if I could be Danny…

If I could be Danny Seo for just one day, it would have been the day he attended La Cocina que Canta, harvesting deliciousness from an all-organic garden and then attending a cooking class at the Rancho La Puerta spa in Mexico.

Can you tell I’m swooning over that food? Swooning, I tell ya!

Danny, I’m so envious.

Add comment 8.20.08

another knitpiphany

I’ve had another epiphany in regards to knitting lately. I find myself noticing knitted things much more often now, and looking at them with an eye for how they are engineered and how I could make them. I’m coveting sweaters, appreciating homespun yarn, and getting an itch to learn how to spin my own. When I see someone knitting in public, it brings a smile to my face.

I caught myself doing this just the other day when I was watching Seven Years in Tibet (which is a fabulous film that makes you fall in love with Tibet, want to have tea with the Dalai Lama, develop a crush on Brad Pitt, and really hurt from the political and militaristic injustices China has and still is inflicting on the Tibetan people). Being filmed in Tibet and being about an Austrian mountain climber, logically the film is full of really yummy woolens, many of which are worn by the equally yummy Brad Pitt. Like the sweater he’s is wearing in this scene, I *love* this sweater! I want to make one just like it to wrap Teo up in. I want to harvest fiber from mountain yaks to spin into the yarn to make this sweater. I want to go to Tibet and apprentice myself to a Tibetan woman who has been spinning yak yarn her entire life in order to make this sweater. Mmmmm…

Or this sweater from Bjork’s Debut album cover.

I love this sweater, I want to make one in a soft muted blue, or maybe a light gray.

I bet it’s warm and fuzzy. I bet if Bjork stopped crying for a second to snuggle in her own sweater and relish its texture, it would cheer her up a bit. If I made the same sweater, Bjork and I could hang out on a chilly Saturday morning in pj pants and sweaters, drinking hot cocoa and making each other giggle. She’s from Iceland, I bet she can spot a good sweater from a mile away.

Hey, at least it’s not a swan. I bet that swan dress was a lot harder to make.

1 comment 8.19.08

10 trippy films

Who needs drugs when there’s films that make you feel like your tripping when you’re dead sober? Many of these films focus on drugs so of course there’s some trippy parts, but some of them? Just plain wacked out. Watch at your own risk, just to say you saw it. Also, most are probably not for the kiddos.

Yellow Submarine

The goofball Beatles team up with psychedelic pop artist Peter Max to create this whirlwind fairytale. The Beatles come to rescue Pepperland from the dreaded Blue Meanies and save Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band, who turns out to be…the Beatles…at least I think that’s what it’s about…There’s a giant hand that attacks things, and a little guy named Jeremy who looks rather effeminate, and Paul defeats them with his words of Love…

Come to think of it, just about every Beatles movie I’ve seen gave me the same trippy confuzzled sense. Just how many drugs did those guys do?

Hair

Nothing like a drug-centric musical made into a movie to make you feel trippy. Especially check out Claude’s acid trip wedding to Sheila, and Berger’s birthday party crashing “I got life,” though I wish he’d actually swung on the chandelier instead of just pushing it. Great stuff.

After the stairway hippie dance fest that is “Manchester, England,” I was sporting a bandana tied around my knee for a while. Yea, I was esoterically cool.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Another film that is saturated with drugs, but if you think the film is something, try reading the book. Hunter S. Thompson, how ever did you survive the 70’s?

Also another example of why Johnny Depp is one of the most talented and flexible actors out there. He’s so believable in every single role.

And while we’re on the subject of Terry Gilliam films, how about:

Time Bandits

and

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

This guy can can really direct a goofy fantasy film, especially when he teamed up with the Monty Python boys. One of my favorite directors as well. Both films are really fun adventures and feature an all-star cast. I think of any of these, these two would be the safest to watch with the kiddos…

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

A rock opera about a boy from Berlin who’s dream of becoming an American female rock star runs into a few hiccups along the way. The film is based off the stage show and its a really awkward storyline to explain to your grandmother. What’s the angry inch? Well there’s this botched up sex change operation…really fantastic soundtrack though.

