something like this

until my cousin Eileen’s lunch break, and I’m absolutely committed to getting something up before she checks in to find that old lame-o has let another weekend slip by with no post. So here goes:

Boston rocked. As always. Not a whole lot of photos to show since I took mostly people shots, but here are a couple of highlights.

The plane touched down at 6:30am on Wednesday morning, so I got to see my niece and nephew off to the bus stop. It was a gorgeous summery morning.

Here was an early morning find. Score! Got to love inchworms.

After school, my nephew showed me the sarcophagus he made at school – complete with mummy. He filled me in on the Egyptian unit they were working on in his class. You know, a couple of weeks ago, my niece told me on the phone, “Second grade isn’t what it used to be, Laura,” and I’m starting to believe that the same can be said for kindergarten!

Since we always go back east during the summertime, it was a particular treat to get a glimpse of the school life for all the kids in our family. I had the chance to check out Eileen’s daughter’s pre-k room – it was awesome. It’s in my old junior high school, which is now an elementary school – a vast improvement, if you ask me. So fun to see those halls now filled with cubbies and art everywhere.

They were having a spring concert on Friday and the kids were all dressed up – remember those perfect spring days? The end of school is so close you can almost touch it, there are final projects, concerts, events, and the days are mingled excitement and hope. Summer might just actually arrive. It still gives me butterflies.

On Thursday I traveled out to scenic Worcester with my parents and my aunt Carmen, to help my great aunt Agnes move from one side of her residence to another. She lives in the Notre Dame du Lac Assisted Living Center, which is an amazing place. First off, it’s gorgeous:

This is the view from the front door – the grounds are long and lush.

And here is the front door itself. Not too shabby. This used to be the convent for the Notre Dame nuns – it has so many beautiful details today, but wouldn’t you love to have seen it when it was first built? Even more impressive than the grounds, though, is the staff. What a stunning group of people – from management to nursing to grounds staff, they were friendly, kind and professional. We had a fun day moving and packing and having a great lunch with Aunt Agnes, who was witty and elegant. The move went a little too smoothly, with no fights or swearing at all, so naturally I’m concerned that we might not have done it properly. We’ll keep our fingers crossed on that one.

On Saturday, my goddaughter made her First Communion and she had a spectacular day. It poured, of course, but that must be good luck for more than weddings, right? There was a wonderful party at my sister’s with relatives from all over the place. Her grandparents and great aunt flew in from Ohio, cousins drove in from all around New England, and it’s difficult to describe the feeling in the house without sounding corny. It’s a certain chaotic embrace that every child should get to feel.

There she is, beautiful girl.

It was all just wonderful. Four sweet, dense, flourless-chocolate-cake days. I wished Tom and the kids could have been there to see everyone and hear my nephew’s Amazing Talking Dog joke, but July will be here before we know it.

Ding dang it – looks like I just talked right through lunch period. Someone needs to work on her time management skills…

It’s been a tilt-a-whirl spring – crazy rain and wind one day, followed by glorious sunshine the next. We’ve skidded into some gorgeous summery days, though, and are making the most of it. Like early weekend-morning dashes to the beach before it gets crowded:

And appreciating the stunning new growth in all the yards:

The other week I had a plan for a crazy hike with my friends to pack in some serious exercise, but when we met up it turned out that one of our hikers had tweaked her knee and couldn’t go. This is what happens when my friend Nuran is faced with such a tragedy: she says, “Alright. You come back to my house for lunch.” And that’s it – the voice of authority. Never ever question it, because here’s what you get:

I dream of being able to just toss something like this together without any advance notice. (Frankly, I dream of having my house be clean enough to just bring everybody home without advance notice. One step at a time, kids.) This soup was the most incredible red lentil concoction with a mint something or other drizzled on the top. It was so good I didn’t even know what it was. Nuran’s like that, though – she can dive into an empty refrigerator and come out with a gourmet meal. I’m sticking to her like white on rice, hoping to absorb a bit of her magic. Check it out – she even has fairies in her backyard tree:

For those of you who happened to follow along a bit with the story of Nuran’s daughter’s fight with leukemia, the great update is that she’s really doing well. Transplant successful, back at school, stunningly beautiful as always and lovely. Keep the good thoughts going, because she’s really amazing.

