Unicorn Photos

My good, kind sister took some pictures of the unicorn pinata, so you can see the splendor.

Note the saddle with stirrups. Madame 5-yr-old painted the saddle, but her sister is insisting that we paint over the stirrups.

Alarming, isn't it?

Unicorn Tresses. Eventually there will also be wings.

This is Madame 3-yr-old's drawing of the unicorn. I may love it even more than the actual unicorn.

Birthday Season

My greatest regret in life thus far is that I didn't have my camera with me at my sister's house today. I saw the greatest thing ever and oh, how I wish I could post a picture of it on the blog. Birthday season has begun in our family. We already celebrated birthdays for Marmot Dad and my sister. My birthday and the birthday of my twin niece and nephew are in exactly one week and Madame 3-yr-old's birthday is four days after that. Soooo, birthday preparations are in full swing at the Marmot House. You will recall that Madame has been planning her 4th birthday for a good six months. Fortunately, she's forgotten her Christmas theme and now wants mermaid-decorated food and a unicorn pinata. (She was sad that I will probably miss the pinata portion of her party, because it was going to be my special treat to be allowed to hit the pinata right after Madame herself takes a whack at it.)

The pinata is almost complete and it is glorious. Imagine, if you can, a paper mache head and body spray painted GOLD with a giant, wide horn protruding right out of the top of the head (my sister, apparently, got in trouble for her poor placement of the horn) and a saddle with stirrups painted on the body (courtesy of Madame 5-yr-old). And that's not all. My sister and the girls dyed some yarn pink and yellow to make a mane and tail and the unicorn will soon have sproingy paper legs. My sister was making them while I was there, and Tuey was chewing on them. He's a helper. As soon as possible, I will be returning to photograph the unicorn and share the pictures. It's the best thing I've ever seen.

Addiction

It's a good thing I don't drink, because, I tell you what, I would be a lush. I'm prone to addiction. In graduate school, there was a Chinese place just off campus and for a little while I was deeply in love with their dumplings. Once I had to leave class to go feed my dumpling addiction. I craved them. (We had three hour classes, so I just left at the break and didn't return.) My newest addiction is the PBS reality series Manor House. I picked up the series off a cart at the library last week and started watching today before work. And now I have to go find out if the new scullery maid is going to stay (the first one left after two days. Scandalous!).

Texas Part 2 - Photos

I didn't take very good pictures in Texas, but here are a few that aren't bad.

My first breakfast in Austin. I didn't even want a waffle, but how can you resist breakfast foods in the shape of the state you're visiting? If they'd had a waffle iron in the shape of an armadillo that would have been even better.

McKinney Falls State Park. Don't be deceived by the name. There were no falls to speak of. If you click on the park link, there's a picture of some very nice falls, but they seem to have been dried up on Friday.

These are flowers on the grounds of the Alamo. Everything was in bloom.

This is Mission San Jose, one of five missions built in the 1700s in South Texas (the Alamo is one of the five). I'm fascinated by the missions. I find them architecturally very interesting, but I'm also interested in the history surrounding them. The Spanish and Native American cultures brought together at the missions were so different from one another. The chapel portion of the mission still operates as a church. Services were being held while we were there, and we could hear the singing out on the grounds.

This is some existing detail work on the side of the mission. All of the missions were originally very brightly painted with big, bold patterns.

This is my lunch from Pesca on the River Walk. Every other meal I had in Texas was large enough to feed 12 people. And my most excellent meal at Threadgill's (grits, spinach goodness, and sweet potato fries) included free refills of all the dishes. More grits? Here you go. Sure you wouldn't like more spinach? It's on the house.

The Supreme Coordinatrix and Stash on the River Walk. We spent a lot of time on the River Walk, because it was so much cooler than being on street level.

Texas Part 1 - What I Learned in Texas

I'm back from my four days of Texas fun. My friend The Supreme Coordinatrix is doing research in Austin, so I flew out to visit her and to go see our mutual friend in San Antonio.

What I Learned in Texas:

1. Texans love tattoos. I've never seen so many tattooed people in one place at one time. This morning a woman offered to give me one on the River Walk.

2. When people tell you the capitol building in Austin is pink, do not expect PINK. Expect pinkish.

It's still pretty, but I was hoping for flamingo pink.

3. I like cowboys. And cowboy wallpaper. Tuey and I are going to start having talks about this. The next word in Tuey's vocabulary? Vaquero.

