We had a great weekend with Jim, his lovely girlfriend Abby, and Adam. They got here late Friday night and headed out on Sunday afternoon. Plus, Chris came by on Saturday, too. What do we do to show our guests a good time? Let them cook for us and suggest to play board games! Our friends are awesome! They love Clue as much as we do!
My Sunday project was sort of lame. It turned out fine, but it was so easy I felt guilty letting it count. I just did a little rubber stamp embossing:
To make up for yesterday's lameness, I spent more time on today's thing than any of the others. It's a little booklet with 8 blank pages:
I just put up more pictures of Irish Day. These were taken my mother-in-law, Mickey. She's a great photographer in general, and her snapshots always seem to have more smiles in them than mine do.
So, it's the second week of Spring Break for the local kiddies (and our teacher friend Chris). There's been a LOT going on. First of all, regardless of it being a vacation-y atmosphere of late, the weather has been completely insane. The wind has been crazy today and right now I can actually hear it howling. (By the way, our house is basically in a hole. Or, as it is so loverly called 'round these parts, a holler.) Here's a couple of pictures:
Daffodils lining our driveway, 3/6/08
About 4 inches of snow, covering the daffodils, the very next day, 3/7/08
In total we got 8.5 inches. 3/8/08
In other news, but following the same theme of being busy, the big local Irish celebration was this weekend. John has put together a video of the highlights:
There are more pictures of snow and Irish Day up in my gallery. Enjoy!
So, weekend before last, John and I spent Saturday at the Huntington Library. It was beautiful and the book room made me breathless. I literally had to stop and breathe. Here's an example:
This was, like, the least cool book we saw and it's actually pirate booty. Are you catching this? Captain Morgan's (yes, that Captain Morgan) pirate booty was the least impressive book we saw. Ponder that one. Two words: Gutenberg Bible.
Jim and Adam were here over this past weekend. They went back to Atlanta yesterday morning. And John and I still haven't quite recovered.
Here's John getting home Thursday afternoon and finding his buddies hanging out in our living room. He didn't know they were coming...hence the odd, confused smile he's wearing.
Here are some more pictures. We had a fantastic time. I didn't want them to leave. I laughed almost the entire time they were here.
My head feels really full. I'm oddly, because it never really happens, full of energy. I have lots of ideas. I'm in the middle of two huge projects, but I'm not working on either of them this afternoon. I wish I still had a yard. If I did, I think I'd go outside and run laps around it.
My parents were here for a week. They'll have been gone a week tomorrow. The apartment still feels empty. On Friday I thought I saw their car.
I'm hiding out in the office at work, on break. There's this customer here that scares me. Because he looks and, more importantly, laughs like a clown. I'm not kidding. I can't stand the guy.
"The In-laws" are still in town. I've been sleeping on the air mattress...and I now formally apologize to any and all of our guests that have previously spent the night in our apartment on that raft.
Well, my sister was here. And my two nephews. And my brother-in-law, with his aunt and niece. The six of them, my parents, and John and I stayed at a Best Western across the street from Disneyland and spent Tuesday and Wednesday in the parks. We went all over LA, criss-cross style, for the two days we weren't in Disneyland. They left on Friday.
On Friday, I was totally, as my dad would say, bummed. That night though, we went to the Hollywood Bowl and saw Garrison Keillor and A Prairie Home Companion. And that was really cool. One of the show's guests was Maude Maggart, who sang songs like "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "Moon River," which I really enjoyed. (I found out later that she's Fiona Apple's sister.) Also in the line-up were Old Crow Medicine Show (they were probably my favorite), Leo Kottke, and Karan Casey. And, of course, the rest of the skits and music that are usually on the show. It was a lot of fun.
I'd talk more about my sister...but I don't want to get all mopey again.
The new thing in my life right now is that company, in the form of various friends and relatives, will be flowing in and out like waves at the beach until the middle of July. Our friend Chris got here yesterday, which was his birthday. This morning while he was reading the book we got him for said birthday, I started reading Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree.
This was a book that came in the mail a few days ago, for free, because I bought a subscription to the Believer...because I felt, I guess, that it was time John and I subscribed to a magazine. I'm not sure why, but in the moment it felt very mature and somehow solid, as though we'd be forced to not move again for a while so we wouldn't have to change our address with Our Magazine. (Why getting a CA driver license didn't give me that feeling, I'm not sure.) Also, I never seem to read as many books as I feel like I should or as many as I want to. Many of these writers (like Nick Hornby, though I've read all his novels already) appear in McSweeneys, but it's expensive...so we got the Believer, which has cool people show up in it, too. Basically the idea is that if I don't read all that many actual books, at least the magazine I thumb threw at night will have more of an impact. If I can't read more books, I can at least read about books.
So, I started reading my "free gift" of Nick Hornby...who just may be the funniest man on the planet. Except for John.
Of course.
