Reading Nest

Last Disney Hurrah

2012-02-13T11:45:00.000-08:00

Last month we spent the day at California Adventures and Disneyland, as a sort of last hurrah. It wasn't our last visit ever, but it was our last time using our annual passes. They expired at the end of January, and we made an executive decision not to re-up this time. Time to take a little break from The Mouse. We have some big vacation plans in the works for the summer, and we also want to visit some of the other major amusement parks in SoCal, like Knotts Berry Farm, and/or Universal Studios.

So here's my last installment, at least for a good while, of Looking up at the Parks. We hadn't been on the big ferris wheel at the California Adventures boardwalk in a long time:

Out in the distance, in the area resembling a mini Grand Canyon, you can see the new Cars Land area that's set to open later this summer. (This area is closed off and unseen at ground level.) Like a lot of little boys, Tucker used to be such the Cars fanatic a few years ago. But now he's the ripe old age of seven, and by the time we visit Cars Land, he's going to be too big to fully enjoy it. (But I think it will still make him happy.)

These are the lights in the indoor waiting area for the Toy Story ride. It's supposed to look like an old-fashioned state fair.

Then we headed over to the Bug's Life area. It's surprising that this area has (so far) remained untouched and unchanged, because I've never considered A Bug's Life a very major Disney/Pixar film. But what do I know? Here I am, looking up at a clover, from a bug-size perspective:

Over at Disneyland proper, they had a small area celebrating Chinese New Year, near Small World.

Another project I need to tackle is printing out some of our oodles of Disney pictures that we've taken over the last couple of years. The kids have autograph books, with a slot to insert the photos you take with each character. Lily's book seriously need updating (and is full), and Tucker's is still empty of any photos!

Tucker put his book on my desk as little reminder: Get on it, woman.

I really should get on it.

Read about my other Disney re-caps in these posts:
Here We Go!
Looking Up At the Park
and Hidden Corners of the Park, written almost exactly a year ago, but it feels like forever.

Small Steps

2012-02-09T11:15:00.000-08:00

I'm linking up on Thurdays with Jules of Pancakes and French Fries, as part of her 2012 William Morris home series.

My projects this week are not very exciting, but the "After" effects of both make me happy. Small, inching steps are still forward progress, and I'm still crossing line items off of my 2012 master list.

The first one is a sequel to last week's project, of doing a thorough cleaning of my son's room. The worst part of his room I didn't even discuss last week, because I (actually, my husband) hadn't yet installed the fix.

But this weekend, we (again: husband) removed the old, filthy, nasty, broken metal blinds that came with the house when we bought it nearly eight years ago. Of course, they weren't always this bad. But after years of dusting and trying to push the grime around, I just gave up. Here is the before shot:

And no, that is not the golden glow of sunset shining through and making them that color. That is dirt, plain and simple How embarrassing. But there it was, one of those simple fixes that we didn't bother with and pushed to the backburner. Here is the bright and shiny after:

Woot woot! New blinds. Faux-wood, but so much better looking. Poor Tucker: his room has the worst views of any of the bedrooms. This is the largest window, and it looks right at the side of the neighbor's stucco.

Onto my next minor fix, which was to add some color to my office nook. I've had these photos by French photog Robert Doisneau framed for several months, and wanted to switch out the boring beige mats that came with the frames right away. I couldn't figure out what to use, all the stock mats were just too boring.

But recently I ordered wrapping paper of French paper ephemera from Paper Source, and used that. I'm not really a Francophile at all, even though I'd love to visit Paris someday (and Midnight in Paris was my favorite movie of last year). I just thought they were a good match for my writing ladies up there: one typing barefoot along the Seine, and another of Simone de Beauvoir at famed Parisian cafe, Deux Magots.

There are still more pops of color I need to add to this area (a slipcover for my white Parsons chair, more art on the neighboring walls) but now, looking up as I type at my desk, I don't have to be irked by those boring beige mats , and the reminder of another pesky, small project that I haven't gotten around to yet.

Two down. Many, many more to go....

Scaredy-Cat

2012-02-06T11:09:00.000-08:00

This is the Hello Kitty clock radio that sits on Lily's dresser. The dresser of a nine, almost ten year old girl, with it's sticky-sweet smelling body spritz, fruit-scented shower gels, and strewn hair clips.

Lily is not a fan of Hello Kitty; the clock was a gift from a well-meaning family member. Although as you can see, she is not at all averse to hot pink -- the color she expressly chose for her freshly re-painted bedroom. (The makeover of which I promise to share soon.)

This radio is very important to Lily, though, and to her well-being, and to her getting a good night's sleep. Because, you see, Lily is a scaredy-cat. By which I mean, she is a very anxious, high-strung child, the product of two anxious, hypochondriac, high-strung parents. Lily has problems getting to sleep at night, and staying asleep.

Enter the clock radio. Every night at lights-out time, the radio has to be turned on, and tuned to our local "smooth jazz" station. The radio has to be left on all night: if the volume goes too low, or the sketchy signal fades to static, she'll wake with a start, and come into our bedroom, waking us to say that "something was wrong with my radio, but I fixed it!"

It amuses me, to go into my daughter's room on my final bed-check before I turn in myself, and hear Kenny G. or Al Jarreau or some other silky, jazzy artist playing low on the Hello Kitty radio. Sometimes I'll linger in her room, by the glow of the nightlight, if it's a song I like, like "Baker Street," by the late, great Gerry Rafferty. I only linger if I can hear that she's truly, deeply asleep.

This is the routine in our house, at this point in time. I hope that someday Lily will be able to fall asleep without everything in her room having to be just-so: the radio, the blinds open to a certain crack, her night-light on, the closet very shut, her door very open. Someday. It isn't monsters she fears, or boogie-men in the closet, but a free-floating anxiety, the stresses and worries of a fourth-grader's day coming home to roost.

For now, we have nights like this weekend, when she woke us with a nightmare at 2am on Friday night. I couldn't fall back asleep that night until nearly 5 in the morning. I then had insomnia myself the next two nights, made worse last night by my awareness that Lily was awake too, reading late and restless and, I knew, struggling with herself not to creep into our room to bring us into the problem: I'm still awake.

As Mondays go, this is a tough one: grainy, bleary, headachy. Sleep tonight for all, let's hope.

Cleaning A Pack Rat's Room

2012-02-02T16:04:00.000-08:00

I'm linking up on Thursdays with Jules at Pancakes and French Fries as part of her 2012 William Morris Project series. (Also, apologies for the awful quality of the pictures in this post. I'm not even sure what happened, because if nothing else, this room gets a lot of natural light.)

Here's a story about a rat and an ostrich. The rat is specifically of the pack rat variety, and the ostrich is a fairly typical one, given to sticking its head in the sand as a means of both avoidance and denial.

Actually it's just a story of my son, Tucker the Pack Rat, and me, his mama, who is an Olympic champion at procrastination and avoidance of non-fun activities. Such as, say, cleaning the bedroom of a seven-year-old boy who loves to collect small items and twigs and pebbles and plastic twist-ties and detritus that others, not as sensitive to the delights of gutter diving, might just call trash.

He's an old soul, our Tucker. He's had extremely specific tastes and preferences since day one, and also a wide streak of sentimentality and nostalgia – things must be held onto, and preserved. Days and moments are precious, he understands, and so are desserts – he's been known to refuse to eat a favorite dessert until he's whipped out his camera and digitally preserved that treat for all time. He also has yet to fully embrace the fun of Legos, because for Tucker, each random construction is kin to a work of art and must not be torn down. EVER.

All of this is a very fancy way of me saying that his room, since well before the holidays hit, has been a HIGH HOLY MESS. And I have not wanted to deal with it, or clean it, or dust and vacuum it, until this week. I'm not sure what the problem is with my son's room – I'm very adverse to allowing this kind of clutter in other parts of the house. (The small playroom can get pretty cluttered, but I tackle it fairly quickly, as it's one of the first rooms you see on entering our home.) Something about Tucker's personality and intense attachment to his random bits just makes me want to shut the door and say uhhhh...maybe tomorrow? Or maybe I'm too tolerant of his collections, and another, more pragmatic mom would just sweep it all into the trash on a weekly basis, while he's away at school.

Anyway. I did it. This week I thoroughly cleaned his room. Let's see some before shots. Honestly, I don't think they quite do justice to the mess. Because every flat surface had literally layers of stuff: take one layer off, and another lurked below. Until you got to the final layer, which was DUST. His headboard, which has little openings and shelves,was a warren of tissues and stuffed animals and tiny toys and books.


I was going to make the bed first before I took the shot, then thought: REALLY?

This was the top of his toy storage bin.

Random business card he'd found & deemed worthy of saving.

My stategy is to put everything that's on the floor onto the bed.

If you look back at my master list of 2012 home goals, you'll see that I plan to buy a dresser for this room, hopefully a vintage piece. I've seen some nice ones on Craiglist for under $150. (I never replaced his old changing table/dresser after I sold it last year, and moved the Ikea unit up from the playroom.) Anyway, here is the cleaned room, after about a day and a half of work:


I moved the small bookshelf from the other wall to under the window.

Of course, once I get a dresser for the room, I'm then going to be forced into dealing with the sheer amount of STUFF and collections lurking inside the bins. Like this fiesta of Hotwheels:

It occurs to me that I could clean it out first, and then sell the Ikea unit on Craiglist to make money for the dresser. Awww, man. That sounds like work. For now, I think I'll be an ostrich about that issue, and just be happy that this room feels so fresh and open. The pack rat and the ostrich are both promising to maintain it to at least a semblance of this improved state.

Faith, Tested

2012-02-01T10:34:00.000-08:00

I've read and enjoyed each of Jennifer Haigh's three previous novels, starting back with Mrs. Kimble, a great book that I'd recommend to anyone. So it was with great anticipation that I picked up the paperback of her latest novel, Faith.

Faith centers on the sex-abuse scandals that rocked the Catholic church and the Boston archdiocese in 2002, focusing in on one particular local family, and a favorite son, who is a priest. Father Arthur Breen is the character at the heart of the story. As a child, raised by a single mother, he was a shy altar boy with an angelic voice and seemed destined from an early age to enter the clergy. At fifty, he is accused of molesting a child, and stripped of his church, his profession, and his entire identity, in the span of one afternoon.

Whether Art, as his family calls him, is guilty or not, is the core of the book. The narrator is his younger half-sister, Sheila, and through her, we explore the dynamics of her Irish working-class, deeply Catholic family. Sheila is a bit of a black sheep due to a fast divorce and her choice to live as a single woman in Chicago. She has enough distance from the family to view it objectively, or at least as objectively as any family member possibly can.

I found the book a little frustrating, not because it was a difficult or slow read, but because each character was kept so much at arm's length. By the end of the book, I felt that I did have a good understanding of just about everyone (except for the mother, Mary, "a lace-curtain Catholic," as Sheila describes her). It just seemed to take almost the entire length of the book to get there. That said, like all of Haigh's novels, this was an absorbing, very well-written book. Like Haigh's previous novels, Faith is definitely a character-driven work, and, through Sheila's narration, she explores and explains the motivations of each main player. Haigh also nails the wordless, strange maneuverings within every family, the minefields of resentment and other long-held emotions that we all have to pick our way through at times.

I admired (and related to) the great writing in this passage:

"Art's news was unspeakable, by him or by anyone. I didn't take this personally. If I felt excluded, injured and aggrieved, that bolus of emotion was at least familiar. It attends all my dealings with my family, and theirs with me. Every one of us limps from old wounds. In a perverse way, they entertain us. We poke each other's tender places with a stick."

Looking back over the course of the novel, I think another appropriate title might have been Pity, for each of the main characters, Art, Sheila, their brother Mike, the young mother Kath, and her son Aidan, all have reason to be pitied. They are all struggling with choices, with wounds, with circumstances that they have no control over. As a priest might say: just as we all are. And there is the great humanity, and grace, of this book.

Elsinore Cruise

2012-01-30T10:22:00.000-08:00

Scenes from a Sunday drive. We drove north on surface streets, avoiding the interstate, up to the town of Lake Elsinore. Lake Elsinore gets a bad rap. Maybe it's not unjustified, I don't know. Even before I moved here to Temecula, which is about 20 minutes south on the freeway, I knew about it's white-trash reputation.

I know people who call it "Lake Smell-somemore." (The lake itself doesn't smell.) I think the town is sort of charming in a rough and rowdy kind of way. There are a couple of seedy "casinos" near the lake, a few budget motels. The old downtown district has a few good antique shops, a few bars and eateries, and constantly resists attempts to gentrify it and make it a destination.

Whatever others might say, folks who live up on the hills overlooking the lake have an awfully nice view of water and trees and the mountains of the Cleveland National Forest to the northwest. Interesting fact: Elsinore is the largest freshwater lake in all of Southern California. Interesting, because it's a natural lake, not man-made or a reservoir, like so many other lakes in the region. Like most of the Inland Empire (as this region is nicknamed), it has it's share of suburban sprawl and cookie cutter tract houses. You can get a big house here for cheap, at least by SoCal real estate standards. But those neighborhoods are further north and east of the lake area. Around the lake, homes and apartments still have a lot of...character.

As we were driving through town, ZZ Top's "Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers" was on the radio. That felt pretty appropriate. Let's just say that the residents here seem a lot more laid back than us residents of prissy, uptight suburbia. After touring Elsinore (but not around the entire lake, which is a much longer drive), we headed north again to the little farm-stand shopping area called Tom's Farms. It was getting late. We had some mediocre Mexican food from one of it's two cafe's, then explored the Cheese & Wine shop. Which looked just like a Cheese & Wine shop should look:

We didn't buy anything here. But the kids begged for and purchased some candy at the very well-stocked candy and nut shop across the parking lot. When we came out, the sun had slipped behind the hills, and it was getting chilly.

Time to get back in our car and head down south for home, another weekend in the can.

Fine & Mellow

2012-01-27T11:02:00.000-08:00

Happy that it's Friday, happy it's almost the end of January. January feels so much like we're all just pacing around in the wings, eager to get onstage and finally get the real show started.

I've been trying to work on the house and get back into routine, but I've felt lazy and unmotivated for the most part. I think it's a long hangover from the hustle and bustle of Christmas. Just last week, I had to ask my husband to take apart the vacuum cleaner, which would turn on but not suck anything up; turns out, it was literally choking on too many needles from the Christmas tree, and had formed these odd, solid clumps of dust and needles that were like large owl pellets. Lovely. So there's my metaphor for the month of January: a solid mass of detritus, blocking the way to getting down to the real work.

So far, I'm doing okay on my resolution to dig in & embrace routine, though there have been a few hiccups. In my efforts to post more often and earn a wider audience, I've logged in lots and lots of time on the computer. Which I know is par for the course and part of the "work" to achieve my goals, but since it's hardly a real paying job, it's also hard not to look around some days and wonder....just what am I doing here, exactly? And why?

The above shot was taken on a sunny, warm day a couple weeks back. It was late afternoon and I'd been puttering around and listening to music. The waning sun was golden, there was a slight breeze in the palm and pepper trees out the window, and I felt compelled to lay down on my unmade bed and just soak it all up. I felt fine and mellow, and like a lucky person, to live where I do, to have the opportunities before me. To bask in warm winter air and wiggle my bare toes and listen to my children, laughing together downstairs.

Golden days, golden sunlight: January, come over here so I can give you a noogie. Ya ain't really so bad, after all.

Afflicted

2012-01-26T10:49:00.000-08:00

I love this print by talented illustrator Kris Atomic. I've suffered from this same affliction for nigh on decades, now.

When I was a teenager and young adult living at home, I had to listen to my dad asking me on a daily basis, "what's the matter?" and "what's wrong?" when I'd simply be sitting there, deep in thought or staring into space. I'm very thankful that my husband gets me, so I don't have to walk through my days assuring him that really, I'm just fine.

Now, that is not to say that I'm not ALSO a moody bitch on occasion, but even in my most giddy, or content, or happy moments, I still look pretty cranky. Sorry. Like the bottom of the prints says...

THIS IS JUST HOW MY FACE LOOKS. "Bitchface" print available for purchase here.

I'm A Rocker

2012-01-24T09:01:00.000-08:00

I'm rockin' some black Chucks these days. I've loved and worn Converse sneakers for years, but always in other colors. I've gone through a few pairs of my beloved burgundy, have some gray with pink accents that are getting pretty tired, and bought a bright aqua pair last spring. But black...oh, I've never felt quite hard-core and worthy enough for black. Until now. (It's not that I'm any more cool. Maybe it's that I don't even care if anybody else thinks it's cool, or tired, or even appropriate, for an over-40 mom to be sporting black sneakers.)

Black chucks are for rockers, for the skinny jeans and black leather set. I feel like I should be muttering, “Gabba Gabba Hey,” under my breath, a la The Ramones. (By the way, Gabba Gabba Hey is NOT the same as Yo Gabba Gabba, which is still pretty rock n' roll too, for kids programming.) Am I rocker? Hells yeah. At least I've thought of myself as such for a long, long time. (Granted, it didn't kick in until the passing of a certain obsession, #3 on this list.)

I don't know what kind of credentials I can pull out to prove my true rocker-status, except that I could show you a small photo album, filled with tickets stubs from rock concerts that testify to how I spent the majority of my time and money in my late teens/early 20s. I didn't attend college immediately after high school. Instead, I worked at a series of small office jobs, after putting in a year at a chain record store (anybody remember The Warehouse?). I was broke a lot, spending my paychecks on used records, new cassettes, used books, and lots of black clothing. (But not black Chucks!) And concert tickets. Lots and lots of concert tickets. When I was really broke, I'd take some of my lesser favorite albums and cassettes and sell them back to the cool record store in my neighborhood.

My husband and I both share a deep love of music (not always the same music) and find it pretty integral to daily life. I talk a little more about his (and our kids) current music taste here. We own a LOT of music, and except for the really old “standards” stuff (Sinatra, Dean Martin, etc.), I think most of the music we own could be classified as rockin'. Because in my book, Waylon Jennings rocked as hard and lived the lifestyle just as much as say, Ozzy did, back when he was snorting ants up his nose, along with cocaine.

I don't see very many live shows anymore. Tickets in general are just so, so much more expensive these days. And living out here in the sticks, it's hard to see a good live show without traveling into either San Diego or L.A., which in turn leads to questions on who/how/what to do with the children, and yadda to the yadda. Considerations that are NOT very rock n' roll at all. But because I grew up in L.A. county, I've seen shows at just about every major venue in the area. (First concert ever: Supertramp's farewell tour, at the The Forum. A friend's older brother had tickets. First concert where I paid for my own ticket: The Cult, at the Palladium in Hollywood.)

I don't smoke Marlboro 100's any more, don't hang out in scrappy dives playing (bad) pool any more. It's been years and years since I sidled up to some strange guy at the bar and flirted for a dollar, so I could play some good tunes on the jukebox (yes, yes I did that). If I went to a concert tomorrow, I don't even HAVE a lighter that I could hold aloft during “the slow, moving song.” ("FREE BIRD!")

But damn, I've got me some black sneakers. I'm hoping that sometime this year, I can attend a live show and hear some loud guitars and feel that drum beat pounding through my body, and get some beer spilled on my Chucks. Because it's important to have goals, y'all.

The Useful Hook

2012-01-19T10:46:00.000-08:00

I'm linking up on Thursdays with Jules at Pancakes and French Fries as part of her 2012 William Morris Project series.

The William Morris quote that inspired Jules' project is this: "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful." It's a good quote to live by, although I personally think one is a little off if you don't have at least one seriously junky junk-drawer, somewhere in your abode. It's like the Id of the home, or something.

My post for today is about a recent purchase that doesn't really meet the standard for "beautiful," but it's definitely proven to be useful, and is something we've needed for a long time. C'mon in to check it out:

So, you've come in the front door and are standing in my minuscule entry. You look around, it's your first time here. Living room is fairly tidy, but what is that, over on the couch? Let's get a little closer:

Oh look, a big pile of random jackets and sweaters. Can I take your jacket? Um, well, uh, just lay it right here on top of all the others.

Seriously. This has been our solution for a coat rack for years. It's the "coat-couch." Sometimes, it spills over across the room, onto the "coat chair." Now, I have a perfectly good closet right in my entryway. But when our family comes home from an outing, or from school, do we hang up our jackets/sweaters right away? Nope. Every one of us just throws our stuff on the couch. I usually let it build up for a couple days, before I get tired of looking at it and hang it all back up, grumbling under my breath why is it my job to deal with this crap?

I've looked online and in stores and on Craiglist for a stylish, affordable coat rack to put up for the winter/early spring months. Because honestly, here in Southern California, we don't need outerwear for most of the year. So damn if I'm going to spend a lot of money on a non-granny looking coat rack to use for only a few months. Enter my purchase from Target last week:

Ta-da!! For $17.99, I bought this over-the-door hook for the entry closet, and voila...

