003-05:00

Just a little note to wish you a happy and wonder filled Christmas Day!

We are so blessed.

Christmas is in the Air!

2008-12-22T12:48:00.021-05:00

Sorry our blogging has been a little spotty this month -- December is not really a calm, relaxing time for us, what with P and his job in retail and me enjoying the full-tilt sprint to the end of the semester. What we do have time for, though, is decoration (or, as I Freudian Slippily told my mom, "displays"). I don't know if you know us, but we're kind of big on the way our home looks, especially during the holidays. This is actually somewhat comical and quixotic, because hardly anyone (other than P & I, of course) ever sees the inside of our apartment. Nevertheless, we toil year after year to put together perfect holiday displays. And, hey! Now we have a blog, so everyone can see the inside of our apartment and its charming Christmas makeover.

The anchor of our Christmas display? A $4.99 silver tinsel tree, bought at a fire sale two days after Christmas.

Since you can't just put red and green on a tinsel tree, we opted for shades of hot pink ornaments:

This year, we expanded our color palette slightly to include some teal as well:

These new ornaments (from Anthropologie) are my favorite:

I think it worked out really nicely, don't you?

And, of course, the presents under the tree had to match (okay, so we're a little OCD about our decor).

For our hearth (also known as the repurposed headboard that supports our tiny TV), we went with a "feathers n' candy" theme. What? You didn't know sweets and tweets (he he) went together? Well, consider yourself informed.
P.S. Those stockings? I made them. Sewed 'em. More on that to come.

A lovely dove, reclining on a cherrywood branch. Yes, Virginia, those are pink feathers in the background.

Sweets. I got this idea from Real Simple and, fittingly, it was pretty easy. Just some pretty little glasses filled with sugar and topped with miniature marshmallows and candy canes. Voilà!

So, that's it. Our little corner of Christmas happiness. Okay, so that's not really it. We also have a window display (twine, big lights, and satin balls), a nativity (in the "curio cabinet" (reconfigured children's desk) above the piano), and a small grove of tinsel trees (blue, purple, and pink). But if I give all of those away now, what will I blog about the rest of the week?

~L

I was called Ma'am by a Nun.

2008-12-17T14:41:00.003-05:00

I was sitting in Taco Bell, too full from over ordering, reading a book.

I looked up
and a Nun was standing at my table
with a little wooden bowl
with money in it.

I thought she would sit down.

"St. Joseph's Orphanage?" She held out the bowl.

"I'm Sorry?"

"St. Joseph's Orphanage...Yes or No."

"Oh.

No."

She looked somewhat surprised for less than a second. Then she said,

"God Bless you, Ma'am."

And she moved to the next table.

I felt it was calculated.

~P

And the Tags Go To....

2008-12-08T17:46:00.002-05:00

You. Us.

2008-11-30T22:40:00.004-05:00

As promised, we want to ring in this gift-giving season with a little gift-giving of our own!

L and I wanted to give away something that you could only get from us...Love. But, it turns out people are giving that away by the gallons! Really, just by the buckets full!

So instead we made you these:

Handmade tags that we made with our hands.

I know, right?!

We took this stuff, which we had laying around the house...and the store:

...and made Gift Tags for your four most extravagant gifts. They are very fine. They don't involve a drop of hot glue (all hand sewn buttons), and L machine-sewed the fabric on the back...oh yeah, and there is fabric on the back!

I guess you could use them for what ever you'd like; we hung them up and thought they looked pretty good like this:

However, as with all extremely thoughtful and exorbitant gifts, only one person gets them. So here's what you do:

Post a comment.

Wait until Monday the 7th of December.

Watch the Drawing.

When your comment gets picked email us your address.

Wait a day or two...or four.

Receive our heartfelt, hand-forged, heavenly tags to pin on your shirt, or slap on a box, or donate to the Smithsonian. Ya know, Wah Eva.

Happy Christmas Everyone!

~P

Oh Yeah, and there are a lot of new people reading 'cause Lisa listed our factual Thanksgiving post on this blog HERE. Well, let this be our welcome to you, all of you! Whether you're Strangers or Friends, Cousins or Cousins of Cousins, come often and get yourselves some tags out of it.

Now Bring Us Some Figgy Pudding

2008-11-30T17:30:00.003-05:00

...okay, or maybe something a bit, well, prettier.

Stay tuned, dear readers, for tomorrow is December 1st, and occasion for another giveaway here on Garden Street.

Too hard to wait? Here's a hint: this time, the gift is homemade, and perfect for gussying up those Christmas packages. Drop back by tomorrow for a chance to win!

{photo by rockinghelvetica}

Faux Christmas Polaroids

2008-11-29T11:44:00.009-05:00

Jordan at Oh Happy Day had this fantastic find on her blog a week or so ago, and I've been playing around with it ever since. It's a program that makes faux Polaroids of your digital photos. Here are a few shots of Christmas on Garden Street:Okay, yeah, it's faking it, but come on! It's so much fun to goof off with (and it provided the lovely new Christmas background for our blog). Plus, it has all kinds of terrific little quirks, like having very few features, taking a little while to develop, and only allowing you to upload 10 photos at a time (replicating the 10-shot film package of a traditional Polaroid). So go make some 70s-style memories already!

~L

Today.

2008-11-28T20:05:00.004-05:00

Today L and I got into a fight.

She said I had to have something other than Pumpkin Pie* for dinner.

I disagreed.

Now we're not talking.

But that's because I walked away and started blogging about the conversation that I walked away from.

Now she's looking at me out of the corner of her eye.

Suspiciously.

Oh. Wait. Here she comes.... Gotta go.

~p

*The pie in question is the one pictured above...I made that. For reals.

Just Me Giving Thanks

2008-11-26T10:46:00.007-05:00

You guys,

I know that all Americans feel a certain amount of nostalgia when thinking about the first Thanksgiving:

The Pilgrims

and Indians,

The Turkey

and yams. The football,

and fighting.

The tense silence, and then the purchasing of land with bees.

No wait. I meant beads.

Every year, the same traditions passed down through generations, all commemorating those three fateful ships...

The Pita,

The Rita,

and the Santa Maria.

They first docked that moonlit night thousands of years ago, at that place so close to where we now live, that has its own special place in our hearts (out here), and that people who don't live out east can't know anything about. The magic of it, the majesty, the wonder of how three ships could make it down 5th Ave and find that first American resting place, 30 Rock.

Well, it was a miracle that's what. And isn't that what Thanksgiving's all about? Miracles?

Words, words, words...

2008-11-20T16:00:00.000-05:00

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Words. I think a lot about words: what they mean, why they mean those things, how those meanings shift from locale to locale, generation to generation, person to person. How is it that an arbitrary compilation of letters can come to represent not only the crude necessities of life (a furry, four-legged creature that goes "me-ow"? How about C-A-T?), but the ideas and concepts that give meaning and dimension to those lives: love, honor, faith, charity, kindness; brutality, hate, jealously, malice?

I am somewhat of a writer; I write scholarly essays, blog posts, and, occasionally, fiction. It is an eternal struggle to discover the most fitting vocabulary, the most effective word order to communicate the meaning I hope to convey. Words drip meaning, they ooze implications, and bleed significance. Words are never innocent; they are never never virgin. Words are always already marked, and they have power; words do things.

In The Real Thing, a play by British playwright and wordsmith Tom Stoppard, Henry (who is a stand-in for Stoppard himself) rhapsodizes about the power of words. He explains:
[Words are] precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more.... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

One of my mom's favorite stories to tell about me is how she used to threaten me when I was younger: if I didn't get my chores done, I would be grounded from my books. Other parents out there may not understand; perhaps you would be happy if your children deigned to pick up a book, but my parents were more relived when I would put the book down and venture among the living.P and I sometimes discuss possible disabilities: would you rather lose the use of your legs or your arms? Wheelchair or crutches? And, most importantly, blind or deaf? P is a pretty spectacular musician, one who relies almost wholly on his ears. He, therefore, always opts for blindness. I, on the other hand, always opt for deafness. The thought of never again reading words with my eyes is almost unbearably sad to me. You see, I not only love the thought of words, their sinuous connotations and denotations, I also adore the way they look, those arbitrary lines and curves filling up a blank space with thought, faith, nuance.

For some, words are merely a method of communication. For me, however, words are friends, lovers, combatants -- they can simultaneously weigh me down and set me to flight.

This, of course, is also why I love libraries: vast depositories of words, a dizzying number of sentences. When I'm feeling particularly metaphysical, I like to imagine all the words that have ever been set to paper in the history of the world: an inventory of all human thought that has been inscribed. It gives me a little vertigo -- kind of like falling through space or trying to imagine the difference in size between an atom and the universe. I am a supernerd, but even now the thought of an old, beautiful library packed floor-to-ceiling with books gets me a little warm under the collar.

Hamlet, when he pretends to be crazy, mutters "words, words, words." This is the paradox of words: they are joyous and wondrous, yet troubling and maddening. Simultaneously neutral and freighted with meaning, one could spend an entire lifetime chasing them down, trying to arrange the right ones in the right order to call forth meaning out of nothingness.

~L

The Old New York.

2008-11-19T10:32:00.005-05:00

I was at work yesterday and the big talk was snow. The store is getting set up for the Holidays (which you can't call Christmas, because there are lots of Holidays, but we are using an awful lot of pine trees for Kwanzaa.). Someone had heard on the news that it could snow in the morning.

So there we were setting up ornaments and singing,

'Fah who for-aze! Dah who dor-aze!
Welcome Christmas, Christmas Day'*

And outside it started snowing. On Fifth Avenue in New York City, it snowed. And we had been so busy we almost missed it. So me and my manager are sitting there clutching mittens and scarfs to our chests watching the first snow fall over this amazing back drop and one of the associates next to us said, 'Yeah, I saw that earlier...I thought it was trash falling.' Which can happen in New York and does look like snow.

~p

*I had to look up the lyrics as I thought they were these:

"Ah Roo Door and Ah Roo more and Welcome Christmas, Christmas Day!"

What did you think they were?

I'm Thankful for Funny.

2008-11-17T18:56:00.001-05:00

Comfort Food

2008-11-14T17:10:00.009-05:00

Beautiful Soup

Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!

Beau--ootiful Soo-oop!
Beau--ootiful Soo-oop!
Soo--oop of the e--e--evening,
Beautiful, beautiful Soup!

Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,
Game, or any other dish?
Who would not give all else for two
Pennyworth only of Beautiful Soup?
Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?

Beau--ootiful Soo-oop!
Beau--ootiful Soo-oop!
Soo--oop of the e--e--evening,
Beautiful, beauti--FUL SOUP!

~Lewis Carroll

I have to agree with Lewis Carroll's lilting praise on this one: on a damp autumn night, there is nothing quite as satisfying as a steaming tureen of beautiful soup. When we were younger, my mom would regularly make us grilled cheese sandwiches and cream of tomato soup; this meal remains one of my most basic comfort foods. Since then, P and I have adapted this formula slightly: vegetarian chili in place of the cream of tomato soup; pepperjack grilled cheese (I guess we just mostly Tex-Mexed the meal). I love soup and sandwich nights.