They call this the Rocky Horror Picture Show of our generation. Oddly enough, I haven’t RHPS so I can’t vouch for that, but from what I’ve heard about it…well, yea.

Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny

I love Jack Black. He always shines best in rock-centric films, and this one features his band Tenacious D, in a fantastical origin story about how they must find the Pick of Destiny to become the greatest rock band ever.

Really entertaining cameos by Meatloaf and Tim Robbins, some drugs, a rock-off with the devil, and a whole lot of Tenacious D.

The Big Lebowski

Hilarious film about a group of bowling buddies who get mixed up with the wrong crowd and sucked into delivering the ransom money for a kidnapped trophy-wife. I hear there’s a drinking game where you try to match the Dude white russian for white russian during the film, but since that adds up to 9 white russians in two hours you’d get pretty tanked.

Definitely more funny if you know what nihilists are.

Tommy

The Who’s original rock opera-turned-film. A boy becomes deaf, dumb, and blind after witnessing his father’s murder, then becomes the greatest pinball player in the world, then starts his own religious cult. I’m still trying to wrap my head around this really bizarre one, especially his mother’s meltdown scene with all the beans. No idea what was going on there.

Keep you eyes peeled for a very young Jack Nicholson…

A Clockwork Orange

I still have yet to see this film with sound, so I can’t totally explain it. It’s based on a 60’s novel and is saturated with social commentary. I know there was some thugs and some brainwashing and a murder involving a phallic statue, and I had little to no clue what was going on through most of it.

Add comment 8.18.08

things I love thursday: skinny laminx

Happy TILT! Since I mentioned how much I love vintage illustrations before, I thought I’d also mention one of my favorite current illustrators, Heather Moore (aka Skinny LaMinx).

I stumbled across Heather’s work through a design blog ages ago and she’s one of the first blogs I started following religiously, I just adore her work. Especially her cut-outs, there’s a bold liveliness to her designs that I imagine is tough to create when you’re focusing on cutting something delicate out.

(one of her latest illustrations, from her post from today)

She’s got a fabulous Etsy shop and ships all over the world even though she’s in South Africa herself. Her tea towels make wonderful gifts as well :)

Check out the rest of this week’s Thing I Love Thursday over at The Diaper Diaries!

7 comments 8.14.08

fruit tree bliss

Oh my, could that be…? Yes!! Pears!!

I have a pear tree in my yard.

Wow!

I seriously love my house and yard. Teo and I harvested a few apples the other day, and by harvested I mean he attempted to knock them out of the tree with our extendy-pole pruner and I attempted to catch them. I got most of them, the ones that fell straight down. The ones that bounced off my head or launched off the branches at an arc, well I had to chase them as they bounced down the hill. The dogs thought it was great fun.

Many had little spots on them, or a place where something had been munching on them, or were oddly lumpy, but there were a few perfect little guys too, a nice bright green with the faintest pink blush. Really not bad considering we just let the tree do its thing without any bug treatment or whatnot. We much prefer it that way, and the deer and groudhog do a great job of cleaning up all the windfall ones (I wish I could get a picture of the groundhog sitting up under the tree holding an apple in his paws and munching, he is just the cutest little guy).

After peeling them and cutting away the icky bits I ended up with plenty to try out Mary Beth’s Apple Bread (her apples are much more photogenic than mine). In fact I think I used a bit too much apple since I ended up filling my large loaf pan and two jumbo muffin cups. So incredibly delicious! I put the loaf in the freezer for winter and we polished off the muffins with a pat of butter. Teo’s review was that it was “really good” and “we should give a loaf to my parents” which in Teo-speak means he thought it was really quite delectable and he wants to share it with the world. We harvested more yesterday, enough to make two more loaves, one for the fam and another one for the freezer. I left an appley offering in each of the groundhog holes too.

