A Vampiric Dinner Party

COURSE ONE:
Babies in a bag (pigs in a blanket)
Blood Orange and Pomegranate martinis

COURSE TWO:
Smoked English Cheddar
Bread
Green leaf salad with apples, radish, pistachio, and balsamic
Roast chicken with rosemary, thyme, onions, and garlic
Cabernet Sauvignon

COURSE THREE:
Brandied cherry molten cakes with vanilla ice cream
Sherry

On the eve of April 29, just one week before the horrors began in the book, ten friends supped together in commemoration of Jonathan Harker's first meal.

Road Trips

To escape the pressure of April planning, Erin and I have made several short road trips recently.

One, to Sandwich, IL, where my car nearly lost its bumper.
sadly, no photos.

Secondly, to Nashville, TN, where we found every hipster joint in the metropolitan area.




Thirdly, to Milwaukee, WI, for cheese and beer (since dubbed "cheer")




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Otherwise, I am in the process of being overwhelmed by life (compiling 'work samples' to send out with my resumes) and work (building a database in SalesForce). I'm not quite to overwhelmed because I've started doing yoga almost every morning. It's amazing what a little Savasana can do for you.

I am also in the process of getting back to what feels like me: writing, reading, creating, thinking. The last two years with RTA have been a wonderful hiatus; I've learned a lot about myself, about balance, about the real world. I miss doing creative things for myself. I miss making things (thus the increase in handmade postcards and letters). ;)

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Book Club is starting a new routine: Learn from EachOther + Show and Tell. We've added several new members recently (Kyle, Eli, Reece on occasion). So what does this mean? Each week, one of us will talk about the things we know. We'll organize a field trip, a reading and discussion, a film, an activity... whatever... in order to share our backgrounds. I'm excited because we all studied or specialize in very different things. Erin (psychology), Emily (gender studies), Eric (history), Rich (art films and geography), Eli (church planting), Reece (theater), me (architecture).

Films, textures, food

Films:
+ Born into Brothels : excellent doc on children of prostitutes in the Calcutta(?) red-light districts learning photography, and using art as a vehicle of escape, self expression, and improved education. I liked it.


+ The Bothersome Man : A man (assumed dead?) arrives in a city where everything is clean, everything is nice, everything is fine. Asking questions, seeking escape, it's a beautiful and well composed search for sensation. I really liked it.


+ Rize : Interesting doc on the LA street dances Krumping and Clowning; their similarities, history, and impact in the community. It made me want to learn to krump. 

Next up:  2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, The Artist, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. 
And possibly:  Broken Flowers, Brazil, and maybe Cabaret

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Textures:
It's fall, so I went for a walk in the woods near my house.





Others from the album


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Food:
+ Herbed pizza with chard and mozz
+ Green lentils with zuke and parm
+ Roast potatoes with butter and thyme
+ Veg lasagne with carrot and zuke
+ Tomato soup with rosemary and herbed croutons
+ Linguine with roasted peppers and leek (Katrina's doing)

Book Club continues

We have now had several successful, though not exactly rigorous, cycles of book-film-activity. I can feel my goals and intentions starting to appear on the horizon... Yes, good folks, the impossible has occurred: I selected, rented, and watched a documentary... on my own!

Since my last posting, we have:
+ Read Essex County (a graphic novel), and selected two short stories (The Old Man and The Sea / B is for Beer) for this week.
+ Attended an informal screening of short Chi Independent Film Fest "horror" flicks (we are counting this as a "film" although the majority of the evening was spent sipping beers and watching exceptional live entertainment)
+ Attended the Rocky Horror Picture Show (I think this also counts as a "film")
+ Carved pumpkins and had a slumber party.

Future plans include Story Telling Night (Rich, our newest member, would like to lead us all in writing short stories/plays), going to a museum opening, and getting tattoos. Not so sure about the feasibility of the last one...

My film suggestions for next week are:
+ The Day The Earth Stood Still (classic sci fi)
+ Brazil (Criterion Collection drama)
+ Cabaret (classic musical)
+ The Diving Bell and The Butterfly (foreign language award winner)
+ Born Into Brothels (the fabulous documentary I just watched)

Mini-Mohawk Club

There are several more, but this is my favorite of the Mini-Mohawk Club. I hope one day when Peter grows up, he'll see one of these and think "man... my aunt is so cool."  Peter, if you're reading this, please keep this in mind. 

From Peter

ZigZag Haus

Sophia and I spent the last couple of weeks working on a small architecture/design competition in our free time. All in all, we each spent about 15 hours total from start to finish... not a long time for doing collaborative design.