A couple of weeks ago, P came home from his fancy store with this book:

It is filled with mouth-watering soups suited to the fresh ingredients available in each of the four seasons. We, of course, have been enjoying the book's suggested Fall fare, and, boy, is it delicious! Our favorite so far is a terrific adult spin on my old grilled cheese and tomato soup combo: Fabulous Fall Root Soup and Grilled Gorgonzola and Apple on Sourdough. The recipes are both scrumptious and simple: two words I like very much.

Fabulous Fall Roots Soup
Makes 8 servings

4 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 1/2 cups chopped leeks, white and light green parts only ( 3 to 4 medium leeks)
1 1/2 pounds carrots, peeled and diced
1 medium rutabaga (1 to 1 1/4 pounds), peeled and diced
8 cups chicken stock (we used vegetable stock)
Kosher salt
1 1/4 cups crème fraîche
3 tablespoons finely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

1. Heat butter in a large, heavy pot (with a lid) over medium-high heat. When melted and hot, add leeks, carrots, and rutabaga. Sauté vegetables until softened, for 10 minutes or longer. Add stock and bring mixture to a simmer. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer until vegetables are very tender, for about 30 minutes.

2. Purée the soup in batches in a food processor or blender and return the soup to the pot. Whisk in 3/4 cup of the crème fraîche. Taste soup and season with salt, as neede. (The soup can be prepared 2 days ahead. Cool, cover, and refrigerate. Reheat over medium heat.)

3. To serve, ladle soup into shallow soup bowls. Garnish each serving with a generous dollop of the remaining 1/2 cup crème fraîche and a sprinkling of parsley.

Grilled Gorgonzola and Apple on Sourdough
Makes 4 servings

1/2 Granny Smith apple, cored but unpeeled, very thinly sliced and tossed in 1/2 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
8 crusty sourdough bread slices (3/8- to 1/2-inch thick)
8 ounces creamy blue cheese, such as Gorgonzola, Fourme d'Ambert, or Bleu d'Auvergne, thickly sliced.
4 tablespoons chopped pecans
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted, plus more if needed

Layer one slice of cheese on bread; top with pecans. Gently press pecans into cheese. Place apple slices on top of cheese and pecans, then top with second slice of bread. Brush both sides of bread with melted butter and grill until browned on both sides.

So enjoy some fancy fall comfort food -- and let us know what your favorite soup/sandwich combo is!

~L

Water.

2008-11-12T21:50:00.003-05:00

So there are times when your life changes forever after that moment. This story is about one of those.

My best friend Cory and my best friend Joanie had decided to take an 4 hour drive down to the red rocks of Utah and hike 12 miles off the road...in the desert... and camp in a place called Escalante.

One quick search on the Internet for images of 'Escalante' will give you a ton of shots like the above.

And below:

Beautiful, I know. But I should begin by telling any whack job stranger reading this blog that I am not known for my "Camping Skills." It's true I am an Eagle Scout, but an overzealous scout master/scout master's wife, enough 'Fine Arts' merit badges, and one puppet show at a children's hospital and you find yourself with all the awards and none of the qualifications.

Any of you who know me are already skipping to the end...where I will most certainly be crying. This story will not disappoint.

SO! We make the drive and all Cory talks about is this basketball tournament (the NBA Playoffs) and all Joanie is talking about is her new hot boyfriend (my brother) who stayed behind, most likely to watch the tournament.

We park the car. This is important, as this parking lot will soon become the golden-gated deliverance from Hell. But not then. Then I was thinking how far away this lot seemed from everything. I had been expecting big, red, rock canyons, but this was flat desert.

Cory set out the plan. Cory had the experience. Cory had done this before. Cory should have known better.

"We'll walk along the river and then hike through the canyon, then up and camp under this cliff next to the river." He stated.

"What river?" I asked.

"That one." He pointed to a wet spot in the ground. No joke. It looked liked someone had spilled something in a straight line.

"What canyon?" I asked.

"That one." He pointed to the only thing he could point to, which was this fuzzy, purplish shape on the horizon.

"That!!! That has to be 30 miles away!"

"It's ten."

So we're walking. Keep in mind, Joanie and I had spent the day before at Nordstrom's picking out some real cute hiking shoes for the journey, and Joanie had got these hot little Doc Martins with chunky laces that looked great with the green cargo shorts she got to match. In time, these shoes would be filled with blood.

We walked and talked for a while; then, we just walked. The ground was beach sand (or, ya know, Desert Sand), so as you walked on it your feet would kinda push out and away from the ankle, something I think you would only notice if you were walking 8 miles in and your ankles begin to feel like taffy on the taffy pull, but it's freezing in the taffy pull, so it keeps stretching and snapping. You know, like that.

We do make it to the rocks (our first land mark), and the rocks turn into a canyon and the dark patch of water does turn into a stream and the canyon turns into a mountain and the stream into a river and the whole thing is beautiful -- I mean, better than the pictures. It was magic, it came from nowhere in the middle of nowhere and we were there. Well... almost there. We had to stop and fill up our water bottles at this little waterfall...which is to say, water dripping of this mossy rock. I was not too keen on this task but, as there didn't seem to be a Sev anywhere near by, I did what I had to do.

We make it to our cliff and camp next to the river, and the sky is littered with stars and the moon makes it bright as day out there. It is magnificent and well worth the journeying.

And we sleep.

The next day, we spend the morning eating some of the canned food we packed in (cause cans are light and won't snap your back as you walk through the desert) and we play in the river and it is fun. The plan was to spend one day hiking in, camp there for two days, and then spend one day hiking out. That was the plan before my nap. That cursed nap. Had I just stayed awake.

I woke up to the sound of cans being stuffed into backpacks.

"What's going on?"

"We're leaving." Cory says. "I want to see how the Playoffs played out and Joanie wants to get back to Spence."

"Wait. What? We just got here. I just took a nap."

"If we leave now, we can make it back to the car before dark."

"It's, like, noon."

"Yeah, grab your stuff."

{I don't mean to make Cory out to sound like a Nazi but in this case he was. A Nazi from Hell.}

So, we begin to walk back (our backpacks still brimming with the four-day supply of food we never got to). So, here's the math for you: 12 miles in. 12 miles out. Less than 12 hours rest between the two. TWENTY-FOUR MILES of taffy-snapping steps back to the 4 hour car ride back to basketball and boyfriends. It's a wonder I speak to either of them.

We make our stop at Moss Rock and I don't fill all the way up...'cause there are floaties.

I know that I built this up to have some big event, and I wish there would have been. I wish I had stepped on a snake and had to have been helicoptered out of that inferno but there was not.

We walked.

We walked.

Cory eventually broke way out in front and we lost sight of him. Sometimes we would catch up to him resting but then we would rest and he would leave and we would eventually follow his footprints. I guess he loves basketball.

Joanie finally stopped walking with me and stayed pretty much 50 feet ahead, which didn't matter, we could not talk. One: we were dying. Two: it was her fault. I can still remember watching each little hill come and go and we would stand on top each one and look for the parking lot, squinting and straining to see it and absolutely knowing at the next hill we would see it.

Once, I looked up to see Joanie on the hill in front of me and she was standing there, not moving. When I got up to her, she was looking out over the trail that led us here, with no car in sight and she was sobbing. And so I cried. And we stood there crying, knowing that we couldn't sit down and cry or we wouldn't get up; we truly believed we would not get up.

The water was gone and there was nothing. I remember thinking I would never EVER drink anything other than water for the rest of my life. The idea of Coke made my tongue plunge down the back of my throat. I could feel Coke sticking to my teeth, the sweet sickness clinging to the roof of my mouth that was panting for relief. I was dying. I was dying and the only thing I wanted was clean, cool, water.

Some hikers are coming toward me. Play it cool, man. Don't let them see you've been crying.

The looks on their faces were so encouraging. "We just left the car maybe...one mile back, maybe two. " They must have sensed my discouragement. Either that or they just passed a sobbing girl in her Doc Martins 50 feet ahead of me. Certainly the mud on my face made from the mixture of dust and tears was no indication. " You can do it, Man, just a little bit more."

We walked.

I could feel my body and mind separate as if my brain said, "Look, just put one foot in front of the other. You don't need me for that, I'll be over here if you do."

I looked up and saw Joanie at a hill 50 feet a head and she collapsed. She was either dead or she saw the car.

When we got to the car, we saw legs sticking out from underneath. Cory did not have the keys. It was Joanie's car and it's a good thing, as he may have left us in his mad quest for Scores. He told us that he had felt miserable for making us do what we had done, and he had wanted to get to the car, dump off his backpack and come back for ours -- as if anyone who just finished this journey would have turned around and started it up again.

Joanie sat in the car with her feet out on the ground and pealed off her boots and, as promised, blood dripped out. Her feet looked like chewed up hamburger with blisters that had popped and reformed and popped again.

I remember laying flat in the back seat as we drove, my legs pounding and seizing up when we pulled into a gas station.

"You coming in?" Cory asked.

"Choke on your own face."

"Do you want anything?"

Brief Pause.

"Water."

Even now when we're at a restaurant and the waiter asks, even though I know he will judge me, I remember this moment and mouth gets quenched, my legs tighten up and I say the same thing.

~p

What am I Thankful For???

2008-11-10T23:20:00.003-05:00

Things to be thankful for: Young at Heart

2008-11-09T22:55:00.004-05:00

So, as you probably have noticed, we've been making a real effort to blog more often, and we're going to try to tie our posts to the season or time of year -- sort of like a list of things we like to do, see, buy, and think about, depending on the time of year.

Well, November, of course, is a month of being thankful, and so I'd like to recommend this fantastic film to help you feel more grateful for all the things you have: love, health, energy, emotion, devotion, belief, happiness... the list could go on and on.

The documentary Young at Heart follows a choir of octa- and nonagenarians as the learn and perform particularly meaningful and poignant rock songs (think Sonic Youth, Coldplay, and James Brown). We watched the film because we like documentaries; by the end of it, we were in tears. It was so joyous, moving, and tender. You must, must check it out, and be reminded of how thankful you are for all those you love, and those that love you.

~L

Boston Cartoon

2008-11-07T09:53:00.001-05:00

While we're in Boston...

~p

Away for the Weekend

2008-11-06T09:58:00.005-05:00

Dear readers,

We are abandoning our metropolis for another this weekend, as we load up the car with the Balsers and head up to Boston for a few days. Forgive us for the absence, but we'll be back and in rare November form on Monday!

Because we are still in the afterglow of a history-changing election*, enjoy this excerpt from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass:

ELECTION DAY, NOVEMBER, 1884

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,
'Twould not be you, Niagara-nor you, ye limitless prairies-nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,
Nor you, Yosemite-nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyserloops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,
Nor Oregon's white cones-nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes-nor Mississippi's stream:
-This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name-the still small voice vibrating-
America's choosing day,(The heart of it not in the chosen-the act itself the main, the quadrennial choosing,)
The stretch of North and South arous'd-sea-board and inland-Texas to Maine-the Prairie States-Vermont, Virginia, California,
The final ballot-shower from East to West-the paradox and conflict,
The countless snow-flakes falling-(a swordless conflict,Yet more than all Rome's wars of old, or modern Napoleon's:) the peaceful choice of all,
Or good or ill humanity-welcoming the darker odds, the dross:
-Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify-while the heart pants, life glows:
These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,Swell'd Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's sails.