Jackets are hung up! Now, this is not supposed to mean that nothing will ever get properly hung up on a hanger, in a closet. Like the couch, the hooks are only to serve as a temporary way-station, for when we first come in the door. I'll probably still get cranky about putting them all away. Still, I was pretty happy to walk in my door this morning after walking my kids to school, and have a place to casually hang my jacket.

Another view of the entry. You can see that it's pretty tight quarters immediately inside the door. (There's another wall right beside that narrow window.) So perhaps my hook and the jackets hanging upon it are not the most beautiful things to look at. But it's definitely a better solution than watching that coat-pile, and my resentment toward it, growing larger until it reaches a tipping point. And in a few months, say by late spring, I can remove the hook and stow it in the closet until needed again in late fall. Or the hook might just prove to be so useful, that we'll use it all year long. Now, if only I can train my kids to actually use it!

Roaming: San Diego Getaway

2012-01-18T12:51:00.000-08:00

On New Year's Day, our family kicked off 2012 by driving down to San Diego for a 2-night getaway. This was an easy, fast trip for us. San Diego is barely an hour's drive south, so it was almost like a "stay-cation." Since we were taking my mom along (the trip was actually part of her Christmas gift), we didn't have any plans to go to the big tourist sites, like Sea World or LegoLand. But lots of fun was had by all, without any need for amusement parks.

We arrived late in the afternoon of the first, so the first night's stay was simply dinner out at a seafood restaurant and settling into our hotel on Shelter Island. In the morning, we took a quick drive through the Point Loma neighborhood and arrived at Cabrillo National Monument. I was really, really hoping to spot some whales (its their season to migrate off the coast toward Mexico), but it was too foggy. That white sheen in the right of the above photo isn't sunlight, but a big bank of thick fog that sat just off the coast.

After this, we got into the car and drove over to Coronado, specifially to check out the Hotel Del Coronado. I've seen plenty of photos of this grand old hotel, but none of us had ever been there. It was magnificent and old and all of the history and architecture made my heart beat fast with happiness.

Inside was a contrast to all the white buildings, with dark wood paneling on the wall and ceilings:

Really, it all seemed quite fabulous. But with an ocean-front room close to $400 a night, I can't see that we'll be checking in any time soon. Still, it was lovely to just walk around and soak it all up.

After the Del (and after letting the kids blow off some energy at Spreckles park a couple miles away), we headed to our next tourist destination: Old Town State Historic Park. Old Town has lots of adobe buildings dating back to the ranchero days, when California was still part of Mexico. There's also plenty of shops and eateries (especially Mexican restaurants, all claiming to have the biggest/best margaritas, burritos, home-made tortillas, etc.)

Lily and a very fake smile in Old Town. We closed out the day with dinner at an open-air Mexican restaurant, and the kids liked watching a performance of some ballet folklorico on a nearby stage. Next day, we checked out of our hotel and walked along the bayview strand, over to the small Shelter Island pier. As you can see by all these pictures, we lucked out with some glorious January weather.

We spent the rest of the day walking around ginormous, beautiful Balboa Park. I don't think my mother had ever been here before, and she was amazed at how big it is. We often go to the Ruben H. Fleet Science Museum, which is perfect for kids (lots of hands-on exhibits). But this time, we checked out the Air & Space Museum. Which was a lot of fun, but doesn't really warrant any pictures. Space and aviation: you get the idea.

Great trip, fast trip. Since the kids had three weeks of winter break this year, I was determined that we go somewhere. And I think its very auspicious indeed that we kicked off the first day of 2012 with a road trip. Bring 'em on!

Reading: The Gift of an Ordinary Day

2012-01-16T11:52:00.000-08:00

Last week I read The Gift of an Ordinary Day, by Katrina Kenison. I don't read a lot of what I consider “mothering memoirs,” just like I don't read a whole lot of “mommy blogs.” But I do read lots of lifestyle blogs by interesting women who happen to be mothers, and I consider this book to be in that same category – even if the book's subtitle is “A Mother's Memoir.” I recognized Kenison's name as the former series editor for the “Best American Short Story” annual anthologies, back when I used to be a serious student of the short story myself, and eagerly scooped up each volume. (Kenison was laid off from that job with just a phone call, as she explains in this book.)

Ordinary Day is a book of journeys and of deep changes within a family. It details the time from when her oldest son was about to enter high school, and she was suddenly seized by the idea to move out of their family's “upscale, well-groomed suburban neighborhood,” and move toward a slower and more rural way of life, and to also find a smaller, less intense high school to compliment her sons unique talents. I was instantly drawn into the narrative of their move from suburbs to country, as one of my own recurring fantasies is to own an old farmhouse, somewhere with a view of rolling hills and the sound of freight trains traveling miles across the land. I completely related with Kenison's description of her new ideal of a perfect home:

“a cottage with sloping wooden floors, a screen door that would bang shut and fasten with a hook, daisies in a mason jar on a big screened porch table, walls that could be whispered through, beds covered with faded quilts, afternoon light filtered through the pines.”

Oh yeah.

So the book is partly about the quest for a new home: buying a 200-year-old summer cottage in rural New Hampshire, living in it for one summer (and comforting the enraged tears of her younger son, upset at living in this terrible new place, so far from his old home and friends), then regretfully tearing it down and building a new, modest farmhouse on the site. (The new home took three years to complete, during which Kenison's family lived with her parents.) Concurrently, the book is also about her two sons, growing from sweet-cheeked, happy young children, into, well....teenagers. She describes one son at thirteen so vividly (surly, grunting, angry, refusing to wear anything but a baggy black hoodie sweatshirt) that I was compelled to put the book down and go plant a shower of kisses and snuggles on my own seven-year-old, sweet-cheeked boy.

Ordinary Day is also about the deep changes in this woman's life, as she finds her role as mother and nurturer shifting. She has to adjust to the “empty nest,” and cherishes the simple joys of just having dinner together around the table, as her son's orbits and interests grow increasingly wider and wider, moving them away from home as they become young men. She also has time now, time to sit and think and write, after being laid off after sixteen years from an editing job that also defined her.

This was a great book for me to read at the beginning of the new year. Fundamentally, this is a book about change, and finding grace, and home, right where you sit at any given moment. About a family and all the little moments we take for granted, in anticipation of the big ones.   Like the gift of all those hundreds of nights at our table, after dinner, when the kids eat dessert and are tired and silly and know that it's the wrap up of one more ordinary, average day:

Katrina Kenison has a very sophisticated web site and blog, where you watch her read an essay cobbled from sections of the book (have a Kleenex ready) or view a slideshow of the lovely, light-filled home they built (and the gorgeous views from the rolling front lawn).

Feathering The Nest in 2012

2012-01-12T12:15:00.000-08:00

Today I'm linking up with Jules of Pancakes & French Fries, for her William Morris Projectseries. (I've never been to a link party before. Hopefully, there's no lipstick on my teeth.) Each Thursday,Jules will be posting about a project, makeover or home DIY as shechecks off her list of goals for her home. You can read much more about that here, where she explains all. To that end, I've made myown list. I'm not a big list maker in general, but when it comesto feathering our nest, I always have a short liststashed away to remind myself where to spend the“nesting” money. But for 2012, inspired by Jules' own massivelist of goals and dreams for her home, I've gone through each room and area of my own house and come up with quite a list of things to tackle.

I've held myself in check and onlylisted actual goals for this year...this isn't by any means acomplete list of things that need to get done/repaired, nor does itinclude any “dream projects” (like replacing the carpets withhardwood, or building a deck off the master bedroom). And it doesn'tinclude the outside of our house, which requires another list entirely.

Living Room/Entry: Thefirst areas you see upon entering our home, the first impression ofour style. The living room is somewhat more formal, a sitting room,a library with a large wall unit of books. Big plans for the room this year:

Re-paint the room, changing out mutedblue paint for sapphire blue
Change out sheers/drapes withmatchstick blinds and new curtains
Possibly sell solid blue chair,replace with new white or vintage chair
Spray-paint frame on vintage Turnerprint
Repurpose a current rug, or buy newrug for under coffee table
Buy new table lamp

This is an old picture of the living room (I don't arrange furniture on the diagonal anymore), but I still own all these elements, and this is the current paint color & window treatment that I want to switch out.

Entry Way

Remove the pesky double shelves, as seen & discussed here.
Touch up paint from exposed shelfholes
Buy new, used or vintage chest ortable for entry area
Solve need for coat rack/hooks for oursweaters/ jackets – (right now they pile up on the couch until I get sick of them and hang them up.

The Family Room/Kitchen– The most active and used area of our home: cooking, meals,TV, homework, video gaming, reading, snuggling on the sectional: theheart of our home is in this one large space.

Great Room:

Replace old wooden blinds/add windowtreatments
Have the sectional professionallycleaned (find out if a foam-insert couch CAN be cleaned)
Replace entertainment center with avintage/mid-century console for the new TV
Paint the nook that will hold the newconsole
Buy a larger, 8x10 rug for the space(guilty of buying too-small rugs)
Buy new art for behind the couch
Add on to the gallery photo collectionon the Big Green Wall (see below)
New pillows for sectional
Replace cold-weather throw forsectional
Possibly replace sunburst mirror overfireplace with new art

Kitchen

Our kitchen is in pretty good shape,thanks to our Ikea remodel, seen here. It still could use a few things/repairs:

Repair/caulk the tiles behind thefaucet suffering some water damage
Better organization for paperflow/mail/etc.
Replace blinds/window treatments
Make a terrarium for the island
Buy pendant lighting for over thedining table
New napkin holder (!): A small thing,but I don't like the one we've used for years.

The Laundry Room: Ugh. Myleast favorite room in the house, because it's a tiny, dark closetwithout even a sink. Located off the kitchen and with a door into thegarage, the linoleum floor is often dirty and full of lint. Goal: make ithappier? Prettier? How about just cleaner?

Rug?
Artwork?
New Storage containers?

Kids Play Room

Organize/purge(never ending)
Hang Mary Blair postcard art from Disneyland
Hang some kids art

The UPSTAIRS:

Office Nook My work space atthe top of the stairs. Recent painting/re-do (you can see the bland "before" shots on this post) needsfinishing touches:

Buy mats for the black&white photo prints now hanging (pop of color)
New art work on bare wall to the left
Colorful slip-cover for chair
Buy or pick fresh flowers for my desk,all year

Master Bedroom: An elegant,cool retreat from the world outside. A (mostly) adults-only space.Over a year ago, we painted and restyled the room in a big overhaul,but it's still needing lots of finishing touches

Buy a true bedskirt ( long story behind the reason, butI've been using a king-size flat sheet as a bedskirt.)
Make & install wallpaper panelsfor the Big Gray Wall. (See Below) I bought a beautiful roll of Romo wallpaperon Ebay last year, and it's still sitting in my closet.
Art work and/or mirror
Small side table for the chair
Possible small/brass shelves for books& storage
New duvet cover, for shot of pattern &color
Purchase correct-sized shades forbedside lamps (current are too small)
New vintage clock! See photo at topof this post. It looks cute and retro, but I HATE this stupid, inaccurate, loud-ticking cheap thing.When it's wound up, I have to stick it in the drawer at night to maskthe ticking noise.

Lily's Room – Bedroomof my almost 10-year-old daughter. Recently had a major re-do last month into a big-girl/tween room. Needs finishing touches:

Shorter bookcase
Wall shelf for her Josef birthdaydolls/collections
Small shelf for her sleeping area
New desk lamp
Need pops of bright color to break upthe hot pink/black/white theme
Improve cheap ceiling light fixture that replaced her fan

Tucker's Room –Bedroom of my seven-year-old son, a collector of tiny insignificantobjects (read: trash) and champion pack rat.

CLEAN IT UP (currently a disaster)
Buy new, working blinds
Curtain or valance
Hang art work
Organize, organize, purge
Buy vintage dresser

Kids Bathroom: A place where the mirror is constantly streaked/spattered

Needs artwork
Switch out old, dusty wicker displayshelf
Hamper for towels
Clean out & organize under cabinet of old toddler bath supplies (Sniff!)

Upper Long Hallway:

Start work on the family photo gallerywall I keep wanting to do. Will include old photos of me and myhusband, extended family members, etc.

Office: aka The Cave, wheremy computer-geek husband works from home. Full of computers,monitors, and too much furniture. (Requires it's own AC system duringthe summer!)

None of my business. Although, Irecently had the idea the he should take the doors off of the closet and organize and utilize that area to work harder for the room. Andnext time he picks a paint color, I totally get veto power. (Current color: Suntan Pantyhose)

Whew! Okay, that's it. Although I'm sure I forgot quite a few things. But do yousee a theme here? Looks like I'm going to be spending a lot of timepicking out new window treatments and artwork this year. I don't know if I'll be able to participate and link-up with Jules every Thursday -- not many of my fixes and projects are cheap ones -- but then again, if I direct my cash and efforts wisely, I hope to check off most of these items by next December. Better get on it. Time is ticking...ticking loudly, like my stupid alarm clock.

Bookish Gifts

2012-01-11T11:14:00.000-08:00

My husband gave me some wonderfully bookish gifts this Christmas. In my stocking was the charm bracelet above, from Etsy shop A Likely Story. Thank goodness for online wish lists, as I'd added the bracelet a few months ago to a list, then nearly forgotten all about it.

Next is this pretty library mug, from Kate Spade for Lenox. Love it.

An occasional Friday-night outing for our family is heading over to our local Barnes & Noble after dinner. Standing in line to buy a few things, I spotted this book bag, designed by Jonathan Adler, and full of quotes from classic books. "I love that!" I told my husband. I also love that it's in one of my very favorite color combos, of turquoise and grass green.

Another item on my wish list was this book, Stealing Magnolias, by Debra Shriver. This coffee table book is a celebration of the French-influenced style of New Orleans. Not a travel book, it's more about the author's own home, and features lots of photos of monogrammed linens, antique china and drowsy courtyards. A great book for whiling away the time and dreaming my anywhere but here daydreams.

So, granted, three of the items were on wish lists, and the other I pretty much told my husband: "buy this for me." Still, I love and appreciate that he takes the time to research my lists, and listen to me, and look over my shoulder as I window shop. If he wants to keep on gifting me in the same vein, I welcome him to hack into my public library account and take care of my overdue library fines. The first outing for the new bookbag will be later today, when I return some seriously late books. Oh well. Somebody has to fund the place.

Digging Into A New Year

2012-01-09T11:42:00.000-08:00

This is me, celebrating my birthdaylast month at a newly-opened Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour. Farrell'swas a big part of my childhood – they used to have locations allover SoCal, including at the outdoor mall in Downey where my motherand her two sisters went shopping nearly every Saturday afternoon,back when I was a kid. At one end of the mall was a Farrell's, and I enjoyed many, many lunches there, eating grilled cheese sandwichesfollowed by their signature “Clown Sundae.” (One scoop of vanillasitting in fudge, 2 cherry halves for eyes, topped by a sugar conehat.) It didn't have to be an “occasion” to go – Isuppose it was my reward for being somewhat patient, somewhatwell-behaved, while watching my mom and aunts browse and try onclothes at The Broadway and all the little chain boutiques.

It's no accident that my first post ofthe new year features a candid photo of me. I don't really wantto talk about my birthday, or the gooey marshmallow sundae Icelebrated with, or my thoughts about being back insidea Farrell's again after so many years. (Let's just say: you can't go homeagain.)

I'm posting this candid, untouched shotof my shiny, happy, toothy self, because a) it's a shot of the real me, nota posed, this-is-me-looking-into-the-camera shot and b) itmakes me deeply uncomfortable to do so.

But that's what I hope to do this year,here on the blog, and also out in the world: be unapologeticallymyself, share my real self, be true to my deepest, authentic self. Even when, especially when, doing so makes me deeply uncomfortableand anxious.

I have big ambitions here on the blog,which I think and hope will also translate into fulfilling some of myother big ambitions. Namely, I intend to try to post at least threetimes a week. Now, that may seem a laughably easy resolution ifyou're a blogger who posts almost daily, but for me, that's a bigleap. Me, who half a year ago, was posting maybe once or twice permonth. For now, in my quest to stay authentic and only sharewhat truly engages me, three times a week should do (who knows,maybe my creativity will spring into gear, and I'll be overflowingwith ideas of things to talk about). And also, hopefully I will start to build a real readership, because most days, I feel I'm just talking into a microphone, into the overwhelming silence of the interwebs -- like "tap, tap, is thing working??"

But also: it's very, very hard for me to commit to a routine and stick withit. Not because I'm lazy, or flaky, or can't focus. I don't likeroutines because they scare me, they fill me with fear and anxiety. Sometime I think my whole philosophy can be summed up by these brieflines from Joni Mitchell's “Down to You:”

“Everything comes and goes/
Pleasure moves on too early and troubleleaves too slow
Just when you're thinking that you'vefinally got it made/
Bad news comes knocking, at your gardengate/
Knocking for you.”

Since I was just a little older than mydaughter is now, I've been living with fear. Bad news came knockingout of the blue, several times over during my early adolescent andteen years. Since then, I live a cringing sort of life, a life whereI'm afraid to truly exhale. The other shoe can drop at any time, man. I'm tightly coiled, gasp easily, jump a mile if a door slams. Mybody, my mind, is poised and waiting: What's next? Thefear of routine is built into me: If I dive into something, enterthe swim of life, become unconscious of just living, what will it bethat comes knocking to snap me out? So I stall. I procrastinate. Idawdle and circle and make plans to make plans. Between all that andraising two children, time slips away. And it's taken me all this time to figure out why I hate routines, why making lists and charting out the week ahead fills me with dread. Just figuring this out feel like such a breakthrough.

So. Begenerous. Share myself, when it makes me anxious and uneasy. Embracethe fear, invite it over for dinner. Wrestle around with it afterdessert. Take on some new routines, and stick to them, even if thenervous voice inside tells me to STOP DOING THAT, YOU ARE CALLING THEWOLVES TO YOUR DOOR. In short, it's time to dig in.

Withgusto.

Late December Sun

2011-12-30T11:28:00.000-08:00

Not to brag, but most years, Christmas is pretty spectacular here in Southern California. I know, I know, it doesn't look or feel anything like winter, or "Christmas", if you've grown up in other parts of the country. (Remember, Irving Berlin was inspired to write "White Christmas" while in L.A.) But I'm a native, so this is just par for the course. On the afternoon of the 25th, we went down to the park and basketball court right near our house to soak up some of that sunshine. The park and walkways were packed with parents and grandparents and kids: walking dogs, riding skateboard, trying out new toys.

This year, Santa brought Tucker a "Green Machine." Kinda like a Big Wheel, except that the hand steering & brakes let him "drift" and do spin-outs. He is getting so big. I admit to shedding a few tears a couple nights before Christmas. He recently turned seven, and this will very likely be the last year he still confesses to believing in the Big Man.

And don't even get me started on this one. She woke up on Christmas Eve morning feeling grumpy and off. All day long, my nine year old acted like she was fourteen. "I don't know why I'm feeling so grumpy," she said later that evening. Oh, my sweet girl: Welcome to my world.

I'll be taking a little blogging break for the next week or so. I'll be back after the kids return to school, but for now, it's time to soak up the sunshine, the lazy days of another week (!) of winter break, and maybe a little road trip. I'll see you on the other side...until then, Happy New Year!

Pink Socks and Black Veils

2011-12-27T12:37:00.000-08:00

Over the last few weeks, I'veslowly been making my way through Reading Lolita in Tehran. SubtitledA Memoir In Books, it recounts the author's days in the mid 1990s, when she hosted asmall salon of female students in her home in Iran, to read anddiscuss major works of Western literature. It also goes further backin time, to when she was a newly hired professor at the University ofTehran, during the heated early days of the cultural revolution inthe early 1980s.

Reading this book and its tales ofstudents and scholars murdered in the name of change, of young womentargeted and severely lashed for merely gathering together withoutmen present, or for not wearing the black veil, is a strange and bracing tonic during our Westernholiday season of excess.

Most heartbreaking is the way ordinarychoices, and ordinary joys, are stripped from the young people,especially the young women. Here's a passage about a student,targeted and shamed for wearing pink socks:

Manna had once written about a pairof pink socks for which she was reprimanded by the Muslim Students'Association. When she complained to a favorite professor, he startedteasing her about how she had already ensnared and trapped her man,Nima, and did not need pink socks to entrap him further.
[…] My generation complained of aloss, the void in our lives that was created when our past was stolenfrom us, making us exiles in our own country. Yet we had a past tocompare with the present; we had memories and images of what had beentaken away. But my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, filmsthey had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin. This generation had no past. Their memory was a half-articulateddesire, something they had never had. It was this lack, their senseof longing for the ordinary, taken-for-granted aspects of life, thatgave their words a certain luminous quality akin to poetry.

