Funniest Joke of the Fringe

Saw a reference to an article about the funniest joke of this year's Edinburgh Fringe on Facebook tonight from Jacqueline Cooley and just had to share:

The Top 10 jokes were judged to be:

• 1) Dan Antopolski - "Hedgehogs - why can't they just share the hedge?"

• 2) Paddy Lennox - "I was watching the London Marathon and saw one runner dressed as a chicken and another runner dressed as an egg. I thought: 'This could be interesting'."

• 3) Sarah Millican - "I had my boobs measured and bought a new bra. Now I call them Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes because they're up where they belong."

• 4) Zoe Lyons - "I went on a girls' night out recently. The invitation said 'dress to kill'. I went as Rose West."

• 5) Jack Whitehall - "I'm sure wherever my dad is; he's looking down on us. He's not dead, just very condescending."

• 6) Adam Hills - "Going to Starbucks for coffee is like going to prison for sex. You know you're going to get it, but it's going to be rough."

• 7) Marcus Brigstocke - "To the people who've got iPhones: you just bought one, you didn't invent it!"

• 8) Rhod Gilbert - "A spa hotel? It's like a normal hotel, only in reception there's a picture of a pebble."

• 9) Dan Antopolski - "I've been reading the news about there being a civil war in Madagascar. Well, I've seen it six times and there isn't."

• 10) Simon Brodkin (as Lee Nelson) - "I started so many fights at my school - I had that attention-deficit disorder. So I didn't finish a lot of them."

Good-bye Montana!

The sun has set on this last night of our time in Montana. It is a bittersweet night--sweet because the weather was finally perfect for today, our last day, and bitter because we have to leave tomorrow. Yes, I am looking forward to being back in the studio again, and J is eager to see her friends and start second grade. We are all missing our home, our beds, our dogs and hamster--our place in the world. But for J and me, Montana holds big pieces of our hearts and it is a wrench to leave.

I am finally caught up on sleep after months of running full out (there were days here I slept 13 hours straight). It is so silent and dark up at the lake that the chattering of one small squirrel in the morning is enough to jar you momentarily awake. Dave did not get a vacation--he worked the whole time we were here, but I hope even he is taking a little bit of rest and peace back with him to Austin. If not peace and rest, at least a respite from the intense southern heat.

Northwestern Montana is about the best kid's vacation there is. You can spy on deer, wild turkeys, bats, and black squirrels. You can catch feral bunnies (and maybe even keep them!), pick cherries and chokecherries, and play with Gramma, Grampa, Gramma's bird Sam, and Grampa's dog Jig (that's Mister Jiggles to you). You sleep quickly and deeply every night, and your days are filled with swims in the lake, rock-collecting expeditions, kayaking, paddling in the paddle boat, and waking up every day to the fresh-air-filled wonder of the wild mountains.

This is one of the best fruit years I can remember. The huckleberries are dark and plentiful, the cherry tree limbs sagged with black fruit, and the apple and pear trees are almost ready to start shucking their fruit. In fact, one of the apple trees in the neighbor's orchard started tossing apples at us tonight as we sat watching the deer. To thank Candy and her daughter Ann (our neighbors with the orchard) we got a bouquet of local farm stand flowers that J presented them on our last day.

We bought huckleberries (five pounds) at a roadside fruit stand the other day, and the neighbor with the orchard let Dave, J and me pick all the sweet cherries we wanted. In under half an hour from one tree we had over 14 lbs of the most luscious, ripe bing cherries I have ever tasted. mid-August is the best time for cherries--they're too ripe to pick and ship, and in a week they will be rotting on the trees. but for now they are bursting with perfect black juice. J and I pitted and froze them all in single layers on cookie sheets and then bagged them to bring home. We froze the Huckleberries the same way, but there's no need to pit them.