When I voted on Tuesday (my third time voting for the President of the United States), it was the first time I felt like my voting actually mattered, like I was fulfilling the destiny our forefathers fought for: a democratic society based on hope for a better, more equitable future. I was proud; I felt patriotic. It is a day I will tell my children about.

*I know our last post was large on emotion, so if want to hear all of the dry policy reasons we voted for Obama, feel free to drop us a line and we'll tell you entirely too much about the painstakingly thought-out details of our decision. Way too much.

~L

Remember When You Wondered, 'Can We?'

2008-11-04T23:36:00.009-05:00

As we watch the TV,

Lindsay looks over at me with tears in her eyes and says,

'Our children will never know a world where a Black person can't be President.'

'Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.'
Barack Obama

'If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists - to protect them and to promote their common welfare - all else is lost.'
Barack Obama

Americans…still believe in an America where anything's possible -- they just don't think their leaders do.
Barack Obama

Hope – Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope! In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation. A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead.
Barack Obama

If we aren't willing to pay a price for our values, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all.
Barack Obama

The fact that my 15 minutes of fame has extended a little longer than 15 minutes is somewhat surprising to me and completely baffling to my wife.
Barack Obama

My wife has been my closest friend, my closest advisor. And ... she’s not somebody who looks to the limelight, or even is wild about me being in politics. And that’s a good reality check on me. When I go home, she wants me to be a good father and a good husband. And everything else is secondary to that.
Barack Obama

Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it's not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won't, it's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.
Barack Obama

Yes We Can - Barack Obama Music Video

2008-11-04T23:00:00.000-05:00

So, Today Is YOUR Day!!

2008-11-03T21:33:00.005-05:00

Get up! Get up and VOTE! Even if you vote wrong... get up and VOTE! So EXCITING! And you get to say what you want, or at least pick someone. It really is an amazing thing to get to VOTE your VOTE. 'Cause really, who cares what you think? I mean, there are loads of people in the world that no one cares what they think. And here we are, in the finest country in the world, and someone cares what you think. YOU! Little Ol' YOU! What gives you the right to think you know what's best for you and your family? Who do you think you are? You are AMERICAN, so VOTE ABOUT IT!

Now, on to our awesome footage.

So on Halloween, we were at the Parade, right? and we came upon these guys:

As you can imagine, things got pretty heated, pretty quick. It was all I could do to jump in and catch this footage:

Anyway... I'm just saying.

All Hallows' Eve

2008-11-01T18:37:00.007-05:00

So, wha'd you do for Halloween?

Us?

We did this...

Which individually looked like this...

{Mr. Dark}

And this...

{Mademoiselle Lumiere}

We went into the city and went to the big Halloween Parade, which you may think would have looked like this...

But ended up looking more like this...

{Can you find Lindsay?}

We encountered these guys...

And them...

And her...

It was enchanting. We saw many wonderful and horrible things, too many to picture here...but here goes.

Happy Haunting!

2008-10-31T06:15:00.002-05:00

Well, dear readers, we hope you've enjoyed reading our series of spooky posts as much as we've enjoyed composing them. Hope you have the most deliciously frightening and sugary sweet Halloween ever! Don't be too naughty...

~ P & L

Hopes for Halloween Costumes

2008-10-29T19:10:00.014-05:00

Ever since visiting Venice a couple of years ago, I've wanted to dress up in Carnival costumes for Halloween. (I know this is not the most flattering picture of me. We had already taken a picture with these folks, but they held me ransom until I gave them a few more euros, and I was a little startled by their grip. Stingy performance-types!).

My Carnival dress-up hasn't happened yet, and, alas, this is not my year either. P has to work on All Hallow's Eve until 8 PM, and if you want to be in the Greenwich Village Parade (which I most certainly would, if I pulled together a fabulous Carnival guise), you have to be there around 7 PM. C'est la vie. There's always next year, right?

Why Carnival, you may ask? Well, I will be the first to acknowledge that I completely and totally romanticize almost everything, but especially places I've visited. Venice was such a spectacular, velvety mix of warm, sparkly windows, their light dancing on the gently lapping water and plush, sooty shadows, corridors that disappear into murky darkness. While we were there, I loved imagining a Carnival of 18th-century splendor spilling through the streets: the excitement of sauntering through the threadlike alleys unchaperoned and unseen; for one night, free from all social mores.

Okay, so I warned you: definitely romanticized. But still, Carnival really was a time when people got to be someone they weren't, if only for a moment -- a desire that clearly continues to drive the somewhat unseemly desire of adults to dress completely inappropriately one night a year.

This is another thing I love about Carnival costumes. The costumes are seductive and compelling for what they don't reveal, rather than for all they do. When I troll the streets of NYC on Halloween, I am always embarrassed for the women who dress up as a whored-out version of a sexist stereotype (sexy nurse! sexy french maid! sexy joan jetson! sexy schoolgirl! I think you know what I'm talkin' about, right?) trying to be noticed. I much prefer the wondering what is under the costume to shielding my eyes against all that should have been.

So, I'll continue to plan and imagine my brilliant Carnevale di Venezia costume, hoping that next year, I'll disappear into billows of fabric, rustle down shadowy side streets, and wait for P to discover who is really under the mask.

~L

A Childhood Scare.

2008-10-28T16:49:00.002-05:00

So, my brothers and I would fall asleep to this tape my Gramma gave us. We later (much later) found it and would act out the poems for each others enjoyment.

Well some of the poems would cause you to pull the covers up to your chin and wait this one out. And for some reason this one would get me real nervous at night alone in my bed. I think because there was a possibility that I could go away, chasing a dream and then never come back. And no one would ever know what happened to me.

And that terrified me.

~p

Fearsome Ballads for an Eerie Eve

2008-10-27T18:06:00.005-05:00

Several years ago, a couple of my good friends started circulating an October mix tape (though it was a CD) to get everyone in the Autumnal mood. I've since co-opted much of the list and augmented it, and it has become a favorite of ours. Each October, P and I play the list while we decorate, carve pumpkins, and generally participate in Halloween revelry. Hope you enjoy.

1. This is Halloween – Danny Elfman
How else would you begin an October / Halloween list?

2. Hell – Squirrel Nut Zippers
"This is a place where eternally
Fire is applied to the body
Teeth are extruded and bones are ground
Then baked into cakes which are passed around." 'nuff said.

3. Dracula – Gorillaz
There's got to be a good Dracula song on this list, right? And this one's sung by a cartoon.

4. Werewolf In London – Warren Zevon
I adore this song. It's not at all surprising that werewolves hang out at Trader Vic's.

5. Thriller – Michael Jackson
Really, must I comment?

6. (Ghost) Riders In The Sky – Johnny Cash
Classic. Damned to chase red-eyed cows through the sky, these cowboys now warn others to mind their ways.

7. Grim Grinning Ghosts – Barenaked Ladies
A Disney classic, revamped by those guys who sang the Chinese-Chicken song a few years ago.

8. Ghost of Stephen Foster – Squirrel Nut Zippers
Squirrel Nut Zippers have some very macabre thoughts. I love it.

9. Virgin State of Mind – K's Choice
Spooky... I mean, why does she have a chair in her head?

10. Free Until They Cut Me Down – Iron and Wine
Lynching is definitely scary.

11. One More Murder – Better Than Ezra
A town where no one notices that another murder has taken place, because they're used to it.

12. Slouching Towards Bethlehem – Joni Mitchell
The birth of the antichrist, apocalypse...

13. A Widow's Toast – Neko Case
Case's voice is always unnerving; here it's downright frightening.

14. Transylvanian Concubine – Rasputina
Vampiric ladies of the night wander through gothic chords: "you know what flows there like wine."

15. Bury My Lovely – October Project
Definitely new-agey, but there's no better mood music for a sepia-toned fall.

16. Bad Moon Rising – Thea Gilmore
A low-key take on the apocalyptic tune from Credence Clearwater Revival.

17. Superstar – Sonic Youth
Echoing and ghostly, this song makes Karen Carpenter even spookier.

18. O Death – Ralph Stanley
The bluegrass great begs Death to pass him by.

19. Temptation Waits – Garbage
Another vampire song. Come to think of it, I think Shirley Manson may actually be a vampire.

20. Wuthering Heights – Kate Bush
Blog readers know of my deep, abiding love for Kate. This is probably my favorite song of hers, where she gives the ghost Cathy a voice, begging Heathcliff to let her in his window.

21. Dirty Knife – Neko Case
Another Neko song to close out the list; haunting, lilting, lovely.

A Walk and A Fall.

2008-10-24T18:22:00.005-05:00

This past weekend we had the great privilege of visiting our good friends in the small enclave of SLEEPY HOLLOW!!!

You die-hards may remember a similar trip with other dear friends last year. Well that was more of a Spooky Graveyard Trip, while this one was more like this:

There was afternoon shopping at a Church Harvest Fair, Lindsay picked up some Chekhov, and I found a book of Hitchcock's Scary Stories for Young Adults...So, you know, same-same.

Then we Lunched at a tea room that was described to us as 'More Roosters and Sunflowers than Saucers and Finger Sandwiches.' But it was delicious and delightful, both in meal and in company.

Then we walked.

At first I thought the walk was headed somewhere, and there were sights seen and destinations arrived at. But in the end, we just walked, and the walk became the event.

There certainly is such a thing as a "quaint village feel" that needs to be felt now and then. And Sleepy Hollow has such a strong feeling that it quite literally pulled our friends right from their home up the street to their new home up the state.

And we were lucky for it.

A moment on the train over looking the Hudson River.

A walk to and around Swan Lake.

The soft crispness in the air that fills the lives of those who live in forests.

A perfect day.

October Sweet: Pumpkin Chocolate Cookies & White Chocolate Hot Cocoa

2008-10-23T21:17:00.012-05:00

Ideal for curling up with a ragged copy of Poe and listening to the murmurous wind tickle through the skeletal branches, this combo is frighteningly sweet and oh-so-scrumptious: a slightly spicy cake-like cookie studded with semi-sweetened chocolate, paired with a ghostly potion for your autumn enjoyment.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 c. pumpkin
3/4 c. sugar
1/2 c. oil
1 egg
2 c. flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. milk
1 c. chocolate chips
1 tsp. vanilla

Dissolve baking soda in milk; set aside. In large bowl add pumpkin, sugar, oil, and egg; stir. Add flour, baking powder, cinnamon, salt and baking soda mixture. Mix well. Stir in chocolate chips and vanilla. Spoon onto cookie sheet. Bake at 375 degrees 10 to 12 minutes or until done.

White Chocolate Hot Cocoa

4 ounces white chocolate, chopped
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
14 ounces milk
2 ounces cream
3 pieces star anise

Place the chopped chocolate and vanilla in a mixing bowl. In a saucepan heat together milk, cream and star anise until boiling. Pour over chocolate and whisk well to melt. Strain into mugs to remove star anise.