4. The conquistadors who first came to Texas from Spain attempted to domesticate the buffalo. Clearly, they failed. I wish they'd domesticated the armadillo. I want one.

5. There is a reason the wilderness park recommends that you drop the animal food on the ground rather than letting the animals eat out of your hand.

Zebras and ostriches are aggressive. Emus are straight up wicked.

6. Shakespeare's The Tempest works pretty well as a space opera. We saw such a production at the botanical gardens (a perfect location for Shakespeare in the park, by the way) in San Antonio. I almost punched a woman sitting near me in the throat for first smoking through half the performance and then answering her cell phone and having a conversation in the middle of the play. True, we were outside, but she was still the middle of an audience watching a play! Grrrr.

7. Do NOT wear jeans in Texas at the end of May. Even if it's snowing in Utah when you board the plane to Austin and you're wearing a sweater and a jacket, pack the capri pants. Even in summer pants, you'll wish you could walk around naked. 98 degrees and humidity is ridiculously hot.

Deep in the Heart of Texas

I'm going to Texas tomorrow. I don't have much experience with the Lone Star State. My most notable experiences with Texas are the following:

1. When I was 6-years-old my family drove from South Carolina to Utah. I sang "Deep in the Heart of Texas" for a good portion of the trip (sorry!). My rendition of the song was made worse by the fact that I only knew two of the verses (and they're SHORT verses, couplets really) which I sang in a loop for miles and miles and miles. The only person who appreciated my song was a Texan at one of rest stops along the way (apparently my singing persisted both in and out of the car).

2. My mom and I once missed a connecting flight in Dallas-Ft. Worth and spent the night there. I don't remember if we enjoyed our stay or not. Texas did not leave a deep impression from the airport to our hotel and back again.

Child of the '80s

I was suddenly overcome with '80s nostalgia recently. So, I visited my good friend YouTube to watch the opening credits of The Smurfs and Small Wonder and Punky Brewster. And then I hit the mother lode. Music videos. Music videos weren't actually part of my childhood experience because (a) I wasn't allowed to watch MTV when I was growing up and (b) I wasn't very interested in music anyway. I had friends, though. Friends who dressed me up in acid washed jeans and made my bangs big when I visited their houses and friends who familiarized me with the music of Tiffany.

Please note (and be excited about the fact) that Tiffany is waiting outside the OGDEN mall, a mall that has since been torn down but is immortalized in this very, very, very '80s video.

STALKER

I have a neighbor named Max. He is four. He came over this weekend to help me do yard work. I was using my weed wacker and listening to a podcast, so I didn't hear him arrive, but I looked up at one point and there he was, squatting patiently on the sidewalk with his fingers in his ears. As soon as I acknowledged him, we became best friends and he talked almost nonstop for a good 2o minutes (he had to take a little break to run next door and come back wearing safety goggles and lugging his trimmer for me to look at--he says he'll come back next week and show me how it works). Almost immediately (after telling me that he also had a trimmer and that it was bigger than mine and faster and better) he asked me if I lived in my house and then, "Where's your husband?" It's like there's something in the water around here. Max also told me that his mom kicked his dad out of the house (not surprising--they spent a not insignificant portion of the winter having arguments in their driveway), that the bug he saw in my grass was full of poison and would kill me if it bit me (I took this under advisement, although it looked like a Box Elder beetle to me), and he invited me over for dinner to have some smoked chicken (I politely declined).

And then he spent the rest of the weekend knocking on my door. If I didn't answer his front door knocking, he let himself into the backyard and knocked on the back door for a while. At night, in the morning (while I was still in bed), in the afternoon. Max was at the door all weekend. I'm being stalked by a 4-yr-old.

I imagine I'll be seeing a lot of Max this summer, because he LOVES the trimmer, and I've decided that all my lawn care will now be done with the weed wacker. No lawn mower, no spades, no pulling weeds by hand. All plants will be uniformly cut down with my trimmer. Some tulips perished in this weekend's work, but it's a small price to pay for the new program.

Gracious Living

I started reading Sloane Crosley's book I was Told There'd Be Cake, which I really want to love but don't think that I do. I liked the first essay, though. The author discusses her worries about what will happen if she dies and people have to come into her apartment, which I worry about frequently, because sometimes I just don't get around to cleaning the bathroom for a while or there's too much chick lit on the shelves and I don't want people to get the wrong idea. Sloane specifically mentions the hazard of beginning a big reorganization project that doesn't get finished because of the need to stop and watch old sitcoms in a prom dress, which I also completely understand.

