Dailyish Pictures: April 2008 Archives

My mother just gave me this chair she had had in storage for many years. Despite being covered in a heavy black plastic that was taped around the base it still had a great deal of dust on it and uh.. other small brown things that had an air of familiarity about them. I spent yesterday steam cleaning the heck out of it, and now I have a fabulously comfortable chair of exactly the right height for my desk. My previous chair was slowly making me into the hunchback of Notre Dame, so this is much better. Aside from the mildly wet bum. Guess after steam cleaning it takes a couple days to get really dry.

My gardenia is flowering at the moment and I've brought some blossoms inside. My friend Isabelle gave me the little glass bowls a few years ago and with their hint of swirl they suit the flowers perfectly.

These are pens that my mother made for Kyna. I love them, and every time I can sneak them into my study I do. Unfortunately, Kyna is rather fond of them too, and I keep finding them back on her desk.

I bought Kyna this book at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. It is written by Wiley Miller (author of the comic strip Non Sequitur) and called The Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Basil. Opening the book in the Scholastic tent this was what I read:

"Although Basil's mother always told him that you couldn't judge a book by its cover, Basil thought this might be the exception."

I knew it was a book for me.

These are our friends visiting from England. It's the end of two serious days of no sleep and lots of wine. You can't see it in this picture but the other kitten has glued itself to Victoria's lap. They're going to miss them.

Our friend Victoria is visiting from England for a couple days. She has three gorgeous kids and an assortment of farm animals that she left with the grandparents. We've been doing our best to keep her entertained and not responsible for anything more than saying "oh all right, I'll have another". This is the beautiful bag that she gave me. She made it. Let me rephrase that; she has three children and somehow had time to make this totally cute bag. The woman is a goddess.

My mom's garden is apparently a hot spot to build a nest as this is her second batch of ducklings this year. We end up having to capture them in a box and then walk the mother (she'll follow the cheeping of the ducklings) the four blocks to the nearest lake.

This was the glorious birthday cake. I'm totally proud of it. I baked another coconut cake using this recipe, substituting coconut milk for regular milk and skipping the whole baking the coconut idea. In my world, baking two coconuts, hacking them open with a machete, then trying to chisel out the flesh in order to grate it on top of a birthday cake is insane. I bought toasted coconut at the grocery store for the top. The icing was the truly brilliant part though. The last time I made coconut cake, I was lamenting that the cream cheese icing was too heavy. So this time I made a mango curd and folded it into whipped cream and used that as the icing. It was perfect.

Mango Curd:

1/2 cup mango juice
6 egg yolks
1/4 cup sugar

Place in small saucepan over medium heat and whisk constantly until curd thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon (usually just after the boiling point - doesn't seem to cause it any harm).

Turn off the heat and stir in 1/2 cup butter cut into small chunks until curd is smooth and butter is melted and incorporated.

Chill.

I'm very excited that this just arrived. I bought it used off of Amazon for about four dollars.  About a week ago I was looking for a description for my travel gallery on my flickr account and the classic Robert Frost poem The Road Not Taken seemed a good choice. All that road less traveled romanticism and such.  But when I found the poem and read it through again  (or possibly for the first time, I was a science major), I realized that it wasn't actually about being an intrepid explorer of the unknown, or rather it was, but not so much with our feet as with our choices. It is our choices that lead us through life, our choices that create our path and exclude other, equally viable ways. Whether the path is well worn or nonexistent really wasn't the point. In fact, if you read it carefully the paths in his poem are actually equal. All that matters is that we take one, eventually to look back with a sigh, possibly a good one, maybe a sad one, and see our footsteps winding away into our past, our very own road traveled, and alas, only one. At that point I highly doubt I will have the self reflective characteristics of Mr. Frost to lightly note the way I distort my accomplishments and romanticize the road I traveled as the 'less traveled one', no, I will whole-hog endorse the thoroughly fabricated version of my life to my children. Not only will the path have been four feet deep in snow, uphill both ways and nonexistent before I had to machete my way through it, but it will have covered most of Mars and Jupiter too.

So that, and the fact that I read S.E Hinton's  Outsiders at a crucial developmental stage and can still recite Nothing Gold Can Stay by heart, have made me very excited to read some more of his poems.

This one I didn't have a prior picture for. I heard it shatter in the middle of the night, right before the sound of scrabbling kitten paws fleeing the scene. I'm revisiting my slipper plan.

 

According to Kyna this is Purrball. Perhaps not my first choice in a name, but as it turns out nothing could have suited her more. She purrs if you just think about petting her. It's very endearing. Here she is purring in a sunbeam.

This is exactly what the title says it is, a purple cauliflower. They also had green, regular white and orange. I almost got the orange, but then figured the cheese sauce would just blend in. I used lots of sharp orange cheddar for said sauce and it was both striking and delicious. I hope they come out with blue apples next, that would be so cool, kids could eat them and compare their tongues.

This is a rather beautiful moth resting on our rather hideous aluminum window. I think it may be trying to camouflage itself against the rust and dirt.

I'm rather proud of these. They are invitations to Kyna's upcoming sixth birthday. We're having a Pippi Longstocking theme so I scanned in images from our Pippi book (don't tell anyone) and with a little tweaking got them onto the cards. We are going to have tea and decorate cookies, then do a little turnupstuffing for treasure in the back yard. Mismatched socks are a must, and I plan to tape pieces of paper like stepping stones all over the house for a giant game of 'don't touch the floor'. As you can see I even did the envelopes. Chris was his usual brilliant self and sorted out how to get all the little girls' addresses to print sequentially. I have removed our address from the invite and the return portion of the envelope for obvious reasons, just in case you thought I missed those smudgy bits.

This is an old photo that I just rescued from my old computer before it completely died. My lovely sister, Lovage, during her blonde bombshell stage.

This was the other main attraction at the Easter farm trip. I love rope swings (yes this is me), and this is a doubly good picture because I also love that sweater. Picture taken by Nick.

We went for an Easter egg hunt at a friends farm nearby and this was one of the main attractions.

There is something very wonderful about spirals. They can lead to good, bad, or infinite places. They can take you in just as easily as out, depending on your mood.

This is the beautiful (if blustery) beach where we stayed for the weekend. I have no idea why the small pilings were there, but it made for a nice structural aspect to the picture.

This was the door leading down to the beautiful stretch of sandy beach where we went for our morning walks. Doesn't it look peaceful and inviting? We had no idea until we opened it of the raging hurricane on the other side. Birds took to the air and were blown to San Francisco. Small children were stuck against the outside of third story windows. We didn't so much 'walk' as slither hand over hand along the driftwood before letting go and flying tumbleweed style back to this very door.