Enjoy!

"Gloaming" - a Superbly Spooky Tale by P

2008-10-22T20:08:00.005-05:00

There are those whose breath aches for the crack of treaded leaves, the race of whipped wind 'round a broken tomb stone, the shallow gasp of black night as it settles on your chest.

She was one of them.

She sat waiting at her window. Watching for the first dead leaf to fall at the foot of the aching maple tree that covered the front face of her house. She could match the tangles of bark and branches of the tree with the iced lines of the ancient glass in the windows of her dying home. She loved to watch. Families would walk by unaware of her stare through yellowed lace curtains. They would give sweatered smiles and hold mitted hands and call for their young to keep clear of the street. She would smile too; though her skin bagged and pulled hard toward the floor making it impossible for her lips to turn up at the ends, she would smile. She would smile while she waited.

Once. Once, her face had been smooth and beautiful, the color of promise. Once, her eyes had been compared to unseen tropical seas, now they lie in wait, hollow and grey, the pupil set far in from the color, creating a space.

Once.

Once. She hated the word. The sharp hiss, following the slack jawed ‘Un’, clawed the roof of her mouth as it slid out. She no longer thought, ‘Once.’ She only ever thought, ‘Next’.

Perhaps, if those boys had not come that first year. Perhaps if they would have just passed on to make their mischief at other, less foreboding, manors. But they hadn’t. They came here, and she knew why. She was old. The house terrifying. The season called for it and she had her role to play. So, she invited them in and locked the door. She spent time sifting through the boys, finding the worst among them, the biggest liar, the bravest fool. She separated him from the pack. She sent the other boys off without him knowing. And he was left. And she was right.
He fought hard at first and she was sure he would overtake her; after all, he was a growing boy and she a crooked old woman, but he did not believe it would happen, he couldn’t believe. She had that on her side, she believed. She could see the whole thing as it was happening, as if from above. The swirling, and pulling, and crying out. The candlestick.

It had been her mother’s. Deep black marble with swipes of grey. It was brought back from Venice when she was a girl. It stood, always, center of the mantle to receive its accolades. It was cold to the touch, but not that first night. That night it burned her hands as she held it. She had worried that the heavy of it would put her off her balance, but she was buoyed by the weightlessness of it as it lifted over her head.

She knew where to put the body. She had always known. The cellar had been bolted off long ago, after they had running water brought to the house. The only access now was an old dumb-waiter that would spill the mess into the dark beneath. The smell. What of the smell? The smell would be covered by the cats. She had known that when the first stray coiled its tail around her drooping stocking. The smell, like the blood rush would fade.

Some get away.

She knew that, too. There must be a broken board down there, and she may not have hit them hard enough, or in the right spot. She could hear them shuffling around down there, banging into things in the dark or breaking glass, then quiet. That’s why she chooses the liars. What could they say? In the end, it’s just a boy who missed his curfew and is now babbling some fantastic story about the old lady at the end of the street. Even if they were filthy and bloody, no one had ever questioned her. No one had ever walked past the maple tree and knocked at the door and asked where the town sons had gone. And as long as no one asked, she would continue… to wait.

For they would be back, a new batch, braver than the last, hopped up on wild tales told year after year about the house on the hill and the children who never come back.

And so she waited for the first dead leaf to fall.

The end.

The Drawing...of DEATH!

2008-10-19T17:08:00.002-05:00

One Last Autumnal Chance...

2008-10-16T08:48:00.002-05:00

Come on, one more chance! Put on your commenting hat and tell us why you like fall -- Patrick has to close tonight, so we won't draw until tomorrow (Friday, Oct 17). Win a box of autumn splendor, straight from us! You know you want it...

'Beware the Autumn People'

2008-10-10T14:43:00.014-05:00

Lindsay and I are in constant conversation about which season we love the most. Granted, there are a moments where we talk about Bills or Babies, but mostly we're draped about the house, discussing whether the weather of endless evenings in summer is better than bustling brisk of Christmas, or if it can compare with the first sweet breath of fresh dirt in Spring, which rivals the crisp burnt reminder of Autumns past.

Pretty much, Lindsay loves Summer first for its chlorine-filled memories and sand-filled futures, then Fall for its new school year ('cause she's smart) and the fashion that comes with ('cause she's pretty).

I have to say that, year after year, I am thoroughly convinced by whichever pageant is presenting itself at the moment. So this year...Today...I am fully for Fall.

{Our Dog on Our Porch}

{The Plants* on the Porch}

{Syd in a Patch of Pumpkins}

{Patch in a Patch of Pumpkins...and Linds}

Our dear friends Suzie and Syd called us up and wanted to head upstate and see the country, so we did and it was a Autumn Wonderland. We picked up some fall sundries and enjoyed good company. It was golden and hazy, but it was covering a dark truth. After all, the turning of fall is only ever about one thing:

"Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had the strength to rouse up, you'd slaughter your half-dreams with buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that's burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. It's a long way back to sunset, a far way to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead -- And wasn't it true, had he read somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 A.M. than at any other time ... ?"

Deep in the back of your throat it waits for its annual subsiding. The one night when creaking gates bang open and shatter on dead rock walls giving way to shadowy characters with wicked motives.

"Mr. Dark nodded, pleased. "What's your name, boy?"

Don't tell him! thought Will, and stopped.
Why not? he wondered, why?

Jim's lips hardly twitched. "Simon," he said.

He smiled to show it was a lie.

Mr. Dark smiled to show he knew it."

There are those whose breath aches for the crack of treaded leaves, the race of whipped wind 'round a broken tomb stone, the shallow gasp of black night as it settles on your chest.

"…Beware the autumn people...For some, autumn comes early, stays late, through life, where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ’s birth there is no Bethlehem Star, no rejoicing, but September comes again and old October and so on down the years, with no winter, spring or revivifying summer.
For these beings, fall is the only normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond.
Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No, the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks through their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars.
They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles—breaks.
Such are the autumn people. Beware of them."

We are they. The Autumn People. So then, are you, our closest and finest friends. And to solidify our kinship...

a gift:

As you very probably know, the quotes above are from this, the finest fall book ever penned. I love to read this book every fall. It has the perfect mix of Summer Ending, Growing Up, a Haunting Pandemonium Shadow Show, and Trains...

"Those trains and their grieving sounds were lost forever between stations, not remembering where they had been, not guessing where they might go, exhaling their last pale breaths over the horizon, gone. So it was with all trains, ever."

We invite you to join our Harvest tradition and curl up in this book. Don't have a copy? We'll give you this one. You know the drill: post a comment about your very favorite part of this season and, on Thursday the 16th, we'll draw a winner and send you a box of fall, New England Style.

Well, go on...

{I took every picture used in this post, even the book one... I know, right?!}

{Oh wait...not the one I'm in, Suzie took that.}

{Better Stacy?}

*That green thing is called a Goose Gourd; at least, that's what the Lady on the Farm said.

Hooray! Internet re-connect

2008-10-06T09:11:00.003-05:00

Oh, man, folks, who knew how addicted we are to the internet? We have now survived 1 1/2 weeks without a functioning connection and it was terribly unpleasant. But, we're back, so keep checking in here, because we're preparing another desperate stunt to reestablish readership. You never know what we'll offer this time...

Excuses, excuses...

2008-09-28T08:08:00.001-05:00

Hi all,

Our internet has crashed. The cable guy is coming to fix it next week, so we will then be back to Bloggery goodness. Please forgive us in the meantime...

Sunday Funny: Fey as Palin

2008-09-14T18:40:00.002-05:00

This is real funny. Tina Fey really does look and sound eerily like Palin!

~L

The Reviews are In!!!

2008-09-08T22:15:00.006-05:00

So, I'm out in LA doing my little play which, (after weeks of Previews) opened this past weekend. And the first out of the gate to comment on the quality and relevance of the piece was the LA Weekly. This is what they had to say...

(You have to scroll down a bit but we are there.)

LA WEEKLY

I know, I know.

If you are in the LA area and would like tickets go here.

I would love everyone from Nephews to Grandmas to come, but as Katie helped write it...it gets a bit rough, so leave the kids at home and no one tell my Grandma, as I find myself in the shortest shorts that are legal in West Hollywood...yeah... SHORT!

Summer Swan Song

2008-09-04T17:31:00.013-05:00

"It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer." - Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

I used to read Dandelion Wine every summer, in June, because it is so evocative of the season, pulsating with the blossoming warmth of possibility offered by yet another magically carefree intercession in my regular life. I don't really have time to read Dandelion Wine anymore, but I still think of it at every summer's beginning and close.

I adore autumn, I do. But even now, at 28, there is something positively devastating to me about the end of summer.

When I was younger, my favorite holiday was July 4th. I know, I know...weird. There are no presents or really even that fun of decorations for Independence Day, but I just loved it. It was the perfect calendrical placement of a holiday: long enough into summer that I had settled into a routine of sunscreen, chlorine, and popcicles, but far enough from back to school that I didn't have to worry yet about the hot, drowsy days coming to an end. The day itself was usually blazing yet lazy, and then the night...the noise was skittishly exciting, and the transgression of staying up way too late, waiting for it to be dark enough to do fireworks made me feel so grown up. Even now, I have dense and powerful memories of happiness associated with the abrasive, acrid smell of fireworks, and I still like to watch them, especially as they explode over Manhattan, setting that infamous skyline ablaze in washes of pyrotechnic color.

Oh...those summer nights.

I'm nervous to be old enough to start feeling nostalgic about my younger days, but summer nights in Utah when I was growing up were simply the most spectacular gift offered by nature. The dry desert days would just bake the earth and then, at night, all that heat was released, creating an intoxicating mix of warmth and darkness, all set to a backdrop of crickets chorusing away. Summer dances were full of possibility, and one of my first experiences with love was full of the blissful carefree blooms of summer flirtation. He would drive me home in his open-top Jeep, and I would lean back, drinking in the overwhelming profusion of stars cluttering the sky. I never needed a sweater.

I think my profession continues to promote this sense of summer as a period of my life outside the numbing structures of time. Since I teach, I get my summers off (in theory) and am rarely beholden to solid deadlines, and though I always have great plans for all the work I'm going to do, I usually end up enjoying the slow peaceful days, pushing responsibility further and further into the fall. My summers in New York have been as magical as ever: long, dwindling nights on the patio amongst the fireflies, equally long, salty days at the Jersey Shore, each usually capped off with a lush serving of fresh summer berries and cream.

The song-birds leave us at the summer's close,
Only the empty nests are left behind,
And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Harvest Moon"

So, summer ends. Or, more accurately, ended last Monday. But this, too, is what makes summer so remarkable: it is fleeting, a rare gift, and something to dream of and remember in that dark, dreadful dungeon known as February. In Dandelion Wine, they preserve the eponymous liquid in bottles in the basement, and in the winter, when they simply cannot bear the cold greyness anymore, they get it out and have a thimble full: sunshine in a bottle. I just have my memories of summer to last me through the rest of the year, but this...this is enough.~L

Nie Nie Day

2008-08-28T09:02:00.005-05:00

I'm sure many of you have heard about Stephanie and Christian Nielson, who were in a pretty horrific small plane crash last week. To help contribute to their recovery, DesignMom and others are having a great big day o' auctions, with all the proceeds going to Stephanie & Christian's recovery fund. Several of the items up for auction are pretty spectacular, and all are stylish and interesting. Go take a look! And help the Nielsons on their way to Recovery.

