Skip to main content

skills

Funny how every time I go to my blog, I'm disappointed to see it's not updated. Like there are two of me, one who is a blogger and one who is a browser. I feel your frustration, schizophrenically.

At the moment, I am sitting in comfy my-morning-is-free attire eating oatmeal (the yummy flavored kind from a package) and drinking coffee from one of Mom's William-Sonoma mugs. They are beautiful mugs. They make coffee taste better - no joke.

And I am browsing through Greek recipes, trying to figure out what to make for dinner tonight. I am cooking for friends. Haven't done this in quite a while.

And I am listening to Greg Laswell, because it's hard to get tired of him. He makes for good morning music. Especially late-in-the-morning, I'm-up-but-still-considering music.

And I really was going to say something significant in this here blog post. Maybe next time.

Oh yes! I remember. Very significant. I carved a pumpkin last night, and let me tell you about genius!! I have found my calling. My gift. So we went to Disneyland the other night 'cause I needed to get an annual pass and, more importantly, my Mom had to check out the brick with her name on it in the entrance. A student (and his parents, obviously) bought it for her last year on her birthday. It just takes about six months for it to actually show up in the ground. So we took a picture of the brick, ate dinner at Cafe Orleans, and took a tour of the Haunted Mansion. Every time I see it all zany and spruced up for the Hallo-Christmas season, it's like a brand new experience. If you are even slightly interested in The Nightmare Before Christmas, you have to check it out. They've been doing it for years, but this was the first time I'd gone right before Halloween. Mom and I immediately determined that we had to carve pumpkins the next night in the exact faces that were decorating the hill on the way in. I changed my mind slightly as I held the carving knife last night. Jack Skellington now sits, in perfect pumpkin form, in my dining room window. Disneyland should so hire me. I had no idea.

Picture (hopefully) to follow.

Comments

  1. Picture of pumpkin, please. Your post is pretty much void of all usefulness without it.
    If you got really good at carving pumpkins you could work at Disneyland. They had a guy just sitting around carving intricate things last weekend. Pretty cool.

    Haha, I was the first to post a comment again! Wheeeeeee!! :-P

    (Shoot, I need a life... where's my book...)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dude, I feel the same way.

    "Funny how every time I go to [your] blog, I'm disappointed to see it's not updated."

    Just because I saw you the other day doesn't mean you can avoid me on your blog!

    :-P

    Off to Bedfordshire...

    ReplyDelete
  3. when in blogger-block, post a poem.

    ReplyDelete
  4. is that a statement or a command or a suggestion? are you talking to me or yourself?
    i like poems! unless they're really deep. then i don't "get" them. or too simple (like sometimes e.e.cummings). then i don't "get" them either.
    hopeless.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

window in the sub

Dear Nathaniel, I am microwaving pie that Mom bought up in Oak Glen this week on her way home from the orthodontist. As I put it in the microwave, I was full of sadness that I was not in Oak Glen with her. Why did I not go? I was working. I want to see the trees turn. I want to wander slowly through autumnal gift shops. Under the water, you cannot sense the approach of the seasons. Even here it is difficult because, after all, it's California. But I can still sense it. After three seasons in Illinois and one in Scotland, it must be with me for good. Or at least for a while. Because I am all abuzz with eagerness for fall and winter, for turkeys and dried leaves and Santa. I should start cooking again this fall. Fall foods are my favorite. Baked squash dripping with melted butter and brown sugar, pumpkin soup... this year, if I have enough money, I will put together a holiday dinner for my friends. And we will drink Scandinavian mulled wine, which is the most wonderful thing I have e...

Again in Gilead

I just finished reading this for the second time last week, thanks to the forever book group of Grace. It was equally as lovely the second time around, and while reading it, I wrote down a dozen more quotes from the incomparable Ames, who is both too beautiful a man to be real and too beautiful a man not to be real. (I'm grateful and amazed to know a few like him.) "It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water." (p.82) I have found this to be remarkably true. I see it in myself, and in many others as well. "I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect." (p.91) This seems to be about the only way I experience visions, but because memory is a rickety thing, I tend not to trust them much. Which makes me a poor prophet. "I know, too, that my own experience of the church has been, in many senses, shelte...

Being a Baker

Working at the Main Library has surprising advantages. Just now I stepped out of my office, walked five paces across the hall, scanned a badge, and walked under the civic center plaza to the elevator that stretches from beneath the earth up to the mayor’s office on the fourteenth floor. I didn’t have so far to go—just up one level to the utilities counter, where a sympathetic, amused woman named Sue shut down my gas payments. It took less than five minutes. I finished packing up my kitchen days ago. My cake pans were in boxes sometime early last week. But as I walked through the underground loading dock on my way back to the office, I was distinctly aware of the finality of what I’d just done. I would never, from that moment on, be able to bake for anyone out of that kitchen. Maybe it doesn’t seem like a very big deal, but I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of a certain identity, namely being “the person who bakes a lot”. I made a tiered wedding cake for some friends (because...