I wonder if right now, at thismoment, I were to turn to the people sitting next to me in this cafein a country that is not Iran and talk to them about life in Tehran,how they would react. Would they condemn the tortures, the executionsand the extreme acts of aggression? I think they would. But whatabout the acts of transgression on our ordinary lives, like thedesire to wear pink socks?

But not all is bleak and hopeless inthis work. That's mostly because Nafisi comes across as the talentedprofessor of literature that she once was. Reading her discussions aboutthe pleasures and lessons to be gained from Lolita, The Great Gatsbyand Henry James puts me back in the classroom, reliving my own daysas an eager English major. I miss that feeling, of being a studentand feeling the charged joy of my favorite profs as they bounced ontheir feet and read aloud important passages. “Dig it, dig it, digit, people!” my great old professor, Dr. Koons, used to exclaimback at Cal State Fullerton, as he read aloud a particular piece byMilton or Nabokov. I feel some of that same excitement and joy when Nafisi defends her favorites of the Western canon to stern, humorless officials and male students in the new Iran.

She's also wonderful at defendingand explaining just why literature is so important to the world, andto every culture. That said, its a slow read, and her situation remains ratherbleak throughout – it's not a novel, it's fundamentally a historyof Nafisi's own process of dealing with all the terriblechanges in her formerly beloved country, and how she had tointernalize so many horrors and make sense of them, both emotionallyand intellectually. Still, there are many lovely moments that takeon the basic love of language:

“We would take turns readingpassages aloud, and words literally rose up in the air and descendedupon us like a fine mist, touching all five senses. There was such ateasing, playful quality to their words, such joy in the power oflanguage to delight and astonish. I kept wondering: when did we losethat quality, that ability to tease and make light of life throughour poetry? At what precise moment was this lost? What we had now,this saccharine rhetoric, putrid and deceptive hyperbole, reeked toomuch of cheap rosewater.”

If nothing else, its a good reminder to relish all of my simple, most basic joys: the ability to go to a public library and choose what to read, to walk in the sunshine and feel its rays upon my bare skin, or to wear pink socks -- or how about no socks at all, and just my red painted toes? I am dazzled with choices, every day. Hopefully, wherever you are reading this, you have plenty of options, too.

Christmas Kitchen

2011-12-20T11:34:00.000-08:00

Instead of showing you how I've changed up the front entry shelves for the season, I offer up my kitchen shelves, all decked out for the holidays.

Shelves: rhymes with elves, which is what I need. A whole troop of little guys to help me finish up the wrapping and baking. Or I can be like my mom: stuff everything into gift bags with tissue paper, buy a pack of frosted cookies from the supermarket, and call it done. Well, she is into her seventh decade. She's earned the right to slough off a bit and kick back with her Kahlua and just admire the Christmas tree.

Over here, I'm still down in the trenches with two little ones who get so excited when I bust out the flour and sugar and chocolate chips. They jostle each other for stirring and pouring rights; they stomp off and pout if they don't get their due share of baking fun. Sibling rivalry at its finest, and I, the referee. "Let her do the vanilla, and then you'll get to add the cup of sugar." "Okay, that's enough stirring, now give your brother a turn." Ay ay ay.

It's enough to make store bought cookies and a bottle of Kahlua seem like a fantastic idea. Still, the stress is worth it in the end. And not just because I get to eat my home-made Mexican Wedding balls. (I love my giant vintage tray up there. And it is GIANT. Easily two feet around, it doesn't fit into any of our plastic storage tubs. I believe it's from the early '60s.)

Apologies for the crappy quality of these shots. I'm no photographer, and it was a cloudy late morning when I took them. I turned on all the lights, which is why it looks a little chilly and industrial. It really feels much cozier in our kitchen, what with the flicker-bulb on my little bear with her hot cuppa, the oven set to 350, and the heated arguments over who gets to lick the spoon first.

Favorite Christmas Books

2011-12-16T11:29:00.000-08:00

Over the years, I've picked up quite a few children's Christmas books. (I also have some vintage Golden Books not included with the general stash, as they're a little fragile.) I generally let the kids peruse them on their own, but try to make a point to read a few aloud each year.

I like to remind my kids, especially Lily, who has read the Little House books multiple times, how blown away Laura and Mary were to receive tin cups, oranges, and some candy for Christmas. Keeps things in perspective. (At least that's what I like to tell myself.)

This year, I again read aloud The Story of Holly and Ivy, by Rumer Godden. Rumer Godden is an accomplished author, and like Kipling, was one of those British Colonial writers raised in India. But her children's story, set in a snowy little English village, is one of my very favorite Christmas books. I read it first as a child, and sometimes I get a little choked up reading it to my own children.

Like the first line says, it is really a story about wishing: for a home, for family, for a place to belong.

And how could we not own this one, with a Tucker of our own?

Yeah Santa Mouse, where are you? I have my original copy of the first Santa Mouse book somewhere in the garage, but can't find it. Both my husband and I grew up with Santa Mouse (his mom has a vintage, ragged little stuffed mouse, too). Santa Mouse Where Are You? is the sequel, but it's not as cute as the original.

And let's not even get started on this one. I bought it this year, but I'm not convinced it's destined to become "A Christmas Tradition" in our house. More like, "hey mom, remember the year we had that elf that you had to move around every night?" (Confession: This week I woke with a start at 3am with the realization that I hadn't moved the elf. There I went, out of my warm bed, bleary down the dark stairs, to move little "Nicky Jack" to another position. Really?)

A Day at LACMA

2011-12-13T10:49:00.000-08:00

To offset the several long, wordy posts I've had in a row, here's one long on images, much shorter on the verbiage. On a weekend in late October, we drove out to L.A. to see the Tim Burton exhibit at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Lily, who'll be 10 in few months (!), is a big Burton fan. She loves both his Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride, and also watched Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands for the first time this year. (Oh, my little goth girl in training.)

The Burton exhibit was crowded and chock-full of his early scribblings and ideas, along with plenty of props and designs from all of his films. I think Lily was inspired by how prolific and imaginative an artist he is, and how he's fearless in just being his own weird, quirky self. I don't have any pictures to show you of the exhibit; there was a strict no-photo policy. (Plenty of folks still took shots with their camera phones, but I was a good girl and followed the rules.)

However, housed in the same building was the California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way exhibit. This was right up my alley: California history, movie lore, the agricultural industry, and textiles, pottery and furniture design were all part of this show.


Oh, Airstream: A girl can always dream.

Swoon. Let's move away from the huge TV-screen trend, and back to huge stereo consoles.

This is a mock-up of the Eames' living room. It was the only part of the exhibit you weren't supposed to photograph, but I didn't see the little sign posted until it was too late and a guard scolded me. Oops. So much for following the rules.

Outside, in a different section of the museum, was this installation with yellow tubes that all the kids were crazy about. I thought it was pretty cool, until my husband pointed out that it seemed to be created from medical tubing, and then I was kinda icked out by the thing.

My little guy didn't mind one bit.

Merry Christmas & The Family

2011-12-09T12:16:00.000-08:00

Let me say upfront, this post will probably come across a little crankier than intended. I just want to ~~complain~~ discuss how blogs have influenced the holidays, at least the blogs that I read. If you're here (and aren't my husband) you very likely read and love many of the same design/lifestyle blogs that I do. And I do love them, but at Christmas, they make me feel a little stressed and (even more) unworthy and inadequate.

There's just so much emphasis about traditions, and making new ones, and special, meaningful decorations and hand-crafted advent calendars. The artfully hip family portraits, the images of baked goods and white twinkling lights as children tackle the messiest, most difficult crafts with supplies brought forth from well-stocked crafting rooms. The trendy gift guides for young and old, which never mention the big brands my family actually love, like "Nintendo" and "Pokemon" or "Nordstrom," (um, that would be me, on that last one). The holiday blogging scene, taken as a whole, is a bit...much, for me.

My own home is pretty much all decorated now, with the exception of the tree, which we'll pick out later this weekend. But my house is also messier than usual: boxes, bags, receipts, coupons and school fliers are invading almost every counter. While I've pretty much got the shopping wrapped up, I haven't begun any actual wrapping. I haven't yet baked a single cookie, and there's been no crafting to speak of. My daughter was home sick for a couple of days this week though, and she was happy to sit at the kitchen table with a box of crayons and a Christmas-themed coloring book. Good enough.

Good enough. I do agree with the unspoken premise of the life-style bloggers, which is that Christmas is all about creating new memories and honoring old ones. It's hard for me not to indulge in my own vivid nostalgia for those hazy days of the early-to-mid '70s, when I was just as wide-eyed and filled with anticipation as my own children. My birthday is exactly a week before Christmas, so the whole season seemed a time of gifts and cake and punch from the glass punchbowl that my mom ringed with candy canes. (To this day, nothing evokes the sensory memory of those holidays faster than the taste of thick red buttercream frosting, but its rare to experience an actual bakery-purchased cake these days.)

But most especially, Christmas meant family. Surrounded by my close-knit mother's family, and even my dad's parents (divorced, but it was "complicated"), all hanging around at our little house. We didn't have any other yearly tradition beyond that: just family. A live tree, yes. A Christmas "open house" that was often on my birthday weekend, so my parties were all really adult parties: cake and presents for me, then moving on to music, drinks and cigarettes for the adults. There were no precious decorations brought forth and hung with any particular meaning. There were just a couple of boxes from The Broadway department store, labeled "Christmas." Each year, my mom hung not a wreath on the door, but a tree made from green melted plastic, similar to this one (and it was awesome):


There was also a tabletop Santa made of folded and spray-painted	copies of Readers Digests.

Whiskey-spiked eggnog, big green jugs of Gallo red wine, bean dip and Ruffle potato chips and massive glass ashtrays, overflowing with the detritus of conversations and off-color jokes. Johnny Mathis and Ray Coniff on the turntable. A small girl weaving in and out between the legs of all the grown ups she loved, and who loved her the most. Those are my own sweet Christmas memories. And it turns out, no matter how much effort or creativity I do or do not bring to the table, Christmas memories are being created in my own family. Year after year, the memories are piling up for my children, and the chance to make more of them, for as many years as possible, surrounded by as much of my family as we can still assemble, is all I really hope for.

In that spirit, I bring you a song from great Texas songwriter Robert Earl Keen,
"Merry Christmas From the Family." While my own family wasn't quite this uh, colorfully rural, it really is a celebration of family togetherness. And I'll take an overflowing sink of plastic cups and a run to the Stop N' Go for more booze over a fancy sit-down meal with a gleaming, creative tablescape any day.

Last stanza of the song:
"Carve the turkey, turn the ball game on
It's Bloody Marys
Cause We All Want One!
Send somebody to the Stop 'N Go
We need some celery and a can of fake snow
A bag of lemons and some Diet Sprites
A box of tampons, some Salem Lights
Hallelujah, everybody say cheese,
Merry Christmas from the Family."

Overnight in the 90210

2011-12-06T16:42:00.000-08:00

So, in my last post I wrote about my love for road trip and day trips. But I wasn't going to write about this particular overnight trip, because first, it took a long time for me to process, and second, after processing, it was clearly such an epic fail. And it was all my fault.

In late September, I decided to spend the night away from home, all by myself, in Beverly Hills. Doesn't that sound lovely, all black and white like that on the screen? I was prompted to do this by the publication of the Design Sponge book, the book that sprang from the hugely popular blog of the same name. The blog's creator and book author, Grace Bonney, would be in Beverly Hills, signing copies of her book at Anthropologie. Listed out, it sounded perfect: Design Sponge, book signing, Anthopologie! A chance to visit my native and beloved Los Angeles county! (To be fair, I grew up way east of the hip Westside area, but still.)   It all sounded like a great excuse to have a night away, a "just for me" 24 hours away from my usual role of wife-and-stay-at-home-mom.

Somehow, it all went wrong. It felt wrong, and pointless. I wasted gas money, and the money for a nice hotel. When it was all over, I didn't feel rested or relaxed or any of those things that a break from routine is supposed to instill.

It took nearly three hours to arrive at my hotel. (It should've taken less than two, but I encountered an accident, and that slow-down put me near downtown L.A. at evening rush-hour.)   After checking into the Hyatt Regency in Century City, I had just enough time to freshen my make-up and check out the room, before leaving again for the book signing.

I got a little lost finding the Anthropologie, which was only 15 minutes away, but I don't know the area well. It was dark, and there were plenty of one-way streets and wide TMZ tour buses to avoid. I went too far north, crossed Santa Monica Blvd., and ended up in a neighborhood of jaw-dropping, palatial homes. I was instantly pitched into that sickening house/neighborhood lust that I know is wrong, but feels so decadent to indulge in. Like a box of frosted, sprinkled, creme-filled donuts: Mmmmm. And then, ugh.

At the Anthropolgie, I wandered around admiring all the cute boots and shoes on every single woman there. (I was feeling pretty nifty myself, in my dark purple tights and grey ankle boots.) I hadn't eaten lunch, it was dinner time, and I was starving. I took a free cupcake from the catered dessert bar, and stood in line to get my book signed. I had absolutely nothing pithy or witty or relevant to say to Ms. Bonney when I handed over my book, beyond "Thank You!"

I wandered around the store. I found nothing I wanted to buy, and yet wanted everything. Anything. Dinner?   Where to eat, by myself, at nearly 8pm? I felt drained, and not up to tackling a search for some posh, small cafe. Instead I went next door to the California Pizza Kitchen, and got a spinach pizza to go. Took it back to my room, ate the whole damn thing and fell asleep to the late news.

In the morning, I woke up intending to do some writing. I was working on an essay that I'd begun a week earlier, writing it out, as usual, on a yellow legal pad. I was several hand-written pages into it, and was about to get to the "good part," the crux, the crucial moment when all is explained. I couldn't find my legal pad. I knew I'd packed it. Perhaps it was left down in the car?

A perfect morning-alone breakfast would've been crepes or eggs benedict at some funky little joint. Instead, I bought a latte and muffin at the house Starbucks, went back up to my room, and felt restless. I watched an hour of the Dr. Conrad Murray trial. I did another thorough search for my legal pad, tearing apart the bed, looking in every drawer that I'd never opened. It's yellow! How could it be missing? I packed up and checked out. In my car, I did another search. No legal pad. I started to feel sick to my stomach.

My burgeoning essay, the first I'd tried to tackle in years, was gone. Gone. It's still gone. Gone like the money spent on the faceless, corporate Hyatt Regency (though I saved quite a lot by using Priceline), gone like the time spent on three different freeways, a five hour total round trip. My legal pad has never turned up. I haven't tried re-starting the essay again.

I downloaded the picture of myself off my camera that was taken against the cute, crafty chalkboard backdrop, adjacent to the book-signing area at the Anthropologie. I didn't look so nifty. I looked waist-less and hulking with my huge shoulders and upper arms, clutching my copy of Design Sponge in front of me. I haven't finished perusing all the sections of the book quite yet.

Seeing the cover brings it all back again. If there's any moral or takeaway from this trip, it's something like...to thine own self be true. I had mixed feeling about staying in faceless Century City to begin with. All along, I'd craved something cozier and more intimate. Instead, from the Hyatt, to the Anthro, to the CPK pizza, to the Starbucks breakfast, it was all one big corporate, logo-filled disaster. My trip was faceless, and at the end, I was not restored to my "true self." I myself felt faceless, and stripped of something essential, besides the legal pad.

I've had precious few nights spent completely by myself, since becoming a wife and mom. There have been weekends with my husband, and nights crashed at friends homes, but that trip to the 90210 is one of the few I've spent truly alone. I relished the solitude. I'm a loner, and an introvert, and I wasn't gone long enough to really miss anyone. Next time, I'm doing it right. I'm going to stay here. And I'll consider long and hard before choosing either the Oak Terrace Room (2 balconies!) or the Tree House Room (tree house!). I'll scribble on my legal pad in my room above the trees, and dine at somewhere small and fine, and come home to my family restored, and feeling like a better person. Not feeling like I need to burrow, and lick my wounds, and retreat somewhere deep and quiet to remember who I am. Next time.

Road Trippin' Mama

2011-12-02T12:01:00.000-08:00

Winchester

I love me a good road trip. Like I say over there on the right, on my new “About Me” page, nothing makes me happier than riding shotgun on a long Sunday cruise to nowhere. “Nowhere,” maybe being some little hamlet where I can buy an ice cream cone, or get out to stretch my legs and smell the fresh grass and sage.

I love road trips and day trips and vacations so much, and have taken enough of them in my life, that earlier this year I had the brilliant idea to start up a whole new blog, in addition to Reading Nest. A travel blog, which I called “The Roadrunner Mom.” Roadrunner, in honor of my late dad, the original great road-tripper. Roadrunner was a word he deeply identified with, using it for his short-lived antique shop, his e-mail, and his Ebay handle. Plus, he loved Arizona and the deserts of the Southwest. And “mom,” because obviously, 90% of my own road trips involve my kids, and usually revolve around them (and their schedules, if nothing else).

At Diamond Valley Lake

Well. I wrote a few posts for my Roadrunner Mom blog, but they were loooong, and took forever to compose. They were trip reports, really. I have three posts devoted to our week-long exploration of Arizona this past summer, and another on my anniversary weekend in Palm Springs. My plan was to go back and do comprehensive, informative reports on all the big family trips we've taken: to Big Sur, to Yosemite, to Hawaii, to Oregon. On top of that, I would include all the short little trips we take on weekends, to San Diego and Orange county and anywhere but here. Like this one, that appeared here on this blog a couple years ago, when we drove less than an hour away to a rare car museum in the hills north of Escondido.

Diamond Valley Lake, Hemet

But it turns out, that's a hell of a lot of writing, and linking, and sorting through my own photo archives. I decided I couldn't do it well, and still do the other writing that's even more important to me: posting more often here on my this blog, scribbling away sporadically on my memoir, and just keeping my house and life in the order I need to maintain and not feel crazy. So, no more Roadrunner Mom, at least not in its current incarnation.(I'm linking to it here, but don't have any permanent links from my main Reading Nest page any more.)

Wildflowers, Diamond Valley Lake

In the meantime, I've added a new label to my posts, for “Roaming.” And I hope to share here a lot more of the roaming that we do as a family. Although frankly, we haven't done as much cruising-to-nowhere in the last couple of years as I'd like. As the kids get older, it's harder to find the time between activities and parties and soccer. Add in the fact that my son gets a little carsick, and we're less likely to jump into the car just 'cause.

The photos throughout this post were taken on great, memorable Sunday drive a couple years back. We had driven out to check out Diamond Valley Lake, a huge man-made reservoir on the outskirts of Hemet. It's less than an hour's drive for us, and we've made the drive to that area often, as it's the same back-door route that we take to Palm Springs. So, why, as I griped to my husband on the way out there, why the hell do you need to keep checking your GPS? (Because he a tech geek. A tech geek who can't NOT use the technology right before him.) I griped, I groused. A true Sunday drive does not come with directions, with maps, with a freaking GPS! crowed the daughter of the original Roadrunner.

Dirt road, outside Diamond Valley Lake area, Hemet

Still he kept pecking away at the screen, looking, checking to see precisely where we were on the planet. And in doing so, he found a secret route home. According to his GPS, there was a way back home, over narrow, winding rural roads, that would lead us not merely home to Temecula, but to practically right on a major street near our house. The drive, on a late Sunday afternoon, was wonderful. It led us past farms and rural homes that felt impossibly isolated, even as we knew we were merely a couple miles from major roads, at least as the crow flies. Sticking to the exact route, we went up some steep gravel and dirt roads, laughing at our own nuttiness.

Farm along dirt road outside Hemet/Winchester

Overlooking... Anza? Winchester?

Our car, a mid-size SUV that does not have four-wheel drive, shook and bounced as we drove over gullies and small boulders. What was possibly craziest of all, is that the GPS led us into the last stretch before home onto a long road that we both knew from experience turns from blacktop into dirt, then dead-ends into a metal roadblock before re-connecting back in town. We took it anyway, and then had to reverse on the dusty road, to get back, finally, onto the highway. This was all less than 5 minutes from home:


Metal roadblock. Beyond begins our corner of suburbia, with its white-fence "horse path."

While we probably aren't the only crazy people in town who've taken this "secret" dirt road, we are among the few, and personally I'm pretty sure we're the only ones in our circle of acquaintances who would choose to spend a Sunday afternoon this way. Hopefully we'll get to explore a lot more, and soon. I'm feeling long overdue for some meandering roads to nowhere, paved or not.

Here We Go!

2011-11-28T10:43:00.000-08:00

A couple of Sundays back, we got in a quick trip to Disneyland. The forecast predicted rain, and sure enough, we were soaked through by the end of the day, despite two umbrellas and parkas for all. Still, it was fun, and a good way to kick off the holiday season. Are you ready for the season? Because it's like, totally here.

Here we go, now entering the holiday rush...