Then I discovered ripe chokecherries out back at my grandparents' cabin and convinced Dave and the J to help me pick 3 lbs of them from one clump of bushes. Chokecherries are very small, acerbic berries with big pits--not much at all to speak of when they're fresh. They are a native American cherry (prunus virginiana) found all over the US except the deep south. The American Indians made pemmican and wojapi from them, and my grandmother Jessie used to make syrup from the ones my uncle Ed and I picked. I remember sitting up here at the lake and putting that syrup on the sourdough pancakes that my Grampa Cecil would make us all for breakfast. Sweet memory, sweet syrup. I froze mine whole--like the huckleberries--and will make syrup, wine, or some other treats with them this fall back in Atlanta.



We all saw more deer this year than we have in previous years too. There is a doe with twin fawns, and another doe with a singleton fawn that graze by the cabin and in the adjacent orchard. A few properties down the lane two yearling bucks, two older bucks and a small herd of other does and fawns frolicked every evening in a larger orchard. The llamas that have lived around the corner for several years are sadly gone, replaced by a roaming flock of wild turkeys, but there is a small herd (gaggle? parliament? symphony?) of yaks a little further down--next to the restaurant that has all the feral bunnies living under the deck. Of course the times I wanted to photograph wildlife all I had was my iPhone--I had left the good camera at the cabin. So if you squint through one eye and enlarge the photos a bit, you can see the bunnies, yaks, and turkeys in the accompanying pics.

Montana brings me back to my childhood with a vengeance, so much so that one night when we were having dinner at the restaurant with the wild bunnies living under the deck and J asked if she caught a bunny could she keep it, I gave the answer I always wished my mother would give and said yes. Of course I never thought she'd actually catch one, but my child is patient, perseverant and resourceful. Welcome to the family, little Jasmine. A sweeter bunny, I could not imagine.

As a last farewell gesture, J honored Montana with the loss of a tooth today. Well, I pulled it out for her before she swallowed it! Now we just need to hope the tooth fairy can find us here (and has enough cash to pay for the tooth!).

Notes From the North

This morning we had breakfast at the Uptown Diner and were served by the same waitress who waited on us last year. I love continuity! Today she told us about her daughter who lives in Troy in a house with single-paned windows, wood-burning heat, and gravity-driven spring water. Apparently in the winter when the ground is frozen, there is plenty of water. But in the summer when a lot of the water seeps into the ground the daughter has to suck on the shower head (the highest water point in the house) to get water down the lines. As she just had a baby, her mother thinks she should have a more reliable source of water, but you know us Montanans--we're stubborn.

The daughter was the 911 dispatcher for Troy before she had the baby, and her last day of work was a doozy. According to her mother, most of the 911 calls in Troy (population 957) are to get licenses and a host of other administrative type things interspersed with the occasional my-neighbor's-mad-at-me-and-filled-my-mailbox-with-horse-manure calls. But on her last day, she heard the burglar alarm go off at the Booze N' Bait (I can't make this stuff up). The Booze N' Bait is listed in the Troy yellow pages under the categories: clothing, hunting and fishing supplies, liquor stores, pawn brokers, and non-resident snowmobile use permits and is the only listing in each of those categories.

When the sheriff arrived, he found two guys waiting in a brand-new (as in one-day-old) pick-up truck and another guy hauling loot out of the store. Now these three were out-of-staters--they'd crossed over from Idaho to to wreak mayhem and maybe their sense of direction wasn't so good. When the guys in the truck saw the sheriff, they peeled off and headed down the road... but not back towards Idaho, instead they headed off towards Libby Montana the next town over and home of the county jail. Rumor has it that when they discovered their mistake--and that the only way back to Idaho was back through Troy where they would be spotted--they decided to create a diversion by setting their friend's new truck on fire and heading off into the woods where one got lost and the other fell off a cliff into the river. They were eventually both apprehended. The official news story reads a bit more dryly, but is entertaining nonetheless.

Today it is overcast and 69 degrees with a light breeze and abundant free wi-fi--which brings me back to our waitress for a second. When we left after breakfast I told her we were going to find some wi-fi and enjoy the passing of the day and she said "I like to call it wiffee. If you look on the internet, it says we have it here, but it doesn't work 'cause the owner can't remember the password." I am so home!