There was this one day when I'd recently moved into a new apartment in the ghetto. I was going through some of my things, when I decided that I needed to wear one of my old college formals, because it has a swishy skirt. I put it on and decided that I also needed to wear my boots, because when is it not a good time to wear boots? They always make me happy. And this was the year that I had a roommate who owned these goblets that made me extremely pleased. I drank all of my beverages out of a goblet that year. Orange juice from a goblet is just divine. AND if you're living in a ghetto, it's much easier to pretend that you live somewhere gracious if there's a goblet in your hand. So I was sitting in the living room, watching a talk show at 4:00 in the afternoon in a floor-length gown and boots, sipping a goblet of juice, when there was a knock at the door. I hesitated for only a moment before deciding that I wouldn't look like a crazy person by answering the door in my dress. How many people come to the door who don't know me anyway, right? Yeah. It was a man questioning everyone in the building about a recent theft. Did I mention how I was living somewhere a little bit dodgy? The police were there every few days and there was at least one big bust at the abandoned building across the street with 9 police vehicles including the k9 unit. And there I was living graciously in my formal wear on a Thursday afternoon.

Human Books

A friend at work sent me a link to this article about human books, which I think is a brilliant idea. Libraries gather individuals who represent a particular group, profession, or stereotype and each person can be "checked out" for 30 minute chats. Some of the human books from the article are Police Officer, Muslim, Gay Man, Vegan, and Immigrant, so if you want authoritative information on Muslims, you can check out a Muslim and talk and ask questions for 30 minutes. Interesting.

What I Like Today

Number 1
I'm still thinking about this book that I finished reading last week. I'm a sucker for this kind of thing. It's a collection of interviews with staff from the Met--trustees, curators, cleaning crew, security, the guy who provides flowers for the Great Hall--a wide variety of people. I was fascinated by the diversity of experiences, the different paths people took to end up at the Met, and the hugely varied responsibilities of the people interviewed. Most of the interviews also included a little bit of life-affirming Yay Met! Museums are Important!, which I agree with. My brother worked at the Met for a while, and it was NOT his favorite job (but it got me some pretty sweet Met-themed Christmas gifts). This book still makes me want to join the staff, though.

Number 2
I'd forgotten about this poem, but I stumbled across it again recently and remembered how much I like it.

GOD'S MOOD

these daughters are bone,
they break.
He wanted stone girls
and boys with branches for arms
that He could lift His life with
and be lifted by.
these sons are bone.

He is tired of years that keep turning into age
and flesh that keeps widening.
He is tired of waiting for His teeth to
bite Him and walk away.

He is tired of bone,
it breaks.
He is tired of eve's fancy and
adam's whining ways.

-Lucille Clifton

Number 3
IKEA Meatballs
I watched the marmots yesterday while my sister and brother-in-law went to IKEA, and my sister brought me back a bag of Swedish meatballs. I can't logically justify the joy that comes from a bag of frozen meatballs made in Pennsylvania, but they are yummy. Those Swedes. They never let you down.

Green Living

I went to the Live Green Festival in Salt Lake this weekend. People who believe in green living fall into a few different camps. One group is comprised of people who believe that the things they do and the products they purchase and the organizations they support impact everyone else and the environment and, because of that, believe in making socially responsible decisions and trying not to be selfish Hummer drivers who burn books for fun and like to make baby animals cry. I'm down with that (and, no, I don't want to talk about the veal saltimbocca I had for dinner the other night). Another group of people who are pro-green are the kind of people who like to tell you about the 52 kinds of allergies from which they suffered until their herbalists taught them to be one with the Earth and how to make their own blue jeans out of hemp and self-righteousness. Those are not my people. There were a lot of them at the Festival, though. I was watching some performers on the stage (powered by a bicycle), and a man was wearing feathers in his hair and playing a flute. I'm betting he falls more in the second category.

The best thing that came from the Festival was my fantastic honey. I bought a pint of honey from a local farm. I can't even tell you which farm, because the honey came in a plain glass mason jar. No label of any kind. It's DElightful, though. It's increased the joy I receive from my nightly toast snack, which I did not believe was possible. So. Good.