There are trees to be bought and decorated (or if you go artificial, trees to be brought down). I'm still winning the campaign for a live tree in my house; a tradition from my childhood that I'm not ready to relinquish.

Just thinking about all the decorating and lights and bustle and baking and late-night wrapping sessions makes me tired to think about...

But it's worth it for the wonder and the joy I get, seeing it through the eyes of my still-awestruck children.

Funny, I felt more in the spirit of the season a couple of weeks ago, pre-Thanksgiving. But I better get on board quick, because ready of not, it always rushes by in a blur, this most wonderful, hectic time of the year

Her Fearful Symmetry

2011-11-22T10:24:00.000-08:00

I wanted to like this more than I did. For deep autumn, a book about ghosts, a famous cemetery, and rainy London sounded like a good read for chilly nights under the covers. And I did enjoy the first 2/3 of the book, but in the end, it all just fell apart into silliness and mere plot hijinks, rather than delving into the characters motivations.

Like a whole lot of people, I read and truly loved the author's bestselling The Time Traveler's Wife (but had no interest in seeing the movie), so I was prepared for a certain amount of the fantastic and magical -- where Time Traveler has a man who jumps through different decades of time as the main character, this novel has a lonely, bored ghost as a central figure. Eventually the ghost becomes powerful enough to make herself known to her 2 American nieces, to whom she's left her large, drafty apartment in her will. The rule is that the nieces, who are twin sisters, must live in the apartment for a year before they decide to sell or keep the property -- and that their mother, the ghost Elspeth's twin sister, can never set foot in the flat. Why Elspeth has been estranged from her own twin for decades is the novel's central mystery.

Highgate Cemetery. Image from here.

Complicated enough? The dynamic between the two living twins, Julia and Valentina, is interesting and has plenty of tension, but I wish Niffenegger had spent much more time on the actual relationships, rather than indulging in so much ghostliness. For me, this was never a true horror story, or the least bit spooky or creepy. Well, unless you consider Elspeth (the ghost) accidentally killing a little white kitten, then managing to bring it back to life by "stuffing" its soul back into its limp little corpse, creepy. So...not too creepy.

I liked the secondary characters a lot more than any of the main ones, and enjoyed the descriptions and history of the real Highgate Cemetery in England, but in the end, I wanted something more substantial than a pissy, bitter ghost and two feckless young Americans to keep me company on a November's night.

Girly Gush

2011-11-18T11:54:00.000-08:00

Oh my. How have I missed the fabulousness that is Matchbook before now? Matchbook in an online magazine, a monthly not actually published in print form. I've been a bit stubborn about fully embracing the online-magazine trend. I prefer to curl up on my couch and intensely study, really immerse myself in the graphics and articles of my favorite monthlies. It's hard to feel that same level of intimacy on a computer monitor that's a good foot and a half from my face. But I also can't go on mourning the loss of Domino and House & Garden forever. And after stumbling upon the November issue of Matchbook, I think I'm feeling much, much more positive about reading online rags. (It also helps that I now have a small notebook/laptop, which definitely improves the experience.)

Matchbox is so fun, girly, glamorous and smart. And I love the subtitle, "A Field Guide to A Charmed Life." That sounded right up my alley, but what made me peruse deeper was the front cover shot of designers Andy & Kate Spade. While I'm not a fashionista, I adore Kate Spade's preppy designs and bold, happy colors, and knew her home would be really something. The November issue also has brief, interesting write-ups about Zora Neale Hurston and Picasso, and has chic and affordable fashion spreads that look like things I might actually wear in my daily life:

Along with cute holiday gift ideas for The Romantic or The Bohemian gal in your life. Or me, The Creative. (It's a magazine intended for young, single urban women, so no spread for "The 40ish Suburban Mom.)

So much eye-candy packed into one issue! I loved the spread on Chicago designer Summer Thornton. I've seen and admired her work around the 'net before, and this double-page shot of her glamorous office only made me love her more:

But the piece de resistance is the peek inside the home of Kate Spade and her husband, Andy. The house tour includes a photo that makes me happier than just about anything I've encountered online in recent memory:

Totally agog at that green-striped hallway, the trio of crystal light fixtures, the faded runner, even the crystal doorknob: Perfection. Can I just camp out here? (After staring at it, I realized that part of my admiration is because it somehow reminds me of looking up at Disneyland.) The rest of the house is just as colorful and chic and feminine as you'd expect from Kate Spade. I love me some intense color, but haven't ever considered deep red as an option for my walls. This incredible, shiny lacquered goodness has me thinking twice:

Gah! Love, love this home. And the way that the Spade home and Summer Thornton's office make my heart go a-flutter drives home the point that my own taste is definitely skewing more formal and glam these days. But enough gushing from me, check out Matchbook magazine here, where you can also access their inspiring blog, The Daily Spark. A great read to curl up with (sorta) and get inspired on this chilly, gray November weekend.

In Which I Embarrass Myself

2011-11-14T14:32:00.000-08:00

As promised in my last, epic post, here's my list of 5 embarrassing things about myself. It's guaranteed to provoke a superior snicker or two and help you kick off your week feeling happy that at least YOU don't share my same list. Probably.

1. I love to sing and am still somewhat surprised and chagrined that I've never done anything about this passion. Unless you count that I was a choir-geek for all four years of high school. It was nothing like Glee; we just stood there on risers in scarlet robes and sang. I spent hours and hours and hours of my teen years singing to myself. I was a latch-key kid, and would often race home, drag out the standing vacuum cleaner, and wail away in front of it for hours. This still seems like a pretty fun way to spend an hour or two. (Disclaimer: am I good? Who knows. I'm not awful.)

Image from here

2. I have a lazy eye, which is mostly controlled, except for a) applying eye make-up b) whenever I become extremely tired or c) sitting in front of the computer. This last seems dangerous, considering how much I sit here. (Every year I ask the eye dr., and he can't see any evidence of a weak muscle.) Anyway, some of my earliest memories are of wearing a patch over my left eye, and hating it. To help me become aware of it and correct myself, the ophthalmologist advised my parents to snap their fingers in my face whenever my eye drifted out. And they, in turn, told my preschool teachers to do the same. To this day, if anyone snaps their fingers at me, I still experience a knee-jerk feeling of shame and check myself: Eyes all forward? Whew, okay.

"Fun to wear" claims the ad. Bullshit. Image via here.

3. A significant part of my junior high brain was consumed with the adoration of Barry Manilow. Loved. Him. Planned to marry him. (Of course, I had no idea at the time that he was gay.) With my very superior understanding of statistics, I believed that the likelihood of anything occurring broke down to 50/50: either it would happen, or not. In this way, I happily sailed along believing that I had a 50% shot at marrying my man. All I had to do was grow up, move to New York, and...um....hang out near his studio. Right? My love for Barry has faded immensely in proportion to my early passion. But: I still know every word and nuance of this album:

Image from here.

Oh, love: Looks like we've made it.

4. I have freakishly big shoulders (and a wide back) compared to the rest of my frame. I mean, I've never been petite, but these shoulders mean that, while I wear a size 8, or even occasionally a 6 in jeans and bottoms, I'm pretty much excluded from wearing button-down shirts. I have to try on an XL, or even XXL, or once, at Penney's a size 16 blouse. What the hell? I think these were passed down from my paternal grandmother, who was rather round-shouldered. I'm afraid that I'm going to end up looking like one of those old ladies with spindly, skinny legs and a huge top half. Note: there is no accompanying image, because my Google search mostly turned up other women comparing their shoulders to linebackers. We should all organize and form a roller derby team.

5. I consider myself pretty familiar with good interior design, via my love of shelter magazines and all the design blogs I read. I know how to employ bright colors and clean lines and mid-century furniture and the whole she-bang. That said, come December, all that better judgement goes out the window, when I put up my beloved Christmas village. You know: little houses that light up. Little round mirrors that serve as "ice ponds." Little tiny people, shopping and decorating trees. I love it, and chalk it up to my thwarted desire to own a dollhouse as a kid. My children love it; it makes me happy to see them hanging off the back of the couch in the family room, staring quietly at the miniature, static world. What makes my particular village even cooler (yes, I just typed that phrase) is that mine is a retro village, with '50s-era buildings and details. Go ahead and judge: yes, it cheesy, kitschy, and middle-american as a plaid Barcalounger: but dude, it's Christmas.

So there you have it. Keep in mind this is just one short list, not even the list of most-embarrassing or humiliating. Trust me, there's more. Reading it over, it's clear I'm about as cool as your grandma: Choir robes, vision problems, JC Penney blouses and my easy-listening taste. Good lord. Honestly, I don't listen to Celine Dion or subscribe to Reader's Digest. And I don't smell like Ben-Gay. Really.

100!

2011-11-09T16:31:00.000-08:00

This is my 100^th post here at The Reading Nest. 100 posts after nearly 4 years – that took a might too long, huh? In the last couple of months, I've made a concerted effort to post more often. For me, that translates into about twice a week. It's hard for me to do more, it takes buckets of time to compose my posts. (That's my fault. I could rely more on images, less on words, but since I'm a writer, that doesn't come easily, either.)

I've hemmed & hawed a bit about what to say in this momentous 100^th post. Thought about doing a “greatest hits” and showcasing a handful of favorite posts over the years. Thought about coming clean with a list of 5 embarrassing things about myself (still plan to do this, and spoiler: the list includes the phrases “Barry Manilow” and “big shoulders.”)

But what I want to talk about today is something that feels Really Big, and like the Willie Nelson song, is Always on My Mind. That thing is: Home. And also, Community.

Here's the thing: I have a very, very conflicted relationship with where I live right now. And let me say right up front, I realize I'm blessed, lucky, and in the minority of the world's population to own a nice, spacious home in a safe neighborhood, in a good school district. I get that. Add in the fact that I'm in Southern California, get to enjoy sunny, warm days in deepest winter and live about an hour's drive from either the mountains or the sea, and one might just say, “bitch, puh-leeze.” I get that, too. There are worse places for fate to have put us.

Still. It remains, this itch, this discontent under the surface of so many days. We've lived here over seven years. The dragging economy, and the housing market in our region being one of the hardest hit in the entire nation, means that it'll be several years before we move away. Unless we win the Lotto. Or the Publisher's Clearing House prize. (I mean, somebody has to win, right? )

This is what I need to do:

Bloom Where I'm Planted? I try. I try, try, try. But should it still be this hard, this many years into it?

Recently I paid to take an online e-course, called Blogging Your Way, and run by hugely successful blogger Holly Becker of Decor8. One of the reasons I took the course, besides the intent to better understand blogging and focus on improving my own site, was to find a community of like-minded souls, in a similar place in their bloggy careers. Well. Yes for the former, not so much for the latter part. With something like 700 registrants, the class just felt too big for me to feel much of the “community” aspect. I did bump into a few bloggers from San Diego (an hour away), but we just kinda waved in passing, if that.

However, the course helped me realize that a big part of what I love most about my very favorite blogs is how they all convey a strong sense of place, and the bloggers seem really, really content in their surroundings (not their homes, per se, but that too). Many times, their blogs spotlight their towns or regions, with lots of pretty pictures of neighborhoods and hillsides, or flower fields and sidewalks, of waterfalls, of lamposts and laundromats. The glorious to the mundane, they soak it up, they revel.

I do not feel the same urge to document my own backyard. Maybe in the past, I've posted something like this:

My actual backyard, from several years back. Or maybe this:

A hot air balloon, landing in the ~~park~~ tot lot adjacent to our house.

In fact, I've purposely avoided mentioning even the name of my town: Temecula. (There, I said it.) The reason has to do with my sense of community: I've never, even at the height of my MOMS Club involvement (I even served as co-president one year) felt much at at ease in my particular milieu of fellow stay-at-home moms. Not because I think I'm better, or more interesting, or anything like that. I take the blame, ~~entirely~~ mostly: I really suck at making friends, at letting my guard down enough to truly let people in. And also, I just haven't felt that I've ever found "my people." Maybe I'm not "more interesting" than my neighbors. But can I say that we do not at all share the same interests? Also, I know more than a few judgemental souls in town, and I've feared them stumbling here, onto this blog and some of my most honest, public declarations, and feeling, well: judged. "If you have time to blog, you have time to come mop my floors." Someone may or may not have said that, once.

But I'm coming to terms with the fact that I'm going to be judged anyway, whether by some mom down the street, or some cranky dude in Lithuania who ended up here to see my Ikea kitchen. (And hello, Lithuanian's!)

In the future, I plan to explore more here about this notion of home, of community, of belonging. After all, half of my blog name is "Nest." My goal is to make my vague dream of "anywhere but here" more concrete and quantifiable. If I have a firm idea of just what I'm looking for in some future town, city, or state, than maybe I'll be helping the Universe along in making it all happen. If nothing else, it will be a point to steer toward. And maybe in between, I'll have some posts of my town, this place where I'm quite firmly rooted for now. Pictures of things that define this place, besides um...hot air balloons and well-manicured greenbelts.

In the meantime, thank you interwebs, for the lifeline of other blogs and kindred souls, who've helped me grow and inspired me to (slowly!) post 99 times about books, fears, dreams, and decor. And have reassured me that even if they're not right down the street, my people really are out there, somewhere.
(And thank you for reading this far down in this extra-long, rambling post.) Do you like where you live? Does your town fit you like a kid glove, or does it make you stuffy and itchy as a cheap rayon sweater?

A Wanderlust Growing In Your Bones

2011-11-04T12:11:00.000-07:00

I love, love the work of New England-based artist Daniel Danger. November, with it's early nightfalls, smoky air and the winding down of the year, seems like the perfect season for his work.

It's always dark in his world. Even the pieces set in the daylight seem dark: dark forests, deep shadows, or night approaching soon.

Something is lurking out there in his world, something menacing approaches. (This piece reminds me of the film Super 8, which I saw this summer. Think Stand By Me, with aliens.)

And this one reminds me of one of my favorite Neko Case songs, Ghost Wiring: "Your ghost is a light show at night/On the Grand Coulee dam/The river is watching you/At the drive-in tonight...."

I very much want to own a poster or print of his work, but they sell out quickly when they go up for sale at his web site, Tiny Media Empire, or like recently, for his current show at the Rotofugi gallery. (There was a Pre-Sale that I could've jumped on, but I was out of the house when it started, and two hours later, everything under $200 was gone.) Some pieces are listed on Ebay for not a lot, really, but baby needs new shoes and winter jackets. You know how that goes.

Look at the sky in his works, see the stars, the moon, the street lights and tangled power lines. They remind me that there is a night, that there is deep darkness, which sounds like a ridiculous thing to say, but married with two children, we are tucked in early here in our house, snuggled in suburbia. Easy to forget what it's like, to be out after midnight, in the empty lots and deserted neighborhoods. But:

Yes, yes there is. November is wanderlust season. Only, where to go, and how to get there?

Dia de los Muertos

2011-11-02T12:31:00.000-07:00

Above is a little diorama that I bought a few years ago in Old Town San Dieg o. On the evening it was purchased, I was playing both tourist and host, tourist because I hadn't been to Old Town in a long while, and host, because I was showing off Old Town, and San Diego, and by proxy, my home state, to a friend from Canada who'd never been to California.

The things I take for granted, that are mere backdrop to my days, were wild and exotic to my friend from the Great White North: crimson bougainvillea, cactus, and hand-thrown tortillas in the Mexican restaurant. And likely, my own background seemed exotic to her: I am half Mexican-American on my mother's side.

Half Mexican-American, yet arguably the "whitest" and least ethnic member of my mother's family, and most definitely the only one who has bought or displayed any memento celebrating the Mexican Day of the Dead. I didn't know about Dia del los Muertos growing up. My family was self-conscious, one might even say ashamed, of our background. My grandparents, both born and raised in Southern California, spoke Spanish as children, but rarely spoke it in my presence. With her fair skin and light brown eyes and strong, patrician nose, my grandmother was sometimes mistaken as (and proud to be mistaken as) Jewish, rather than a Mexican. (And even as an adult, her world was so small, I doubt she's even known a real Jewish person in her life.)

Sometimes, my mother and I would drop in on my grandparents in the evening, after dinner, and my grandpa would be relaxing in his recliner, watching an old Mexican cowboy movie on one of the local Spanish stations. When we entered, he was quick to point the remote and change the channel. All of which is to say: It's November 2, both "Dia del los Muertos" and All Soul's Day, but the date really doesn't mean anything to me or my extended family. Unlike what seems like 99.5% of the other many, many "Hispanic" "Latino" "Chicano" or "whatever" families that make up the population of my state, my own family isn't Catholic. Ritual and tradition isn't something we're much comfortable with.

Maybe that's why I never encountered Dia De Los Muertos until a high school friend went off to college and got involved with a political group that was all about celebrating and elevating the "heritage" of Chicano students. I hung around with that group, attended a few of their parties with my friend. It wasn't ever my heritage, it seemed. Still, there I was in that souvenir shop in Old Town, fondling the hand-made Mexican crafts with my Canadian friend, and wanting to claim something of it all as mine. To show her: see? After the enchiladas, and the strolling mariachi musicians at the restaurant, after the walk through the dry autumn air beneath rustling palm trees: see, this is who I am.

But sugar skulls, skeletons, bright paper flowers, and Frida Kahlo? Really, I'm just a tourist here, too.

I display the little diorama there for today, amidst old photos of family members who have passed on (not my grandma, but she is not really here and present these days, either). On All Souls Day, the barrier between the living and the dead is supposed to be thin, easily permeated. Recently I complained to my husband that I never dream of the family members who've passed on, that they never come to visit me. Maybe it's because we don't need the nether world of sleep to say hello. Maybe they are here in my every step, right beside my elbow. Drowsing, at the very least, in my every last cell, waking sometimes to assert: See, this is who I am.

Mumbo Jumbo!

2011-10-28T11:19:00.000-07:00

Mumbo Jumbo is a wonderful picture book that's part of my Halloween decor this year. (We're hosting our first-ever kids Halloween party on Saturday, so I went a little more detailed with the decorating. A little, but it's not like I need much excuse.)

I picked up Mumbo Jumbo on clearance, a couple years back at a groovy store called The Alley. As far as I know, there are 2 Alley's in existence: one in Palm Springs, and one tucked in between a K-Mart and our discount theater here in Temecula. The Alley sells lots of outdoor and indoor ceramics, vases, pillows, rustic furniture...and cheap birthday cards, joke gadgets, and Pillow Pet knock-offs. Sort of like a funkier, less organized Home Goods.

For $5, I couldn't resist the great graphic illustrations inside Michael Roberts' collection, subtitled "The Creepy ABC." (Roberts is a talented artist who has created covers for The New Yorker.)

G is for ghosts.

N is for Nightmares.

M is for Mummy.

And of course, Z is for Zombies. I also love the witty little poems that accompany each letter, making the book less creepy for kids. Not that I bought the book for the kids, anyway.

This is how I have it displayed, on the living room table:

Open to the spread for C is for Cobwebs. (Not candelabra.)

Close-up of rats checking out my silver tea service. It needs polishing, I know. I think the tarnish is just going to have to be part of the scene. I still have cupcakes to decorate, and a "mad science lab" with creepy body parts for the party guests to touch and squeal over to assemble. For example, we're using beef jerky bits for "scabs." Creepy and gross: The kids will love it. Happy Pre-Halloween weekend to you!

Hello, Halloween

2011-10-24T11:25:00.000-07:00

Another hello from my house to yours. As mentioned earlier, I tore down my "fall" shelf display, and decorated for Halloween. Or in the case of the above picture, added a couple of pieces to spook things up.

One of the benefits of being married for almost fifteen years is that I've had a lot of seasons to accumulate holiday decor. I do rotate and purge, but some items, like the witch silhouette and scary tree up there, have been around for such a long time, I can't remember anymore where they came from.

In the case of my pesky entry shelves, a lot of the items (with of course the exception of the old books) are fairly new: the wall decal, the silver words, the mummy statue...I believe they're all from Michael's. (I bought the mummy just last week, marked down to $2.50. ) On the other hand, my poor old crow perched on the glittery tree is really getting a little mangy and should be replaced. He was purchased many years ago at the awesome Roger's Gardens, a wonderful high-end nursery and decor store in Newport Beach.

I'm in love with that creepy, moody cover on that old copy of Wuthering Heights. Isn't it awesome? A recent find at a local antique mall. The cover of my Frankenstein is pretty cool too, but you can't show 'em all.

I upload these images, knowing that in just over a week from now, Halloween will be over and I'll be futzing with the yet shelves again, finessing another display, for the deep autumn days of November.

And don't even get me started on thinking about Christmas. Yet.

The Necklace

2011-10-18T15:02:00.000-07:00

This is the necklace my daughter earned for being the MVP player on her soccer team. She got to keep it for a week, and then had to hand it over, to be given to another girl at the next game.   Her team didn't win the week she earned the necklace, and she didn't make a goal. In fact, her team has only won one game so far, and the season ends on November 5.