Anyway, Mr. Hornby writes this column for the magazine that apparently is going to keep my husband and I in California for at least 10 issues in which he discusses the books he buys each month versus the books he actually reads. There's this one section though, where he talks about looking around at what books people are reading by the hotel pool when he goes "on holiday" (he's English) to see if anyone is reading one of his. I just thought that was so interesting...mainly because I read his first two novels while "on vacation" (I'm still not English).
I read High Fidelity in London during my "study abroad" month. And I felt like crap in London--lonely, depressed, directionless...pretty much like I do now, only I was thinner then and now I get to see John all the time. The movie version of High Fidelity played an interesting role in the ending of the relationship I had before I started dating John and in the book Why Girls Are Weird, which (even though I didn't really like it) kind of inspired me to start this website. Anyway, I felt like crap in London and I would lay on my little bed in the Kings College dorm and read High Fidelity on the days I couldn't make myself get on a bus or train to some sight somewhere.
I read About a Boy while on a trip to Chicago with my mom. Probably the point in our relationship where we started acting like two adults talking to each other as friends...rather than one adult and a moody teenager.
I read How to be Good, too, but I wasn't on vacation...and I don't remember reading it as vividly. Mr. Hornby has a new novel coming out in June, which I plan to read, too. But I seriously doubt I'll be on vacation. And we all know I can't move.
This is approximately the third entry I've started since my last post. This early in writing it, I'm not sure if it will, in fact, actually be published or if I'll fall asleep in the middle. If the second does occur, I envision it happening like I'm a cartoon character: my head will fall on the keyboard, filling the entire screen with indefinite repetitions of the letter "h."
So, yeah, there's been a lot happening. And by "a lot," I basically mean "normal for other people" or "still not much, but I'm used to 'nothing.'"
Easter. I wore the afore mentioned new clothes and hung out with family members all day after church. Good stuff.
Monday I hung out with two girls I work with. The plan was to go to the library in downtown LA. But it was closed. According to the homeless guy on the stairs, Caesar Chavez's birthday was the reason. So, coffee at the Coffee Bean near the Hilton instead.
Tuesday John and I got our taxes done. This is the first time I've done that. And I just had to pick this year to have seven W2's from four different states. Good. Gravy. As some would say.
Tuesday night my mother-in-law and her brand new husband (they got hitched in Reno, NV) drove up on their new Harley and stayed the night with us. Today, they came to the store where I work and took pictures of me. Then they left. I think they're in Arizona now.
I've felt pretty weird lately. Sort of like everything that's happening feels somehow...surreal.
Well, that's not entirely true. We took my sister-in-law to the airport this morning. We did not, however, do anything else I planned on doing. In fact, I've been pretty much wiped out since Christmas.
I need some rejuvenation. I guess that's an appropriate statement for New Year's Day.
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I've started reading Toast, the book John gave me for Christmas. So far, I really like it.
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There's been a commercial on TV lately for Resident Evil: Apocalypse, a movie (that I've never seen and don't want to) about zombies, that is using the tagline, "Go ask Alice." My question to you is: Huh?
Isn't that a young adult novel about an adolescent girl addicted to LSD? Does that association make you want to see a zombie movie starring Milla Jovovich? Or any movie at all, for that matter, that isn't based on the book?
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So, hopefully, any creative impulse I ever had will return again at some future date and I won't write like the "news blurbs" section of a high school newspaper forever. In the meantime, Happy New Year.
Retail on Christmas Eve. And yet, still I like my job, which I've been told, has become permanent. This is good news. I like the idea of "free" insurance. Daily striving to make my life more Canadian.
I toot-tooted my French Horn (a.k.a. Freedom Horn, a.k.a. American Noisemaker: Another Way We Stick It To 'Em) at my uncle and aunt's Christmas Day dinner party. They served a delicious chicken fetticini. But it was no honey-baked ham. Or green bean casserole.
There were Santa hats, carols by the piano, everything but the snow. Which seems to have taken up residence in Tennessee.
On Christmas Eve, we drove around and looked at Christmas lights strung around palm trees. And I struggled with myself to imagine "the first Christmas" and how palm trees are actually much more Christmas-appropriate than store-bought, pre-shaped Douglas firs.
Every now and then I get a wanderin' urge to see Maybe California, maybe Tinsel Town's for me There's a parade there, we'd have it made there Bring home a tan for New Year's Eve
My sister-in-law got here tonight. John got a special "my sister's a minor" pass to go back to the gate to meet her. I had to wait out by baggage claim, which was okay, because I didn't have to go through security and take off my shoes. (Though, I must say, I do have on nice socks today.)
Standing there looking over the barrier by the luggage carrousels, watching people hug and lug around luggage, I started to wonder if the people waiting beside me were from Nashville, where Misty's plane came from. As people filtered in from the gates, I felt this weird affinity for them, having just come from "my home land." Probably the only time in my life I'll every feel an affinity for people from Providence, which is where the plane came from before it picked up Misty in Nashville.
So. Back to work today. Back to normal life, except that we have company and my birthday is Wednesday. The Christmas rush is over and the gift certificates have already started to resurface.
Disneyland or the beach tomorrow, depending on how cold it is.