Yesterday we had a lovely stroll through the Missoula farmer's market which was full of farmers of varied ethnicities from hippies of all ages, to our Hmong community, to a larger-than-expected eastern European/former Soviet Union population (Russian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Serbian, Uzbekistani--who knows). We bought huckleberries, basil, little cucumbers, green beans and beautiful fingerling potatoes for Dave to turn into a feast when we're back at my parents' house.

Now I think it's time for a nap... Happy Sunday all!

Life is Short

It's been a couple of hours since I last looked in on the house wren babies. I watched them all go through the hole in the screen and heard chirping from outside as the mother fed them. Even the little runt hopped up and out the screen. It's been quiet for awhile now so I went out to look. The mother and the two larger fledglings are gone. The little runt fell to the ground and, unable to fly, was left there alone. He didn't make it. I buried him in the ferret graveyard on the side of the front yard.

Nature

An ambitious father house wren came into the screened-in porch on the front of our house this spring through a small hole that a squirrel had made in the screen. He built a nest on top of one of the porch columns, and this nest, unfortunately, was the nest best liked by Mrs. Wren, so they settled in to raise their first brood of the year there.

Four almost-fledged babies popped out of the nest and rambled around the porch over the weekend. Late last night there were only three alive and one sad, still one down on the floor in the corner. The parents were nowhere around, and the remaining three babies were huddled on the cement collar around the middle of the post.

I worried and fretted about them and went to wild bird sites on the Internet for guidance. If all is well, I learned, the mother will be back at sunrise to feed them, and she will continue feeding them every 15-20 minutes throughout the day. I went to bed resolved to wake Jessie early and send her out for worms or maybe to buy mealworms today at the pet store if Mom doesn't show up (shades of the year before last and the blind little sparrow who hatched on the same porch column).

This morning I went out to check on them and they were all in the same place with no Mom in obvious site. When I went over to look at them, two flew away and the third huddled deeper into the corner. I looked at him more closely and one of his wings is either deformed or just not all the way fledged. I hope it's the latter. While I was examining him, Mom flew by the outside of the screen and scolded me so I felt better about their situation and left them be.

Now I sit at my desk starting my day, and I wait for Mom to return to feed them. They have all moved from the column to the porch floor. It's chilly this morning so they are all huddled together for warmth. Maybe the one with the not-right wing fell and the other two flew down to share body heat and hungry cheeps with him.

Mom has been back, but Darwin is proving right. The two more developed fledglings are out-competing the little one for food. I'm afraid he is not going to make it through the day. In the spirit of non-interference interfering, I moved a shred of the nest from the column to the railing by the hole in teh screen and put the littlest bird in it. I figured the nest material would help him conserve body heat--and therefore energy--and putting him by the entry to the porch would make it easier for Mom to feed him. He was quickly joined there by his nest mates who snatched all the food form Mom when she showed up.

Nature is cute, warm and cuddly from afar. Up close, not so much.

10-Day Detox With Kashi Yoga

Day four of my detox and I am feeling pretty good! No caffeine, alcohol, meat, dairy, salt, sugar, oil (other than the clarified butter I have before breakfast every morning) since friday and through next Monday. I'm basically eating kitchari (basmati rice, mung beans, a little veggies and spices), Moroccan oatmeal (whole rolled oats mixed with dried apricots, dates, raisins, cinnamon, ginger, turmeric, and cloves), and leafy greens soup. I'm drinking herbal tea, water, and more herbal tea. Dinner every day for the rest of the detox is a semi-fast--I get a pomegranate shooter (1/4 c. pomegranate juice, water and minced ginger).

I scrape my tongue, use a neti pot, and gargle with turmeric and salt water every morning. I meditate for 10 minutes after I drink my warm clarified butter (started with 1 t. per day and am moving up to 7 per day by the end) followed by a hot water chaser. I haven't been too good about doing yoga every day yet, but I'm working up to it. It's been 14 years since I did yoga and the simplest poses are now the hardest for me (child's pose, e.g.). Anytime I have to sit with my legs tucked under me it's almost impossible. I think my thighs have expanded too much... But I'll get better, and I hope to start doing it more often--even if only in our basement while Dave works out on the treadmill. Now to work!