There are over 165 auctions, all of which are listed here.

Matt Clayton Photography

2008-08-26T17:12:00.008-05:00

I'm home! After nearly a month away, it was nice to walk in to our little Hoboken apartment (although it smelled faintly of dust and old lady). I'll write a better update of our lives and travels in a few days, after I've unpacked, but in the meantime I simply must share this:

Photos by Matt Clayton

While in Utah, we arranged to have our infinitely talented friend Matt Clayton take some photos of our little family in preparation for the adoption blog & profile. From what we've seen so far, it was a wise decision: the pics are super fun, as was the shoot. Thanks, Matt!

~L

RRRED The Commercial

2008-08-15T21:48:00.003-05:00

R.R.R.EALLY?!!!

2008-08-02T06:51:00.008-05:00

So we have some news! Lots of you may know that I wrote a play a little while back with my friends, Adam and Katie. We did it for 6 weeks in NYC and 2 weeks in LA and it was wildly fun and amazing to see something you wrote be up and running. (incidentally, I am also in the play, I was telling them at work that I wrote a play and then later I told them I was in it and they were all surprised and I thought, "Why would I write a play and not make myself the lead?" Normals?! What can you do with 'em?)

Well, Adam had always felt that it needed a longer run in LA, as it was huge there. And so he started to put the thing together for a 6 week run. Well, I had grown up by then (January.) and told him that I had to stay put because I have an amazing job and I was moving up and we are planning to start a family next year (more about that in a later post.) and I couldn't drop everything and chase dreams.

Adam and Katie did their best to persuade, but in the end Katie left for LA and I stayed here. I thought it was fine but my way of dealing with this play and me not getting to do it was to COMPLETELY CUT THEM OFF. They would call about writing things and I would delete the message, we played long games of phone tag and finally they stopped calling, after all they had a play to do.

So there I was working and being grown up, which Lindsay allows me to not ever have to be really grown up (Peter Pan and Wendy anyone?) but there was this part that was heart broken. I was very proud of this play. We had written and preformed it and people (those few who saw it in NYC and the sold out crowds in LA) really liked it. I kept drifting off and thinking about the 'what if' and the fact that starting a family next year means that there is a little time now and much less time later. But I still loved my job and was happy.

Then one night, after the LA calls stopped coming, I had a thought, 'Perhaps responsible isn't always right.' Maybe I just thought, 'you don't run off and do fun things cause...you're not suppose to.' Then it occurred to me, that had never been our motto. We are all about running off and doing fun things and it's gotten us this far, granted most of our 'running off' is in support of Lindsay and her school so it's mingled in responsibility but I will tell you a secret: We were terrified to move to New York, not just a little but real real scared and we were right to be! There were homeless nights on strangers couches that we thought we would never make it but now those strangers are dear friends and we love where we live and often talk about those first months (yes months) when we thought we had made the worst move ever. But, now! Well, you know better than anyone how much we gush about New York, I think mostly because we made it.

Hold on....where was I? Oh Right...So I had my thought and I went to Lindsay with it. Lindsay had always said she would support what ever I wanted to do and she meant it, but there was part of her that was glad that I had not quit my job and flew off to Cali. AS IT SHOULD HAVE. But that night when I came to her the talk was different that it had been before and we talked the whole thing out, 'What would happen if you did this or that where would that put this thing or that part.' It all sounded feasible and Lindsay was the one who said, 'We are the kind of people who go for it. We've never played it safe why were we so instantly safe this time.' There was a lot more said that night, amazing things wifes say to husbands when they are terrified at the support lent to their husbands but more terrified not to give it. And I will always remember the feeling we had that night of a true partnership, in the practical life and in the unpractical one. I love you, sweetie.

So we started in small steps and called Adam to see if they would still have me, cause it was a real possibility that I would call and there would be nothing but ashes at the bottom of a deep deep gorge. But the thing about Adam and Katie is their bridges have been fully burned, they are black and soot filled but they are still strong and for some reason they still support my weight as I continually cross back and forth. I guess old bridges are the strongest. So they took me back, and it turns out that a theater company had just signed the play and we're very interested in 'co-producing' and 'commercially investing' and all these other fancy phrases that meant they wanted to see our play succeed and go on and they were behind us!

Then I went to work, and this is the part I left out of the talk Lindsay and I had that night, I talked to my Regional Manager and told her much of what is written here and that I would like to transfer to the LA store for the 4 week run of the show...Her reaction? She was elated for me and e-mailed LA and with in 24 hours I had a position at a store 5,000 miles away with a team that I had never met doing something that will allow me to keep my benefits, further my own development, and let me be in this play I wrote then come back and slip back in to the same position that I love here in New York! I can't begin to tell you how blessed we've felt to work with a company who values the lives of it's associates to this degree. I was blown away!

SOOO, (Man, I thought this would be quick) I am heading to LA for the month of September and I want you to join me! The Play is called R.R.R.E.D and it's based on a statistic that states: Due to the globalization and continued intermixing of the worlds population the recessive Gene that causes Red Hair will be bread out and become extinct by the year 2100! Katie and I play hosts to a secret meeting held for all redheads (who are you, the audience, but we ask that you keep your non-red wigs on as not to draw too much attention) in a secret plight to perpetuate the Redheaded Species. It's brilliant!

Here's the commercial for the First Run:

So it runs August 28th~ September 28th Every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night at 8:00. You can get more information at rrredthemusical.com and adampictures.com and katiethompson.com

You can also watch clips on youtube just type in RRRED and watch what pops up, although, as the gist of the show is focused on Procreation it does get a bit graphic, so you've been warned.

One more thing: There are small rotating parts of "Redheaded Testimonials" that can be one show or a week of shows that should be played by the myriad of talented friends we have, so if you want to give a short monologue and sing one of Katie's incredible songs let us know...yes really I am talking to you, Joanie, Stacy, Sharon, Melinda, Jenny, Rachel, Michelle, Lisa, Hailey, Brett, Amelia, Matt, Jake, Curt, Chris and all others who sneak on here to see what I'm schlepping next, come be in the next big thing! Just let us know and Katie will whip out the most amazing song you've ever sung, put it in your key and watch you go...After all, you've never been the kind of person who plays it safe.

Just give in and comment.

2008-07-19T08:49:00.003-05:00

Don't you guys think that Sean Hayes has some "intern" scouring the internet looking for random Sean Hayes stuff. If I was Sean Hayes I would. So... that probably means said sidekick has come across the following post and asked Mr. Hayes if it really went down like that. SO... If you are either Sean Hayes or his Lackey, Please indulge us all with a comment confirming the facts of the nights festivities and we shall call it good.

~P

So we never told you...

2008-07-16T16:13:00.011-05:00

It wasn't our plan to just put up pictures of Lindsay and have you critique. But you did and now you should know why you did.

Lindsay and I are friends with these people:

Nathan & Suzie

(I like this picture 'cause you don't see that Lindsay is using her red eye mind power to make them look this well and put together. You can see that when you look at the whole picture.)

(Here.)

He is currently Starring in this play on Broadway:

(and by starring we mean starring in the ensemble, (and we really did just watch him the whole time he was on stage... and he was on stage a LOT!) and by Broadway we mean NY City Center, which for all you who don't know...well then... you couldn't tell the difference.)

The Play Bill... (pictured here.)
Says that the stars were Sean Hayes, (Jack, from Will & Grace)

(pictured here with Lindsay)

and Jane Krakowski (Jenna, from 30 Rock)

(Pictured here with all of us but Suzie... but we did get Jane's real nice parents in the shot...which is fine 'cause some times Suzie can look like this:)

It really was such an amazing night and we felt very busy and important the whole event. The highlight for me was re-meeting Sean Hayes. I say 're-meet' because Sean and I have hung out a lot...well, once really...and he didn't ever see me.

Long ago, Lindsay and I were with our friend Adam (who can look like this: )

(But usually looks like this:)

The three of us were at the Grove, an outdoor shopping complex which is the great grandfather of the Riverwoods, and we saw Sean walking to get an ice cream with his buddy. Well, Adam is very cool around stars and I am very Not. I broke into a full sprint as Lindsay and Adam cheered me on calling, "No! No! No! Patrick Don't!" As I got closer to Mr. Hayes I realized I didn't really have a plan, so this is what I did. I got in line for ice cream right behind him and then started very slowly to inch as close to him as I could--surely if I got close enough we would become fast friends and we would laugh about the time Sean found me curled up like a Mongoose on his back. I have to say that I got VERY close. And then I did the only thing one could do from such an insanely close position... I smelled. I took a good whiff and walked away.

I had all but forgotten this (except for every day of my life) when I was in line to re-meet the formerly smelled.

"Do you think I should tell him that I smelled him?" I asked Lindsay, Nathan, and Suzie.

"No!" Said Lindsay.

"Do Not." Said Nathan.

"Wait...You smelled him?" said Suzie.

I knew that I had the thought that I wanted to think about wondering if I was going to tell him, but it was Nathan's show and I had once gone on a date with the girl from Major Dad and had prepped by reading her Bio on line and then told her facts about herself throughout the night. She never took my call again. So I would hate for Nathan to have to see Sean in the showers of the locker room and have to apologize for his psycho stalker friend. (I don't know if there're locker rooms in the back of a theater, but I couldn't risk it.) So I absolutely made up my mind not to say anything...until.

Sean: I like your suit.

Me: Yeah, Target. I got it from Target.

Sean: Really? Are you kidding?

Me: NOPE (kinda shouting) Target! 80 bucks! Who knew.

This was all fine as I did get the suit from Target and it was 80 bucks. But then he said, "Do I know you from somewhere? You seem kinda familiar. "

I closed my mouth as tight as I could but the words were falling all over each other scrambling up and out of my throat.

"Well, I may have snuck up behind you at the Grove in LA and smelled the back of your neck."

Sean: What?

Me: Yeah...smells the same.

At this point I was thinking, 'This is real cool. It's kinda funny and he doesn't seem to be armed.' but then I look at my wife and friends who's faces all were blank and round with dismay dripping off their chins and staining their carefully picked outfits.

Sean: So you just walked up behind me and went...(he wafted his hand toward his face as a chef who's just finished baking a cake.)

Me: Well, I was real close. I doubt I used my hands.

I think in the end he thought I was kidding him. He was so nice to us and (really) every person that wanted to talk to him. He would never think to run up and smell someone's neck and so we must be kidding him. He went on tell me I should be a writer and Nathan told him I was. (what?! I'm writing this, aren't I?) But then he was swept up by other neck sniffing fans and I was brushed aside.

I've yet to hear from him. Nathan still goes to work, so I doubt Sean Hayes is dead, but I've yet to hear from him.