I just can’t get over the fact that I have full-size fruit trees in my yard, not ones that I just planted and have to wait 15 years to harvest anything. And the variety! Pears, apples, crabapples, mulberries, they make me so happy that I want to hug them. So totally lovin’ it!!

5 comments 8.13.08

mile marker 28

I have hit a milestone in my knitting. (The first time I typed that it came out milestrone which made me really want some minestrone soup…but I digress).

I have hit a milestone in my knitting. Yesterday I taught another newbie knitter how to bind off her first shawl. I had a lunch date with a few of the lovely ladies I work with and when we got in the car to head back to the office one of them discovered the shawl. Which sparked a lively conversation about how she’s just getting into knitting, how she had finished knitting the one shawl in March but couldn’t find anyone to show her how to get it off the needles, how she started another one for her daughter’s best friend who is like a daughter to her, and how she wanted to finish that one before college but she still needed to know how to finish the first one. As soon as she pulled it out of the bag I jumped in with “I can show you right now!” And  I did, fumbling through the verbal explanation but letting my fingers do the talking. I also showed her how to tell which ones are knits and which ones are perls, and helped diagnose why the two shawls, which were a k3, p3 rib pattern, didn’t look at all alike. (Turns out the one was 3 stitches wider and the pattern didn’t specify to knit the knits and perl the perls like it probably should have).

This may not seem like much of a milestone, but it’s huge for me. In January I couldn’t even understand how to read a knitting pattern, now I can recognize when something is going to be tricky or not work out quite right.  I can show the basics to another knitter in a way that makes sense, and I can understand how things like gussets are created if not having a ton of practice with them. And, at Auralay’s suggestion (thank you!), I recently joined Ravelry. It’s a wonderful site where you can keep track of all your knitting projects, stash, patterns, and needles, and join in on the web forums to share experiences and ideas with knitters from all over the world.

I get excited about knitting. I wake up on Saturday thinking “Hooray! I get to knit today!” And apparently when a fellow knitter gets me started, I prattle on about it. Which I did yesterday in the car, probably confusing everyone else as I went on and on about mistake rib stitch and gauge and variegated wool yarn. I’m still a small-time knitter, the thought of making a sweater makes me twitch, but I’m excited about working my way up to it and making lots of lovely scarves and hats and mittens in the process.

I just finished this scarf last night, this is a WIP shot of it. It’s my first project with special yarn store yarn as opposed to the stuff from the craft store. It’s like baking with vanilla beans as opposed to vanilla extract. Yum!

3 comments 8.12.08

canned, as in past tense

A little while ago I tried canning for the first time.

And it was a success! I made another batch of the rhubarb ginger compote, only this time with real ginger beer instead of ginger ale. I also tried to not cook it to disintegration this time, so it turned out a little soupier but retained a nice color and some pink chunks. Boy is it gingery! Like, clear your sinuses gingery.

I *think* the canning was successful, all the jars sealed up nicely. Such a pleasure to hear that little ping after removing them from the water bath! For the water bath, I used my 11 quart mondo pot with the noodle insert, which was almost not deep enough. I had to hover over the pot mopping up any water that boiled over, but at least it was just water. This is a huge success for me because even my mother was intimidated by canning and so we only had freezer jam growing up. I think my next canning experiments will be crabapple jelly and apple butter from the fruit in my yard. I might even get enough wild rose hips to make some rose hip jelly, that would be so cool!

Also, Mary Beth over at Salt and Chocolate recently did a fun biographical meme and tagged anyone else who wanted to join in. I thought it’d be fun:

The rules:
1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player tags 5 people and posts their name, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

What was I doing 10 years ago?
Gosh, 10 years ago I was still a junior in high school. That summer I participated in the pre-college art program at Carnegie Mellon, which pretty much changed the course of my life because I discovered design and decided that *that* is what I wanted to go to college for, not art. Art was so loosey goosey and interpretive, but design, design made sense. Design was practical and effective and problem-solving and I totally loved it.