No matter. At the risk of hyperbole and proud-parent gushing, I've been awestruck with Lily, and this whole soccer thing. At 9 1/2, she is somewhat "old" to be playing for the first time. Here in our corner of suburbia, it feels like every other child from age 4 on up plays in the recreational soccer league. I'm not the type to force my kids into any activity they don't show an interest in, and for years, when I'd ask if she wanted to play soccer, she'd shake her head and utter a vehement, "NO!"

That's my girl, I'd think. Just like her mom, a lazy, curled in the corner with a book and a head full of hazy images kind of girl. No running around in cleats for us, thank you.

And then, this summer, she said, "I think I want to play soccer."
"Um, like on a team?" I asked.
"Yes!" she said, and then went on to describe all the fun she'd been having at recess, kicking the ball around with her friends.
"Okay then," I said, but in my head I thought....really?

She started the season slowly, literally. My husband and I would watch her at practice, at her early games, moving around on the field like she had ankle weights attached. She didn't know the basic rules, needed positions explained over and over.   No matter. The day of her first game, it was 103-degrees at 11 o'clock. She was sweating hard, and flushed a blotchy red color that I'd never seen on her face before. Except for exclaiming about the heat, she didn't complain.

She hasn't complained, once, about the practice schedule, the early mornings, the way the routine of it all has started to slowly dictate our lives. (Me, on the other hand...)

I didn't play sports as a child. I was overweight until sixth grade, when puberty and hormones kicked in, melting away what was evidently mostly "baby fat." In junior high, my glasses broke in half when a volleyball smacked me in the face. Yeah. That kid.

I get a bit of ribbing from my mother, who worked for most of my and my sister's childhoods, about being a stay-at-home-mom. For years, she referred to my local friends as merely "the mommy's." But until this fall, she hasn't been able to officially call me a soccer mom.

Now she gets to call me a soccer mom. It's a loose strand, a clue to tug at, in the tangled, knotted ball of yarn that is our mother-daughter relationship, that when I told my her over the phone that Lily (and her brother, too) would be playing soccer this fall, my mother's first response was:

"YOU'RE GONNA BE A SOCCER MOM!!!! BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA!   Better you than me, that's all I can say!"

To which I could only reply: "Yep," because what else can you say to that?

So. Lily is playing soccer. She's in fourth grade. So far, she's having the most amazing, happy, social time of her life being nine years old, in the fourth grade, and part of a soccer team.    Last week, her team won their first game. And at that game, Lily kicked in her first-ever goal, the first goal her team had scored in weeks and weeks.

I sat on the sidelines, under our new Easy-Up shelter, and felt something go bursting in my heart: That's my girl. Running around in the heat, with cleats and shin-guards, and talking already of playing again in the spring. Then coming home and curling up in a corner with a book, her head full of hazy images of getting that Hogwart's acceptance letter in a couple of years

That's my girl, the one who screamed in surprise and joy when she earned that game necklace, for hard work and "battling for the ball." And me, I'm her soccer mom.

Hello, Fall

2011-10-13T11:27:00.000-07:00

Some nesting pictures of fall around my house. Except that the entry and console table behind the couch don't even look like the below photos anymore, because Halloween has invaded. And it's spooky! But now I feel like a twit, because I spent the better part of a recent afternoon styling those 2 entry shelves to get them just so...and then this week, I tore it all down to put up the creepy/spooky Halloween tableau.

But the top of the stairs still looks like this:

Remember, during the summer, it looked like this. I love my little typewriter girl from The Black Apple. The canvas is wrapped with retro barkcloth that I purchased a long time ago from the now-defunct ReproDepot. The yellow roadrunner is a local vintage find. Orange and gold dish from one of my favorite online vintage shops, The Blue Carrot.

Next is the entryway:

Confession: I am really sort of over these shelves. They need to go. A few years back, I had an Ikea storage cabinet here. It had frosted glass doors on the bottom and an open area beneath the top. I got sick of that; it was pale wood and just felt too...Ikea-ish. Then I was struck by the inspiration to put shelves here. (They look just like Ikea Lack shelves, but they're not.) The shelves are a pain in my butt, and basically are compensation for the fact that we don't have a mantel over our sad fireplace. I don't actually have a lot of flat surfaces for display space downstairs...so. The problem is that this is too much display space, so I'm forever fussing with it. Totally a case of form over function, since the only functional area is the little tray to catch my sunglasses/keys/lip gloss.

Let's just move on. (Oh -- ceramic white owl from T.J. Maxx last year, owl candle from Marshall's, yellow vase is vintage Frankoma pottery. Those cute green mercury glass candles I found at Big Lots, $5 for a set of 3.)

This is the long console table, behind our sectional in the family room. And there is my lovely big blue Blenko. I love bright, happy fabrics, but I don't sew at all. So this is my solution, to put them up on the wall in frames. I'm pretty much over this solution, too. I want some real artwork up here, to keep my print from Leah Giberson company. Lamps are Ebay vintage finds from several years back. Green shades are from HomeGoods, taken from the lucite lamps that are in my bedroom.

Sigh. So many things to fix and improve upon, but I guess that's always the case. I'll show you the Halloween decor soon.

Top photo details: Hello print from here. The 2 larger white vases are HomeGoods/TJ Maxx, and the small aqua one is a vintage Royal Haeger that got broken & repaired, when I displayed it somewhere and a book knocked it over. Because I'm a twit!

Freaks & Rogues

2011-10-06T16:00:00.000-07:00

I half-expected that reading Susan Casey's book The Wave before bedtime would give me nightmares. Around ten years ago, I would occasionally dream of standing on a pier, or near the ocean, and being powerless and rooted to the ground as a huge, monolithic wall of water raced toward me. I would wake myself up, crying out and panting hard to catch my breath. Awful!

Thankfully I don't have my "tidal wave" dreams too frequently anymore. But I've been fascinated with big waves since I was a child. Maybe it started when I was very small, watching the Poseidon Adventure in the theater with my dad. (And holy crap, did I just admit to seeing the Poseidon Adventure when it was first released? Egads.) Except "fascinated" isn't the right word -- it's more like, "extremely perturbed by their existence."

The whole idea of rogue waves -- technically, waves that are freakishly large for the general surrounding wave-size -- really gets to me. For years, scientists believed the stories that sailors told for centuries of huge waves, rearing up from the sea to swallow a ship in one gulp, were just myths. Like mermaids, or sirens. Then they amended their beliefs to saying, "well okay, maybe there are rogue waves, but they happen like once or twice per century."

People, according to the scientists (and thanks to weather satellites), it now appears that rogue waves happen all the time, and that one or two huge container and freight ships are lost every month, swallowed by freak waves. Or maybe it was once a week. Suffice it to say: the rogues are out there. Indubitably, and undisputedly.

The Wave didn't give me nightmares. It was an entertaining, smart and fast-paced read. Some chapters discuss the science and study of rogue waves, found out in the middle of the ocean, especially in the north Atlantic and near the tip of South Africa, where the warm waters of the Indian ocean collide with the frigid currents moving north from Antarctica. These chapters alternate with other chapters profiling big-wave surfers, like superstar Laird Hamilton, who pioneered the sport of tow-surfing (having a boat tow surfers way out to the big waves) and consistently surfs sixty, seventy, and even eighty foot monsters...just, y'know..for the fun of it.

It is not reassuring to read the scientists admit that they're just now starting to get a grasp of rogue waves, and that they basically know nothing about why they occur. They also state that average wave sizes across the planet's oceans are rising every year, and this is attributed to the general warming of the oceans. Bottom line: bigger waves, and bigger waves more often.

The Wave didn't help me get over my dread of big waves. I still find them fascinating/perturbing. It's a visceral reaction, a gut thing I feel when confronted by that much power. I feel the same way when I look at huge icebergs, too. Something about the very quiet, very inhuman force of nature, rising up to obliterate everything in its path. Looking at those images makes me want to put my forehead on the desk and quietly weep. And hope that I never, ever, get the opportunity to take a photograph of one for myself.

Wave images from the aptly named site deathwaves.com.

Looking Up at the Park

2011-09-30T14:13:00.000-07:00

Previously, I've written here about how much I admire the overall attention to design and prop details at Disneyland, specifically how even the smallest corners of the park are not forgotten.

Last week, we were at Disneyland again, after an enforced summer break. (Our annual passes are blacked out for most of the busy tourist season.) It was good to be back; the park is totally decked out and ready for Halloween, and we checked out the newly revamped Star Tours ride and the new Little Mermaid slow ride, over at the California Adventures park.

Here are some shots of more park details, specifically what you'll see if you just look up.

Entering the "Great Moments with Lincoln" attraction, on Main Street.
I don't think I've ever seen this show! (Not on this visit, either.)

Inside the art gallery on Main Street

Decorated ledge at the Animation Studio, inside California Adventures

Again, in the Animation Studio room

My family at the Beast's Library, an interactive exhibit at California Adventures

And then there's always the Haunted Mansion, which transforms into a Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas theme, from the Halloween season through Christmas.


I have always wanted to live in the Haunted Mansion, and admired the ironwork way back before I ever knew what it was called.

Yeah, it's coming too soon, I know....

Hope you enjoyed another peek at the park. And speaking of Tim Burton, I really need to get on it and order tickets for the awesome retrospective of his career, running now at LACMA. My daughter is a big Burton fan and is amped to go, and the show ends on Halloween (of course).

Little Corner of the TV World

2011-09-27T15:15:00.000-07:00

Last week, I found out about this:

Holy Hell, how did I miss the fact that a Gilmore Girls soundtrack is out there in the world?

I loved the show so much. For me, it's the television equivalent of a hot toddy, a warm throw and cozy new socks on a chilly night. Just...pretty much perfect, for that specific mood. One day last year, I felt literally sick and tired, like I was coming down with a bad cold. In the middle of the day, I crashed on the couch, too exhausted to do much besides point the remote at the television. And there on ABC Family was a Gilmore Girls re-run. I dont remember what particular episode, but there was Lorelai and Rory with all their sassy, smart banter. There was Luke, looking hunky behind the counter, offering up his coffee and pie. A small, germy tear of happiness leaked out onto my pillow.

I was sorry when the show got cancelled after seven seasons, but I think it came at just the right time in the storyline. My favorite episode might be the one ('cause I have several) where Lorelai is feeling miserable about her relationship with Luke, and she's sitting at home, watching Judy Garland sing "The Man that Got Away," from A Star is Born, and then Luke rings her doorbell... Yeah. That was a good one.

I wonder, if I play this soundtrack in my car, with my Monkey Girl riding with me, will our conversation suddenly become witty and loaded with pop-culture references? Will our hometown seem as charming and quirky as Stars Hollow, Connecticut?

Probably not, huh? First of all, she's not even quite big enough to ride shotgun yet. Also, since I didn't have her when I was eighteen, there's really no chance at all of me ever being as cool and hip a mom as Lorelai. Also, our town is the extreme opposite of a small, quirky New England town, fictional or not.

By the way, I found out about the soundtrack after digging around to find out what the show's creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino, has been up to these days. According to Wikipedia, she recently created and pitched a new series for the The CW that never made it on-air. The plot synopsis? "Gilmore Girls meets Little House on the Prairie."

HELLO.

Gasp

2011-09-20T12:42:00.000-07:00

Image from here. Originally found via this lovely post.

Sometimes, interwebs, you do not disappoint. Sometimes I find the most beautiful, unusual, inspiring images out there. They remind me, when I am stuck in a rut, when my world looks and feels small and wholly known to me, when looking out at my horizon feels flat and blasé and ho-hum and yeah, yeah, got it -- these images remind me of how big the world can be.

Forget the universe...my minds reels at the numbers, at explanations of light-years, of quantum this and particle that, until I feel in my gut that it's all elaborate smoke and mirrors by a particularly remote Oz. No, planet earth, terra firma, is large and mysterious enough for me, thank you.

The gorgeous reading room above is something from a dream, something imagined in some wee early morning, when I pull up the coverlet against chilly air and burrow deeper, with some half-remembered nostalgia for Christmas, for snow, for another life, not yet lived.

If the shot above is the interior world of that half-dream, than here is what it looks like, just out the windows:

Image found (and available for purchase) here.

According to the Flickr comments on the first photo, that library or reading room is somewhere in either the Netherlands or perhaps Germany. The bottom photograph is of New York City.

But it's my dream, my imagined universe. If I find it hard to imagine a life where I'd ever need a full-body parka to brave the cold out my front door, or be able to sit in an old, old room surrounded by beauty and history, I can look out there, into the ever-expanding universe of the web, and find images to make such undreamed corners of the earth possible, seem like places that I might visit, might even inhabit. Someday.

Not Young Enough in the Young Way

2011-09-16T12:49:00.000-07:00

Image found here.

Most of this summer, the music by San Francisco-based My First Earthquake has been really, really popular over at my house. My kids both have a few of their songs on each of their little Sansa MP3 players. (Those players have taken a hell of a licking and still keep ticking, after at least 3 years of abuse.)

My husband, who is the musical maverick around here, first heard them on PopTron, an online station through SomaFM that plays lots of synthesizer-heavy, 80s'-inspired electronica. He's in his late 40s, but still listens to and seeks out new music, unlike some of his Old White Guy peers who are content to still be workin' on their night moves with Bob Seger. (Although in full disclosure, we'll both crank it up for original, Roth-era Van Halen.)

Anway, so he played the music for the kids, showed them the cute, low-budget videos on YouTube, and my kids have been hooked. The songs are fun, poppy and bouncy, the lead singer is a cutie, and I can totally relate to the song, (I'm Not) Cool Enough in the Cool Way:

"I can't be compared, without mentioning old ladies/
I can't be compared, without mentioning old ladies holding babies!

Had a fantasy about dark socks/Got a cup of tea, but Earl Grey rocks..."

Video Below:

My daughter and husband both claim "Mad Tight" as their favorite. (Should I be concerned that my husband bops so happily along to a song about a dress being mad tight, because it got left in the dryer too long?)

Anyway, I'm not trying show off how hip we are. Hardly. I'm just sharing what it sounds like under our particular roof these days. I like their music too, but feel a little "I'm not worthy." As in, maybe I'm just not young enough in the young way. I'm also probably too old and nerdy to be lurking around some of the hipster blogging circles that I do, but no one has called me out on that, not yet. (I do weep a little into my cold coffee, though, when I read a blog post by a whippersnapper fondly recalling her preschool days, back in the early 90s.)

On the other hand, the fact that I honestly like My First Earthquake gives me some hope. I'm not at all fond of much new music these days, the type favored by young indie hipsters. Especially the music put out by all those bands full of earnest young men and their facial hair. I just...don't...get it? (Maybe I need to move to Portland?)

Fleet Foxes, image from here.

Mumford and Sons, image from here.

See, I like me a little banjo and all, but when I hear it, my brain immediately thinks of this guy:

Roy Clark on banjo, Buck Owens on the gee-tar. Ernest Borgnine (?!?) providing hand-claps. Image via here.

See? I'm not cool enough, by a long shot. And yes, I have sat in a living room in my childhood, while Hee-Haw played on the televison. A great big, huge console television, and someone had to get up off the couch to change the channel. Suck on that, hipsters.

Fantastic Ms. Fox

2011-09-14T10:35:00.000-07:00

Paula Fox. I wouldn't mind looking like this when I'm older: smart, warm, and more than a bit intimidating.

A few posts back I mentioned picking up a Paula Fox book at the library, in a hurry, in one of those moments when I flip open the dust jacket, say "hmm, okay," and throw it in my bookbag, on top of 20-odd children's titles.
(Recurrent nightmare: I'm in a library, or sometimes a clothing store, and the clock is ticking down and I have to just make a choice, dammit, but I'm frozen in a paralysis of indecision.)

So, speaking of nightmares, that first book was The God of Nightmares. Good stuff: New Orleans, prior to WWII, a young woman making her way among bohemians and drunks (or both) and a homosexual or two. The French Quarter feels like a small-town neighborhood, and everyone seems to know each other, and each other's business. But it's not the plot, it's the characters, the razor-sharp outlines of people and of moments.

This spurred me onto Borrowed Finery, the author's memoir. Considering the helluva childhood Ms. Fox endured, this book could easily have been twice as long. Born to a young couple, unwanted, the young Paula lives first with a kindly, cultured Congregational minister for her first five years. At one point, her father shows up, deposits a box of children's books at the house, then leaves again. After the age of five, young Paula kicks around between an apartment with her Cuban maternal grandmother, a sugar plantation in Cuba, and back to New York City, before her father brings her out to Los Angeles, where he is working as a Hollywood scriptwriter (this is back in the late 30s). After only a couple of days, her mother pronounces, "either she goes, or I go." And so Paula is shipped off to a stranger's house in Redlands, a citrus town about sixty miles east of L.A.

The central, terrible character in this spare, slim memoir is the mother. She is neither explained nor psychoanalysed, as a younger writer, or one from our current generation, might feel tempted to do. The reader is left to glean from between the lines that the beautiful, glamourous Elsie was simply immature and frankly envious of the few, small moments that Paula shares with her father. A bit of a spoiler here, but let's just say that Ms. Fox never reconciles with her mother. Toward the end of her mother's life, the adult Paula pays a visit to Elsie, after not seeing her for literally decades. I was floored by this telling detail: Fox's "revulsion" (her word) for Elsie remains so strong, she opts to go outside to urinate in the yard, rather than sit on the toilet seat in her mother's house. Whew.

Finally, I've just finished reading The Village By the Sea, a children's book. (Fox was an even more prolific author of children's books, and has won the Newbery Award.) Despite, or maybe because it is a children's book, I was more deeply affected by this than the other two. It is about a 10-year-old girl, Emma, who must go stay with distant relatives for two weeks while her father undergoes open-heart surgery. Aunt Bea, her father's older half-sister, is already well-known as a "terror" to her parents, but Emma experiences her aunt's caustic personality first-hand. The terrible dread that Emma feels living in her aunt's home by the sea, a dread that flares up at every thought of walking past her aunt, or provoking another of her bitter comments, was so vivid to me, and so reminiscent of a similar time in my own life, that at one point I had to put the book down, as my eyes were filling with tears.

Of course, after reading her memoir, I can see how Fox's writing sensibilities would be uniquely tuned toward how adults can be baffling, hypocritical and downright terrifying to children. After all, despite what children may sense or know, the adults wield all the power.

Now I have one of her back-in-print novels, Desperate Characters, winging its way to my doorstep, and I can't wait to read it. In a funny twist, many of Fox's older novels are now back in print after Desperate Characters was re-discovered and championed by big-time author Jonathan Franzen. And I first mentioned discovering Paula Fox at the end of my post here, when I discussed reading Franzen's novel Freedom. Not that any of it has a thing to do with me, but I still like those little moments of literary kismet. The book world is a small world, after all.

Big Blue Blenko

2011-09-09T16:03:00.000-07:00

Say it three times fast. Look at this lovely. I got it on a recent trip to Palm Springs, where we stayed at the Hotel California. We could check in any time we liked (after 3pm) and we could never leave (but had to come home anyway).

Our first night in town, we strolled though a little outdoor mall with a collection of vintage stores on the north end of the Palm Canyon shopping district. I found the greatest little shop, called Bon Vivant. Loved it. The owner has a great collection of stuff...just so well curated, I wanted to pause and fondle it all. He also had a beautiful collection of vintage Blenko glass pieces. They're like big shards of hard candy that you wanna lick. Or at least I do.

Photo from here.

Usually my husband sort of intimidates me into not spending when he's around. (I won't say he's cheap, but....) However, after about ten minutes inside Bon Vivant, I knew I wasn't going to be able to leave empty-handed. Also, we were in town for a romantic anniversary getaway, so I was able to play that card.

Score.

Turns out that Bon Vivant and its collection of Blenko glass was mentioned in this April's issue of Martha Stewart Living. Read all about that on the shop website, or visit their Facebook page, where I read how J.A., Jonathan Adler himself, is quoted as saying that this store has some of the best pieces at some of the best prices around.

Well there ya go. And that's why me and J.A. are so tight like that, see?

Read about the rest of my desert weekend here, over at my new-ish travel blog. I'm still sorting it out over there, and trying to figure out how to write an informative post in less than 12 hours. Sheesh.

Our Ikea Kitchen (Only 3 Years Late!)

2011-09-02T12:11:00.000-07:00

No more being a tease, it's full-monty time. Here it is: our Ikea kitchen with the Nexus yellow-brown cabinets. It was completed back in May & June of 2008. I can't believe we've lived with it for over three years now.

Except for the granite installation, my husband did all of the work himself, all the way down from ripping out and installing drywall (apparently, the old ceramic tile backsplash did not want to leave), on up to screwing in every piece of cabinet hardware. You can see a "Before" shot and some of the process here on this old post. (Note: he's not a contractor by trade. In fact, he's plays a mild-mannered computer geek by day.)