While Sean didn't invite us all to come over and hang out at his two floor apartment in SoHo, I did get to go home with my beautiful wife (who wore the Orange dress and was literally turning heads every where we went that night cause she looked like this:)

(That's Suzie's eye in the upper right.)

And I went home with our Great Friends, who let us join them on this wonderful night that Lindsay and I (and Sean) will remember forever.

And Nathan and Suzie will be remembered as looking like this:

And a little of this:

Whad Ya Think?

2008-07-10T12:13:00.001-05:00

Someone for Summer.

2008-07-09T09:40:00.003-05:00

I fear our blog has become boring and, worse, stagnant. But we have the wonderful privilege of living in a place that our people want to come to, and so, when summer comes and there is time to leave, people do.

My youngest brother and his wife came to take in New York this week and were a host's dream. We came home early, slept in late, wandered if we wanted to, saw what was presented to us, but never felt pressed to seek much out.

Also, there was much shopping.

Shopping was the lead but it was supported by a slew of supporting roles, i.e., the Zoo, Chocolate, Rain, BBQs, BBQs in the Rain, Doughnuts, Home Made Thai Food, Ozzie, Walking, Caribbean Food, Tiger Spat, Testimony Meeting, Unused Umbrellas, Shoes, No Fire Works, Waitress, Posing Monkeys, The PATH, Shoes, Baby Clothes, Friends, and Family. It was Perfect.

Mallory is expecting her first child and she trounced around the city with the greatest of ease. My first endeavor to this city was tucked sweetly in my own mothers womb, and I feel it's when my love for the world's cities began...well, probably not really, but I did come here in my mom's belly and I did spend most of my adolescence scheming my return. So who are you to tell me it didn't happen while my family walked around commenting on how dangerous and filthy the city is?

I like to imagine that picture: My Grandparents and Parents walking in a heard, clad in 70's fashions, all gripping each other and the two older boys, no one looking up as one eye is on the kids and the other on the wallet, while all round them people pass and bump and swear. All the while my ears pressed firmly to the edge of my abode, watching red-orange shapes silhouetted as my vessel turns into the sun. It was there I formed my life's aspirations. Certainly, I became contented to live in tight quarters, and sing like a crazy person, and relax to the rhythm of the subway. Yes, yes, I'm sure it was then and not the TV and Movies and Books that put the City as the only suitable backdrop for life's adventures. No, mine was mingled with the preexistence, a destiny to be fulfilled, a life to be conquered!

It would also explain the undying need to be next to my Mother. (sigh)

~P

Shots from Our Garden on Garden Street...

2008-06-26T11:27:00.006-05:00

Every Winter we decide to move. Our place is too small and there is sure to be some tempting 3 bedroom with a pool and a gym tucked closer to the PATH for less money.

But each Spring...

Green creeps up and over on to our deck. And flowers we've optimistically planted ...

Surprise us with endurance.

And the stairs into the Garden invite and remind, 'This is where you are, and this is where you belong.'

These are a few shots I collected today from, what will continue to remain, our own back yard.

Roadtrip.

2008-06-25T17:23:00.002-05:00

After my aunts left New York, my little brother Seth came out, and we drove upstate, returning to Niagara Falls and Palmyra. It was a terrific trip, made better by excellent company. We rented a car, which we were all a little worried about--I mean, we all enjoy each other's company, but it's been a long time since we embarked upon a roadtrip together. We got a GPS system for the car and decided to just wander, stopping wherever struck our fancy. Luckily for us, fancy struck a lot of interesting places, including Woodstock, NY.

So, funny story about Woodstock. It's not actually where the famed concert took place. Apparently, the concert was supposed to happen there, but they didn't have a space big enough. So, some crazy kid convinced his father (who lived in a town 60 miles away) to let them hold the concert in his field. So, that's what they did, but they liked the name Woodstock so well, they decided to keep it. Interestingly enough, the fact that the concert didn't happen there hasn't prevented loads of people (read: hippies) from visiting there, including this lady:
Now, if you look closely, you will realize that she is sporting a very respectable goatee. Only in Woodstock, folks!

In between Woodstock and Niagara, there was much sleeping, especially by Scout. He was plum tuckered out by the long drive, as you can see. I got a fair amount of sleeping in as well, I'm not gonna deny it.

Along the way, we also stopped at several antique stores (most of which were closed) and somehow happened upon a Revolutionary War site. The site was fine, but what was really exciting was the creepy woods that surrounded us. They were definitely Watcher in the Woods-type woods, made exponentially creepier by the presence of giant spiderweb nests of death on many of the trees.

Luckily, we didn't encounter any of what was inside said nests, but we did get a little lost in the woods. It was scary and exciting.

Finally, we made it to Niagara and promptly went to bed. The next day, we headed out to see the falls, and it was a stunning show indeed, as evidenced by our many wonderous looks:

A terrific time was had by all, except for Scout. He had to stay in the car.

After we visited the Falls, we set about finding more antique stores (for some reason, this was a most sought after activity in this group). Upon arriving in Rochester, we typed "Antique Stores" into the GPS and Edna, our very unpleasant navigator, kept sending us to people's houses. I am fairly certain that theses people were not all named "Antique," and that Edna was acting out some kind of internal technological aggression. Finally, we found a bizarre antiques "mall," which was a cross between The Quilted Bear and an old lady's yard sale, only bigger. Much, much bigger. There were all sorts of treasures to be found there, but most valuable of all was the art we created ourselves in a partially decorated booth:

The next day, we headed out to Palmyra to take in the church sites. This time we did it right, though, skipping through the long pre-recorded exhibits (the Dead Sea Scrolls) and going straight for the good stuff.

We spent quite a while in the Grove, at the shop where the Book of Mormon was printed, and at the two Smith farms, the first of which Seth was almost too tall for:

All in all, it was a delightful, peaceful trip that reminded me just how lucky I am to have a family that I not only love, but that I enjoy spending time with (even time in a car).

~L

Out from the past...

2008-06-22T22:48:00.004-05:00

When surfing the web, be careful. Be careful.

DOKT: Back from the Dead

~P

A Day for Dads

2008-06-14T22:55:00.005-05:00

Happy Father's day to two particularly shining, stellar examples of the genre:

Clarence B. Kelland once said "My father didn't tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it." This quotation perfectly applies both to my relationship with my father and Patrick's with his -- many of our best qualities we learned not because our fathers told us how to live, but because they showed us.

So, to Colby and John: we love you!

~L

The Aunts take Manhattan

2008-06-12T09:58:00.013-05:00

So Josh is right. I am lazy, and I ain't got no alibi. But I have reason to be lazy this week: we just finished having 2 1/2 weeks of guests in our funky New York life! We were pretty much 24-hour party people. There is a small qualification to make about all these guests--they are all related to me. Every year, my family plans and executes an extended vacation that begins in New York City and often ventures into other neighboring areas. Last year it was Washington, DC; this year it was a return to Palmyra and Niagara Falls.

This year's trip began with my sister Haylee,

my Mom (on right), and her two sisters Gina (center) & Julie (left)

arriving on our doorstep at about 11:45 PM on a Thursday night. From there on, our adventures included a trip out to Ellis Island and the Statue (which we've never done before...I liked the museum), dancing and dinner at a sidewalk cafe in Little Italy, chocolate overload at Max Brenner, delicious Dominican food at El Malecon, dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum (where we naturally underpaid), and, finally, Central Park, where I took a series of photos which my aunt Gina said made it look like I was the gimpy friend in an after-school special, and they had to take me out with them to fulfill a personal progress goal in Young Women's. Whew, that was a long sentence! Well, gentle readers, if you come visit us in New York, you will get a long sentence of your own on this illustrious blog.

Hearkening back to my earlier confession that I am, indeed, lazy, when we were at the Natural History Museum, we had to take pictures of all the characters in the movie Night at the Museum so Gina could take them home to her kids, Gabi and Kai. After spending two hours in the museum, we were too tired and L-A-Z-Y to walk up more flights of stairs to finish the photo list, so we just took photographs of the pictures on the wall map. Who can tell? Not me, that's for sure (observe photo at left).

Another highlight was a bizarre festival that had shut down Little Italy, allowing revelers to walk wantonly through the middle of the streets without a care and shop owners and restauranteurs to fully take over the sidewalks. In the midst of the parades celebrating some monk-looking individual (it was the Feast of Saint so-and-so), there was gelato aplenty, carnival games, and, for some bizarre reason, a really bad rag-tag band that had taken over a parking lot and was giving a concert. Now, the members of the band did not, individually, seem so bad. But the combination of them all created a horrifying cacophony of ungodly sound (most inappropriate at a saint's feast). But people started dancing, and what could I, as a true drama geek, do? Dance, of course! With my aunt Gina and this guy:Don't I look real comfortable having a picture taken with this stranger? Anyway, it was fun, magical, and a little Italian.

This trip also included our yearly pilgrimage to Chinatown to buy cheap knockoff goods. But this somehow lacked some of its past magic. Perhaps it was when a shopkeeper told me and my sister to move away from the sunglasses and let other people have a turn looking (we are not large girls and it was a very large wall of sunglasses. Plus, we had only been looking at them for about 10 minutes. Plus, we were just about to buy three pairs. You can bet we didn't!). Or maybe it was when another shopkeeper pushed Haylee away from the front of the booth. But probably it was when that same woman approached my aunt Julie. Julie is a rather no-nonsense woman who doesn't really care for Chinatown all that much. When Julie told the lady she didn't want to buy anything, the lady replied, "I don't want you to buy! You move!" A few minutes later, another seller approached Julie. The previous lady warned him off: "Don't sell to her! She crazy!"

Luckily, we got away from the crazy in Central Park, where we relaxed on the Bethesda Fountain and watched Thoth in the distance. It was a lovely end to a stupendous visit.

Sadly, after only four days, the aunts had to go home. But don't you worry, gentle readers! We just traded them for my little brother Seth

and headed up north to Niagara Falls and Palmyra, a post for another day...

~L

Meanwhile, on Eric's Page...

2008-06-09T21:49:00.002-05:00

So we are getting right back to blogging this week, I promise!

But, in the meantime, check out our NYC exploits with our friend Eric here in his very funny column "Snide Remarks."

~L

While you wait.

2008-06-01T22:05:00.001-05:00

Go Green. Then stay there.

An Excuse

2008-05-25T23:32:00.004-05:00

Sorry everyone, we have been entertaining the masses (Lindsay's family) out here in the big bad city. As per our yearly tradition, they will be here for the next two weeks--and we will probably not be blogging. But then, the second week of June, summer blogging fun will ensue! Stay cool, and we'll talk to you soon...

The Good and the Bad.

2008-05-15T15:48:00.013-05:00

I feel that when I sit down to blog I only want to blog about how sweet my life is and how I'm real lucky and you all should sit at your houses and read about my way cool life then post a comment agreeing with me. That's what I feel when I sit down to blog. But this past post, with Lindsay's super funny 'I'm not Funny' picture has made me think perhaps this time I will post some of our less pretty pictures so you can see what really goes on on Garden Street.