The Degradation Continues...

A Silver Lining

Dominos now delivers in our area--and they have a spiffy on-line interface that obviates even a phone call!

Missing Dave

It is the middle of the morning and I'm in the studio looking at the mess that is my desk. I should be working. I should be firing, and sorting papers, and, and, and... But I just instant-messaged my spouse to share a funny with him, and it hit home that I won't see him tonight, or tomorrow, or at all for two more weeks. Two weeks isn't so long, I know. But it's already been 100 and a half hours since I saw him. 6,035 minutes since I hugged him. 362,100 seconds since he kissed me goodbye in the hotel parking lot in Dallas and headed off in his Mini Cooper for Austin.

The things that I was so afraid were going to be impossible have been almost trivially easy--thanks in large part to Jessie, my very helpful little angel. I am on top of all the tasks I normally manage--my business, the tax papers, the finances, etc.,--and I have neatly folded in the groceries, the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry, and the care and feeding of the J (including nightly reading, baths and transporting to and from school). I even have playdates and sleepovers planned.

But the things I thought I could handle--the temporary separation, the sleeping and waking alone--those have been really tough. The days are not so bad. J and I follow a schedule (how else would we get everything done?), we do our chores, we share life and cuddle. But at night, when I sleep, my non-rational mind takes over. It rears up and cries, "Why can't I have my spouse snuggled next to me?" And I dream dreams of loss. I need to stop listening to my melancholy playlist (these are the songs that were playing as I wrote this post), put on my big girl panties, and just deal with it. But he should know how much I miss him.

Get Yer Samoas! Get Yer Thin Mints! Get Yer Do-Si-Dos!

The first annual Jessie Griffith Girl Scout Cookie sell-a-thon has begun! We have more boxes than she is tall so pull out those wallets. I went the extra mile today for her (okay, so I indulged my obsession with Internet technologies) and I created a Google Docs spreadsheet (a spreadsheet shared between Dave and me that lives in our private space on the web) to track her cookies and sales. Then I put the iPhone application for Google (which includes Google docs) on my iPhone and now I can pull up the spreadsheet wherever I am to see the address and phone number of the person I am delivering too, and I can also see--and update--how many boxes we have left in each kind. It was too much fun (and I am such a geek!).

But enough about technology. This is all about our little Daisy (pre-pre-Girl Scout) and her cookies! Without further ado, I present This Year's Cookies! My personal favorite is the Samoa. You can't go wrong with Samoas, I always say. The Girl Scouts say:

Samoas®: These are round doughnut-shaped cookies about two inches in diameter with a hole in the center, covered in caramel and toasted coconut, and then striped with chocolate. Samoas® are made by Little Brownie Bakers.

Thin Mints: The most enduring and universally familiar Girl Scout cookie. These round, mint-flavored cookies covered with dark chocolate perennially sell the most boxes of any cookie. Thin Mints have never changed their name. Little Brownie Bakers and ABC Bakers both make Thin Mints.

Do-Si-Dos®: A sandwich cookie. The round, bumpy perforated oatmeal cookie top and bottom surrounds a peanut butter-flavored layer inside. Do-Si-Dos® (formerly Gauchos) are baked by Little Brownie Bakers.

Trefoils: These shortbread cookies are shaped like the Girl Scout Trefoil design. Scot Teas were a similar, lighter sugar cookie made by the now defunct Burry. These cookies come in a blue box. Little Brownie Bakers calls them Trefoils.

Tagalongs®: These are round cookies with a layer of peanut butter on top, and covered in chocolate. These cookies come in a red box. Little Brownie Bakers calls them Tagalongs®.

Lemon Chalet Cremes™: Featuring a design of Our Chalet in Switzerland, a beloved Girl Scout World Center, this sandwich cookie has a touch of cinnamon-ginger spice that evokes the warmth of a fireside chat on a snowy evening; they are made by Little Brownie Bakers.