I live in a very typical, newer (11 years old) builder-grade home, and everything about the old kitchen was builder-grade. We didn't change any of the architecture or tear down any walls...it's just a typical u-shaped kitchen. Except now we like it much, much better.

I remember this part as being the biggest pain in the ass: installing that narrow top cabinet above the fridge. Oy. I recall the full weight of it resting on my husband's head and shoulders as he tried to wrestle it into place. Evidently, the width of the front of this niche was narrower than the back. Fun! And no, we did not go out and buy a new Subzero fridge. It was free. FREE.

My father-in-law is an installer and repair guy for high-end appliances, and this was a "second" that a client didn't want. (It had a couple of scratches and a small ding.) He drove it down from Oregon for us. That kind of windfall never happens to us, but this time, it did.

Some other shots, from the top:

We created the island by putting two base cabinets back-to-back. The front of the island, facing the family room, stores kids homework and craft supplies. The back of the island has two deep drawers. The island, with the granite slab, is heavy. Standing right next to it, I can feel a slight depression in the laminate floor from its weight.

My husband was able to link all the under-cabinet lighting together, so that I can flick all of them on & off with one switch. (As opposed to going down the line and doing them individually.)

The lighting fixture is also Ikea (no longer available). I didn't want to go "all Ikea," but I liked this fixure...it kinda reminds me of the Capri pendant from Jonathan Adler. As for the cheap matchstick blinds...those were supposed to be a temporary solution, but you know how that goes.

I love, love, love the backsplash tiles from Susan Jablon Mosaics. They are definitely the "jewelry" and bling of the kitchen. I love the shimmer created by just walking across the room. You can see more of the sample tile colors, and read about me geeking out on them, in this post. (I still have all those lovely sample tiles...what to do with them?)

Another view...

And another view, of the sink


And one last view. The door leads to my tiny laundry room, and then onto the garage. And no...this long counter is NOT always this clean. This is where old homework and junk mail goes to die.

A final word: I know the funny nose-wrinkle that some people get when you say "it's from Ikea." That's a long debate for another day: custom-built modern design vs. affordability for the great unwashed. But I will say: we've lived with the kitchen for over three years now; these pictures were taken just a few months ago. Everything has held up very well...including those awesome drawer-closing dampeners that let the drawers glide silently shut on their own. So cool. And I haven't mentioned the cost yet -- but this was easily under $15K.

I have two children, (now ages 6 and 9) who are not careful about anything, least of all how they treat a kitchen. If I had to do it all again, I'd make some different choices (not all that thrilled with the stainless sink, wish we a double wall oven, etc.). But this is from a person who rearranges furniture a few times a year, so what do you expect?

In the end, I am still thrilled to look at it here, and know that we made this happen, ourselves. Yay us!

Tease

2011-08-29T12:09:00.000-07:00

Deep drawer, on the island

I am such a tease. I'll let you look into my drawers, but not see much else.

I don't check my Blogger stats very often, but when I do, it's very clear to me that what The People want to see most here is my Ikea kitchen.

And people, I have been there. Sitting in front of the computer for hours and hours, trolling the interwebs looking for photos and inspiration of other Ikea kitchen projects. I understand. It's a long process, the planning and choosing and measuring and buying and installing. You need visual proof that it can be done, and that what you're choosing will look good.

My narrow cabinet for cookie sheets and muffin pans. LOVE this.

Being the shameless tease that I am, I have mentioned in passing my kitchen a few times on the blog, long long ago. You can read details & see some in-progress shots here and here. These posts are easily my most viewed, hands down. (Note that in both posts I link to a now-defunct page over on Ikea Fans; I never maintained my site when they did a re-vamp a couple years back. Sorry.)

Anyway. So here is another teaser post. I promise, barring personal or natural disasters, to show you the whole thing on Friday. No more teasing, no more close-ups of the part, but big wide shots of the whole. I will be Giving the People What They Want: my kitchen with the Nexus Yellow Brown Ikea cabinets. Promise!


Ikea Stainless shelves.

Top of the Stairs: After

2011-08-25T13:06:00.000-07:00

Back in February, I wrote about The Mess at the Top of the Stairs, my boring-beige-blah bookshelf moment that was the first thing anyone saw when coming upstairs.

That was then:

And this is now:

Needless to say, I like this a whole lot better. I don't remember the paint color, but it's by Behr and has a name like "Jamaica Bay" or something Caribbean. My inspiration was the photo below, but when it came down to it, I just didn't have the heart to paint up my old bureau. It seemed a little more dignified to leave the wood as-is.

The mirror is old, but it's not an original Turner, or at least I don't think so. I was happy to go from all-new, almost all-Ikea in the old version of this space, to almost entirely vintage in the new version. The only thing I bought for this project was the paint; everything else is stuff I already owned and styled here. The mirror is just propped against the wall, and along with the fan, it brings an Old Florida kind of vibe, which I like now, but will probably swap out as the seasons change.

Challenging to try to take shots of all this, without having my own reflection show up.

Some well-loved old books.

When was the last time you read a "zany" novel? I confess to buying this for the cover alone, and have never read it. But, I have seen the movie several times. I used to think I loved it and considered it a must-do summer event, but after the last viewing, I realized that's it's really quite an awful, Puritanical morality tale. I love watching the great Paula Prentiss, but want to smack her upside the head when she expects a marriage proposal after hanging out with affable old Jim Hutton for a weekend. (And "hanging out" isn't some kind of euphemism: they really are just hanging out on the beach.)

A better, more realistic-for-the-times morality tale, is A Summer Place. Oh, now that's a good summer movie. And it has some great interior set designs, to boot. AND, it features a house on the Carmel coast, built by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Image via here

See how I brought the conversation back to design there? Yes, I really am that slick.

*I should note that the original post and "mess" actually refers to my desk, located over to the right of the bureau. This area has also been painted and much improved upon, but it wasn't quite ready for its close-up on the day I took these shots.

Lazy Summer Reading

2011-08-19T13:51:00.000-07:00

Margarita, with obligatory summer toes

Summer is considered over now, in my neck of the woods, even though the temperature is just now really cranking up. All the kids in our district went back to school last week, so while we'll still have pool days and be wearing shorts for the next couple of months, “Summer 2011” as a concept is in the bag.

This summer was a lazy one. There were many, many days when the kids and I didn't get dressed and leave the house until the afternoon. When we did leave, our aspirations were low: a trip to the library, or Jamba Juice, or the discount movies. (We also spent a week in Arizona, but that was way back in early June...that was late spring, to be exact.) I felt our laziness to be some failure of imagination and ambition on my part. Last summer, I had a big butcher-paper list attached to the kids art easel, full of ideas and plans. But in truth, this summer really was quite eventful, and featured a couple big rites of getting bigger: The kids playing at our nearby park all by themselves! Both kids swimming in pools without my help! My Monkey Girl getting her ears pierced! Also, there was Scripps Aquarium in La Jolla, Girl Scout camp, and my girl's immersion and total geek-out into the world of Harry Potter books. There was Monkey Boy, saving his allowance for a DSi, so he could quit pestering his sister to borrow hers. And various play dates and sleep overs and trips to a couple of new, modest water-parks around town.

Monkeys, with complimentary apples at our pool cabana in Scottsdale

You get the idea. And where was I, in the midst of all this kid-centric activity? Reading scores of blogs while ignoring my own (ahem), blogs with lots of peaceful photos of coffee in pretty mugs and late-afternoon sunlight striking glasses of white wine, with bloggers waxing poetic about staying present, staying in the moment, holding onto every sweet drop of life.

Right. So when I wasn't feeling guilty from either reading too many blogs, or from the blogs themselves, I often avoided the kids and thinking about my life and cleaning the toilets by reading novels. Some were good, some were instantly forgettable (which is why I can't list them), and a couple were Big Novels. Novels in the grand tradition of the Great American Novel.

The first of these was Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen. This was the first of anything I've read by Franzen, who got famous after the The Corrections – and turning down Oprah's invitation to be on her show, after she'd selected the novel for her book club. Evidently, he's a serious writer.

I really delved into Freedom, and found it was a good, involving read. Lots of commentary on the current culture through the interlocking fates of the characters, who are mostly all from one family. Also, in Patty, the wife and mother, he creates one of the most disagreeable, annoying, and yet ultimately fascinating female characters I've met in a long time. The only section of the book that slowed down for me was the long section dealing with the politics of coal mining and mountain top removal in Appalachia, and their role in the ethics crisis of another major character.

And, I will say that Franzen's writing is really top-notch, specific and revealing. This was most evident when I moved onto the next book I attempted after Freedom, which was The Widower's Tale by Julia Glass. I think some of the plot elements of her book felt too similar (a family saga, commentary on the liberal lifestyle and the push for gentrification, environmental activists, etc.) Maybe I should try it again, as I really loved Glass's first novel, Three Junes. But I gave up this novel after several chapters, feeling that the writing definitely suffered in comparison to Franzen's.

The other Big Novel of the summer was a re-reading of William Styron's Sophie's Choice. I had actually meant to re-read this last summer, but I wasn't able to get my hands on a copy. Shamefully, my local library doesn't carry anything of this late, great Southern writer's works, except a slim collection of military short stories that appeared much later in his career. So recently, in a used bookstore, I bought the mass paperback edition of the book, the same edition of the book I'd read way, way back when I was in junior high. It's kind of funny now to think of me reading this in junior high, because as mentioned, this is a Big Novel, with big themes about guilt and grief and passion and the Holocaust and sex and sex and sex.

Sex and sex, because the narrator, Stingo (not-so loosely based on Styron himself) is a young man from the South living in Brooklyn in the first years after World War II, and he's a very inexperienced and lonely and horny young man. And his first encounter with Sophie and her lover, Nathan, is when he's subjected to hearing their very loud and enthusiastic lovemaking in the room above his, in the boarding house where they all live during the fateful summer of the book.

Sophie's Choice is a wonderful book, not least because of the evocative descriptions of place, from 1940s New York places like Coney Island and Flatbush and, in Sophie's retelling, to pre-war Crakow, the Warsaw ghetto, and the terrible sights and smells of Auschwitz. It's also just a great story, a tragic one on many levels, and reading it decades later, as an adult and a mother, opened up new layers of the story to me. Layers that I probably didn't quite appreciate when I first read this at thirteen or fourteen, and was likely just shocked to see the word cock repeated so often in book. (One joke from the book has stayed with me all these years: when non-native speaking Sophie refers to Stingo's dapper suit as a cocksucker, rather than a seersucker.)

So now the kids are back in their classrooms, and I'm blogging again, something I found too time-consuming and guilt-inducing (there's that word again) with children sometimes literally at my feet, moaning aloud their boredom.

And I'm still reading; this time not a Big Novel, but a quiet little book that I'd never heard of, The God of Nightmares, by Paula Fox. This is heady good stuff here, about a diffident young woman who leaves her lonely home in upstate New York to live among a cast of artists, drunks and young people in the French Quarter in 1941. Sometimes (often) the best books are those desperate choices I make at the library, when nothing else I'm searching for can be found on the shelves (note again, dear Riverside County Library system, your grevious lack of the works of Mr. William Styron).

Loved

2011-07-12T00:31:00.000-07:00

I was able to treat myself to a solo movie night a couple weeks back. Midnight in Paris was such a treat, in the midst of my summer-vacation uber-mama days, filled with snacks, lethargy, sunscreen, and fending off repeated queries for the Wii...Wii now? Wii later? Wii when?

Instead, for two hours I soaked my senses with Paris and magical realism and bad Hemingway and cobblestone streets and cafe chairs.

Oh, and Marion Cotillard in this dress. Or any of her dresses, really. Swoon.

What I Didn't Write (For Weeks and Weeks)

2011-06-30T14:22:00.000-07:00

Like the book title says: I could tell you stories, man. I could fill your head with my busy busy tales of end-of-school class parties and field days, and planning a summer vacation and then going on said vacation. How four weeks (already!) into summer break, we are lazy-lazy most mornings, the daughter and I both waking and reaching for our eyeglasses and books on respective night-stands, long legs in shortie pj's tangled in the sheets. And also: swimming at the neighborhood pool, blueberry picking, a lemonade stand. Etc., etc.

Excuses, excuses, all. I have so many for not writing. Remember a few months back, I very ambitiously announced a weekly post featuring a snippet of what I'd written that week? Yeah, that.

Well, here is the truth of why I stopped writing. It has nothing, nothing to do with my busy busy days. It has everything to do with a thought. One thought. Or two.

First thought: I pictured a family member reading my memoir. No matter that my nascent memoir is literally years from ever reaching publication stage. The family member wasn't my mom or sister (although that thought is scary, too). No, it was the image of another family member reading my someday-memoir, their lips pressed tight into a thin white line of anger and disapproval, that scared me silent.

Second thought: the second thought was more of an issue than a lone thought -- but the issue is that I wrote far enough into one section, that I ran smack up against one of the "Big Events" that affected my childhood. Big event, big repercussions for my and my family's life...and reader, I was sore afraid.

So, in a word: Fear. I became afraid to write any more, any further, any deeper into the story of my childhood and my family. Fear of family reaction, and my own fear of writing it all down, even for myself. I'm working through it: I have my trusty The Artist's Way on hand, and I'm trying to stay grounded in the present, and not fill my head with (too many) dark imaginings.

I Could Tell You Stories, by Patricia Hampl, has been illuminating in ways both helpful and cautionary. I think that Hampl is just terrific, one of the best memoirists around. A couple years back, I wrote about her book, The Florist's Daughter, here. I Could Tell You Stories is a collection of essays about the memoir form, and I immediately connected with how she describes the compulsion toward memoir for the writer, as opposed to fiction:

"Memorists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to "tell a story." They want to tell it all -- the all of personal experience, of consciousness itself. That includes a story, but also the whole expanding universe of sensation and thought that flows beyond the confines of narrative and proves every life to be not only an isolated story line but a bit of the cosmos, spinning and streaming into the great, ungraspable pattern of existence. Memoirists wish to tell their mind, not their story."

Yes! Precisely! This was the illuminating part, putting words to why I feel the compulsion toward memoir right now: to tell it all, not just the story, the "this is what happened" part. But then, in the last essay, "Other People's Secrets," Hampl writes of the people she has lost from her life over the years, because of her career devoted to "telling it all." So here is the cautionary word about memoir: people will get angry. People will be hurt, surprised, betrayed even. And usually, it is the people you least expect. In a sort of plea to the jury, to those who have left her, Hampl writes:

"I never understood the fury my desire to commemorate brought down upon me. The sense of betrayal --- when I thought I was just saying what I saw, drawn into utterance, I truly believed, by the buoyancy of loving life, all its strange particles. I didn't have a dark story of abuse to purvey or even a horde of delicious gossip. I was just taking pictures, I thought. But then, doesn't the "primitive" instinct know that the camera steals the soul?

And a few paragraphs later:

"I've lost quite a few people along the way. And not to death. I lose them to writing. The one who accused me of appropriating her life, the one who said he was appalled, the poet miffed by my description of his shoes, the dear elderly priest who said he thought I understood the meaning of private conversation, this one, that one. Gone, gone. Their fading faces haven't faded at all, just receded, turned abruptly away from me, as is their right."

Oh, crap. So yes: fear. For me, who shuns conflict and dreads confrontations, I have reached a rather thorny bridge. I'm determined to cross it, but perhaps I won't be displaying the process as publicly as I'd planned. No more "What I Wrote," with accompanying photos. The kids have five more weeks left of their "summer break" (how I hate that they return to school on August 10th, right when the heat really starts to bear down the worst here) and I admit, I won't be working on any "real" memoir writing during these lazy weeks. But by the end of August, I intend to get back on that horse and cross that thorny bridge and extend my awful metaphors for all they're worth.

Father's Day with Willie

2011-06-19T13:09:00.000-07:00

A Father's Day tribute to the two biggest male influences in my life: my daddy, and my Grandpa. They were not very much alike at all, and their relationship was uneasy at best, especially in my early childhood: one was a hard-working family man, father of five children, and reliable as a gold watch. The other, my daddy, did not take as naturally to the role of husband and father, mostly due to his own inner struggles and issues. He loved me and my younger sister dearly though, and he did the best he could for both of us. Which is all one can really ask.

But one thing both of these men had very much in common was a love for travel and hitting the highway for the next road trip. Both of them had campers on the back of their pick-up trucks. (I think one had a Chevy and the other a Ford, but I'm not 100% sure of that.) Some of the best days and memories of my childhood were spent in the back of their respective campers, on the road to the Kern River, or Sequoia, or even, once, Vancouver, Canada. (My dad took the family to see the World Expo up there in '86. I was 17 and didn't want to leave my friends, and spent a good chunk of time up in the above-cab sleeping area, pouting and listening to The Smiths on my headphones.) (Which was a pretty good soundtrack for the cloudy and chilly Northwest summer coastal landscapes.)

Both my grandpa and my dad died four years ago, within four months of each other. Neither of them got to travel much in their last years, but in those years they did get along better. My dad shared a lot of his old books on the Old West and Native Americans with grandpa, and they had some times reminiscing about old travels and forgotten back roads.

I heard this song on the radio the other day, and it made me think of both of them: how they loved this song, and how they were both happiest on the road. One did a lot of careful preparation ahead of time, and the other was a lot more spontaneous. But they each enjoyed some good, good times.

On the road again/Goin' places that I've never been/Seein' things that I may never see again/And I can't wait to get on the road again....

The Books of Diana Abu-Jaber

2011-06-06T11:28:00.000-07:00

A few months back, an acquaintance asked me what I get out of reading fiction. First, let me say that the breadth of the question kind of left me flabbergasted -- I mean, really? She asked in such a way that implied that IF I gave her the right answer, she just might want to start reading some fiction, herself. The pressure was on for little-'ol-me to justify the existence of libraries crammed full of made-up shit.

Well. I guess she asked me because I do declare myself a bookworm, and thus am supposed to know things about books and reading and such. And I do. Lots and lots of things. Really! However, I am famously inarticulate about talking about these things. When someone asks me what I like to read, I draw a blank: white noise and static fill my head, and I say, "um...literary fiction?" And then draw another blank on naming just one such "literary" book or author. Jeeps.

The answer to why I read and love fiction is as basic as any of those cute posters pinned up in the children's sections of libraries. It's the whole "discover new worlds" thing, of course. Travelling without leaving your couch, etc. etc. And (most of all, probably) being reassured, over and over again, that I am not alone in my weirdness. (It occurs to me that you can do these things by reading quality non-fiction, too. So I guess a better reply still needs to be dredged up regarding "why fiction?" A quick answer is the intimacy to characters.)

Recently I read the first three books by Diana Abu-Jaber, and what I "got out of them" was pretty much what I listed above: the chance to visit other places, peek inside other homes, and be assured yet again that humans are weird, in so many fantastically unique and specific ways.

I read her first novel Arabian Jazz.

A sort of coming-of-age story, about two grown women still living at home with their widowed father. The father and his extended family are from Jordan, and the family has all kinds of plans for marrying off these sisters to eligible strangers from the home country. It's a little too long, a little messy in the plotting, but I liked it -- maybe for those very reasons. I also liked the clandestine affair between the protagonist and the greasy loner who works at the gas station -- a romance with descriptions ripped right out of about five Bruce Springsteen songs.

Reading about the family dynamics and the specifically Arab culture that Abu-Jaber describes in her first book made me want to know more about her, so I was glad to find her memoir, The Language of Baklava. It details her mixed race childhood growing up in upstate New York and the pressures put on the family by her very emotional, traditional father. For about a year, the family moves to Jordan, and it was fascinating to experience the shift from American suburbia to an apartment in a dusty Jordanian village, surrounded by a close-knit Arab family. And the food! Lots and lots of descriptions of food (there's lots of food and eating in Arabian Jazz, also). I've never been that interested in Middle Eastern cuisine (except baklava, which I thought was solely Greek), but reading these books made me very interested in trying lamb kabobs and stuffed grape leaves. The descriptions of a Bedouin feast under a tent in the desert, and a hot summer night's drive to the coast of the Dead Sea were wonderful and vivid.

Finally, I read her second novel, Crescent. (Finally, because even though it's a few years old, the book was always checked out of my local library.) Crescent is again the story of an Arab-American young woman, working as a chef in a restaurant on the westside of Los Angeles. Like her first novel, Crescent is a little messy, a little too long, but again, I didn't mind. This plot is a love story, but there's also some world & gender politics thrown into the mix. And again with the food! People are always eating in all three of these books, and they're the type of people who always have interesting, good food on hand. Unlike me, who reads the meal descriptions and gets hungry and rummages around in the kitchen, only to come up with Triscuits and low-fat string cheese.

