we just had our first blizzard in boulder… in typical colorado fashion we went straight from summer to winter, with only an afternoon of fall. i never get used to the roller coaster weather here. i am never prepared with the right size snow boots for the kids or snow pants that fit properly or matching pairs of mittens. at best, i get a whiff of the cow poo smell (which is a pretty reliable snow predictor - i don’t know why) and i have a few hours to get ready. at worst, i wake up and the yard is all white and i have to scurry around and see how i can outfit the kids in some collection of warm clothes before school starts. we are usually late on this first snow day… i just always expect there will be that third season before the snow comes and even after seven years here, i haven’t learned to check the weather.
Read Morehank is on a diet...
hank is on a diet. we took him to the vet a few weeks ago because he had a weird boo boo on his lip and the vet told me he should have a waist. he was thirty-two pounds. i WAS wondering how big he ought to be because his dad is only twenty-six pounds. six pounds more on someone the size of a breadbox does seem like a lot, but i HATE diets. the vet asked me how much i was feeding him and i replied, “3/4 cup of kibble with water and a spoonful of wet food twice a day, like the breeder told me to do.” (i didn’t mention all the treats and extras that i gIve him throughout the day… just like when you fill out those forms at the doctor’s and they ask you how frequently and how many glasses of wine you drink…who is ever truly honest then?) “yes,” said the vet, “but that was when he was a puppy. now that he is over a year, he is a regular dog and that’s too much.” i still consider hank a puppy - his first birthday was just in september. also, it doesn’t really make sense to me that as he gets bigger, he should have less food. i feed my kids way more food now that they are eight and twelve, than i did when they were babies… bigger kids, bigger portions. i guess that’s not how it works with dogs. and it never occurred to me to alter how much i feed hank because i am a rule follower. the breeder gave me a big binder with all kinds of instructions about how to take care of hank and i have been following it (mostly) to a tee.
Read More1940's cottage with modern interior
i had so much fun styling/staging this amazing house listed by superstar realtor, alissa peterson of kidder plus. the light and views of the flatirons from the million windows make it a truly special home. boulders - alissa is hosting an open house this sunday, october 7th from 12-3 pm. go take a peek!
Read Moreglitches
i have a few inconvenient glitches. i cannot tell my left from my right. thankfully, i did learn how to hold my hands out in front of me to check which one makes an “L” when i was in pre-school, but somehow i never internalized it, like most people do. so i still use this crutch when navigating the many directional choices throughout any given day. sometimes, this is problematic… if i am driving, and you tell me to turn “right” there is only a 50/50 chance that i will make the correct turn. it is best for you to also point in the direction you want me to go. otherwise, i will have to take my hands off the wheel and double check for my “L”, which probably isn’t the safest. also, i prefer a little lead time. i like that the google maps lady not only verbally tells you which way to proceed, she shows you a picture. i’ve realized that i am more of a visual learner than an auditory processor.
Read Morethe oldest men's club
twenty-seven years ago, in 1991, my mother was infuriated by the clarence thomas/anita hill sexual harassment hearings. she kept the TV on as she worked in her studio and was struck by how a panel of old, white, male senators aggressively and ruthlessly interrogated the poised, young attorney, anita hill, questioning both her integrity and character.
Read Moreharvest season
i don’t know what factors came together to produce such an enormous bounty of fruit on my farm (i.e. my backyard) but the output has been tremendous. i decided to have a couple of neighborhood harvest parties so that i could get some help picking all the apples and then the plums that ripened a few weeks later. i thought i could pull off a tom sawyer “painting the fence” caper and make my friends think it would be FUN to harvest with me. i would provide snacks and drinks and my neighbors could do the labor. i was imagining something like the barn raising parties they used to have on little house on the prairie. pa would be out there entertaining everyone on his fiddle (i could play macklemore on my sonos), ma would would lay out cornbread, fresh, grilled deer meat and homemade pies (i made a run to trader joes), the children would be running around (i have a couple of those) and the grown ups would build a barn (the neighbors would pick my apple tree and plum bush clean) so i wouldn’t have to gather up any more rotten fruit or worry about the bears coming into my yard and leaving giant poops or mauling us.
Read Moredellwood
the challenge of this large, rectangular living room was bringing intimacy and continuity to the expansive space. we started with a grand, persian carpet generous enough to unite the room and also to serve as artwork on the floor. we added spacious sectional sofas at opposite corners that mirror each other, defining and clarifying the space. the sofas were joined by rounded, organic-shaped, low tables and accessory seating in the form of the undulating wooden wave bench and the deep teal ottomans.
