Category: birfday

Thhhhppppttth!

Yeah, yeah, I haven’t blogged in FOUR days.

I have no one but myself to blame.

Goals?

Ah, tttthpthhhht to that!

We don’t need no stinkin’ goals.

Ok yes, we do. Or we, ahem, I, tend to wander a little off course.

Anyhoo….

There is a lot going on in my little world these days. Details to come. But for now, suffice to say, it’s a good thing summer days run long, because I have a lot to try to cram into those daylight hours!

By the by, thanks to the good people at the San Francisco Zoo (follow them on Twitter! @sfzoo) for the fun this past weekend!

We celebrated the first birthday of my littlest goddaughter in style!

I’ll post a picture of her adorable self, but I have to ask her parents permission first!

I am sooo, like, you know, literate!

For my recently celebrated birthday, The Good Man scored me a most awesome present.

I gots me a Kindle!

Oh my stars and bars, how I love that Kindle.

We’d had a lot of philosophical talks over Sunday morning breakfast about iPad vs Kindle and what did we *really* want from such a device.

I thought it was all idle chatter until a Kindle showed up under all that wrapping paper.

Fabulous!

So, being the cheapy cheaperson that I am, I immediately went to the free section of the Kindle store on Amazon, and began downloading my bootie off.

I did pay for a couple books that’d I’d wanted, like the new Jeannette Walls book, “Half Broke Horses” (a five star recommend from me! This and her first book “The Glass Castle“), but mostly I downloaded the free stuff.

There are a few for free trashy romance novels in there. I downloaded a couple but I doubt I’ll get to them.

The biggest portion included in the free section are books that are in the public domain, meaning their copyright has expired.

I guess anything published prior to 1930 is now public domain. There are quite a few of the classics in the free collection.

Let’s be honest here, I wasn’t exposed to a lot of the classics during the course of my education. Ok, some of the basics. “To Kill a Mockingbird” was on the list. “Grapes of Wrath” (haaate it!) was a forced read. And there was also a lot of bits and bites, but not full books. No “Scarlet Letter” or “Moby Dick” made it across my transom.

On the other hand, The Good Man has read almost all of the classics, many more than once, and it’s no wonder he’s so much more well spoken and intelligent than me.

But! The Kindle may just even out the game.

I have things like “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “The Jungle Book” and “The Last of the Mohicans” and “Pride and Prejudice” to name just a few that are loaded up and ready for me to get into.

I also have beautiful classic books that I have already read like “Red Badge of Courage” and “The Secret Garden” and “The Velveteen Rabbit” on the Kindle. They are like old friends, lost to the sands of time, who have returned to me.

My only issue is that sometimes I have a hard time reading the classics. The language or style can be tough.

I do love the Kindle’s in line dictionary that makes looking up tough words a snap.

But all the Oxford English Dictionaries in the world can’t help me get around some of the archaic language.

Right now, The Good Man and I are taking on our latest book club title. It is just us in our book club. We read together and then discuss.

Currently we are reading “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde. The Good Man is a confirmed Wilde fan. Until I got the Kindle last month, I’d read zero Wilde. I started with the play “The Importance of Being Earnest” and really enjoyed it.

But I’m finding ol’ Dorian Gray to be a bit of a slog. All the reasons that The Good Man likes it, the deep thought and philosophizing…well, that just makes me ape sh*t. I want some story to move the thing along!

I’m doin’ it. I’m chugging though the pages. Currently about halfway done. The story part of the story is really fascinating. Well drawn characters and quotable pithy sayings.

But the expository pieces that run for pages and pages are about to make me insane. I *know* that’s why people love Wilde and I *get* that he was a great thinker and artist of his time.

But damnit! I’m just a girl who likes a little Louis L’Amour sprinkled in her day. There is a cowboy, he fights another cowboy over stolen cattle or water rights, and then gets the girl. The end.

I know, I know. This high-minded literature stuff is good for me.

And I really am enjoying it.

Tell me, what do YOU make of: “But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail.”

I spent a while working on just that one sentence. I get it now, but my brain is tired.

Maybe wearing out the ol’ brain on classic literature will help stave off dementia. It’s a nice thought, anyway.

Are you there, baklava? It’s me, Karen

You know, I’m really very spoiled. Terribly so, and I must work to not let it all go to my head.

