also!

Just to brag a little, I went to yoga last night and left Brandon a cryptic post-it note on the fridge which read, "Gone to yoga. Back at 7. Start dinner please!"

We had talked that morning about the fact that we'd gotten the ground beef out of the freezer to thaw. We planned to use half of it for burgers, half for stuffed peppers. I thought for sure he'd go the burger route.

He didn't. He dug through three cookbooks (only going for the Joy of Cooking last?) to find a recipe and made those stuffed peppers from scratch!

He complained they were a little bland. I said they just needed a touch of salt to be brilliant.

it's a good thing

A few good things from the desk of me:

• Wegottaeat.com – Since the dawn of the personal computer (or thereabouts), I have been searching for a recipe organization program I could love. I have tried several, loved none. My biggest pet peeve? The TIME it takes to enter each recipe, and the fact that most programs make you enter quantities in decimals rather than standard fractions (ie: 0.66 cups instead of 2/3 cups). I save recipes from all over the place, frequently found on the web, and the last thing I want to do is re-type everything when I feel like a simple cut and paste ought to suffice. Enter We Gotta Eat recipe manager. The smart cookies developing this site (still in beta) realize that a lot of times you just want to copy and paste, and have made it easy for you to do so. Also, it looks like it's got a social function, whereby if your friends are also members, you can share recipes. Cool.
  
  (I'm already drooling over Cookbook, one of three winners of the "My Dream App" competition, but until it is released, wegottaeat.com has my vote.)
  
  
• Epicurious has a redesigned website that kicks booty, while we're on the subject of recipes.
  
  
• Gaim.com – The community portion of this site has tons of great articles about living well, living whole, living green.
  
  
• Just found out that this lunchbag is on sale at reusablebags.com — I'm totally buying two right now!
  
  
• Bought one of these Chico Bags at Vitamin Cottage a couple of months ago, and I cannot TELL you how handy it is. I keep it in my purse at all times and use it whenever I'm buying just a few things that don't REALLY need a plastic bag. The best part is that It is really easy to stuff back into its carrying pocket — a must for collapsible bags like this.

fooffera

I think I'm finally coming out of my wedding hangover. It went well, Emily was amazingly beautiful, as always, and I found out that not only is Matt a fine dancer, he's a heckuva singer as well. ;)

If you haven't already seen them, there are a few, mostly blurry, pictures on my fickr page.

Tonight, the hubby and I are going to see "The Little Mermaid" at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House. I'm kind of interested, because apparently, based on how this six-week run goes, the show could change dramatically between its run here and its opening on Broadway in December. I'll have to let you guys know what I think. Actually, I'm angling to write a sort of pre-review of it for the winter NYC guide book here at work. We'll see if that pans out.

~*~

Last Friday, I went to my first ever baseball game. Truth be told? It was kind of boring. But as my friend Jeff put it, you don't go to a baseball game for the baseball. We were actually there to support my coworker, Mikey, who won an American Idol-style contest to get to sing the national anthem, and she ROCKED. You can download a recording here if you'd like to listen. Unfortunately, the Cubs beat the Rockies rather soundly, but we had great seats, decent stadium food, and lots of fun with drunken coworkers. Good times.

~*~

I'm reading the most awesome book called "Eat, Pray, Love," and it's beautiful and may be changing my life. It's made me want to take up yoga again and maybe learn to meditate, and I've found an ashram south of Boulder that sounds perfect for both. Of course, what REALLY sounds perfect is a week-long yoga retreat up in the mountains, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Maybe for Christmas...

~*~

On the subject of vacations, however, the husband and I have booked three nights in Vail for our anniversary/Labor Day weekend. I'm v. excited. Apparently, it is also the Vail Jazz Festival and Gourmet Festival weekend, which sounds delightful. They're doing a sale thing for the end of the summer, so we got a pretty swank hotel room for $81.50 per night — because Vail is at 8,150 feet above sea level.

Deathly Hallows Review

I was going to cross-post my entire Deathly Hallows" review here, but in honor of those who haven't read it yet, I will instead post a link to the review on my livejournal.

SPOILERS! Do not click this link until you have finished the book. Then, please feel free to click and read and tell me what you think.

harry potter party in boulder!

Photos from the Boulder Books Harry Potter party on Friday night!



Brandon tries on some eyewear at Boulder's version of Honeydukes, Powell's Candy Store


Owls! In the bookstore! In the ballroom! That wee one on the left looked so much like Pigwidgeon to me! And he was blind which is why he's part of the rescue.


Mayhem outside on the Pearl Street Mall. (If you look closely, you can see a very punk rock Tonks standing up taller than most of the crowd near the left edge of the main bookstore window.)

We made a list of all the characters we spotted and BOY were there a lot! Some of the best? There was a teenage couple dressed as Hermione and Harry that were SO good it was scary. We kept getting creeped out every time they walked by. Then there was a dad who was a pretty good family. There was another family — three of the kids had red wigs and were Fred, George, and Ron (with scabbers on his shoulder), there was an ickle wee Draco, a wee little Harry, and then mom was dressed like Tonks, with pink hair and dad? Dad had a wolf puppet on his head. We about died. It was awesome.