Tuey Talks 2

Tuey made a major breakthrough while I was in DC. Before the trip, he called me Uck but now he can actually say Aunt. Sentences still mostly elude him, though, so he packs a lot of meaning into a few words, which the fluent English speakers in his life must then interpret based largely on context and tone.

Here are some excerpts from our conversations Sunday night.

Tuey: Out. Aunt. Aunt!
Translation: Mealtime has concluded. Please release me from this booster chair. I have important work to do.

Tuey: Off. Aunt. G'ound. Aunt.
Translation: Get off that folding chair immediately, young lady! Sit yourself down on the ground where you belong, so I can sit on your lap and maul you.

Tuey: Aunt. 'ip! Aunt. 'ip! 'ip!
Translation: Dear relative of mine, this is a delightful little frog purse toy you have brought to me. Kindly zip it up. Zip, curse you! Faster! Zip!

Tuey: Aaaaaunt.
Translation: That little blond girl has once again stolen my frog toy. Please remedy the situation.

Tuey: Aunt. Aunt aunt aunt aunt aunt!
Translation: You, there. Tall lady. Please pull that bicycle with training wheels over here to where I am sitting in a small plastic car. I would like to touch it and marvel at its shiny pinkness but I am trapped in this plastic prison and cannot recall that the side of the car that I am shaking is not the side that opens to allow my escape.

A Surprise Visitor

Just now I was in the middle of writing a post about the Green Living Festival I attended this weekend, when my doorbell rang and there was excited knocking at the door. Usually that kind of manic knocking only comes from friends at the door who are bursting with good news: they're getting married, they got a new job, they want to give me cake. So, I opened the door. Standing on my porch was a woman I'd never seen before. She didn't look crazy but the first thing she said to me was, "Well, you're well-endowed, aren't you?" (No, not really.) She asked for a quarter, which I gave her, and then she left (after telling me that I have nice skin and that she had some powdered chocolate milk with her). She reminded me very much of our library patrons. I can almost guarantee that I'll see her tomorrow at work.

When Utah Behaves

Utah does summer really nicely. (It's not technically summer yet, but we're close enough to start praising the season.)

Fall is better in the Midwest, with all the brightly colored leaves and pumpkin patches and apple dumplings.

The South does the spring better than anywhere else. If you disagree on this point, I have only two words for you: Dogwood. Trees. If you still disagree, we have to fight.

In the winter I want to be far away from Utah. Preferably in Hawaii.

But I really like Utah in the summer.

These are my favorite things about Utah summers:

1. Fruit trees. It's true that Utah has been very busy in the past 20 years razing all of its orchards, but there are still tons of fruit trees and it's really easy to get fresh fruit at farm stands all up and down the state.

2. There are only 5 mosquitoes in the entire state. People complain about the mosquitoes here, but that's because they're crazy.

3. It cools down at night. It may reach 2,000 degrees during the day, but it still cools off at night and makes a nice morning walk possible.

4. No humidity.

5. Festivals. Almost every town celebrates some kind of festival during the summer: Cherry Days, Days of '47, Onion Days, Highland Days, etc. Fantastic.

Good job, Utah.

My Lawn Makes Me Sad

I need some kind of grazing animal.
Or some serious weed killer.
Or a boy scout troop.
Or all three of those.
Something to remedy my lawn care woes.

The current composition of my lawn is
35% - Grass
30% - Dandelions
25% - Crab Grass & Assorted Miscellaneous Weeds
10% - Dirt Patches

I put in an hour of lawn care attention today, and the lawn looks better, but only to me. You'd have to know how terrible it looked before to realize there's any improvement.

And THIS is part of the lawn that I'm pretending doesn't even exist. Because, really, what am I supposed to do with this?! Dirt and weeds. That's all it is.

Soup = Sad

Every now and then I can't find anything I want to eat in my kitchen. The kitchen may be full of food, but food like frozen raw ground beef and canned tomatoes and bran flour--nothing I can eat immediately, which is when I want the food to be available. At these times, I turn to the cans of soup in the back of the cupboard.

I like soup. Soup is delicious. When I reach for the canned soup, it always seems like a good idea. The picture on the label is so enticing, and I get especially excited when I'm opening a can of Italian wedding soup. It sounds romantic, right? It's wedding soup. Yeah, no. It's the least romantic food in the world, because canned soup doesn't taste like food. It doesn't count as actual soup. Oddly enough, it tastes both bland and overly salty simultaneously. And everything in canned soup--vegetables, meat, rice--is the same texture. That's so strange and wrong.