Now I’m jamming to get myself packed up and organized for a quick trip to Boston. Just me this time, so I’d better go make sure I have all the arrangements lined up for the next few days!

We have a great garden, thanks to our friend Finn. We also have very industrious gophers, thanks to our ‘friend’ nature. We love her and all, but she really likes to test the relationship.

Anyway, we’ve tried pretty much every anti-gopher method out there – cayenne pepper, smoke, water, hair (I know, but desperate times…) and most recently, these sound emitters you stick into the ground. Supposedly, gophers, like teenagers, are supremely irritated by certain pitches that the rest of us can’t hear. Well as it turns out, our gophers laughed at our sound sticks and cozied up right next to them, so a weekend ago, Tom pulled them all out and decided to return them to the Home Depot. With all his gopher-related muttering, I was a little nervous that he’d trade those sound emitters in for a gun.

He didn’t. He did, however, come home with this:

Denial is a very powerful drug. He was a very happy gardener for the rest of the afternoon.

I just have one thing to say, though, Tom -

The 1950’s called and said they want their glasses back.

It’s been weeks since I’ve posted images from our Friday Ruth days. We’re still going strong and the girls are doing some fantastic work, so I thought I’d dig out some photos from weeks past and show what we’ve been playing around with here. These photos are from one of my favorite days – we were doing layered abstracts.

We started out by taking a look at some contemporary artists who incorporated different materials, images, text, you name it, into their work, and we talked a little bit about the idea of layering meaning into the work as well as color and texture. I’d pulled out tissue paper, paint, crayons, markers and everyone dove in.

Some were focused on color, and we talked about the technique of stepping away from your work to see how it reads from a distance.

Others loved playing with dimension. They’re ready to try anything.

I think this piece, though, was not only one of the best outcomes of the day, it remains one of my favorite experiences working alongside this group. This painter started out with multicolored circles drawn in crayon all over the paper. For a while, she really liked where it was heading. Then, all of a sudden she thought she’d gone too far and that it was awful. She wanted to throw it away.

At that point I said, well, what have you got to lose? Push it farther. When she asked me how, I suggested that she just dive in with some paint, but I thought she should try acrylics because then she could have some fun with texture. Layer after layer of paint went on, and at every stage, she said she thought it was awful and I encouraged her to really wreck it by going just one step further.

She came back to crayons, sometimes dipping them in paint and using them like pens, other times digging into the paint and to carve out a poem and more circles that played off the ones that had been there at the beginning – it was just so cool. The end of the afternoon found us all around the computer again, looking at Jasper Johns’ work. An absolutely terrific day.

We canceled our annual egg and beer hunt this Easter, due to rain and Tom’s impending 40th birthday party in a couple of months. (There are going to be two bouncy castles, people – we need to stay focused.) It ended up being a lovely, quiet, rainy day and we had a lovely brunch with our neighbors. We actually hit the jackpot there, because Joan and Hank had us over at the beginning of the week to celebrate their Passover Seder with them, and then at the end of the week to celebrate Easter. Perfect bookend events.

I’ve never shown you this unbelievable bowl that Joan gave me (ok, us) for Christmas. It’s simple and delicate and perfect. Filled with Cadbury eggs, this one goes to eleven.

This photo actually cracks me up, because the eggs are these gorgeous pale blue eggs from Finn and Susie’s chickens, and the nest was abandoned in our back yard – I like them together, even though the nest is woefully small for the eggs. What would happen if they were real? It would be like swaddling a baby in a washcloth. I still love looking at them together though.

Whew. We made it. Our trip to Sutter’s Fort was challenging, incredibly fun, and thankfully over without a hitch.

I can just hear all those pioneers from the 1840’s laughing. “You call that a hard day?” they’re saying. “Shoot. You don’t know a hard day from a hog’s beard.” (Now they’re laughing even harder. “Hog’s beard?? What the Sam Hill is that?!”) So fine, I’ll amend my statement. It wasn’t that hard, in the scheme of hard. But I was very sleepy when I got home.