Read Moresoccer mom
“soccer mom” is a term i never wanted applied to me… museum mom or high tea mom or movie mom or banana split mom or snuggle all afternoon on the sofa mom are all ones i can embrace (even though they haven’t really made it into the vernacular.) but the other weekend i found myself schlepping three twelve year old boys and my daughter and my puppy across the state to a tournament to kick off the boys’ fall soccer season. i don’t really know where we were… i just obediently listened to the google maps lady and followed all of her turns… but i do know that we were way past ikea, which is about as far away as i ever drive. and we didn’t even stop there for my customary hotdog and ice cream cone, which was a little disappointing.
Read Morewhat if... quilts by ann rhode
my mother, ann rhode, is the rare artist who primarily approaches her creativity with logic, rather than emotion. she is a problem solver who revels in puzzles and mazes and geometric explorations. she frequently alters traditional or established quilt blocks to construct new patterns and pathways for the eye to follow. she creates movement and depth in her quilts by varying color value or combining unexpected prints and hues. her pieces are both mathematical challenges and painterly in her color use.
Read Morepopeye
my twelve year old son has a bit of a sailor mouth. he is not entirely to blame because his father and i are both pretty salty… and try as i might i can’t seem to reign it in too much, especially when i injure myself, which happens with shocking frequency. i am always covered in bruises from walking into corners or moving furniture around or misjudging whether my hip will hit the counter… last fall i even shut the trunk down on my OWN head and gave myself both a concussion and a contusion - my doctor was duly impressed. so most of the time i don’t get too flapped by his swearing, unless we are around grandparents or other people’s better behaved children. but we were around the grandparents A LOT this summer and i came up with a GENIUS rule (normally i would never give parenting advice, as i think the whole process is so hard and unpredictable and none of us will even know if we did a good job for decades, at which point it will be too late anyway, but this is a good little nugget i think…)
Read Morecriss cross apple sauce
BOULDERS - just a reminder to PLEASE come pick some apples from my tree! they are falling and smashing like crazy…. it’s dangerous for me to be out there as i am sure i will get bonked on the head by one and i cannot afford to have another concussion… i have enough trouble remembering stuff.
we have moved on to apple sauce as we cannot eat anymore apple crisp…
Read Morerepost: cuckoo clocks
i wanted to repost this story on cuckoo clocks because i got the nicest note from a fellow blogger, koen van der list, who also wrote a piece about modern cuckoos that i'd like to share: cuckooclockonline.com
mr. van der list sourced many other charming clocks you should know about. he is from the netherlands.. a country that has wonderful, whimsical home design and holds a special place in my heart. ENJOY!
Read Moreclimb up my apple tree
"say, say, oh playmate,
come out and play with me
and bring your dollies three
climb up my apple tree
slide down my rain barrel
into my cellar door
and we'll be jolly friends
forever more, 1-2-3-4"
when i was little, i was desperate for an apple tree like the one in my favorite hand clapping song. i also wanted a rain barrel, although i wasn’t really sure what that was. forty years later, i do have a great, big, sweeping apple tree in my backyard. my tree has a beautiful, twisted, architectural trunk with a hole the perfect size for hiding easter eggs, it makes lots of shade (crucial for a fair-skinned mama living in a town that bumps up against the sun,) in the winter, the way the snow lands on the branches is right out of fairy tale, it’s covered in lacy, white blossoms in the spring, and every other year or so, my tree grows apples in the late summer.
Read Moremagpie
noun
either of two corvine birds, Pica pica (black-billed magpie), of Eurasia and North America, or P. nuttalli (yellow-billed magpie), of California, having long, graduated tails, black-and-white plumage, and noisy, mischievous habits.
a person who collects or hoards things, especially indiscriminately.
(from dictionary.com)
hank can be pretty cheeky… he gets away with it because he is outrageously cute, but sometimes i am astounded by how forgiving i am of his behavior. if my kids did any one of the naughty or disgusting things he does, i think i would sell them on ebay. somehow, when i discover one of hank’s bad acts, i just end up giving him kisses. (my children HAVE started to notice the inequity in how i discipline - or don’t, rather - hank vs. the time outs and revoked desserts and phones and TV time that they suffer. i figure i am providing them with important material to discuss with their therapists in their forties.)
Read Moresummer cleaning
returning to boulder after a month in berkeley is challenging every summer. i get so immersed in my california life that i’m a bit discombobulated when i get back to colorado. i forget my regular routes to places, i mix people up and can’t remember how i know them and generally feel a bit muddled for a while… a sort of travel dementia. this year was tougher than usual because everything was broken when i left and unfortunately, everything was still broken when i returned. my garage remains bent outward from when i bashed it while backing out the day before my trip. the grass in my backyard is all dried up - i DID call the sprinkler guy before leaving and he just didn’t come. (he showed up yesterday and said that a BEAR had chewed a portion of the piping for my sprinklers. i thought maybe it was actually hank, but then i saw a GIANT poop next to the fence. it looks like paul bunyan squatted down in my lilacs - sometimes there is just too much nature in boulder.) the AC in my house is still spotty, despite the AC man “fixing” it before my departure and to top it off, my car wouldn’t start AGAIN! i realize that these are all minor, fixable problems in the grand scheme of things, but it’s taken me longer than usual to get myself sorted and functioning properly.