With summer upon us, hopefully you have some fun vacation plans. Road trip? Amusement parks? The beach? But if you don't have the means or desire to go anywhere soon, I advise one of Diana Abu-Jaber's books. For me, they were a great trip away from my white-bread suburban scene, and a little taste of the exotic. (Although I imagine the author probably cringes at that word.) And after reading them, I remembered my acquaintance and her "why fiction?" question, and thought to myself: yeah, THAT. Like, duh.

'Cause I have a graduate English degree and am all articulate and stuff.

Oh, by the way, I've also read Abu-Jaber's most recent novel, Origin, which is probably her least autobiographical work, and could also count as "staycation" reading -- because freezing winters in Buffalo are pretty damn exotic to this California girl. I briefly mention Origin in this old post.

I've Been Everywhere, Man

2011-04-15T14:35:00.000-07:00

Dammit, I did it again. Got all into blogging, for like two and a half weeks, and then I did the disappearing act again. How does that happen, and how do the weeks fly by just that fast?

According to blogging etiquette or mores I'm not supposed to mention and/or apologize for the fact that I went incommunicado again. (Evidently people hate that. It makes them roll their eyes.) It's just...I disappear for a month, and then jump right back into the deep end? That doesn't feel right, either. So sorry to make you roll your eyes back into your head, oh you hipster-daily blogger, you.

But before I get back into talking about books and decor and writing (oh yeah -- that) and whatnot...here's a quick little travelogue of places I've been since last I posted.

There was a weekend trip out to Palm Springs. It was for a school-based

event, but it's always good to get out to Palm Springs.

The weekend after that, there was a day-trip out to Hollywood to play tourists.

In the middle of the following week, I drove out to meet a Canadian friend who was in town. We met up at Fashion Island. The sunshine wowed my friend and made her happy. The Jonathan Adler store wowed me, and made me very, very happy.

In the middle of all that, my daughter turned 9. Here she is, posing after the Nordstrom Spring Fashion show that she participated in with her Brownie troop.

And then there were the two weeks of Spring Break. See the statue of the iconic

photo, of the sailor kissing the nurse on V-Day? (D-Day?) This was in San Diego.

And of course, there's always Disneyland.

And somehow, even in the midst of all that busy busy time, I was still able to write a bit. Emphasis on "bit."

I wrote about a girl named Shayla that I knew in the 5th grade.

And how she bore a strong resemblance to Tom Petty.

But then Spring Break hit my house and I stopped writing anything at all. And I've been increasingly cranky and testy and generally fed up again and I know I need to get back to the yellow legal pad.

As for today, at least I'm back here.

What I Wrote (Week of 2/20)

2011-02-26T20:00:00.000-08:00

In an attempt to keep myself honest and motivated, I've started posting at the end of each week a snippet -- usually a paragraph, maybe longer, maybe just one long convoluted sentence (I'm fond of those) -- from the writing I accomplish each week. Also, I'm currently writing long-handed on yellow legal pads, so seeing the words typed up onto the white screen is sort of an interesting process, too.

The new beard would prove to be the missing element needed to complete his [my dad's] image of arch raconteur. It divided his round face, camouflaged his full cheeks, and gave a more pointed finish to a somewhat weak chin. He'd also ceased wearing his graying curly hair in the cropped, tight afro popular in the mid-seventies, and now brushed it straight, where it fell slightly below his ears. In what seemed a matter of months, he'd transformed from resembling the post-Brady Bunch Robert Reed, to the gruff romantic charm of Kenny Rogers. It seemed that everyone who met my father, from this point throughout the next half-decade, would at some point make the comparison to Kenny Rogers.

Before

After. Dad's beard in the early '80s was nearly identical to Kenny's.

Helluva Thing

2011-02-23T22:18:00.000-08:00

Have you seen it? Probably on the web, if you visit any design blogs at all. But have you really seen it, in person? As Jimi would say...but...are you experienced with this thing?

Because the Ikea Maskros pendant is a. hell. of. a. thing. A helluva thing. To whit:


It's big.

It looks like a big puff of dandelion. And at 32" in diameter, this thing is big. It is a statement. I have a big-ish house, with some tall ceilings here and there. But I don't think any space in my house could handle this guy.

Until.....
We took a trip down to the San Diego Ikea a couple of weekends back, and turns out...they now have a smaller, more manageable-sized Maskros. At 24" in diameter (I think...didn't write down the exact dimensions) it shaves nearly 10" off the mother-ship size. Not sure where, or even if, I would use this, but just the fact that I can potentially put this somewhere is pretty exciting. I think I even did a small mini-shriek there in the lighting section. Hey, maybe it can be my new light fixture over by my desk area.

Here's another shot of the original light, shown more in context of its size:

I told you it was big. Image from here.

And not to say that this is what my bedroom looks like now, but it does sort of remind me of my new bedroom re-do. I should probably show that off here sometime, huh?

New Feature: What I Wrote

2011-02-18T12:15:00.000-08:00

In an attempt to keep myself honest and motivated, I'm going to start posting each Friday a snippet -- usually a paragraph, maybe longer, maybe just one long convoluted sentence (I'm fond of those) from the writing I accomplish each week.

Also, I'm currently writing long-handed on yellow legal pads, so seeing the words typed up onto the white screen is sort of an interesting process, too.

As I've mentioned in passing here, I'm working on a memoir -- which is sort of a cringe-inducing statement to make. Isn't everyone working on a memoir? Isn't the blog self-confessional enough? Well, long story short: for years I worked exclusively in the short-story form. I do love me a well-written, elegant short story. But after completing my MFA from here, where I delivered a book-length collection of short stories in fulfillment of my degree, I felt sort of tired of the form. And after I had my daughter, and stopped writing for literally years, I found it harder to get engaged and excited by the often dense prose and clever structures of short stories that I read. Also (and this is the heart of the matter): I grew quite weary of fictionalizing and creating different characters and plots for things out of my own past. Especially events from my family and childhood.

Well, enough throat-clearing (as we used to call belabored introductions, back in workshop). Here's what I wrote this week.

They [my parents] trailed me down the carpeted hallway, watched as I stood in the doorway of my bedroom. It was transformed. Gone were the the head and footboard of my bed, gone the long white dresser with its thick coat of glossy white enamel paint. In their place was a set, a suite, a symbol, I understood almost immediately, of their acknowledgement. Yes, they were saying: we've made you say good-bye to hard-won friendships and near-normalcy in Whittier, moved us all to sun blasted Bakersfield, and so here, here is a set of matching, creamy yellow furniture. There was a curved headboard with an inset of woven wicker lattice, a long dresser with ornate white handles and a tall mirror hanging above. A low bureau of three drawers, and upon it a hutch with two shelves. The top shelf displayed my collection of ceramic Josef birthday dolls, the other a stack of yellow Nancy Drew spines, my growing number of Dell Young Adult paperbacks, and all of my Judy Blumes (had mom flipped through and read any pages of Forever? I worried).

This isn't my dresser, but an image from the web of a dresser a lot like mine, and the same exact color.

Ditto the Josef doll. I still have them. Somewhere.

The Mess At the Top of the Stairs

2011-02-16T17:50:00.000-08:00

When I was a teenager, and heavily into my Stevie Nicks/The Mists of Avalon stage, I loved writing poems and songs containing the line..."the dark at the top of the stairs." Wooooo. Spooky! But this isn't that.

This is about the mess at the top of my stairs, and the area isn't dark at all, but very bright, considering that this half of the house is all windows and high ceilings. The mess at the top of the stairs refers to my desk, my nook, where I'm sitting right now typing up this post. I have a window beside my desk, and it's cloudy and windy today, and the heavy branches in the pine trees beside our house are waving about. And that's about the extent of the pretty up here: the view out the window.

Let's take a tour. I'll meet you as you come in the front door.


Well hello! If I knew you were comin', I'da baked a cake.

Here I am looking down at the stairs from the first landing. Let's travel up to the next landing for a look-see...

Okay, not too bad so far. Lots of windows and light, like I said. Now let's make that last turn...

Whoa. Okay. Bookshelf! Ikea Expedit, to be precise. We all sure do love our Expedits, don't we? Lots of squares and storage, not too ugly. But why did I buy it in birch, instead of black? Well, we need to take a couple more steps first.

And here it is! The Mess at the Top of the Stairs. Namely, my desk. With its piles of school stuff and receipts and bills and travel ideas and kid art and just...stuff. I'm a piler and a stacker. Here we see the reason for the beige Expedit...why, so that it can better match the beige desk! (Also from Ikea. I can't recall the name, but as of right now, they still sell it.)

So. I know you're thinking...eh. It's not that bad. Messy, okay, but you've seen worse. Sure. But considering how many hours I spend here during any week, I think I deserve better, and my house deserves better, than this chaotic desk and this vision of...MEH. Beige desk, beige walls. Beige bookcase with burgundy organizers? EEK. And that chair! Which is broken, by the way, and so sometimes I start sloooowly sinking down, feeling like the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz: "Oh, what a world, what a world!"

I'm not sure just what I was thinking. To be honest, I haven't applied my same sense of design sensibility of fun and color and contrast to this nook, because it's just...a nook. And a narrow one: at about 46 inches across, it can be tough to find a desk or table to fit the space. But, the nook is where I spend hours and hours of my life. Staring out the window. Shoving aside the piles, scrabbling for a pen. "I know there's one in here somewhere, dammit!"

This is all going to change. There will be paint! And art! And a new desk! And the bookcase will move..... Somewhere. Oh, and a new light fixture, too. This is what I have now:

Ain't it pretty? Four lightbulbs up in this fixtures, and these babies are all over the hallways of my house, both up and downstairs. Don't get me started.

Here's another view, coming out of the master bedroom:


This wall is supposed to be a gallery of kid-friendly art. Another work-in-progress.

Here's one more view of the space, before we head back down the stairs:

All righty, then. Down the stairs we go. Lets pause and admire the Valentine's-themed display on the entry shelves.

Awww. How romantic.

I wish I could say I'll have pictures of the stunning update at the top of the stairs very soon. But these things take time, especially when the update will include switching around computers and desks not just in my nook, but in the children's playroom area. They have quite literally outgrown their current computer set-up, and will probably be inheriting my old desk. And then there's the matter of finding new places and spaces for everything that will get kicked out of the Expedit. But I have a plan! And inspiration! And with that, I can do anything! (Within the budget.)

I leave you with a final image, of the inspiration photo that started this whole ball rolling.

Image via House of Turquoise

Oh, mama. Oh yes, please. I saw this and had a total eureka moment. It helps that I have a dresser quite like this (sans the extra decorative molding) sitting rather uneasily in my bedroom right now. After I bust out the sanding paper and black paint, I know the perfect place to put it...right at the top of the stairs.

Hidden Corners of the Park

2011-02-09T12:54:00.000-08:00

View from the tippy-top of the Treehouse; Haunted Mansion in the distance.

A couple of weeks ago, we were at Disneyland. Again. I love being at Disney, and so do the kids. We have annual passes, which are expensive, so I was very grateful when "Santa-Husband" tucked a box under the tree this year with another set of passes for our family. (Note: the passes are expensive, but Disney does offer multiple-payment options to stretch out the injury, which I suppose is why it feels like everyone and their mother living in the SoCal radius has passes. Including my own mother.)

After visiting the park so many times over my lifetime, you'd think I'd seen it all, but there always seems to be some new nook or cranny of detailed goodness. This is why people love Disney -- not for the rides, or the "happiest place on Earth" experience, but because those Imagineers really, really know how to pay attention to the details.

For the first time (ever?), we tackled the big treehouse in Adventureland. The treehouse used to be the Swiss Family Robinson house, but now it's the "Tarzan" house, based on a lesser-known animated flick that came out about a decade ago. Here are some shots of the detailed props around the treehouse.


Victrola and telescope -- this looks like an awesome antique store


Typewriter in the trees. I just realized that the teapot in the background is "Mrs. Potts" from "Beauty and the Beast."


This display looks like something from either Anthropologie or a high-end nursery.

My favorite area in Disneyland is easily New Orleans Square. I love the ornate wrought-iron balconies, the narrow cobbled streets and "hidden" alleys. On this trip, coming out of the restroom, I looked up and noticed these clothes on a laundry line, which I had never ever seen before. Were they new? Or have they been there always, and I never paid attention?

Bad lighting, but you can see them hanging up there.

Every light post in the Square has these Mardi Gras masks. Again, love all that detail, and how they're always changing things up.

Of course, with the crazy prices for parking and food and STUFF, they damn well better step it up. Love ya, Disney. As long as you're around, and the water in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride still has "that certain smell," things can't be too wrong in the world.

Reading: Little Bee

2011-01-27T22:42:00.000-08:00

I thought I should talk about a book, because um, this is The Reading Nest, after all. 2010 was sort of a slow year for me for reading novels. I know I still read quite a few -- but darn if I can think of many right now. I read a couple of the early books in the True Blood/Sookie Stackhouse series, which are fun and light, but not nearly compelling enough for me to keep going onward with all those many chubby little paperbacks.

Also, I want to try to tone it down, with the English-major term papers every time I discuss a book here. I've mentioned it before, but it's a drag, when I really just want to say, "hi there, I read this book and here's my 2 cents," but instead turn it into a damn book report.

Soooo...Little Bee. Hmmm. On the fence. Liked it enough that it was hard to put down, but see, it's hard to squash my inner English major. I kept hearing the professor from my grad school program who always railed against what I guess he'd call "sociological fiction," or "IMPORTANT fiction," which usually meant any book written by or concerning minorities or Third World issues.

Little Bee is the name of the narrator, a young girl about sixteen when the book begins. She is a Nigerian immigrant who's been living in a British detention center after stowing away into the the country, to escape the horrors of her native land. The action begins on the day when she is released from the detention center, out into the English countryside.

Unlike her fellow detainees, Little Bee has studied and learned the Queen's English, and armed with only her language skills and the drivers license of a British man she met on a Nigerian beach, she sets out. How she came to own the drivers license, and have any connection with the British man and his wife, Sarah, is the gist of the novel.

It's about Third World horrors, oil politics, immigration policies, First World guilt and culpability...you get the idea. It's also about sadness and grief and savoring the world's beauty. I guess I saw through the Important Message of the book a little too easily, which made me enjoy it less. Not that it wasn't moving, or affecting.

And I will give this disclaimer, to anyone hoping for a light, breezy read for their book club: this was the first book in a very long time to give me a nightmare. Pretty gruesome stuff described here, and it stayed with me, after I closed the book and shut out the lights at bedtime.

Hello, New Year

2011-01-19T10:16:00.000-08:00

Hello, peeps. I've been wanting to post here, but after such a long absence again, there's the inevitable pressure to say something stupendous. Like, "2011 will be the year I conquer Mt. Everest!" or, "2011 will be the year I sell my first book!"

No plans like that. Let's just say...hmmm. Maybe 2011 will be the year I really commit to my writing schedule, which was going along okay, until HOLIDAY 2010 hit my household like a Mack truck. Or, let's just say...maybe 2011 will be the year I commit a little better to the old blog, here. I'm a bit chagrined that the blog, which purports to be about "nesting" (at least some of the time), hardly ever ever mentions the subject. So I'd like to change that.

For now, here are a couple pictures that make me smile. On New Years Eve, my family went ice skating at the temporary rink our city installs in the Old Town district. I was taking some pictures of my daughter (who did about 110% better with her ice skating compared to last year, when she spent almost the entire hour either clinging to the rail, or landing hard on her bum). At home, reviewing the pictures, I noticed the young couple behind her. Ah! Young love!


Young love on ice (the blue tie-dyed girl is mine).

It's like a commercial for diamond engagement rings!

So, a belated Happy New Year to you and yours. If you're at all like me, you're just finding your footing and balance going into this brand new year, anyhow. (Which was not supposed to be a bad ice skating metaphor, but I guess that works, too.)

Black & Blue

2010-12-06T22:35:00.000-08:00

No, not the Stones album, actually.

So I fell down a week ago. Like, fell down as in ate it. Munched it. Kissed the sidewalk. It was...epic, at least judging by my injuries. A bleeding, fat lip where I bit myself. A black not-quite eye, more like a black cheekbone, where my sunglasses shoved into my face. Another small, greenish lump of a bruise near my jawline. And that's just the stuff above my neck.

It wasn't a trip, wasn't a stumble, but was some kind of careening, out of control, headlong rush into a metal gate. I was running, because my son likes to race me home from school. I usually resist his requests to race, at least until we're much closer to our house, because, duh, I hate to run. But that day, in my boots, my cute, low-heeled, up to my knees brown leather boots with no traction on the soles I thought, "why not?"

Reader, I was running fast. It's clear from the location and sheer number of bruises on all four limbs that I bounced off that gate more than once. Else, how do I have bruises on both my inner and outer forearms? All I truly remember is the feeling of things turning sour and south very quickly, a sickening panic of feeling totally out of control and being unable to correct what was going wrong. And then, my face hurt.

All week long I've been making jokes about my husband taking a swing at me, to explain the red and purple and now yellowish bruise on my cheek. Ha ha! And someone I know, and generally like, came up to me and said, "oh, I remember doing something like that and how stupid I felt afterward!" But the thing is -- I didn't feel stupid. It wasn't that kind of fall, where you trip, and go splat, and recover and tuck your hair behind your ear and off you go, hoping you didn't look quite as stupid as you know you just did.

Not to sound all melodramatic, but it was some fall, and it shook me, and made me feel alternately shaky and weepy and just generally vulnerable for a solid few days early last week. What a charmed life I have lived so far, to go four decades on the planet without a serious blow or injury. No broken bones, no lying in traction. Not even a sprained ankle! (Such is the physical life of a lazy bookworm.) Maybe I need to start climbing more mountains?

In related news (sorta, you'll see): I am writing a memoir. Though not exactly climbing mountains or snowboarding in the High Sierras, this feels like dangerous work. It's dicey, dredging up the past, remembering all that stuff that people (read: family) wanted you to just forget and shut up about, already.    I think that's the danger of growing up in a family where people (again, read: same family) want you, expect you, require you to shut up and just put one foot in front of the other. Trouble is, the child becomes an adult, an adult who still feels the need to ponder and mull and rehash and relive and puzzle out: just what the hell happened here, folks?

When I crashed into that metal gate last Monday, part of me later wondered if somehow, some part of my psyche is still trying to get me to shut the hell up. I thought of Carolyn See, and how after the wrenching business of writing her terrific memoir, Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America, she came down with a bad case of meningitis, or some other nasty viral disease. The brain is powerful. It know what it wants to do, what it has been conditioned to do for decades on decades. So, again with the melodrama, but it's true that for just a moment or two, I wondered if perhaps my brain was trying to shut me up. For good! (Cue the dramatic music: duhn, Duhn, DUHN!).

Well. I am on the mend. The lip is nearly healed, the bruises are fading, and I'm almost ready to step back into my cute boots that are now sorely scuffed on one toe. The writing is going...well, the writing is going slow. December is a bad month for somebody who is already lax on writing discipline. Still, my yellow legal pad is slowly filling up. Maybe in some not-so-distant week, I'll even need to move on into a brand new legal pad.

That is, if my brain doesn't grab the wheel and send me hurtling over some cliff.

Old and Older

2010-10-29T12:25:00.000-07:00

I love old stuff. Old places, old cars, old houses. Old trains. Earlier this month, we went to the L.A. County Fair on its final weekend. One of the first exhibits we visited was a collection of old trains. The exhibit itself was sort of off to one side, annexed off, a quiet and relatively lonely area, compared to the the glitz and screaming lights of the nearby carnival zone.

The peeling old paint, the bare bulbs. It gave me a thrill and a chill that I always get, visiting and seeping in the spirit of old stuff.

As soon as I saw this, my brain immediately started playing Judy Garland, singing "on the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe," from her movie, The Harvey Girls. Because old movies, and old MGM musicals, are also things I love best.

What's that? You say you can't stand old musicals --- they're cheesy, corny and unrealistic, and in real life, people don't ever just break into song and start tap dancing on tables? I would banish you from my world -- except that, as it turns out, the love of my life, my soul mate, my dear husband, feels the same as you.

Ah well. Such is life, such is love. The ying and yang of it, and all that. I'm a night owl, and he's up before the sun. I like looking back to the dusty, forgotten past, and he gets all tingly imagining the future.

But, he does like old trains, too.

Even if, as I'm snapping pictures of bare light bulbs, he's admiring, like, the engineering marvel that made those trains move. And stuff.

Old and older: that's us. Quite a team!

Finally...

2010-10-12T21:21:00.000-07:00

A bit abashed to admit this, but lo these many years after earning both bachelor and masters degrees in English, I've finally gotten around to reading Jane Austen. I'm just a contemporary American Lit kind of girl at heart, which is my excuse. But really, for a bookish chick who claims to be a bluestocking at heart, is there really any excuse? No.

It took me me a few days to get into Pride and Prejudice, but once I fully committed, I was hooked. I think what I enjoyed most was the (re) discovery that human nature hasn't really changed all that terribly much in the 200 years since the book was published. Kind of the same delight that I felt when reading Shakespeare. (At least I DID do that as a good English major.)

