Get in the Christmas spirit

I love it when Stephen is home because I get to do things like make mulled mead, listen to Christmas music for 4 hours straight, and make decorative strands of cranberries and popcorn.

Yesterday Stephen and I indulged in all of these luxuries. We also bought a tree, decorated it (after Colin got back from a weekend in New York), made a wreath, and made pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. I'm now way behind on Co-Madres work, but it was worth it.

Thanksgiving at home

Okay, I posted more pictures to Facebook, but I still like to feature some pictures here.

I went home for Thanksgiving for the first time in 6 or 7 years. I brought my boyfriend home with me for the first time. We had so much good food. Also, we had Thanksgiving dinner on Friday so Elise and Becca and parts of their families were able to join us. That was really wonderful. Anyway, here's the pretty:


Mmm, pie.

That's my Colin, doing what he does. He probably left that coffee cup half full on an end table. Just a guess.

And there she is. The star of the show:

I got time with my girls. So that makes everything else a little bit better.

And, completely unrelated

I'm thinking about moving this blog over to WordPress. I've been annoyed for a long time with how difficult it is to put picture up in any format other than one below another. What if I want two side by side? I have to learn HTML and then mess around in the backstage of Blogger. It's going to take more than that for me to learn HTML.

10 months

One of these months, "Kirby" is going to overtake "Raleigh" for number of tagged posts on this blog. It's terrible how the earth shifts when something you planned for gets yanked out from under your feet. I was so prepared to deal with Raleigh's stinky, grumpy old self. I feel cheated that I do not get that. I was sure that my kids would one day wake him from his naps by sitting on him, the way Celeste used to sit on Petunia, and like Petunia, he would heave a sigh, look at me with disgust, and walk away. Or if he was in a good mood, turn and try to lick the kid's face. I feel cheated that Raleigh won't get to meet my future kids, and more so that my future kids won't get to meet Raleigh. I feel cheated.

Books

I want to reorganize the books I've got in DC because right now they're kind of randomly scattered across 10 shelves on three bookcases. Anyway, it's not super practical to put everything on the dining room table and organize it or something, so I thought I'd just type it up and rearrange virtually. Here's what I can see from the dining room table (that belongs to me, excluding the books that belong to my housemates):

Top Shelf:

• Tom Jones (Henry Fielding)
• Strange Bedpersons (Jennifer Crusie)
• The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Stieg Larsson)
• Back to the Bedroom (Janet Evanovich)
• Trust Me On This (Jennifer Crusie)
• The Cinderella Deal (Jennifer Crusie)
• One Perfect Rose (Mary Jo Putney)
• Oh My Stars (Lorna Landvik)
• a bunch of dishes
• pens and small notepads

2nd Shelf:

• A Passion for Chocolate
• The Essential Baking Cookbook
• The Joy of Cooking
• The New Best Recipe
• Breakfast
• How To Be A Domestic Goddess
• 1080 Recipes
• Sundays At Moosewood
• The Vegetarian Epicure
• The Essential Vegetarian
• A Beautiful Bowl of Soup
• Laurel's Kitchen

3rd Shelf:

• The Lacuna (Barbara Kingsolver)
• Pigs in Heaven (Barbara Kingsolver)
• Small Wonder (Barbara Kingsolver)
• Homeland (Barbara Kingsolver)
• Animal Dreams (Barbara Kingsolver)
• Angry Housewives Eating Bonbons (Lorna Landvik)
• Atonement (Ian McEwan)
• A Simple Story (Inchbald)
• Fantomina and other stories (Haywood)
• Emma (Jane Austen)
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz)
• Far Afield (Susanna Kaysen)
• The Diaries of Adam and Eve (Mark Twain)
• The Fifth Sacred Thing (Starhawk)
• Evensong (Gail Godwin)
• The Bluest Eye (Toni Morrison)
• Eva Luna (Isabel Allende)
• Portrait in Sepia (Isabel Allende)
• Retrato en Sepia (Isabel Allende)
• The Essential Pablo Neruda (ed. Mark Eisner)
• Memorias (Pablo Neruda)
• Residencia en la Tierra (Pablo Neruda)
• Spain in Our Hearts (Pablo Neruda)
• Odas Elementales (Pablo Neruda)
• Canto General (Pablo Neruda)
• Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Pablo Neruda)
• Sonnets from the Portuguese (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
• The Fact of a Doorframe (Adrienne Rich)
• Robert Frost: Poetry and Prose (ed. Lathem & Thompson)
• The Essential Rilke (ed., trans. Galway Kinnell & Hannah Liebmann)
• Midnight Salvage (Adrienne Rich)
• Goblin Market and Other Poems (Christina Rosetti)
• Acts of Contrition (Anna George Meek)
• Love Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)
• Beat Poets (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)

4th Shelf:

