the official theme song of june, 2009

"drowning, everything is drowning
go ahead and take the town
the town is yours to take

oh, let the rain fall down
and wash this world away
oh let the sky be gray
cause if it's ever gonna get any better
it's gotta get worse for a day."

old friends

i have so much to say about this weekend, which i spent mostly* in connecticut with my dearest, oldest friend holly. we had recently gotten back in touch with two close friends of ours from high school (thanks, facebook!), and we made plans for a mini-reunion at holly's house, which is more or less a central meeting point for the four of us (i had the farthest to drive, but i also have the oldest children among all of us, so i'm pretty free and flexible in comparison to everyone else). i was a little nervous about meeting my friends karen and jen again after so much time (approximately - ahem - twenty years had passed since we last saw each other) - wondering if we'd have anything in common anymore, anything to talk about, even. it was a kind of magical surprise to see them, looking simultaneously exactly like themselves and also like beautiful, grownup ladies, and to realize as we hugged each other hard, with true feeling, and my friend jen even burst into tears, that we love each other, truly. that we share a history together, from a particular, strange time in our lives, and just how meaningful that really is, even after all this time.

we ate and talked and shared pictures of kids and siblings and we each summed up the last twenty years, and about six or seven hours flew by. it was quite amazing.

also, holly gave me a hair cut (seen above). i'm such a doofus that i didn't take any pictures except of my own head, in holly's lovely bathroom mirror. also, i got some cute kids to model those glasses for me. oh yeah, and here's a spectacular tree house that holly's husband val built in their back yard:
























*on sunday, i raced back to portland to experience some zombie kickball in the rain.

product placement

...but i have no problem writing about food. weather, no. food, yes.* last night was spicy tofu night, featuring enoch and guest starring jason, who brought this ice cream with him. boo thought it was too "nutty," but oh my god it was good. i am thinking about it now because i just finished off the pint for lunch. it's seriously delicious, creamy, smooth, and truffley (i don't think that's a real word, but i bet you know what i mean - like chocolate truffles, not mushroom ones). we subjected to jason to a nasty, cutthroat scrabble game followed by hours of little big planet on our brand new (to us) enormous (to us) television, a surprise gift from enoch, who now deserves free food and video games for life.






*oh, who am i kidding? i write about the weather all the time. i just don't want to think about the noah's ark-style rain that's been going on here lately.

rainrainrainrainrainrainrainrainrain

blogging rule number one: don't write about the weather. it's boring.





p.s. seventeen days!!!

imaginary friends

i never thought i'd become one of those bloggers with pretend friends in the blogosphere, you know? but somehow i have accumulated a bunch of new imaginary pals, and they're really not as "pretend" as i might have guessed. in fact, a couple of them have morphed into real-life friends recently, which is kind of awesome.

i've never actually met erin in the real world, but that didn't stop her from mailing me some junk!




















i love getting mail. and i love surprises.
























especially surprises involving silvertone earrings - one that says "NEW" and the other that says "KIDS."
























i could only model "KIDS" cause my other earlobe was pretending it had never been pierced.
























thanks, erin!! i have a place where i keep special little things, and these are going right there. it's basically a teeny tiny collection of very tiny, odd things (example: my human tooth collection). i'll show you sometime. but i have to admit, i'm glad my junk was a pair of earrings and not a human tooth.

*rain, rain, go away...

minnow's sick of getting toweled off after every walk.




*UPDATE: it went away! the sun came out today. minnow is pleased.

belated

boo got a belated birthday box in the mail from bean yesterday! and it was quite belated - for some reason, it took about a month to arrive. "unpredictable" seems to be the story with the mail between here and germany. sometimes it takes four days, sometimes six weeks.
























lucky boo, he got a ritter sport chocolate bar, a huge package of fancy german pens, and a peter fox cd (we have all become total fans of peter fox, by the way).
























tucked into the box were also a couple of books for me, flight to afar and norwegian wood. i have gone from being bereft of good books to having a massive stack beside my bed. i have been chipping my way through angst, loaned to me by enoch, but i'm taking a break to read edgar sawtelle for my virtual book group.


p.s. 22 DAYS!

peonies

i got invited to the nicest little vegan tea party last week by my (no longer imaginary) friend melissa crowe. at the last minute, realizing i was going empty-handed, i cut some flowers from my crazy mess of a yard, stuck them in a glass jar, and brought them along. you'd think, looking at them, that i was a bit of a gardener, and that my yard must be a lovely mass of cottagey flowers. but you'd be wrong (my yard is a pile of willow branches and very happy weeds, in the midst of which dwell the remains of various perennials* we planted - optimistically - years ago, and an even happier groundhog who lives under the old playhouse). anyway, i heard it was supposed to rain from today til forever, so yesterday i cut a bunch more flowers for my own table. look how pretty they are! i stuck in some beach roses from the massive bush in our front yard, and they smell amazing.