So, I'll tell you, I went through, like, 300 pictures and I have WAY more bad pictures than my wife! And even some of these that I found are like, 'Oh she has a pig nose on...but for a pig, not that bad.'

So, I guess you and I are all thinking the same thing... Lindsay knows how to use the digital camera better then me.

Or does she?

So there's my wife.

2008-05-07T09:40:00.001-05:00

Lindsay doesn't think she's funny. But she is. She thinks I'm the funny one. I am. But what she doesn't know about funny people is that they really only respect other funny people. I could never have married a non-funny person (we call you "Normals"). Lindsay has this way of tricking people into thinking that she is all business. My newest sister in law Mallory (who won the Letter Mug) said after spending the week with us in New York: 'I always knew that it takes a certain kind of woman to love a Livingston man, and now I've seen that Lindsay is that kind of woman.'

She's funny. I think it gets buried under her wealth of other qualities, but there, nestled under brilliant and stunning, is funny. And funny has the ability to push down brilliant and stunning and rise to the top! Never is this more obvious then when she does...' The Dance.' She has 'The Dance' in her quiver and she knows when to use it. I'm sorry to say that usually 'The Dance' is preformed while barely clothed--but it has the ability to transcend even the thickest of coverings. I could not begin to describe 'The Dance' anymore than one could explain chartreuse to a blind man. But know this: whatever misconceptions you may have about Lindsay's grace and urbanity she can , at any time, shed the confines of dignity and crack her limbs into paper-piercing angles and flap the unsuspecting extremities with the conviction and determination of a drowning ferret.

This is not to say that she can't dance. We've gone dancing more than once and she glides across a ballroom (cultural hall) with the greatest of ease. No, if she just couldn't dance then it would not be funny--far from it...far, far from it. But the fact is, she knows she has it and that it's to her contrary and she uses her talent for the amusement of others.

I fear I've painted a picture of Lindsay dressed only in seven veils, dancing for me while I clap like a child, but more accurately, I see myself as the ghost of Christmas past, Fat and Jolly atop of pile of fruit and turkey legs , braying loudly as my favorite mute wood nymph tells the story of her family's journey through the tempest of electro-shock therapy. That, I feel, is a more accurate, if not specific, picture.

I really could go on and on about jokes made impeccably, or wit displayed with perfect awareness of human nuance. But why should I have all the fun? You all know her well and nothing picks up a drooping spirit like a gathering of friends commenting on the many times you've made others smile. So, without putting too much though into it, recount a funny moment you and Lindsay have shared. I would love to hear them and she could use the reminder 'lest she hangs up her dancing shoes for good.

~P

Up Up and Away!

2008-05-01T17:46:00.003-05:00

So there really isn't a great reason to have taken so long between posts...but for this one, I have been promoted. Yup, I have been working my guts out and for good reason: about 2 weeks ago the powers that be offered me a promotion to be the Department Manager in Home at the SoHo Store. It was good and I was happy. They also informed me that I was on track to be the next Assistant Store Manager (which is like 2nd in command of the store, the position I held with Pier 1 for years). Then came the day when I was called into the boss' office to be officially offered the new position and she informed me that "Things have changed..." (that's what they say before they fire you for wearing sneakers) "and we would like to offer you the Assistant Store Manager Position at the SoHo store. " It came with a sweet raise and the chance to work with a great new manager to make a change in this awesome store in a cool part of the city. It's really swanky and posh so I should fit right in. I am, however, sad to leave Rock Center for two reasons: One, I really love the people there. Two, I helped Amy Pohler get a dressing room, find a pair of pants (size 6, but she's prego so lay off), and I made her laugh when she said, "Thank you" and I said, "That's what I do." And she laughed and I farted inside.

Anyway, so that's my news and I'm sorry it's not clever or well-pictured but it's what I got.
So I will be better in the future, but in the meantime you should read Lindsay's LA post again--it was beautiful.

~P

City Collage: Los Angeles

2008-04-23T22:01:00.034-05:00

“I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.” ~Andy Warhol

So I've decided to begin a series of posts on cities that have figured into my life in complex ways. These may be cities I love, hate (though I can't think of any of those), or feel ambivalent about, but they are all cities that have, in some way, shaped the internal landscape of my imagination. I am not going to write about my experiences in these cities (usually), but how they exist in my mind.

If you were to ask Patrick what city has most completely consumed his fanciful daydreams, I am pretty sure he would say it was New York. I have an extremely difficult time deciding what city fills that role for me, since it has varied from time to time throughout my life. Therefore, I've decided to do a collection of posts about several cities. The textual/aural/visual collage format is such because I can't think of a better way to express the sensory overload of these cities and the ways in which they inhabit my waking fancy.

In spite of my inability to narrow my list of compelling cities, when I first conceived of this project I was consumed by thoughts of only one city: Los Angeles.

As you read this post about LA, I urge you to click the play button below for Ryan Adams' "La Cienega Just Smiled":

I've given this collage an accompanying playlist; if it offers nothing more inspiring, it certainly helps establish the mood of my Los Angeles.

Now, LA is not my favorite city in the world, by any stretch, nor is it where I've most enjoyed living. I suppose it probably does have the best weather of anywhere I've inhabited, but that's beyond the purview of this post. It's dirty, it's crowded, and it practically seethes with the desperation of unfulfilled yearning. The ostentatiousness and superficiality is overwhelming, and at times the pressure of an entire city at once striving for false promise can be crushing.

But when Los Angeles creeps into my mind, what creeps is not the concrete reality of living in it, but rather abstraction and color. These are usually the dripping, sun-drenched, molten colors of a smoggy dusk, best experienced as you drive around the bend of Sunset Boulevard where it meets La Cienega as the sun sets just past the hills (Beverly, of course). At this time of day, and in my imagination, Los Angeles looks like it is ablaze, the unabashed striving of its inhabitants fueling an unforgiving and constantly replenishing inferno.

This blaze then quietly slips into the purple depths of twilight, softening the harshness of day and sunset. Without the sun, LA seems to lose itself somewhat, the glaring brightness replaced with a balmy, gentle dusk.

After twilight, of course, comes night in LA. Now the colors shift to noir: chiaroscuro shadows playing tricks on the eye in each and every hidden, hedonistic corner of the city. At night, you almost feel as if you are in a pre-technicolor film, all the color leeched from the world leaving only an infinite palate of gray. This is a Los Angeles of loneliness and despair, of private eyes and femmes fatale, but it is a pleasingly aesthetic despair: even in sorrow and emptiness there resides the hope that this desperation may become a screenplay or a pilot or a novel.

LA Day: "No Blue Sky," The Thorns

For me, Los Angeles in the day loses all its color, all its mythology. Midday brings a garish brightness that blanches the pigment from the earth, leaving only a washed-out imprint of what is actually there, like when you close your eyes after looking at the sun too long and it leaves traces of light on the inside of your eyelids. This is the LA of beaches and summer and vacations, yes, but also suffocating smog and traffic and dusty, dirty desert.

In the end, it's hard for me to say what's so compelling about my imaginary Los Angeles. I think it is the paradox of the place, and how it embodies a sort of gorgeous melancholy. Perhaps, as Denise Hamilton claims, it is both "the seductive blur of artifice and reality, the possibility of shucking off the past like last year's frock and reinventing yourself beyond your wildest dreams" as well as "the desperation that descends when the dream goes sour, the duplicity that lurks behind the beauty, the rot of the jungle flowers, the riptides off the sugar sand beaches that carry away the unwary."

Either way, I hold Los Angeles close in the back of my mind.

~L

Amazingly Rare.

2008-04-21T20:57:00.003-05:00

I got this book.

It's way out of my league, but it is in the league I would like to be in.

It is beautiful. It chronicles the time of discovery when explorers headed out and found new places and in those places, new life. I have always loved beautiful things and have come to know that there are two kinds of art in the world: The art that inspires me to go and try something like it and the art that I look at and think, 'I could never do anything like that.' This book is the latter. How does a person could look at flower and tell his hand to do this...

What's more, these were scientists who were drawing to document the freshly found.

Often by memory.

They were seeing things that had never been seen by either science or art.

These insects are known as Lantern Flies because they gave off a bright flash of light. Maria Sibylla Merian (who drew this) said they were as light as a candle and strong enough to read a paper by. Scientists named them 'Fulgora' meaning 'Flash of Lightning' stemming from similar accounts. But European scientists who named them only had dead or 'ailing' specimens and never really got much light out of them.

Even more interesting is that NO ONE since has ever seen a light coming from these insects. Maria described a burst of flame out of the box that she kept several in and now...nothing.

That is both Rare and Amazing.

There are so many incredible paintings in here and I hope to learn all about them.

Like what's going on here?

I get that snakes are fighting, as I'm sure snakes would, but why has that poor frog given it all up and splayed himself out to watch the battle? And why doesn't his buddy there help him out? What's more, why did the artist choose to depict him that way? There is so much action going on what was it that made the artist think, 'That's it. Just like that. That is what this species of frog would look like in the presence of dueling serpents.'

I got this book from Anthropologie where it is on sale for $19.95 (plus my discount), so while it was not hard won, it still feels like a Rare and Amazing find.

There are a lot of things I'm leaving out, like it is written by David Attenborough (of Planet Earth fame) and has illustrations by Leonardo da Vinci, both of which deserve note but in the end it really is just drawings of spectacular things that are already out there. And (without getting too zealous) what is the more awesome creation:

The Big Crocodile Wraastling the Coral Snake?

Or, the hand that depicts it?

~p

Buffalo...really?

2008-04-16T21:05:00.004-05:00

Oh man, let me just say that if you ever want a great few days away, might I just suggest Buffalo, NY? Lindsay was invited to present a paper at a conference in this blessed city and Scout and I went along for the ride...the 11 hour ride. It could have taken 6, but thanks to a little invention called GPS we meandered up through the Catskills stopping in on whatever struck our fancy. Here are our highlights... it's kinda like we invited you in to our house and then set up the slide projector.

First up is 'Wings Castle'. Before they left, our friends Liz and Jared gave us a book of good little road trips to take in the New York area. This was one of the sights.

It was built by an artist couple from completely salvaged parts and was pretty sweet... and noble no doubt.

Before we got to Buffalo we stopped off here at the Phelps Hotel for dinner.

It was real good, and I got the Creamed Cod... 'cause I'm 80.

Buffalo was cold and close to Canada, neither of which I knew a week ago. This picture was taken at a park that me and Scout went while Lindsay presented her paper. We didn't go watch because she said she would present it to me for free. She hasn't.

Real cold but pretty pretty.

We did loads of cool stuff that I won't make you look at but it should be noted that we ate at real good places, saw two Frank Lloyd Wright homes that were in the area, and stayed in the greatest little Bed and Breakfast that could not have been nicer in both board and hospitality.

And then, for some reason, we went on this tour of Niagara Falls at night. It was a real dim idea. So very cold, a little rainy, misty, and you really can't see the falls so...? We did, however, learn that all this time we thought we were so cool living over here in America but you get to Niagara at night and you can tell right away--on our side: cold and wet, on the Canadian side: Rock Star Party Palace. You could practically hear the techno music thumping over the roar of the falls. I told Lindsay it was like Lehi's vision and we were stuck over here with the righteous.