But, I must also say…I deserve a little spoiling now and again…

Like, say, around the celebrations of my birth? Yes. Always a good time to spoil me rotten, and my wonderful mom-in-law held nothing back.

In fact, Sunday was a darn good day in my life.

The day started with the opening of Localvision 2010, a photography exhibition. I was invited to add a photo to the event, and was totally geeked out by the first real gallery showing of my photography.

The Good Man and his mom went along with me to be my entourage for the fun.

It was really heady to see my framed print on the wall and to see people looking at it and talking about their impressions of the image. It pretty much made we want to go hide in the bathroom for the duration. But I held strong.

After the gallery opening, we went to my mom-in-law’s place for dinner.

And oh what a dinner.

For appetizers, there was guacamole (yum!) and Italian salami, and olive and feta cheese and oh my!

I was already starting to fill up.

But then, oh then…….

That amazing cook made me chopped chicken livers. Fresh! From scratch! I saw the actual raw livers before the magic began!

Oh my heavenly days! My love of da liver is well documented.

A whole bowl of homemade liver-y delight! All for me me me me!

Whooooo! I get dizzy just thinking about it. It was the best chopped liver ever in my history.

I almost wept. I really did. It was a brown lump of heaven on a cracker.

If loving cooked chopped organ meat is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

As I surrounded the bowl, my husband had to remind me that I could take some home, I wasn’t required to eat it all there. Seriously, I was afraid someone would take it away from me!

But there was more!

Succulent chicken for dinner with the most delicate and tasty potatoes on the side.

And then….

Oh then….

Homemade baklava for dessert.

For me! Me me me me me!

Ok, I shared the baklava with The Good Man since he’ll eat it (and not liver).

But damn!

I loved my multicultural dinner (Mexican, Greek, Italian, Jewish, etc). I felt so incredibly spoiled and it was one of the best birthday presents EVER!

Whoo.

Today I might need to take a walk and burn a calorie or two. I may have overindulged just a skosh.

And that baklava in my ‘fridge. It calls to me. Sings to me. Beckons me to come and sample of the tasty goodness inside.

I. Can’t. Resist.

The chicken liver is already gone. I couldn’t resist it so much I had it for breakfast, lunch and dinner and every snack in between.

*burp*

Feliz Cumpleaños para me!

The things that stick with you

Yesterday, in celebration of my mom-in-law’s fabulous birthday, the three of us (The mom-in-law, The Good Man and me), loaded up for a trip to a museum.

It’s become our tradition on birthdays. We have a day of culture in celebration. Memorable days are the best presents ever.

Yesterday’s destination was The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.

I was unsure what to expect when we got there. Would it be Jewish artifacts? Would it be art made by Jewish artists?

But I love museums, so I was totally in.

I was fully unprepared for what awaited me. There were just three main exhibits, as the museum itself isn’t that large.

The first exhibition we visited was called: “Our Struggle”: Responding to Mein Kampf

I’d read online how French painter and photographer, Linda Ellia, took on a project to have artists and non-artists alike transform the pages of Hitler’s nasty tome.

From the website:

“The book’s weight in her hands embodied the heaviness of the Holocaust; she felt compelled to respond. After personally altering a number of the pages to express her anger, she invited hundreds of people from all over the world to paint, draw, sculpt, and collage directly on the pages of the book.”

I could not have begun to imagine how tragic, and beautiful, and life affirming the exhibit would be.

There were over 600 altered pages on display, each one with a unique voice, a unique pain, a unique promise.

There were pages done by professional artists and pages done by random people that Linda met in coffee shops and on the street.

The works were sometimes simple and elegant, like the page where every word was carefully excised, leaving only a page of small rectangles. Or a page where every letter was made into a small figure of a person.

In some cases, the works were very extravagant, a train, in exquisite detail, done in watercolors, completely covering the page. Or an intricate felted and painted heart that was then sewed and stapled to the page.

Each page transformed the words of hate into a work of art. Truly, deeply, reclaiming those pages.

I don’t know if my description or the websites description even does the exhibit justice. It was one of the most profound things I have ever witnessed.

And this one will stick with me for a while.

(image of The Contemporary Jewish Museum, from their website)