*peonies (i always think of my mom telling me about a kansas neighbor who pronounced them pee-OH-nees)
*columbine
*johnson's blue geranium
*blue iris of some kind
*some new white thing that crept over from next door, vaguely geranium-like
*rosa rugosa, or beach roses

math, math, math

this article is interesting - it's mostly about how to stop yourself from staring at disfigured people. honestly, it may be common, but it's not something i've ever had a problem with. i think i'm pretty skilled at not staring at disfigured people, actually. but one of the methods they mention is mentally doing "a simple math problem" to re-engage the higher-thinking cortex (instead of the emotional, hormone-releasing part of the brain, the amygdala). and that's a technique i use all the time to keep from crying in public! i summon up my cortex by doing simple division, usually, like dividing by fives or threes. fives and threes work the best for me, for some reason. they're so businesslike. i find odd numbers less emotional than even numbers. okay, i'll stop now, before you begin to think i am a bit of an autistic savant and can't stop staring at me the next time we run into each other.

frontier ruckus

the other thing i did last weekend, besides hang out with my friend stella, was watch this great band from michigan play a short concert in the rain on leander's back porch!

eavesdropper

do you know about my overheard in portland blog? it's my other love, aside from this virtual scrapbook of a blog we have right here. i was so pleased today to receive two emails and one verbal message from three of the spies i have out in the field. and they're all really funny overheards, just you wait. i only posted one today, overheard by m, because i like to space them out.

today was the last day of school, by the way, and tomorrow i shall celebrate by not getting up at six thirty in the a.m.


p.s. 24 days til bean comes home. just in case you didn't look at yesterday's post and then use your math skillz to figure that out yourself.

25 days

...and counting!

the adventures of stella

my almost-one-year-old sweetie, stella kate, came to visit us this weekend. she brought her parents along, too!

stella kept busy while she was here, receiving kisses from minnow;
























taking us out for a delicious dinner at pom's thai taste;
























telling hilarious jokes;
























playing the piano;
























hanging out with her cool cousin boo;
























and strolling on the beach with her adorable mom and dad:

re: my kids

this kid
























*won a karaoke contest at school singing come on eileen and you spin me round. his solid education in the music of the eighties has come in handy at last!

*told his friends at school that yes, he only owns one pair of pants (which is not literally true, but might as well be, since he only owns one pair that he will wear), and came home with a piece of notebook paper which had been fashioned into a collection bag and marked "PANTS FOR BOO FUND $." his supporters collected a total of $3.95.

*has no more homework this year.




and this kid



















*is coming home one month from today!!! we are picking her up at 1:00 in the afternoon at a hotel in virginia near dulles on july 11.

*is looking like a german girl. for real.

public school

i love this tee shirt so much! click on the photo for ordering info.



















(via swissmiss)

"like homemade ring dings!"

my contribution to our lovely dinner last night at eva and nathan's house.

remember,

(image copyright studio mela)




i have a few friends who could use this reminder, so sweetly put and decorated with flowers! xo

culminating

as i may have mentioned before, the word "culminating" comes up a lot in these crazy schools my kids attend. this week we went to boo's culminating event, which was really pretty awesome and involved science fiction and imaginary planets and other assorted cool details.
























(above, an inhabitant of the planet arvestadia)



also, we went to artemis's high school graduation! it was funny, celebratory, and poignant. but the emphasis was on "funny," and as a result, i only cried a very little bit.



















if you look very very closely at the above photograph, you can kind of make out artemis graduating.

below, a very happy graduate and her mother (sorry, dancer lady!)

up

let me be the first (or...not the first, as the case may be) to instruct you to go see pixar's new movie, up, whether or not you have a child to drag along with you.



i saw it last night with m and boo (cheap night at the nick!), and although the trailers i'd watched had left me sort of cold, it was really wonderful, possibly my favorite (i know, i always say that after i see a pixar film don't i?). i cried and cried, and i also laughed out loud. PLUS there are dozens of dogs in this movie, the best one of all being dug (i thought his name was doug, but apparently not). who reminded me of a less intelligent minnow. oh, please go see it! and tell me what you loved about it: the "...and then..." nature of the story (which is something scott nash mentioned enjoying about it when we ran into him and his wife nancy afterward), meaning that things seemed to happen almost randomly as the story moved along, one thing after another. OR, like me, did you love the fact that it was basically a profound buddhist parable disguised as a cartoony kids' movie? OR, like m, did you just love how very weird it was?

rabbit rabbit!

happy june to you from my rabbit and me. here's hoping you have to wear sunglasses almost every day this month!