Mini-versary.

Today marks the fifth year that Marvin and I have been dating. You know, the anniversary that we would be celebrating big-time had we not gotten married. People tend to toss the poor dating anniversary aside once they tie the knot. I bought Marvin a cookie, tied it up with a ribbon, and will probably eat half of it and retie it before he comes home...because that's what marriage is all about.

I got paid to plant flowers at work today! It made me wish I had a landscaping job, although I'm sure the majority of landscaping isn't as pleasant as playing in a flower bed.

Last week I sent Kathleen Hanna a very unofficial letter of interest regarding a summer internship with Le Tigre. I told her that if for some crazy reason they were unable to find a suitable intern, I would gladly quit my job, temporarily abandon my husband and cats, fly to NYC, and work my happy little feminist derriere off for her. She wrote back and said that they had stopped taking resumes due to the overwhelming response, so I need not ditch my spouse and job, but that my unofficial letter had made her day. This made my day. First the Jorge Garcia self-portrait, and now a personal e-mail reply from the riot grrrl of all riot grrrls. Two responses from celebrity friend-crushes in one year. (Actually Ms. Hanna is more of a heroine. I not only want to be her best friend, but also want to be just like her when I grow up. Or at least as fearless.)

5.17.10

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
-Joni Mitchell

Monday is for movies. Good documentaries. Boring black & whites with the volume turned down, supplying my own soundtrack and making up my own plot, but still admiring the cinematography. This particular Monday is also for sweet tea with peppermint and hoping for another charming walk like the one we took last night. South Denver is our favorite avenue.

I like it when things are on the border of magic.

Mama's Day.

My dad and I baked a pretty bumpin' roasted veggie pot pie for my mama. I did most of the cooking, but I give him full credit for peeling the parsnips!

So it looks like a typical over-glazed pie...but on the inside you'll find cauliflower, parsnips, carrots, sweet red pepper and lots of other delicious things.

Mama's heart cath results came back mostly flawless. She has a gnarly bruise that I would love to post a picture of on here because it's THAT impressive, but my sweet mother would be mortified to find a picture of her inner thigh (amazingly bruised or not) floating around the internet. Just take my word for it. It's far worse than anything Marvin has ever acquired from skateboarding.

Speaking of Marvin, look at this picture I came across today:

Six years later, I still have a huge crush on that boy.

Our anniversary vacation plans have changed a good deal due to the oil spill and visit from the Reilly clan. No more New Orleans, and now a four day mini-vacation to plan instead of a seven day trip. I was thinking Hot Springs...the Al Capone suite at the Arlington...but since we tied the knot near the 4th of July it might be hard to get reservations with such short notice around that date. Any suggestions?

It's 10:30. That means French toast time. Happy Wednesday.

Hello, bicycle legs.

Did you know that this is a week of miracles? Not only did Marvin learn how to boil water for pasta (haha), but a lady I know who has been very, very sick and mostly bed-ridden for almost a year is suddenly up and about and back to her normal routine. Majorly amazing.

I heard a mockingbird imitate a crow yesterday. I also had a nosebleed which reminded me of Katie (who always has nosebleeds and who I adore & hadn't seen since last fall) and then ran into her on the trail while riding bikes after work! We sweaty hugged. Little amazements.

I can't wait to try the bring-on-the-broccoli pizza that's on the cover of Vegetarian Times. My diet lately has consisted almost entirely of the following things: The Dr. Oz Smoothie, trail mix, apples, oranges, extreme veggie pasta, and Nutty Bars. It's a delicious life I live, but it's about time for some variety. And fresh greens.

Gotta get to work on a container garden...and gotta make a trip to visit this sweet little girl:

And her mama. <3

P.S. - I am quite envious of Vanessa who not only has TWO pet goats, but also recently got her creep on with Zooey Deschanel! Dang!

Post V-Day Post.