A favorite passage, spoken by Miss Elizabeth Bennett:

"There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense."

Amen, sister.

Next up, perhaps Emma, or Sense and Sensibility. I would like to read Henry James, also. However, a few months ago I checked out The Wings of the Dove (I liked the movie, with kooky dear Helena Bonham-Carter), and felt completely illiterate trying to plow through the dense prose.

I highly recommend it, if you're troubled and can't seem to fall asleep. Works like a charm!

Pet Peeve

2010-09-26T22:11:00.000-07:00

It was really hot here this weekend. Really hot. I think the high was 108 degrees today, according to the weather sites.

Okay: So it's hot, and it's the end of September. Turns out that typically, for Southern California, our hottest month of the year is October.

Still.

Some people seem surprised, even taken aback, by our heat this weekend. And if you just moved here, from say...Idaho? New England? Canada? It would be okay to be surprised at our Indian summer heatwave. But those of you who, say...have lived in California all your life? Have lived specifically in SOUTHERN California all your lives?

Y'all need to get a grip, and like, get a longer memory, or keep a daybook or something. Because, people! It gets this hot, at this time of year....every year! And still, I have to hear: "Can you belieeeeeve this heat? And it's FALL." Yadda yadda. You can't really blame folks, what with Halloween costume catalogs arriving, and my magazines full of robust and hearty autumn stew recipes for those chilly September weekends in...Vermont? Wisconsin?

Tomorrow is supposed to be even hotter. And then it will cool down later in the week, and probably return to a normal 83-ish degrees by next weekend. And then, in a week or two, the Santa Ana winds will kick in, and it'll heat up again, and you'll all start talking about the end of the frickin' world again. It's a CYCLE, people. It's what autumn looks like, in our part of the world. Write it down. Remember it for next year. All right, I'm done.

Peace out, homies. (And no, the above pics weren't taken this weekend. Are you kidding me? It was HOT out.)

Paranoia (The Destroyer)

2010-09-16T22:16:00.000-07:00

I could say lots about where I've been for the last eight weeks since the last post. Detail my very real social anxieties and dread of other people, fill you in on all the charming anecdotes of the kids' first few weeks back at school (the cause of most of said social anxieties) and how I internalize my utter failure to make relevant, chatty small talk as an utter failure at being a good ...mother, citizen and human being. I'm not really quite that bad. But some intense few hours can feel like that, sometimes.

Instead, I'll summarize all that inner turmoil with this droll little poem, that I re-discovered the other night:

We who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting,
as a group,
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift.

Your analyst is
in on it,
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband;
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us.
In announcing out
association
we realized we have
placed in your hands
a possible anecdote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves.
But since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community
of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center,
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your disastrous personality
then for the good of the collective.

HA. Poetry, a mighty good dousing of cold, fresh water on all my hand-wringing, head-banging self obsession of late.

The poem is by Philip Lopate, who also wrote the mighty words: "They fuck you up/Your mum and dad./They may not mean to/but they do." Ah. Truer words, and all that. And (this time) I don't even mean me own dear mum and dad, but myself, as a parent, as a stay-at-home mom -- one who has volunteered herself way out onto new and scary precipices. And so early in the school year!

Ah well. Here I am folks. Been reading, been nesting, been thinking of the blog and then losing the train of thought, or the will. That paranoia, it eats up the hours. But if nothing else, it's gotta be a good omen to title the first post-dry spell post after a Kinks song. Ray Davies rocks.

Which reminds me: barely three months left in the year, and we haven't seen a live show or concert. How to fix that?

Back

2010-07-29T22:13:00.000-07:00

I'm baaaack. Actually, I've been back home for about a week and a half. One thing I like about vacation is unplugging, literally. I logged onto the internet maybe once in the 10 days that we were gone, and rejoiced in how Facebook completely fell off my personal radar. (I guess it goes without saying that a soul as conflicted as mine feels totally conflicted about the ~~wonder~~ evil that is Facebook.)

So I've been lying low and being very lazy, living in both denial and increasing anticipation of the fact that the kids will start back to school in less than 2 weeks. Crazy! A 9 week summer vacation isn't at all the 3-month season that I had as a kid. We were out of school mid-June and didn't return until after Labor Day. And we liked it that way, sonny!

I took the photo above at a rinky-dink little amusement park called Oaks Park, located a little southeast of Portland, Oregon. It's very retro, in a boardwalk/carnival sort of way. It even has a roller rink! My children loved it. I loved that my 5-year-old son, who can be a bit of a nervous nelly, mustered up the guts to ride on the kiddie roller-coaster with me -- and then rode another 4 times with his big sister. Such joy on his face!

I also loved that when I was standing there, taking the above shot of the colorful "Rock & Roll" spinny ride, the PA system was blaring Manfred Mann's version of "Blinded By the Light." Something about that song just sorta screams 70s summertime to me, and it was a good moment.

We were in the Portland area for 6 days, visiting my in-laws. My in-laws fled the arid high desert of Southern California for green, drippy rural Oregon about 20 years ago (before I was on the scene) and they seem to love it. As for me, I like Portland plenty -- especially the miracle that is Powell's bookstore, where I got to spend a couple of glorious hours alone one evening -- but I doubt I could take the weather for too long. I will probably always live in California, and if not, I would still opt to move somewhere in the southwest or south -- something in me just drifts that direction, as opposed to the chilly and bundled up north. Give me my palm trees!

This final week and a half before school will be a weird combo of lazy and ambitious: sometimes staying in our PJs until noon, sometimes me taking 2 kids alone to the beach, the local pool, the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Double scoops of ice cream still need to be consumed! Same for peanut butter sandwiches, eaten with grains of sand crunching in our mouths at a beach picnic.

As for Cherry Icee induced brain freezes?

Check.

The Unlikely Bonfire

2010-07-08T23:41:00.000-07:00

The world is such a wonderful, weird place. Ditto that, for the internet. Without this old world, and the still-new internet, I would not have found myself at Ocean Beach two weeks ago, with someone I'd assumed I would never meet.

The person I got to meet was sweet Jenn Mattern, of the blog Breed 'Em and Weep. I've been reading Jenn for oh, around three years now, when I found her blog. I started reading her because at that time, she was writing a lot about the ghosts in her old house. Which I found both fun and creepy, and reading her late at night would sometimes give me the willies. (I'm a big fan of the concept of ghosts and the paranormal from way, way back. Remember "In Search Of.." narrated by Leonard Nimoy? Like, almost the best. show. ever. Right up there with Emergency! And, as if right on genetic cue, the Monkey Girl is suddenly fascinated with ghosts and aliens and "weird stuff" too.)

I digress. Anyway: I had just assumed I'd never meet Jenn, that she'd only ever exist for me as a voice out there in Blogland, because Jenn is from way back yonder over in Massachusets, and I'm way over here in Southern California. Also, when Jenn writes about the places she imagines herself, it's clear that she fancies some cold, remote, windswept kind of life. Iceland and Newfoundland? She's so there.

However, thanks to the vagaries of life and the wonders of the internet, Jenn had the opportunity to spend her 40th birthday not in Iceland, as she'd long planned, but in a rather stunning turn of events, right down south in sunny, ever-pleasant San Diego. Even more of stunner, she celebrated her actual birthday with a hot-air balloon tour right here in the wine country region of my own little 'burb. You can see her, here. Doesn't she look all happy and glowy?

Suffice it to say, Jenn has had a bit of a rough time lately, lately being the last couple of years: divorce, dying pets, mental illness and mean commenters, to name just a few. Much of her deepest and darkest emotions have been bravely and beautifully written about on her blog, and I admit that sometimes, during her most challenging, darkest days, I would click on her link and wince a little, afraid for her and her smart young girls, dreading some awful note from her mother, or some new twist of the knife dealt by the Fates.

So when Jenn sent out an open invitation for anyone in the San Diego area to join her at a celebratory Birthday Bonfire at Ocean Beach, I was quick to say: I'm so there!

And here we are:

How typical: West Coast in bright pink, East Coast in black.

There were s'mores, and contraband champagne drunk from the back of a car. There was much talk, talk, talking, and delight (on my part) to see Jenn in person, to see how lively and animated she is, and also, how very, very awed she was on this evening: by the Pacific, by the concept of "the West," specifically SoCal, and mostly so awed at the magical hands of fate, and our own industrious, creative hands out here on the interwebs, that made the whole night happen at all.

Thank you, interwebs! And thanks to my friend Becky who was quick to agree to accompany me on an evening bonfire meet-up with a whole passle of strangers. Thanks to Jenn, and Ed, and all the other bloggers and friends who were gathered 'round the fire on that evening.

I'm heading out myself for a while here. Back later in the month, with tales of summer adventures to share.

F.U., Lakehouse!

2010-07-06T11:44:00.000-07:00

If you spend enough time on the net (which you DO, because you found ME) you've probably heard of the hilarious blog, F.U. Penguin (actually, Fuck You, Penguin), where the site host writes mean, taunting dispatches to adorable, fuzzy, and/or just weird-looking members of the animal kingdom. (Or as the subtitle says: "A blog where I tell cute animals what's what.") The blog seems to be on a bit of a hiatus, but the owner did get a book out of the whole enterprise. (I saw it on the table at B&N this holiday season and spent several minutes flipping through and giggling out loud. Here is a primo sample post.

So anyhow, I was bumbling around the 'net in my usual parenting-avoidance state the other day, and stumbled on the first picture below, of that perfect bed. And I clicked on it, which led to the Flickr set of a whole buncha related photos from this pristine, unbelievable lakehouse in the Adirondacks. The Adirondacks! A whole style of summer outdoor chair from a mountain range, which about sums up the history and mystique of the area.

Just look at that bed, that little nook of a room. The quilt, the pillows, the white iron bed. The vintage mirror, the lighting sconces, the paned window. That yellow floral comforter that I love so much, I want to eat it. When I saw the bed, I didn't know where or what that window might look out on, but poking around on the Flickr set led me to the whole house.

Which is where I encountered other pictures of the same house, with this kind of idyllic crap:

A hammock. In a sunporch. Not just any hammock -- look at the sweet and vintage-y cover. Not just any sunporch, for look at that 180-degree view of the lake. I have never slept or spent any significant time in a sunporch. Ditto for the concept of hanging out a hammock, with or without a juicy novel, or a cute boy, or a sweating glass of icy sun tea or whatever the hell you're supposed to have with you in a hammock. Two of my most favorite words, in one dreamy place. This was just about when The Uglies kicked in. That's the only good name I have for the wash of vile green envy and pure, degrading lust that flows over me when I see certain houses, certain glimpses into a way of life that are real enough, but completely foreign and pretty much unattainable to the lowly likes of me.

Hence, my post title. Please take it in the same spirit of the more famous blog I'm copying. This is too adorable, too perfect, too hard to believe that it exists alongside us all on God's green earth. In short: Fuck you, lakehouse!

Here's the exterior of the house. Green, green trees, green water (me, green with envy). Imagine waking in the fresh morning, walking down to the deck with a cup of hot coffee. Listening to and watching the birds, the water lapping soft against the pilings.

In the attic bedroom with the window view out to the lake, the children will sleep in late every single morning, exhausted by the sun and swimming and late nights. The girl Monkey gets the pink-painted bed on the left; Monkey boy gets the green.

The Monkeys especially won't be waking in the middle the night to disturb their 2 parents, especially since mom was up late again, reading one of the books conveniently shelved on her side of the bed. (Also? Mom might well be sleeping alone in that Perfect Bedroom up top, hogging the bed all to herself.)

If I had found this house in a magazine, like Cottage Living or such, I don't think my envy would have kicked in so strongly. After all, one expects such perfection in a styled magazine spread. But to stumble upon it on Flickr, sitting there all innocent-like for anyone to find -- or not -- made it all the more unbelievable, at least for me.

It makes me feel somewhat better to know that this house isn't lived in full-time by one extremely lucky family. Instead, it's listed as a weekly rental for anyone to have -- anyone who can ante up $1700 a week. That price, plus the airfare it would cost my family of 4 to haul ourselves that far back east, probably makes this an unlikely destination for us. Still, one can dream.

And in the meantime? You there, lovely lake in the Adirondacks providing the perfect setting for the perfect lakehouse?

Yeah, fuck you, too. And just so you know? I have a lake in my town! And just because it's a man-made little pond surrounded by cheaply made, cookie-cutter faux-Cape Cods here in this arid suburban sprawl, and just because the city closes it down at dusk, doesn't make it any less.....
Wet. So there.

All photos courtesy of here, where you can also find rental information for your own Perfect Lakeside Summer.

Doormats R Us

2010-06-29T23:37:00.000-07:00

Why hello there, last day of June. Summer is upon our household. There has been tent camping in Big Bear, splashing in our association pool, park days, free-movie-at-the-mall day and one theater day camp already completed. Cookies baked, plenty of Wii time, signing up for the summer library program (one book a week, they suggest? Puh-lease! We are reading fools over here, me included). What else? Ah! True Blood, thank you very much, Miss Sookie. And, one beach bonfire with a good friend and plenty of nice strangers (more on that one, soon.) One could get the impression that I've been too busy to be in a funk or to get myself into deep emotional waters.

Well, one would be wrong. Wrong! Because there is always, always ample time to get myself swamped in dark & mucky emotional waters. Duh.

And really, what I want to do this summer is to keep it light on the blog, light and full of photos and brief, pithy, happy briefs from yours truly. But first, well...I just feel the need to purge a little, navel-gaze just a little bit (again). The route to my present state is long and circuitous and involves characters from my past and most definitely my present. But I'll speed us further along that road a bit and just say that, recently I felt moved to re-read some e-mails I'd written to an old friend, spurred by yet another round of weird, passive-aggressive e-mails from a current friend.

I sat here at my desk and felt appalled, chagrined and ashamed at myself, for the consistent use of one word, over and over: Sorry. "I'm Sorry!" I found myself writing, so often, so frequently, that I wanted to slap both the past and present versions of myself. Sorry, sorry, sorry...and, "I apologize..."

Good God. I must stop this. Stop it right now. I know all the reasons why I'm such a doormat. I've never attended even an hour of therapy, but hell, I can watch Oprah and Dr. Phil with the best of them. Co-Dependent, and I could list you all the reasons why I feel compelled to be such a Good Girl, Good Daughter, smoother-over-of-ruffled-feelings. It's exhausting, this doormat life. And the flip side of the doormat, underneath all the bending over backwards and turning of other cheeks, is a deep and abiding anger.

Anger at others, those others who allow me to grovel and simper and scrape my way out of whatever cul-de-sac of missed cues and miscommunication we've found our way into (again). Anger at the way they can use silence or a turned shoulder to let me twist in the wind, flailing and flagellating and doubting. But mostly, of course, I feel the deepest anger at myself, for letting myself become such a doormat in the first place.

I should make clear that the last person I feel this way toward is my dear husband, that Tek Nynja of understanding and abiding calm. Of course, he is the one person I trust most on this earth, the one whom I can share my honest and immediate reactions with, without having to soften them first in those suffocating quilts of apology. (For not surprisingly, it is the ones whom I mistrust the most, in whom I most detect a chilly inner core, that I find myself apologizing to the most.)

Well. It's the middle of the year, a long way away from New Years, but time for a resolution. If you're reading this, and feel I owe you an apology for something? Dear ones, my conscience is clear. If there's a book I lost, some promise unkempt, or empty assurance from me that I'd deal with it..but I never quite did? Oh well. I'm just trying my best, best as I can. I'm an honest person, a mostly kind person, and, as I may have mentioned, always quite willing to find fault with myself first and let you off the hook. "But, no more apologies", as Morrissey sings in an old and favorite song. No more easy apologies, unless they are truly deserved and earned.

I also need to take a long and hard look at some of the people I call "friend," and work my way through my general mistrust and loner tendencies to be able to forge new relationships, and make my peace with the current ones, flawed though some may be. It is hard to make new friends, good friends, at any age (at least for me). But here, on the other side of 40, it might be near-impossible. But worth the effort.

Besides, I have a daughter to raise, and she watches me so closely. I owe it to her to stand up for myself, and stop being so deeply angry and disappointed with the way I deal with conflicts. She's confident and smart and a total goofball:

And I don't ever want her to apologize for any part of that.

Now...onto summer!

Pin It Forward: What Home Means to Me

2010-06-10T00:50:00.000-07:00

Hullo, June, and thanks for sweeping into my life like a darned March lion. It's been busy busy busy around my digs lately, and as such, my mini-blogging break over the long Memorial Day weekend has stretched into 2 weeks. Until today....

Today is my day to create a post on the "Pin it Forward" project, organized by creative uber-blogstress Victoria over on SFGirlbyBay. Pin it Forward is a blogger's project to showcase and promote interest in Pinterest.

Pinterest, is a site where you can bookmark and store all the great images you find on the web, and sort them into your own personal boards. I admit that the aforementioned household chaos (and attempts to wean off a BIT from my net-trawling habits) means that I've only in the past week really dug in and started using Pinterest. And you know what? It's fun, a little addictive, and a much-needed service for me, who is alway finding cool gotta-have-it stuff, or inspriational pictures, and then losing or forgetting them.

The theme of "Pin it Forward" is What Home Means to Me, and so I've been trying to find and pin images that reflects home, and our life inside these four walls. Since I am about to start ("about" being relative, as in "sometime in the next few weeks") finally, finally embarking on my master bedroom re-do, I'm drawn to images of glamorous gray bedrooms. Because home to me is a place where I can curl up with a good book, preferably in pretty room with an upholsterd headboard.

But I've also got many other images on my "What Home Means..." board. Such as the one below, which is from an artist who designs chalk-board style labels:

As I say on my Pinboard, "how can I dare to be sad, when I get to hear this every day?" My little Monkey-Boy, who graduated from preschool today, tells me this as he squeezes me tight around the neck. Not to mention, we all feel this way about each other, here in our house. Which is a very cozy feeling of home to carry around, always.

I invite you to head over to my Pinterest board and check out the other images I've selected so far. While there, check out Pinterest in general, see how others are utilizing the site, and ask for your own invite to join, if you'd like. And then tomorrow, move on along to the next participant in the "Pin it Forward" project, over at the Inspired Designer blog, and Chalk & Talk.

My retro/vintage leanings + his geeked-out high-tech self = exactly what this home means to me.

Too Much With Me

2010-05-27T13:14:00.000-07:00

Escapism. Not a new concept for me, as one could argue I've practiced it all my life, being a major bookworm since about age four. Still, I've never ever felt guilty for reading too much -- maybe a little bit, when I knew I was avoiding homework in high school or college. But lately, I've been spending a lot of time out here on the internet. A. Lot. of. Time. On. The. Internet. Doing what?

Looking at pretty pictures, mostly. I'm pretty addicted to a lot of design and decor blogs, all the famous ones, and some obscure ones, too. Every day, doses and doses of photos of lovely homes and knick-knacks and cute art prints and on and on. I read "narrative" blogs too, blogs of women, mostly, just struggling with and documenting the everyday, a lot like I do here. When I can be bothered to actually type up a post for y'all. Oh, and don't forget Facebook. But good lord, let's not even go there right now.

Another of my escapist hobbies is watching House Hunters on HGTV. I've been watching it for what feels like forever, and I miss host Suzanne Wong a bunch and wonder where she went, but I still tape it on my DVR. I skip just about every single reality show out there, and don't feel any loss, but damn I would miss my House Hunters, if it ever went away. . Last night's episode was a House Hunters International, with a family who lives on tiny Harbour Island in the Bahamas, needing to upgrade to slightly bigger home.

Their budge was a million dollars, and let me say, a million won't get you much on Harbour Island. Except, of course, a home and life on Harbour Island. You can picture it right? The palm trees, the sea, the charming pastel cottages in every Easter egg color imaginable. Anyway, this family had 4 children, 3 at home, and the wife was just so warm and lovely and had such a cool, clipped accent. She reminded me of a curvier Sonia Braga. Remember her? Sort of Latin and warm and effortlessly sensual and sexy.

And it occured to me, curled up on my sectional: this woman? This woman is not spinning away the hours of her life in front of the internet. I'm not sure just what one does to fill up the hours and days of life in the Bahamas, but trolling for decor porn is probably not it.

All of which is to say, I'm hitting a bit of sensory overload these days. The world is too much with me, to parapharse old Wordsworth:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not......

So, this long Memorial weekend, I have plans. We have plans, as a family. To visit family, see friends, maybe see the ocean. In between, I have plans to not be sitting here, before my monitor, looking, looking, looking for some version of the life I want to live.

I want to be out there, living it. So, enjoy your own weekend. Mine starts tomorrow, because of a teacher furlough day in our district. Me and the 2nd grader have plans to go here.

So peace out and enjoy these lovely Bahamas pics.
And don't forget to stop and smell the hibiscus.