When I was a child, I liked canned soup. This is because little children are not smart in the food arena. Given a choice, they will eat entire cubes of plain butter. Once I saw a spaghetti-o can (close cousin to soup) with a label that announced Now Tastes Better to Kids! (or something like that). I think this meant that the spaghetti-os sauce now tasted more like ketchup, which makes sense. Kids love ketchup. I personally spent some happy times sitting in the backseat of the family car drinking ketchup out of the little packets from fast food restaurants.

I went the canned soup route yesterday. Couldn't make it through the entire bowl. Have to go make actual food, so that I'm never tempted by the unromantic Italian wedding soup ever again.

The Rummage Sale

This weekend was The Rummage Sale. It's an annual fundraiser that people from across the state (and I've heard from different states) attend, because it is so very good. The doors open at 8:00 a.m., and my sister and I arrive early like those brides at Filene's Basement. Skirts cost $0.75, shirts are $1.50, jackets are $3.00, children's clothes sell for $0.50. I bought a jacket, two sweaters, two skirts, three tops, and a whisk for $11.00. It's such a fantastic sale.

My sister and I attend the sale together, but we don't actually shop together. We take our huge bags and spread out, reconvening to critique one another's purchases and to give opinions on whether or not selections should actually be taken home. For example, this year my sister made me put back the brown swing cardigan that she said made me look like I was wearing rags and a gray blouse with ruffles that she mocked (it would have looked fine under a jacket). She had a bright pink, flowered rayon dress in her bag. She pulled it out and showed it to me, saying that she felt that something might not be right with this dress. Too true. What was wrong with it was that it was hideous. I assured her that we could no longer be sisters if she purchased that dress and reminded her that once before when she was pregnant she thought it was a good idea to buy a hot pink, flowered maternity bathing suit that still makes me fall down laughing every time I see it. The pregnant are not always wise.

p.s. Did you all hear This American Life this weekend, in which Ira Glass admitted to his love for The O.C. Validation! (It was actually a rebroadcast episode. I'd heard it before but I didn't fully appreciate it before I became acquainted with Seth, Summer, Ryan, and Marissa.)

From the Reference Desk

The Utah Library Association annual conference is this week. I'm not attending and being professionally developed, because we have to leave enough people at the library to man the reference desks and keep the public from burning the place to the ground. This year I'm one of the librarians left to languish at the desk (and I do languish after returning from vacation), so I've been working with the public more hours a day than I usually do, and at different times than normal. Specifically, I've been working when the businessmen come into the library.

I do not care for the businessmen. They drop things on the reference desk (money, papers) and give me a look that suggests that a) I should know what they want even though they're not using their words (and even after I prompt them to use our common language to express their needs, there are no pleases or thank yous forthcoming) and b) I'm an 18-year-old unpaid intern from their offices who should be scurrying about doing their bidding. Neither of these things is true, which is why when I finally open my exclusive, MBC-dictator library, businessmen will not be allowed inside the building. Unless you count the kid who tried to make a deal with me today in which I would sell him Internet guest passes in bulk for $0.50/each so that he could sell them on the street for $1.00. I declined his offer, and he went off to try to forge some court documents (he asked me if they looked official). Friendly kid. Way better than the businessmen.

Better Blogging Later

Can't blog.
Must read.

I started reading Apples are from Kazakhstan, a travel memoir, on my way to DC. JetBlue (bless the company's little heart) has those individual TVs in the backs of the seats, though, so I was very busy watching the Food Network on my flights, and didn't get very far, even though I'm liking the book very much.

THEN a bunch of books came in for me at the library while I was gone, so I'm now also tempted by

Lock and Key (newest Sarah Dessen)
Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100 Mile Diet
So Brave, Young, and Handsome (the new Leif Enger)
Travels with Herodotus (about the author's "first youthful forays beyond the Iron Curtain")
Dedication (little bit of chick lit from the authors of The Nanny Diaries)
The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur
Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath
Shakespeare's Wife (new biography about Ann)
Dramarama (young adult)
Mister Pip (teacher on tropical island teaches his students Great Expectations)
Positive Attitude (Dilbert)

And I want to read them all immediately. So, I'm gonna go get on that. Better blogging in the future.