We dropped the kids off at school at 6:45 am. They rode up to Sacramento in buses while we drove with all the supplies. I was on the kitchen crew, so when we got up to Sutter’s Fort, we brought in all the food, inventoried the kitchens, and set everything up for the day. Meanwhile, the kids all went to the train museum in historic Sacramento and traded in the buses for horse-drawn wagons, which pulled them through the city streets to the fort. When they arrived, all the parents went out to greet them. We were allowed to take a few photos as they rolled in, and here’s a glimpse:

There were actually five wagons of kids.

Once inside the fort, there was a brief welcome by John Sutter (played by one of Honey’s classmates), and then we all got to work.

I have very few photos of the day – partly because they didn’t want us to break the time period by walking around with cameras, and partly because we were pretty much working the whole time. The students rotated through stations where they participated in activities that were standard fare in the fort while it was active. At each station, parents would give them a bit of history, demonstrate the activity and give them some work to do – the stations were baking, spinning & weaving, laundry, animal care, corn husk dolls, kitchen, trapping, carpentry, trade store, vaqueros, candle-making, blacksmith and covered wagon. All of the parents had been trained at the fort so they could not only teach our students, but act as the fort’s docents for all the other visitors as well. (There were only a couple of stations with docents that were not parents from our school – the blacksmith and the main animal care docent.) That day, there were four other school groups visiting, so there was plenty of foot traffic.

In the kitchen, we had lunch and dinner to prepare for 150 people. Let’s just say that by the end of the day, we all had a healthy respect for the cooks of the time. Our lunch was a simple, ploughman-style deal wrapped up in waxed paper, since we didn’t all sit down for that meal. Here are two of my beautiful friends working on the lunch assembly line:

We had to be sure that any containers we used were at least possible for the time period, so all serving bowls had to be wood or metal, and the waxed paper was all torn into lengths out of sight in the ‘modern’ kitchen that we could use for washing up. The first groups of kids helped us wash apples, slice cheese and wrap lunches. Just before noon, they all assembled on the lawn and ate during mail call.

After lunch, we went into full dinner prep. I wish I’d had time to take some photos of the period kitchen to show you the fireplace in action – hopefully I’ll be able to grab a shot or two from the parents who were assigned to document the day. You can see one shot of the kitchen on the Sutter’s Fort State Park website, and it gives you a bit of a glimpse – all along the back wall are the fabulous cast iron pots and dutch ovens we got to use to prep the dinner. What you don’t see is the fireplace where we got to hang those pots on massive iron swing arms and surround the dutch oven with the coals from the (wood) fire. After being away from a hotshop for so many years, I have to admit it was great to be back in the heat!

Of course, where there’s fire, there also has to be some serious respect. Particularly when your Environmental Learning Program training materials contain sentences like this one:

“Hearth injuries were second only to childbearing (birthing babies) as the leading cause of death in women.”

Okay then! Good to know! We all learned how to tuck our skirts between our knees when moving the pots around in the fireplace or on the spit outside, just to make sure our hems didn’t start smoldering. But lifting those big old pots, swaying with water and carrots or beans, with iron hooks and sliding them onto the spit, or in among the coals… seriously, it was awesome. And the dinner! It was amazing too. The kids filled their plates at long tables covered with cucumber salad, freshly baked bread and churned butter, grilled chicken, ribs and salmon, black beans, pinto beans, carrots caramelized by a long slow cook in the fire, and mashed potatoes. This was all followed by apple cake and cream whipped by hand. It was delicious.

After dinner, the kids learned some folk dances and songs from a team called The Amazing Harmonatras – folk musicians who teach history through music. I thought my Uncle George would have like hearing that part! The kids learned a few Gold Rush folk songs and even galloped through a couple of line dances before settling in to hear some stories. I wish I could have heard more of that part of the performance, but we were all cleaning up like mad to meet our end-of-day deadline. We weren’t sure what exactly would happen to us if we ran past our end time, but we knew it wouldn’t be pretty. Everything had to be cleaned, cast iron oiled, utensils carefully put back in place and two kitchens inventoried before we got the green light to close up shop for the day. It had to be perfect, and thanks to all the volunteers who washed and cleaned, it was. Turns out that many hands might not always make light work, exactly, but they certainly can get the work done. And how. Looks like we’ll get to come back next year.