For Valentine's Day we intended to make a heart-shaped wheat crust pizza together from scratch, but we ended up having adventures instead. There was a visit to Goodwill and then a road trip to the skate shop in Conway and then a little hangout with Courtney and an intense search for rain boots, which failed. There was also coffee and a bunch of parakeets and music and Moe's. I forgot to wear my red and white ribbon in my hair.
Marvin gave me a mini-wedding cake.


Since we didn't have a "real" wedding, we missed out on the tasty cake and he decided it was about time to make up for lost dessert! Mmmm. He also got me a dozen cranberry macadamia nut cookies from Catherine's Cakes, which are the most delicious cookies in the world, but he accidentally ate eleven of them before I made it home from work. He told me about the accident sheepishly and I laughed. A lot.

I gave him a Frankenstein Danzig Kewpie doll that I found on Etsy.

Here are some of the treats I made in honor of a formerly hated holiday that I'm just beginning to enjoy:



Peanut butter fudge cupcakes...and celebrity valentines inspired by Elsie.

Here's a link to Class Class. I've already learned a thing or two.

An Arkansan blizzard and RuPaul.

Marvin got really excited about the snow. Partially because it got him out of half a day of work and partially because he hasn't seen a whole lot of it in his lifetime. Normally I have to pester him to smile in photos, but this time he supplied ample grins on his own:

Being the fatso that I am, I ate some flakes:

And we tried in vain to take a kissing pic:


Apparently we just aren't emo enough for that garbage.

This quote from RuPaul made my day: "Culturally, many women feel they have to play along with how things are set up. Women are supposed to 'be this' and 'do this,' but drag queens mock that setup. The whole identity of being a woman, and the rules about what a woman can or can't do, it's all such a crock of shit, and drag queens embody the hoax of it all."

Love it.

I also love being back on the Funeral. Daily doses of no-longer-local friends in a non-stalker setting can't hurt. Who needs Facebook when you've got a nineties style forum?

Other loves of the day: Quinoa & sauteed veggies, endless cups of hot cocoa, seeing the castle church in a winter wonderland, and BUST magazine. I usually read it straight through, but I'm having a hard time doing that with this issue because I'm dying to get to the article about Lurlene McDaniel. (No pun intended*, I promise.) She was my favorite author as a pre-teen.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Lurlene McDaniel, she writes books about girls who are faced with terminal illnesses.

If you're easily grossed out, don't read this Birthday week post!

I'm twenty-six!
Marvin took me record shopping for my bee-day and we sat by the river a bunch and admired the lights on the water and it was a happy day and night. It was also the day that I started my raw foods diet. For the first forty-eight hours of raw fooding, I felt unbelievably energetic and very alert. Then, out of nowhere, I started puking and pooping like I'd never puked and pooped before. At first I blamed the raw foods, but I eventually came to the conclusion that I've developed a terrible allergy.........to GARBANZO BEANS! The last time I ate hummus and the last time I ate chickpea curry I felt horrible and on the day of violent stomach malfunction, I had eaten tons of raw chickpeas on my salad. Mystery solved. My new plan of dining is this: no meats, no chickpeas, very little dairy/white flour/sugar. I threw up too many fresh fruits and vegetables Tuesday night to want to go completely raw again any time soon. Yuck.
This week I've been a little obsessed with pioneers, Revelation, Henry Darger, Picnic at Hanging Rock, photographs of transparent balloons, and soup of all kinds.
I just learned that on St. Valentine's Day, Picnic at Hanging Rock is shown at Hanging Rock. That's one more thing to add to my bucket list.

The brightside.

I kind of like it when I loan Marvin the car and he forgets to pick me up from work, but only because his "apology" is typically in the form of Chinese food. Usually he doesn't forget me...just loses track of time while playing video games and doesn't hear the phone ring when I call him because of the noise canceling headphones I've already griped about in another post. It's convenient that he forgot me today - I need to load up on all the nutrient poor foods that I can before Tuesday rolls around. Tuesday will be day one of a week (or more) of raw vegan food. My raw foodist customers always have the most amazing conversion stories...so I'm gonna give it a try. After that week I'm hoping to stay 100% vegan...and 70+% raw. This will be a big deal for a sugar and carboholic. A very big deal. Even a week of it will be a big deal. HUGE, even! Wish me luck. And wish Marvin even more luck. He's shooting for a week of raw eating too, and the only vegetable that boy likes is the potato. And even the potato has to be either deep fried or smothered with butter and cheese. Oy.