Dulce de Leche: New for 2009, and inspired by the classic confections of Latin America, these sweet, indulgent cookies are rich with milk caramel chips and stripes. They come in a turquoise box, and are made by Little Brownie Bakers.



Get Yer Lemon Chalet Cremes! Get Yer Dulce de Leche! Get Yer Tagalongs! Quick, before we eat them all...

Snow Day in the South

I post here first this morning instead of on Glass Incarnate. I post here first because my spouse informed me that it has been so long since I have posted on this blog that his RSS reader has greyed it out. Whatever. I also post here because we had friends in for the weekend, a southern family, and when we were talking about blogging I said the name of this one and the 14 year-old son asked me in a surprised voice, "You don't like the south?". I feel obliged to answer. After six years of not planning to remain here, I am settled in. With Dave exploring the vast sea of employment opportunities post-CNN, we have the option of living almost anywhere. In fact our options have opened up so much that Dave felt comfortable throwing down the gauntlet and saying if I want to move to Montana, we can do it now...

You see, when we were married--in Montana--he promised me that we would move there within eight years (we lived in Chicago at the time). Well, it's been 13-1/2 years now and I occasionally smugly throw out in the conversation that he still hasn't lived up to that promise. I did so in conversation in front of our friends over the weekend and he replied, "Why not now?"

Why not now indeed. So I search my soul. What would I be giving up if we moved to Montana, or to Austin (where the jobs actually *are*). What would I be gaining (best case)? We never intended this house to be our forever home. Our forever home was the sprawling old mansion built in 1917 where we lived outside of Chicago. Then it was the large, airy Austintacious new house we built in the hill country next to a nature preserve and a green belt in Austin. But this house was the best choice in one day of house hunting after signing a contract at CNN and then finding out that the houses that we had looked at on the Internet from Austin were not at all the same in person and we couldn't afford *anything* like what we had there or imagined having here. But after six years here--considerably longer than we have spent in any one house--we have made this our home. It fits us, it is us, and we have no interest in moving to another house as this one is just right for our lifestyle now and into the future.

Then there's my studio. It's a perfect space for a studio, couldn't be better located, and we were able to afford it. What's the likelihood we would be able to find anything like what we have with the two properties combined in either Austin or Missoula? I have a better chance of being eaten by a shark the next time I go scuba diving.

Beyond property considerations there is all the quality of life I thought I was missing. Turns out, I was mistaken. We not only have friends and a community here, we also have a great school for Jessie. Though we are not geographically centrally located, Atlanta is one of the major airport hubs and we can get anywhere (except Hawaii or Australia--and how likely are we to need those routes now?) quickly and cheaply. And finally, the Indigo Girls had it right and there's no more beautiful place than the southland in the springtime.

So we stay. I'd change the name of the blog to something like "Settled In the South" or "Snoozy In the South" or even "Seraphic In the South", but I like the reminder that life is all about change. That's not to say that I wouldn't like to have a house in Missoula someday, I still would. But I no longer need to, pine to, must.

It's a Wonderful Life

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Elf Yourself!

I just can't seem to help myself...

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One Last Movie For the Day...

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Snowball Fight With Friends

Thanks to Keith and Stacy for joining us for our elf snowball fight!

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Merry Christmas Dad!

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Merry Christmas Everyone!

Something's coming next to this spot...

I Was a Fool

I should remember that true beauty has nothing to do with looks, and yet I am ashamed to admit that I underestimated because of a not perfect appearance. I was a fool.

Last Wednesday I baked Christmas cookies with Becky H. It was a very enjoyable day, but it was a considerable effort for both of us, and I frankly didn't think the end results would be worth it (we are not, after all, professional bakers). When all was done, out of the oven and divvied up into big ziploc bags, I basked in the glow of a nice day with a good friend, and figured that the people we gifted them to would appreciate them for our effort rather than for any intrinsic goodness. As has been noted, I was a fool.