There was also someone dressed as the Knight Bus, a Howler, and three brooms (they were wearing grass skirts with broom handles sticking out the backs of their shirts, and nametags that said things like "Cleansweep" and "Nimbus"). There was also a troupe of death eaters complete with metalic masks like in the films, and a little Peeves dressed all in white, with a white face, and a brightly colored bow tie. There was also a Marietta with SNEAK in dots all across her face.

We also invented a game we called, "Not a Costume." You see, Boulder is a pretty unusual place to begin with, so there were some people who may or may not have been dressed up particularly for the party. The lady wearing a wreath of dried flowers and carrying a tambourine? NOT A COSTUME. The bloke in the stocking cap and silk waistcoat smoking an ENORMOUS pipe? NOT A COSTUME.

Anyway, we had a lot of fun. The bookstore was divided into "Houses." You picked up a Marauder's map from Platform 9 3/4 outside the store, then you had to go through each house and get your map stamped. Then you come back out and got to graduate with your Hippogriffs. :D It was fun, and I'm glad we went.

"Words? Words? Words."

I'm really worried that Harry Potter is going to end up like Hamlet. I mean, he's avenging his dead father, sort of in love with the girl next door, but unable to be with her, and more than a little mad. So, I have this bad feeling it's just going to end in a bloodbath. Cos in Hamlet? EVERYONE dies. Literally. Everyone. Horatio is the only one left, so it'll be, like, Neville kissing Harry on his now-scarless forehead and saying, "Goodnight sweet prince. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest," and curtain.

And I will be very peeved. And depressed for months, no doubt.

Note to self: buy kleenex before the weekend.

P.S. If JKR deals with Hermione and Ron with a line saying, "Granger and Weasley are dead," she will be hearing from me.

This is, if I may, a damn fine cup of coffee.

Watched Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me last night. Got it from Netflix cos we have Twin Peaks season 1 on DVD and want to rent season 2 and let me just tell you, David Lynch? Craziest filmmaker ever. I mean, he seriously even gives Salvador Dali and L'Age d'Or a run for his money. And Dali was doing crazy for the sake of crazy, whereas with Fire Walk With Me I got the distinct impression that David Lynch knew exactly what was going on and the rest of us just couldn't follow the plot.

Which is freaking scary.

In other news, I broke the 10k word mark yesterday on my WIP. This is good news for all. (I usually get to at least 30k before I start flailing too much and have to give up.)

Also, I had a dream last night which cast a boy I knew in high school as Oliver Wood. Quite what this says about my brain, I don't know.

drive-by blogging

Quick link to a great NYTimes article of 101 Simple Meals Ready in 10 Minutes or Less. Not particularly low fat, but high-class and quick! These are going on my fridge.

Myspace might also be the work of the devil

This has been something of an odd week.

In the past five days, I've had two long-lost friends contact me on MySpace. Is some strange alignment of the planets responsible for this blast from the past? It has to have been a strange sequence of events that prompted both of them to come looking for me on MySpace at almost exactly the same time.

I'm not a big fan of MySpace. It's too busy, too flashy, too full of stupid advertising and a lot of even stupider people. I got a MySpace account originally because my brother in law started posting pictures of the baby there, and I couldn't see them without an account. Then, I attended a workshop at the SCBWI conference this spring where they talked about building a platform and how helpful MySpace could be for that.

I never really thought I'd use it. Right after I signed up, I did a little snooping around, I'll admit it. There's a feature where you can put in what schools you went to and what years, and it will spit out all the members that have put in those same details. It was a little weird, seeing those people. I felt a little stalkerish, and so I never contacted them.

I've now had four truly long-lost friends find me on MySpace and contact me. It's a weird feeling. These people were such a huge part of my life at the times I knew them, and since, they've all sort of faded into that tapestry of memory that stretches out behind us into the past. To have them reappear now is jarring.

It's not that I'm uninterested in talking to them, finding out what they're up to, seeing how they're doing. I think... I think it's just that I feel like I've overcome a lot since I knew most of these people. I didn't like myself very much in junior high and high school, and I probably wouldn't like how people saw me then. To be thrown back into those roles again is disconcerting.

I could ignore them. The internet is awfully good at distancing us from confrontations we don't want to have. It isn't as though I've run into these people on the street (a perpetual fear of mine whenever I visit back home); I could choose not to interact. But the curiosity is too strong. Why did they come looking for me? Why contact me when they could have just passed me by? Why now?

"Unfinished business," Allison called it, and I think she's right. I just wonder now how many more ghosts from my past are going to be paying me a visit, looking to put things right, wrap up whatever loose ends we had between us.

marmot under the car!

marmot under the car!
Originally uploaded by LacyLu42.