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world (and in this world as well):

  • Toasted Nerdlic sandwiches (not sure about the spelling…) - that’s peanut butter, banana, and honey, sandwiched between banana bread slices. Heaven!
  • Peanut butter and chocolate anything, but especially Baskin Robbins ice cream.
  • Sushi
  • Fondue
  • Sour cream and onion Pringles

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:

  • Hummus and whole wheat pita or veggies
  • Crackers and peanut butter or cashew butter
  • Hard boiled eggs with a sprinkling of salt
  • Berries and almonds with plain yoghurt
  • Whatever baked deliciousness I made recently (we just polished off some of Tartlette’s wonderful Rice Tea Cake. I love glutinous rice cake.)

Five jobs that I have had:

  • Office Assistant
  • Softball coach
  • Teaching assistant for a drawing class
  • Freelance Web and interactive designer
  • Creative lead/game designer

Three of my habits:

  • Staring down my straw when drinking from it
  • Whacking my head on overhangs
  • Doodling in the margins

Five places I have lived:

  • Spokane, WA
  • an apartment in Rome (for 1 lovely summer)
  • a dorm in Pittsburgh, PA
  • an apartment in Monroeville, PA
  • a house in Glenshaw, PA

(okay, the last three are kind of the same place, but since I’ve really only moved around the area I got nothin’ else…)

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:

  • Buy a car that runs on just solar energy
  • Create a company that makes cars that run on just solar energy so everyone can have one
  • Build a house that is completely self-sufficient
  • Create a company that builds houses that are completely self-sufficient so everyone can have one
  • Have a personal chef so I can have sushi every day

Five things I need to do today:

  • Lunch meeting over hummus to discuss video editing
  • Send weekly update to my manager
  • Get groceries
  • Join the faction raid this evening so I can get flagged for Ashengate (oh my, that is soooo nerdy…)
  • Celebrate that it’s Friiiiiiiiidaaaaaaaaaaaay…

Five people I want to get to know more about:
I’m hopping on the bandwagon with Mary Beth and open tagging everyone for this, since I too would love to see your answers. Join the party!

3 comments 8.8.08

things I love thursday: the farming game

Happy TILT! I wanted to share with you my absolute favorite board game from when I was a kid (and is still my favorite, second only to Settlers of Catan), The Farming Game. Never heard of it? Most people haven’t.

The Farming Game is “the game that was invented on the seat of a tractor.” Really! It was created by a Washington State farmer who was struggling to make the family farm into a lucrative business so he could quit his city day-job to till the soil full time. And that’s exactly what the game is about too. As a Washingtonian farmer (you may choose between Rosa Ray, Harrah Harry, Wapato Willy, Sunnyside Sydney, or Satus Sam, all of which are farming regions of Washington state. I always like being Sunnyside Sydney since my grandparents lived in Sunnyside), you purchase acres of hay and fruit and grain, livestock, harvesters, and tractors. You plant during the spring and harvest throughout the rest of the year. You pay taxes and bills and you sometimes hit it really big on your cherry harvest or the livestock auction.

It really gives you a sense of how tough it is to be a farmer, how operating expenses will almost always get you down, how debt is totally unavoidable, and how fate can play you a tricky hand (sometimes Uncle Bert dies and leaves you a tractor worth $10,000, sometimes Mount St. Helens blows and you have to roll to see if your farm was covered in ash, and sometimes pesticides wipe out all your cows. That really stinks). There’s a fair amount of strategy involved (hay is practically worthless, but you need to have enough so that you don’t lose money on it every year. The real money is in fruit and cattle ranges), and there’s a heck of a lot of math because your harvest payout is determined by rolling a die and comparing your roll to a chart of values, then calculating based on your acreage and operating expenses. But it’s really a ton of fun and I totally love it!

Our family was actually one of the first to get to play this game, because one of my parents friends was working at the bank that gave the inventor a loan to create the game. We got to test out the early prototype before it ever made it to the shelves. Maybe it’s because we’re Washingtonians and we like recognizing the places in the game, but it’s definitely a family favorite. They also have a kids version, and I really want to try out the other title he created, The Construction Game. Instead of cows and harvesters, you have backhoes and dumptrucks. Who wouldn’t want to play that game?