• The Velveteen Rabbit (Margery Williams)
• Toot and Puddle: Top of the World (Holly Hobbie)
• I Like You (Amy Sedaris)
• Espaco Cravo
• Tuesday (David Weisner)
• Sew What: Skirts
• The Essential Calvin and Hobbes (Bill Watterson)
• It's a Magical World (Bill Watterson)
• The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book (Bill Watterson)
• Farfallina and Marcell (Holly Keller)
• Come By Chance (Madeleine Winch)
• Skin Again (Bell Hooks)
• Abuela (Arthur Dorros)
• Amazing Grace (Mary Hoffman)
• Otis (Janie Bynum)
• The Story of Babar (Jean de Brunhoff)
• The Call of the Wolves (Jim Murphy)
• The Whales Song (Dyan Sheldon)
• Grandfather Twilight (Barbara Berger)
• Where the Wild Things Are (Maurice Sendak)
• Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge (Mem Fox)
• Niña Bonita (Ana Maria Machado)
• Outside Over There (Maurice Sendak)
• Blueberries for Sal (Robert McCloskey)
• The Cat with a Really Big Head (Roman Dirge)
• Everybody Needs a Rock (Byrd Taylor)
• The New Girl/La Niña Nueva (Jacqui Robbins)
• I Am a Taxi (Deborah Ellis)
• Bambi (Felix Salten)
• Love That Dog (Sharon Creech)
• Charlotte's Web (E. B. White)
• The Enchanted Castle (E. Nesbit)
• Walk Two Moons (Sharon Creech)
• Holes (Louis Sachar)
• Seedfolks (Paul Fleischman)
• Love That Dog (Sharon Creech) [yes I have two]
• Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)
• The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
•  Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
• I Like You (Sandol Stoddard Warburg)
• The Tale of Two Bad Mice (Beatrix Potter)
• Deck the Halls (illus. Michael Hague)
• Maurice Sendak mini box set including: Pierre, Alligators All Around, Chicken Soup With Rice, and One Was Johnny
• The Beekeper's Apprentice (Laurie King)
• A Monstrous Regiment of Women (Laurie King)
• A Letter of Mary (Laurie King)
• Italian-English/English-Italian Dictionary
• 501 Spanish Verbs
• Spanish Concise Dictionary
• Roget's A-Z Thesaurus
• The Other End of the Leash (Patricia McConnell)
• Photobooth (Babbette Hines)

Bottom Shelf:

• Stephen's political books
• Ranajoy's economics books
• Bossypants (Tina Fey)
• wine glasses, candles

The stuff down here is loosely organized thematically, or at least was 6 months ago. You'll see the issue when I get to the upstairs shelves; I have one dog book down here and five more upstairs. Most of my DC collection of novels is downstairs but a random assortment are upstairs. My language reference books are downstairs, but my theory and religious reference books are upstairs. Tom Jones is hanging out with a portion of my Jennifer Crusie and Janet Evanovich collection. It makes no sense.

Life at home

No underage fees

I turned 25 last month. Some people may feel like 25 is a throwaway birthday, it being neither 21 nor 30, but I'm actually really excited about the whole car rental thing. Anyway, here's me blowing out my candles.

Doggy playdate

The doggy playdates between Kirby and Maddie are ramping back up, now that it's usually cool enough for them to play more than two minutes without risk of heat exhaustion. I'm still in the figuring-it-out stage with my new camera, so you might get some more of these in a week (except better! I hope). Anyway, here are the dogs having at it:

Time for a panting break.

And we're back in the game!

Kirby with her crazy face on.

Happy dog.

Today it is sixty six degrees

Let's talk about how amazing 66 degrees is. I'm wearing long pants, a shirt, AND a sweater. My toes are chilly. The sun is out. It's fucking spectacular.

Yesterday was the first day of fall. Colin called me from his run with his dog and told me I might want to step outside with my camera. It was sunset and a storm was blowing through north of us.

I'm still figuring out how to make the best use of my new camera to create the effects I want or capture an image the most accurately. Colin has been teaching me how to use Photoshop and Camera Raw, so I played around with some of these. Photoshop is still way beyond my comfort level, but Camera Raw is a lot easier to use for the simpler stuff that I'm more likely to want to do.

I got a Minolta-Canon adapter so I can use my manual Minolta lenses on my Canon camera. The picture above was taken with one of my Minolta lenses, but it came out terribly. I have a lot of learning to do to figure out how to take good pictures on this new camera with those lenses. Anyway, I tweaked this one a lot in Raw and turned a terrible, overexposed, undefined picture into something kind of cool.

I like that you can see the storm and the reflection of the sunset in this one.

This picture used to have a light pole in it. Can you tell where? (Photoshop is kind of neat.)

These are my housemates

Don't let these pictures fool you. The dogs are not more dignified than the people.

New camera! New camera!

I started saving for a DSLR camera last fall because I've been wanting one for a long time. I was at a job that didn't make me very happy, but paid well. If you can't use that sort of situation to buy something nice for yourself, what the hell is the point?

Starting in late spring I began agonizing over which camera to get. The process was made easier when I found an excellent Canon lens that I wanted. I finally took the plunge about a week ago. Here are some shots taken with my new Canon T3i and the 50mm f/1.4 lens that I got. All of these shots (except the second from the top) are taken indoors in dim evening light. They've been corrected a tiny tiny bit for white balance, but that's it.

I'm thinking this new plaything will probably bring me back to blogging. Oh yeah, I'll write about the kiddos soon.

Tiny baby goats

I just feel like I should put this here for posterity. Let the record show: I'm a little obsessed with the idea of one day getting a goat. Or, getting more than one goat, because my [multiple hours of] research into goats as pets last week informed me that they need at least one other buddy.

Anyway, I was posting on Twitter about how awesome goats are and how much I would like to have one, and Mel sent me this video:

So, he wins the day.

Wildwood 2012

Here are a few of my favorite action shots from Wildwood 2012.

An excellent representation of the facial hair at Wildwood.

Note the umbrella reflection in the sunglasses.

 

Blue Door Portraits

Wildwood is an annual beach Ultimate tournament that takes place in Wildwood, NJ. What that means for my life is that it's an annual reunion of my Ultimate friends from Haverfood who are in the area or can make the trip for the weekend. A wild good time every year.

Last year I took a few pictures of people in front of the blue room doors at our motel. I took more this year. I didn't tell them what to do, just to pose however they wanted in front of the door. I like them.

Disclaimer: there is a lot of facial hair in the below photos. Just embrace it in the spirit of Wildwood.