I was curious about what the Freaks and Geeks kids looked like as adults so I did some research and found this (d'awwww):

And this (yowza!):


And this photo of the girl that played Cindy Sanders...the wholesome cheerleader:

These findings made my day.

Happy Birfday, Marvin!

Today my sweet, sweet boy turned twenty-six. I am so happy that he was born!!!!! I left work early to make him a carrot cake.


There were so many candles on the cake that after he blew them out, smoke lingered for a solid fifteen minutes. Talk about being ANCIENT!


Marv requested his usual birthday hibachi dinner at Fuji. Lauren, David, Heath, and Josh partook in the festivities. The chef chose a particularly large piece of broccoli for me to try and catch in my mouth and asked, "You like the big ones, eh?" and then when I opened my mouth to have broccoli thrown at me, "AAAAAAH!!!! SHE LIKE THE BIG ONES!" I chose to just get a little embarrassed instead of making a crude joke about my husband vs. Asians. Hooray for my filter! Not so hooray for me being capable of coming up with a racial stereotyping penis joke as a defense mechanism.

I got a bunch of bargains with the $25 Hobby Lobby gift card from my boss: two 16" x 20" canvases, 100 tea light candles, a bamboo wind chime, a cute-ish mushroom decorative plant stake thing, modeling clay, and some freeze-dried space ice cream! I had intended to spend it on maybe some fancy baking supplies or an ant farm, but the 50% of sale flyer sucked me in. (And I thank it.)

Anyway, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARVIN EDWARD REILLY, JR!
[Here is the mention of you being awesome at Modern Warfare that you requested. I love you!]

Misogynist noise canceling headphones.

Searching the internet for advice on how to get one's husband to cut back on his video game playing was an unsurprising waste of time...with the exception of this:

"Ah yes, the noise-canceling headphones. You could lock Rush Limbaugh, Phyllis Schlafly and Mullah Omar in a room together with a stack of Hustlers and 10 ounces of meth, and they couldn't come up with anything more misogynist. I storm back to my desk and type the phrases "my husband" "addicted" "video games" "HELP" into the search engine. Hundreds of links appear.

I click on the first one, a Christian counseling Web site, where a desperate woman named Tiffany, whose husband plays video games nine to 11 hours a day, is reminded by the nonaccredited Christian counselor that man is master of her dominion and tells her to pray to Jesus to restore her husband's love.

This isn't going to work for me. Besides, I have already prayed to the Jewish God for guidance, and the Jewish God, as he has done for millions of Jewish wives since time immemorial, advised me to rip my husband's headphones off his head and scream at him for never putting his leftovers back in the fridge. This tactic proved less effective than I hoped.

I click on another page, where a forum of concerned women instruct me to regain Ben's attention by walking around the house dressed in skimpy outfits and waggling my hips provocatively. One enterprising poster, aptly named Cyberhottie69, even suggests draping one's naked breasts somewhere impossible to miss -- like the coffee table, or on his head, like a doughy, undulating hat."

Yessss.

Cheer.

I love the Amish and try to love the grumpy.

Right now I should be hanging out with friends, picking the weenies out of the rice dish Jumpy made and feeding them to Bennie...but it's just too cold for me to want to step away from the space heater and set foot outside without the promise of snowfall. Sadly, it's hard enough to coax hermity little me out of the house on a warm day. Usually books and cats and candles and blankets and tea keep me perfectly content. I love my friends SO MUCH.......just not hanging out with them. Sometimes. Please forgive me.

I can't wait to bake bread to the record Marvin gave me.

God bless 'im for his noble attempt at fitting in with the granola gang at my work Christmas party. HE ATE VEGETABLES.

And now, a waterfall: