Here Be Dragons
This dragonfly was hanging out on our plum tree and I managed to zoom in all the way and capture him here, and it isn’t even blurry!!
Rock! Death! America!
Littering our noise on the EarthArchive for June, 2007
Lunch is Ready
O starts Kindergarten in the fall (~sniffle~) and we’ve been eyeing the laptop lunches ever since we first saw them on Vegan Lunchbox. Turns out they sell them locally at one of the coolest stores in Portland: Mirador. He picked out the lunchbox with the purple carrying case, and I was happy to see the Vegan Lunchbox Cookbook right next to it! Score one for the team.
O is very proud of his lunchbox. He wrote his name on the tag right away and showed it to everyone that came over. I’ll have to start making some food out of the cookbook before school actually starts to see what he likes and doesn’t before I send them off to school with him. (Ten bucks says he’ll be taking pb&j most of the time)
Mirador is chock full of awesome, and I literally had to make a bee-line for the lunchboxes and then back to the counter, otherwise I could have spent way too much money. If you’ve never been, they sell all manner of eco-friendly goods for kitchen and home and you. You can even register there! They give discounts to members of any of the local food co-ops as well as KBOO members. Very community minded. Very cool.
Fast ship? You’ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon?
Your kids can sleep soundly too, knowing they are guarded by the likes of Greedo, a Gamorrean Guard, and a Sand Trooper with his trusty speeder.
Kids Drink Free!
I saw on the Oregon Brewer’s Fest website that the OLCC has backed off and will allow kids to attend the Festival. Hooray! O has been almost every year since he was born, and we usually go with friends and relatives that he loves and we bring him stuff to do, so he hangs out in the shade with us and slurps down the root beer. We asked him if he remembered going there, and he said “yeah, we ate pizza and hung out with Uncle Rick but Aunt Kari had to go early!” His memory is scary sometimes, but he balances it out by not remembering that he shouldn’t put his sister in a headlock.
Anyway, here is what they have to say about the ban:
The Oregon Brewers Festival is pleased to announce that, as in the past, minors under age 21 will be allowed all-hours access to the 20th annual Oregon Brewers Festival, provided they are accompanied by a parent. The Oregon Liquor Control Commission granted permission for minors/parents to attend after receiving a new OBF compliance plan.
Minors will only be allowed at the OBF with a parent; guardians are not acceptable. Minors are encouraged to attend the root beer garden, in which complimentary handcrafted root beer is served in cups (no mugs allowed) for all minors and designated drivers.
We greatly appreciate the OLCC’s willingness to work with the festival to maintain minor patronage at our event.
#!%$&@()%&@ Hilarious
Okay, so I’ve had a bit of rum, since we had to drink some along with Mark DeCarlo on his Taste of America segment in Puerto Rico, but these two videos cracked my shit up:
Microsoft Surface Parody:
Here is the original Microsoft promo, in case you haven’t seen it.
And this Bud Light ad from BudTV…I bring you, the swear jar.
The Power of Art
I saw this article yesterday on Simon Schama’s The Power of Art, which originally aired on BBC and is now on PBS. I watched the first half of the Van Gogh episode last night, and I love it so much, I never want this series to end. I was worried it might be dull, or cheesy, especially since they use an actor to do re-inactments, but instead it is just remarkable and captivating. I found I had to pause and rewind because my mind would be off on crazy Van Gogh tangents and I’d missed a couple sentences of dialogue. I just want to draw and draw and draw. I put the book on hold at the library, and added it to my Amazon wishlist.
There was something altogether too decorative about the impressionists, marinating the meat of human existence in the rinse of their luminescence.
Brilliant.
Living in the 80’s
Things I learned watching VH1’s “100 Greatest Songs of the 80’s“:
- I can recognize Nick Rhodes simply by a picture of him with a headband on, visible only from the eyebrows up.
- One of the Bananarama’s married Andrew Ridgeley, or as she put it: “that other guy from Wham”.
- 1987 was a really bad year for popular music, no thanks to Guns N Roses and Def Leppard. Sheesh.
- Pete Burns from Dead or Alive has turned himself into one creepy looking dude.
Typing Quickly…
Our computer is trying its very best to die in the most hideous, expensive, and file losing way possible…I tried to log in to post from another computer but couldn’t remember the password.
So! Today is our fourteenth wedding anniversary. Go us!
Weird neighborhood things…we seem to have a variety of mail carriers, and while I see one more often than the others, I don’t see her consistently, and sometimes we get two mail deliveries in one day. The trash trucks careen around the streets like lunatics. Unlike at our last house, where the trash and recycling was all on one truck, there is a seperate truck for trash, recycling, and yard debris, making for a full day of noise and trucks and mayhem. Someone also broke into our car and tried to steal our stereo, but apparently changed their mind at the last second and left it hanging there. It still works…sort of. We also have ice cream trucks that drive by at 8pm, waking up all the kids in the neighborhood.
I can be at Fred Meyer in two minutes. The new big Trader Joe’s five minutes away opens mid-summer, as does the Ikea (ten minutes away!).
We discovered a tiny place called Bui Tofu that is so awesome. We bought fried tofu with green onion, fried tofu with lemongrass, fresh tofu that I ended up baking with a little soy sauce, nutritional yeast and tomato/seaweed/salt flakes, and some sweet rice cake with a kind of sour/sweet coconut spread. Everything was delicious, and the fresh tofu was only a dollar! They were surprised that the kids tried a bite of tofu when they were there, and I think O can live off of meals of rice, tofu, and broccoli.
We let O watch Star Wars episodes 4, 5, and 6. I’ve never seen a kid more happy in his life.
Today we have a playdate with a child that was in XM’s orphanage! I can’t wait to see her reaction.
Fingers crossed on the computer issues…
Roses Gone Wild!
There are rose bushes planted along the parking outside our house. When we moved in we wondered what color they’d be. Now we know.