Oh and in case you’re wondering – all the sewing did get done. A group of parents sewed 95 bags for students and volunteers to use for their supplies – a batch of mine looked like this:

And my dress actually came out. I don’t have pictures of it on (thank heavens) – but here it is the next day:

A little ragged, and smelling of smoke from the fires, but still in one piece.

So there you have it. Now, if you’re ever just dying to know something about Sutter’s Fort, 1840’s California cookery, or if you simply have a need for a fetching pioneer frock, I’m your gal.

Here’s a little of what’s going on around here:

I have this one scrappy lilac bush in back that pops out about seven clumps of blossoms every spring and then spends the rest of the year feeling just a bit sorry for itself. It ain’t pretty, most of the time, but it sure is worth it for these two weeks in March, when I can bury my nose in those tiny purple blossoms and transport myself back in time. I’m usually about six, tangled in the stalky base of that lilac at the front corner of our house, surrounded by lush, leafy sweetness and the drone of bees and distant lawn mowers. Sometimes I’m older and in the kitchen, and Mum has just brought in an armful of lilac branches to put in a big vase, and the room is filled with that incomparable relief of spring.

We’re marching inevitably closer to our Sutter’s Fort day, now just a week away. I’ve been stitching up the bags for the students and writing this letter to Honey. They have a surprise mail call up at the fort, and all the parents are meant to submit letters to their children, written in a style appropriate to the time and their children’s characters. Honey’s character is Ellen Murphy (appropriately enough) and I managed to dig up a little bit about the party she traveled with across the frontier, so I was able to send her a letter from a pretend friend back in Missouri.

She probably won’t be able to read a third of the letter, due to my erratic calligraphy and some vocabulary that’s a touch past its expiration date. Although I should not, I’m just going to say now that it’s a pretty fine letter. My first go at fourth grade may have been a bit shaky, but this time I’m nailing it.

Honey, on the other hand… seriously. She’s a week away from portraying a young woman from the 1840s, and she goes and gets braces put on her teeth. Where’s the commitment to authenticity, people?! Sheesh. I told her she’s simply not allowed to smile that day. Or eat. Or talk, for that matter.

No, but really. She has braces now. In fact, she has so much paraphernalia in her mouth, I shudder to think of her next trip through the metal detectors. (Ok, so I just spent 10 minutes trying to spell paraphernalia. Somebody tell me what that ‘r’ is doing in there.) She’s in good spirits, though.

Of course there’s always a lot of this going on around the house. We were particularly fond of this arrangement. Hot Wheels is being his usual goofy self. Yesterday he played himself in a game of Go Fish – open hand. It was so funny to listen to that a couple of times I had to write down what he said. Here’s a little glimpse (now I realize it can be annoying to write the way kids pronounce words instead of the proper word, so I’m just throwing it out there that the whole game, Hot Wheels said “fiss” instead of “fish”):

“Do you have a 4?

Nope – go fish.

Do you have a queen?

Aauugh – you are the master of this game!!

No I’m not – you’re still winning!

Do you have a 6?

Go fish.

Do you have an 8?

Haw, man!  You’re beating me up!”

That’s the way it went. Not sure yet whether this warrants creative writing class or therapy.

So there you have it – March Madness.

Last Sunday, Honey and one of our friends from across the street took their cooking interest up a notch. They took it to a… whole… ‘notha… level and made dinner for our families All By Themselves. We have discovered a new land out here, and it is good.

Tom was hanging out in the kitchen with them in case they needed help, but he had very little to do. Joan and I were in the art room catching up and being neighborly – Joan hand stitched dress cuffs for me while I put together an apron for the Sutter’s Fort adventure. That’s old-school neighborly, for sure. Too bad we don’t share a fence.