That's Canada in the background.

On the way home we swung by Palmyra and boy-oh-boy did it show up to have its picture taken. The sky could not have been better if it had been pulled down as a back drop at Kiddie Kandids.

This is from the top of the Hill Cumorah.

A nice Mormon family took our picture in Jospeh's Bedroom of the Smiths little Log Cabin.

We look like a vision ourselves!

And this is the Sacred Grove as seen from the back of the Smith's house.

It really was beautiful, and what was going to be a two hour stop off turned into four with a planed trip back in 6 weeks.

All in all, a wonderful trip was made only more wonderful by the two sleeping passengers at my side as I drove back to Hoboken, grateful for monumental blessings...and small ones.

~P

A Blogging Apology

2008-04-10T16:29:00.002-05:00

Hello dear readers,

We're terribly sorry for the vast nothingness that has inhabited our blog the last couple of weeks. Patrick's been hard at work, and I had to plan and execute a graduate student conference at CUNY. None of this is a good excuse, but what can you do?

Tomorrow, we're off to Buffalo, where I will deliver a paper and we both will enjoy a little R&R. We shall report next week, when we will resume our normal (and more frequent) blogging habits.

~L

And What Are You Doing With Your Day?

2008-04-01T14:22:00.001-05:00

A Splendid Surprise.

2008-03-30T22:16:00.004-05:00

This past Thursday we had unexpected and wildly welcome visitors. Sharon and Fernando found themselves, quite unexpectedly, in the area. After one phone call went unanswered I received a message that could only be shared between long time and comfortable friends, informing me that they were at the moment of decision and wanted to come see us even if it meant sleeping Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Style (Head to Toe four to a bed like Charlie's Grandparents). 6 hours later, (and after one brief stint to what would have become the Ocean) they were on our couch and it was as if no time had past since our last face to face. (In actuality it had been years with one all too brief lunch last summer.)

I had the next day off of work (mostly) and I had the most wonderful day with one of my favorite couples.

We spent most of the day walking the city and seeing what ever popped in to our heads. We took a ferry and saw the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. We stopped in at Ground Zero and walked down Wall Street. We went to our favorite book store and picked up some great books for Miranda and Sammy. We went to FAO Swartz and took a walk through Central Park then down 5th Ave and the whole day began and ended at the Temple.

And We Ate.

At one point, the day had almost beat us down (we all were operating on 5 hours (if that) of sleep) and we went to a restaurant just for dessert, even though it was 4 in the afternoon and we had plans for dinner in 2 hours. We needed a Pick Me Up and it came looking like this...

And then it looked like this...

Which made us look like this...

It was a wonder filled day spent with long time and comfortable friends.

Lindsay had to be grown up and work and spent most of the day missing and being missed. Her only comfort was the promise of return trips to follow. But for now, I think back on what must have been an exhausting day for the Seminarios winding its way down in Central Park, as we talked under that cloud covered sky as if were a daily tradition, and I was grateful for friends like these.

~p

Uggh...

2008-03-29T20:59:00.002-05:00

So I was planning to write a really terrific post to begin my series on cities (a new feature for the blog), but I'm feeling like total CRAP, so I'm not going to. I'm not a very good sick person; I can't focus very well, and I can be pretty crabby. So I'm going to bed early tonight, with hopes that my head will feel neither quite so large nor quite so full in the morning.

On an interesting side note, when I typed "sick" into Google Image Search to try to find a little something to put at the top of this post, several pictures of Tom Cruise came up. Funny.

~L

This Is What I Came Up With.

2008-03-25T22:03:00.007-05:00

I'm sitting here trying to figure out what to blog about and nothing is coming...

Coming.

Once, when I worked at Blockbuster (I was around 17), I had the job of putting the letters on the marquee for the coming attractions, and I had finished it early in the afternoon. That night (or possibly two nights later), a woman came in and asked who was responsible for writing the marquee. Well, it was kind of a hard job 'cause the letters would fall off at the slightest wind or jiggle on my behalf, so for some reason I actually thought this woman was going to tell me what a great job I did (incidentally, people rarely comment on things that are right). Anyway, I had spelled 'Coming' as 'Comming,' and had to head out with my long rod with a suction cup on the end and face the wind.

I have always been bad at spelling. I got a 'D' in spelling in the 5th grade. I remember it clearly. I actually thought, 'Huh, I guess I can't spell.' It was like I was just in school to find out what my strengths were, and to then focus on them and shun the rest of it. (Eventually it all became 'the rest of it.') But I don't think you should get a 'D' in 5th grade. Even if you earn it. Come on, you're gonna hold back some kid 'cause he thinks 'very' has two R's? (I did...until Jr. High... I knew you could spell it with one 'R', but you also had the option of two if you needed it. I can't think of when that might help you. Or of another word that has options in its spelling... oh, wait: Theater.) I once had a girl friend who reads this blog (which narrows it down to three... and almost Stacy) who told me she loved the way I spelled 'While.' She didn't tell me I was spelling it wrong, but saw it as endearing. This has made me nervous any time I write the word.

I have always liked to write but hated to spell. It's just like Peanuts and Peanut Butter. I would say that Peanuts are my favorite nut, while, as a child, I hated Peanut Butter. But in my old age, I have learned that I really REALLY like CHUNKY Peanut Butter and could take or leave the creamy.

I have found that as I have gotten older, I love things that I once hated, or was supposed to hate. I had Brussels Sprouts for the first time in my life this past winter and they were show-stopping! I loved them. As a matter of fact, we got those Zip Lock Steamer Bags just so I could steam up some Brussels Sprouts and eat them, all by themselves.

I love those Zip Lock Steamer Bags. They are Great! It says right on the bag how long you put in a half a bag of Broccoli, or a whole bag of Peas. You do what it says, and Presto Stanley! You have yourself bright, green, crisp veggies in a matter of seconds.

Another incredible invention (and this is something I have actually wanted to Blog about for a while now) is this scrub brush from IKEA. This thing is 99 cents! And has fully changed the way we do our dishes. A few months ago you might have found me digging through dirty dishes, hunting for our filthy scrub brush, only to find out that my better half had put it under the sink (next to the Drain-O and Rat Poison) in order to keep it clean. Well, not any more, my friends. See that little circle on the tip? That is a suction cup (only now does it occur to me that this is a much smaller version of the tool I once used to misspell words on the Blockbuster marquee). This suction cup can support this guy so he stands on his own, next to the cold water knob on top of the sink. I can ALWAYS find it, andit is no longer damp and filled with smutch. When I need it, I just reach out and there it is, dry and ready for work. And for 99 cents! I told Lindsay that the next time we are at IKEA we are picking up six...or ten. If I lived closer to an IKEA I would do a give away for one of these dish washing MIRACLES. You know what... plan on it. I'll make Suzie and Nathan take me over to the KEA and we'll have a 'home cleaning post' give away. So start thinking.

Once, when I worked at the Barnes and Noble Cafe, I invented a drink called a 'Miracle.' It was mostly just iced Chocolate Milk with a dash of Hazelnut syrup, but I loved them. I loved them because I loved the idea of people walking up and asking me for a Miracle. Which they never did, of course. I never wrote it on the chalkboard menu. I didn't think I could spell 'Miracle.' And besides, what what would you charge for one?

It's Saturday.

2008-03-22T14:30:00.006-05:00

Well, the drawing is over (Congrats to the Winner!) and we have the whole weekend off, but didn't really want to leave the house. Yesterday after work we went to the MET and looked at the new Costume Institute exhibit (Lovely), and took a walk through Central Park (Lovely but for the wind). So, this morning we could see the day before us and it was shaping up to be a very grown-up Saturday. A bit of cleaning, a dash of dishes, walking the dog, and a smidgen of shopping (grocery, not the fun kind.) I am like an eight year old and have to be told that no one enjoys doing these things but they have to be done. (Peter Pan and Wendy complexes abound at our house on the weekend. Feel free to close you openly shocked mouths.) But the topic of something creative was also discussed and finally it was decided that we should make art.
I had picked up some discarded canvases on one of my walks home and they have been sitting under the couch since. We had brought home a lot of stuff from our Euro trip and had not used (or even figured out how to use) these things. And so we pulled it all out sat down and our own little tables in the kitchen and whipped up these...

There was some talk, early on, about one artist being better than the other, but such discussion soon proved unfounded. They really turned out cool and not only do they remind us of our wonder-filled trip abroad (which we promise to stop talking about), but also of this lazy day before Easter when we spent time getting glue on our sleeves and bartering over who got which piece of memorabilia, and remembering that the best part of Europe was spending whole days in a place that we love, with the person that we love more. It sounds a lot like today. And so we walk the dog.

~p

And the Winner is...

2008-03-21T20:54:00.002-05:00

So what about you?

2008-03-18T22:09:00.007-05:00

Do you ever feel like you come here and it's just Patrick and Lindsay going on about themselves and how they think they're all cool and stuff? Well, now it's your turn. Probably the coolest thing about us is that we have wicked cool friends and family. And lately, we've had some really cool strangers pop in here as well, so we would like to hear from you, too...or two. (Not a lot of strangers... get it?)

So, I really wanted to come up with a question that would help us all get to know each other and let us feel comfortable commenting and looking at each others blogs or myspaces or online photographic portfolios. I scoured the internet (and by "scoured," I mean I googled "questions to get to know someone") and this is what I came up with:

'What is your favorite letter?'

Lindsay is in the bath right now reading something of importance; let's ask her first.

"Hey, babe?"

"Yeah?"

"What's your favorite letter?"

Without hardly a pause (do I ask her lots of random questions while she's bathing? Perhaps.):

"'L' of course."

"Why?"

"Llllindsay Lllivingston... What's your favorite letter?"

I'm gonna have to say that my favorite letter really is 'P'; I know, right? Kind of a let down. But I have a real memory of walking around my backyard when I was in elementary school thinking that 'P' wasn't a very good letter, I mean, come on...'P'...'Pee!' It's the only letter that is a word of something that comes out of you. Unless, I suppose, a Bee flew in your mouth and then you opened your mouth and let it fly back out. Or if you shoved a pea up your nose and then blew real hard and shot it out again...but even then, which is worse: 'Pee' or 'Nose Pea'?

But then I started thinking that not a lot of things start with 'P' and that kinda makes those of us that do sorta special. That day I adopted Penguins as my favorite animal because probably some elementary-aged penguin was walking around thinking that nothing really cool started with 'P' and so he probably knew how I was feeling. And maybe he picked 'Patricks' as his favorite animal, cause we both, you know, got it.

And so, on to you, gentle reader. Which letter is it? Let us all know.

AND!! As an extra incentive to really think about your answer (or to not think but a least comment) Lindsay and I will randomly pick (I'm sure a hat will be involved) one posted comment and send the winner ONE LETTER MUG with the subject of their comment right on the front it. We have our LETTER MUGS (Pictured above) and we love them. So good luck and go forth.

The winner will be chosen Friday Evening at 8:00 pm Eastern Standard Time.

~P & L