Read Moremarigold
marigolds were first cultivated and appreciated by the aztecs… they were recorded in the de la cruz-badiano aztec herbal manuscript (a document describing the medicinal properties of various plants) in 1552. these “herbs of the sun” were believed to have both healing and magical qualities and were used to cure hiccups, treat getting struck by lightening and employed as love charms. they are symbols of passion and creativity and have been incorporated into spiritual ceremonies across the continents… and now they serve as the namesake for san francisco’s loveliest floral shop.
Read Morefentons
i am not a camper. there is just about nothing in the scope of that activity that i enjoy… i like to be clean, i like proper toilets, i like hot showers, i like cozy beds, i like to be indoors and i like to be safe. so camping is not something i would ever do, even with my children. i’m happy to do camping-like things (s’mores by a fire pit, blanket forts in the living room, picnics in a park, looking at the stars from the backyard, daytime walks in the nature, what i call “car hiking” and scary stories) but i like to sleep in an indoor bed. when we first moved to boulder, i was picking my son up from school and there was a discussion on the radio about a boy scout who got his face eaten off by a mountain lion in OUR colorado mountains. the story was so horrifying that i forgot i had my children in the car until theo piped up and said, “wait… WHAT happened mama?” “a little boy got eaten up by a mountain lion when he was sleeping in the nature - that’s why we don’t camp!” i replied. and i hoped it would put him off camping forever.
Read Moresouth side
i grew up on the north side of berkeley, right near the little tunnel that runs under the marin circle and off a shopping street full of restaurants and quirky boutiques called solano. my friends all lived very close by… mostly because i got lost so easily and could only have friends whose houses i could find. this was in the days before mothers drove you all around the world for playdates. i can still distinctly picture the map my friend cynthia’s mother drew for me so i could get to their house. at the time we were in a rental behind the library and i had to walk three long blocks past the firehouse (she made a perfect circle that i marveled at, to indicate the station, as berkeley’s no. 4 is cyclindrical - designed in 1960 by ratcliff architecture) and turn right on los angeles for half a block. i carried that map with me for months (yes - i am a SLOW geographic learner) when i was going to her house.
Read Morejelly bean
the first time it happened, the kids had taken hank over to their father’s house. i got an excited phone call AND photos. i had really hoped that we would never have to deal with this because hank is so mellow, but there it was, a glossy, hot pink protrusion coming out of hank’s nether regions. i have to say, if you didn’t think about what it was, it was really quite pretty… so shiny and my favorite hue of pink. it is rumored that someone touched it (before really understanding what it was) but that has not been confirmed.
Read Moreuncomfortable
i do not like to be physically uncomfortable. when i have a headache, i take an advil. when i am having a baby, i get an epidural (this was no small feat in the netherlands where both of my children were born and 30% of women give birth at home.) i don’t understand people who run marathons or bike a million miles, despite blisters or cramps or just being tired. i only run when my children are headed into traffic or if someone is chasing me with an ax. actually, in my early 20’s, i did run the bay to breakers (san francisco’s 10k) once. between all the bands and the cheering and the popsicles and the costumes and the fact that it was so crowded you couldn’t go very fast, i had a great time. and on the way home, my roommate and i bumped into jerry brown, who was running for president at the time - but was not accompanied by any entourage or body guards - and he invited us back up to his converted victorian firehouse home that was a few blocks from our apartment for a chat. i ended up volunteering for his campaign and it sparked my interest in politics. overall, it was a pretty amazing day and i thought i had discovered a hidden running talent in myself. two days later, i tried to go running again… but without the entire city cheering me on and handing me treats, i realized that i actually do not like to run at all. i do exercise a bit because i am vain. i take classes at the bar method a couple of times a week - it is air conditioned in there and the teachers are funny and i have a range of strategies for getting through class: i only use the 2 pound weights (perhaps this is why i still have “dinner lady arms” where the bits between your elbow and armpit flap too readily when you wave,) i almost never do the challenges, i go to the bathroom if there is more than ten minutes left for the tummies (if i go earlier, i just really had to go,) i only accidentally take the level 2 classes and i count stuff: boob jobs, filled lips, tattoos and pig tails - you’d be surprised at how many women in their forties still tie their hair up like school girls.)
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