The girls cooked up pasta

and an incredible salad, while Hot Wheels dashed back and forth taking orders for his ’special drink’ – a lemon-lime concoction with so much sugar it’d make your teeth curl. (Suggesting that he rethink the sugar levels, though, brings you the same arch look I imagine you’d receive from the sommelier were you to suggest an ice cube in your wine.)

All the while, our other younger neighbor friend was working across the street with her father to make a lemon meringue pie. Now that’s ambitious. As Joan was walking out the door to come over to our house, she heard the following exchange between her husband and her daughter:

Husband: Now what does it say?

Daughter: Stir over low heat until translucent.

H: Ok – it’s translucent. What’s next?

D: Add the egg yolks.

H: What egg yolks??

Joan: [closes the door quietly behind her]

What a cliffhanger! Don’t worry, the green archer doesn’t actually get crushed by the… oh wait, wrong cliffhanger. The pie was delicious. As was the dinner itself – bruschetta, mixed green salad and pesto pasta. Now we’re getting somewhere.

a muffled cry for help?

That would have been me, calling out from under an avalanche of cotton and muslin. Honey’s fourth grade class goes to Sutter’s Fort on the first of April, and we’ve been in full production mode, putting together her outfit, my outfit, and a pile of bags for the kids to use for their lunches and notebooks.

Overall, it’s been really fun. I’ve spent a couple of sunny Sundays cutting and adjusting and stitching away, listening to the Blind Boys of Alabama and learning a good deal. For example, I learned how to grade my seams! (I gave most of them Bs and one B+.)

I also discovered that had I been alive in the 184os, I would have been sunk. I have a hard enough time with patterns and a sewing machine – the idea of cutting the material freestyle and sewing it up by hand just gives me hives.

See that sleeve on the right there? My pattern called for an elastic cuff, but that would be a no-go for this time period, so I figured, no worries – I’ll just stitch up a cuff to cap the end of that sleeve. I wanted it to be a bit adjustable, since we’ll pass this dress down to our friends next year, and just working it out burned up a good section of my brain cells. They were nice ones, too – I’ll miss ‘em.

Of course, typical me, I ended up pacing myself pretty well for a while and then staying up into the night last night finishing all the button holes and hems, since they needed to wear their outfits to school today for a costume check. So by the time I realized I really needed to lop off a good 8 inches off the bottoms of the apron and the dress, it was just too late, so I hemmed them sloppily and will have to go back. Bah. I still hate hemming. I certainly wasn’t doing myself any favors, though – look at that hem! It’s like a foot high!! No wonder it’s wonky. It never had a chance.

The good news? She likes it anyway.

As predicted, our friend Russell didn’t end up making an acceptance speech at the Oscars last night, but we are all still psyched for him. Our friends Susie and Finn came over with their gorgeous baby girl, winner for best performance in a leading role for her work in “Birth – The Next Generation.” Our friend Mark joined us as well – he brought a container of cookies he called “Starship Gingerprises” that were unbelievably tasty. Honey made Russell-inspired sandwiches with roasted turkey, gruyere and cranberry sauce that were fantastic, and we tried a new Cooking Light recipe for apple/raisin compote on toasts with brie. It was delicious, but we bought light brie accidentally (heavens!) and it just doesn’t melt properly. It was still tasty and easy to make, so a win in my book.

It was a great night, although we only got one quick glimpse of our friends during the broadcast. If you go to the Oscars website, you can see them at the very beginning of the Visual Effects acceptance speech clip.

The place to go, though is to the Access Hollywood site, and check out the clip of Sandra Bullock talking about how much she loves Gabourey Sidibe. Keep watching, because as the interview goes on there are some awesome moments of Courtney and Russell in the background. I’m sorry Sandra, you were gorgeous and funny too, but there’s this moment when Courtney turns around and you see the cool layered detail of her dress in the back… it’s fabulous. And what a beautiful woman!! It’s not every couple who can just step into a situation like the Oscars red carpet and look so thoroughly at home.

There’s another photo of them on the Huffington Post site, which I love because they’re smiling at each other. That prankster Sandra hopped into the photo in front of them again in this one – she’s such a card.

Well done guys!! We’re all so happy for you.