Oh the recipients appreciate them alright, but not because of obligated regard for effort. They, and I, appreciate them because they are damn tasty! Store-bought cookies always lure me with their prettiness, but their taste never lives up to my expectations. The cookies we made--while a little more brown than we would have liked (the oven needs to be recalibrated and Dave has volunteered to step up to that plate)--burst with swirls of delicately complex flavor varying from a perfectly balanced key lime to a genuinely spicy gingerbread. The spritz butter cookies are awash with almond-infused butter. The peanut butter Hershey Kiss thumbprints have an underlying richness that the pretty store-bought peanut butter cookies never even approach. The Mexican wedding cakes are so chock-full of ground up pecans that their rich nut oil raises these little powdered sugar bombs from a dry, dusty cookie into the realm of the sublime. Even the anise crisps (I say "even" because I am not typically a friend of the anise), with their subtle aroma and bite provide a perfect finish as they round out the flavors of all the other cookies. Before really experiencing them I thought to myself that I should just have bought a bunch of Pepperidge Farm cookies, it would have been cheaper. Yes they would have been cheaper, but oh so not better. I was a fool.

Yesterday while I dressed the loom Dave finished the last batch I had not had time to make--Dave's Dreambars. The recipe is from a Christmas cookie book and really called "Dave's Dreambars". Maybe only someone name Dave could make them. My Dave's comment on them was that it was if space aliens had come down and put a monolith next to my grandmother's dreambars and they had evolved into a higher state of being. I think he means that they are damn tasty.

So, Becky, want to bake again next year?

Just Freaky...

Okay, the weather is just plain freaky. I have been moaning and whining about how cold it's been here. Every day when I check the temps it's colder here than it is in Chicago, Missoula, Kalispell and Polson (the last three are in Montana for the northwest-challenged). I just looked at the weather, and it's 68 degrees here at 8:00 pm! That's the same temp it is in Los Angeles and a degree warmer than Phoenix--and it's three hours later at night here! I, of course, spent the day in two sweaters and a knitted scarf and wondered why I was sweating...

Thanksgiving, No Longer Thankful

Ahh, it's been a weekend--and not the kind of wonderful, off-to-get-a-Christmas-tree, deck the halls kind of weekend I had hoped for either. It started off well enough with a lovely, relaxed, cooking-light Thanksgiving day (we had dinner at the house of some friends) and rapidly went downhill from there...

Thanksgiving night J took a fall at our friends' house and it looked like she might have sprained or broken her little toe. Nothing to do about it but wait for it to get better. Friday morning she woke with a cold and a fever, and between the foot and the cold, she stayed in bed or on the couch for the day. Saturday morning I woke to the remembrance that strep throat has been romping through J's class. When she still had a fever and a bad sore throat and couldn't put any weight on her foot, we decided to take her for medical help. At 11:10 am I called her doctor's office to see if their service had a clinic recommendation and was surprised to get not only a warm body on the line but also the news that if we could be at the office by 11:30 they would see us there as they're open till 12:00 on Saturday. We dressed, we raced, we made it. Then we waited. And waited.

We finally saw a nurse practitioner who confirmed that J did have strep throat and who further said that she might have a fracture in the growth plate in her foot so we had to go in for x-rays. Off we went to Eggleston to wait some more. At 3:00 we got the welcome news that J did not have a broken foot (so no cast and no crutches). As we happily headed down the hall of the hospital--visions of Christmas-tree-shopping dancing in my head--J gave me one frantic look and threw up all over her father (who was carrying her). Oh boy. Got home and found out that a stomach bug had ravaged the house of the friends we had had Thanksgiving dinner with, and Mom and both kids were throwing up all Friday.

J showing us the contents of her stomach lasted through late evening, by which time I was starting to feel queasy too. Today J and I are both laid low, though we have so far mostly managed to keep down what has gone down. I now drag myself back to bed--after a little chicken noodle soup provided by the very patient and nurturing (and still healthy) spouse. Happy Holidays everyone!