For the rest of this week’s Things I Love Thursday, pop by The Diaper Diaries.

8 comments 8.7.08

the tail end of summer

No WFMW today, since Shannon is on vacation until the end of August. Which is fine by me since it gives me more time to think really hard about what to post. In the meantime, I’m playing catch up with some other bits in my life.

Like books. The recent batch of returns contained some really good ones which I would recommend (and have been) to any and everyone:

  • Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert - loved it to absolute bits. Liz’s journey of self-discovery pulls you right in and is a breath of fresh, beautiful air. Inspiring.
  • The Splendid Table’s How to Eat Supper: Recipes, Stories, and Opinions from Public Radio’s Award-Winning Food Show by Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Sally Swift - a really fun and engaging book, full of not only delectable recipes but all kinds of useful information and historic tidbits. Also has really great typography design, very fresh and modern. The first recipe I tried was in fact the cover recipe and it was divine! Everything is very approachable and allows for tons of variations so you can custom create a dish to suit your palate.
  • One-Skein Wonders by Judith Durant - Lots and lots of projects in this book. A number of them are not really my style (frilly, in other words), but there’s enough clever hats and socks and bag patterns to appeal to just about every knitters palette. I tried out a coffee cup sleeve, a set of fingerless mitts, am working on a pair of socks, and will probably be revisiting this book from time to time to try out some of the other patterns.
  • Not Your Mama’s Stitching: The Cool and Creative Way to Stitch It To ‘Em by Kate Shoup - a really comprehensive guide to all kinds of embroidery and stitching. I loved reading the history of string and the stitches guide covers just about everything you can think of. A good beginners book, and I’m going to look into the others in the series, which include crochet, knitting, felting, and beading.

The rest were decent but not much that really struck me as “fantastic.” I’ve got some new ones checked out though that I’m eagerly going through:

I also recently discovered that some of my favorite children’s books from my list are in fact part of a series, so right now I’m reading some of T. A. Barron’s other books and looking forward to the rest of the Dragon Chronicles series as well. Who knew?

In other news, my brother and his fiancee stopped by over the weekend and we had a good time playing The Farming Game and going to see the new Mummy movie. I heartily recommend former, but the latter, while fun, was quite ridiculous and I’d suggest waiting for the DVD (Jet lI is always awesome, but he was very CG’d up, and why wasn’t Rachel Weiss in it?).

The pumpkin plants are covered in blossoms now and we also dug up the supposed wild garlic and were delighted to find that it is indeed garlic. I now have 3 heads that came from my very own garden. Neat!

Add comment 8.6.08

things I love thursday: vintage illustrations

Happy Things I Love Thursday!

I have been just adoring the vintage illustrations that I keep coming across in books and blogs. Like the ones in Sow and Grow: A Gardening Book for Children, which happens to be a wonderful book as well. It has diagrams of what the parts of plants are and how they work, methods for sprouting seeds, all kinds of indoors gardening projects like growing an avocado tree or a pineapple, all divided throughout the year by month. It even has a section in the back for you to take notes about your own garden, and it’s chock full of wonderful illustrations, like these ones.

Are these not the most adorable illustrations you have ever seen?

They remind me of the books I used to read as a child, the Edward Eager books (the Odyssey Classic ones specifically), A. A. Milne’s stories and poems (and Winnie the Pooh, of course), and Tasha Tudor’s lovely watercolors.

The illustrations or originally from The sew-it book, by Rachel Taft Dixon, which I *think* might mean that these are actually costume designs. Which is even more marvelous!

The rest of this week’s TILT is over at The Diaper Diaries, so stop by and share the love.

11 comments 7.31.08

Previous Posts

RSS Ames is listening to...

Ames just bookmarked...

RSS Ames is reading...



Pc2




Links

Categories

Archives