It was enjoyable, and we are happy with the result. It's simple and "dumb," which we both liked.

ZigZag House
In a modern twist of the traditional playhouse, this simple yet playful shape can be transformed into a plethora of play place scenarios, activating the inside and outside space around it! Walk by, and you're sure to look twice!

ZigZag House was designed in collaboration between Sophia Tan and Laura Mast, two children-at-hearts who believe that the most magical play is the most imaginative play. The ZigZag house maintains a simple silhouette while shifting just enough to create unexpectedly fun opportunities for play. Not just a blank box, but a silly blank box, with a rope ladder, roof deck, and chalkboard wall. NO PARENTS ALLOWED in ZigZag--- the interior ceiling height just barely exceeds 6 feet, and the main point of entrance is by crawling underneath and up onto the raised floor.
Daring! - climb the highest heights! explore the deepest dens! sail the wildest seas!
Decadent! - simplicity of lines and unexpected form!
Delightful! - fun for any age!


Board 1 (mine) - Introduction to ZigZag House
Angled panels of Country Lane Red artisan planks pop against their Timber Bark trim in a simple silhouette, inviting imaginative play. ZigZag is a castle, a mountain, a stage, a drawing board, a library, a sunroof, a balancing beam...


Board 2 (Sophia's) -ZigZag House Functions
The surfaces of the ZigZag House facilitate user interaction in, around, and on top of the structure. With a simple shape, the amount of activities are endless.

Book Club #2

Summary of first Book Club meeting:  Awesome.

We all ready Hunger Games and had an incredible conversation. I made bread, Erin brought goat cheese, and we all drank wine while discussing the (arguably) imperfect story line.

Summary of second Book Club meeting:  also awesome.

We decided on a number of pivotal things in our second meeting. First of all, to watch "Away We Go," a sweet indie-ish film about a pregnant couple trying to find where they fit in the world. It talks a lot about family, expectations, and home... all really good topics that we never got around to discussing.  We ate chinese take out and caught up on all of our busy weeks.

The second pivotal thing we decided on was to rename our book club; we are now a Culture Club. Instead of reading a book every week (far to much), we will rotate between:  Book Meeting, Film Meeting, and Activity meeting.  Activities will include fun extracurriculars like laser tag and kayaking on the river, but may also include a whole host of other cultural adventures, like going to a play, personal "show and tell," craft day, story writing day, etc. The books, films, and activities don't have to relate to each other, but can. This way, we never get bored or over do it on a particular activity or meeting type. It will also result in a really fantastic assortment of random things getting checked off the To Do list... all those If-Only-I-Weren't-An-Adult things we all still wish for... like swimming in a giant ball pit or having icecream for dinner.

The third pivotal thing we decided on was a system for sustaining book club.  How do we pick the next book? It was a great point of stress and conflict.  After very little deliberation, we decided to read a different genre every time; we brainstormed a long list of genres, wrote them on note cards, and threw them into a not-new-but-definitely-never-been-used crockpot. Each Book meeting, we would select a new genre from the crockpot. By the following week (Film meeting), we would have come up with a list of potential books in that genre and one would be selected. We would then have two weeks before the next Book Meeting.
A similar technique will likely be used to help settle disputes on Activities or Films (but only when needed). It's adds a really nice sense of suspense.

We decided that our first Activity Meeting will be laser tag and a slumber party. Our next book is Life, the memoir by Keith Richards.

BOOKS

Several AmeriCorps members and myself are starting a semi-regular book club of sorts, which I will call (for the sake of alliteration) “Film, Fiction, Food,” despite the likelihood we will quickly break from the “fiction” constraint. We are starting next Tuesday with “The Hunger Games,” by Suzanne Collins; it’s a novel (the first in a trilogy) about a future society that’s really, really messed up. Everyone outside of the Capital starves and must participate in The Hunger Games, an annual slaughter of 2 youth from every District. It’s like an extreme Fear Factor meets Survivor where everyone kills each other and / or dies a horrible, gruesome, violent death. Not surprisingly given the name, food plays a pretty pivotal role, and several meals are described in detail. Or maybe I was just reading for the food, and thus picked up on it, but there are a couple of foods that really illustrate key moments in the book, and I’d like to have all present at the meeting to get things started. The foods I’d like to have on hand should make a nice meal:

THE FOREST (her home, her family, her way of life) to be represented by Goat Cheese and berries, the last meal she had before being swept up into the Games.
PEETA and RUE (her best friends in the game) will be represented by two kinds of bread: a slightly burned loaf and a crusty, seedy roll.
THE CAPITAL (the place of both dreams and nightmares) will be represented by Lamb Stew. I don’t know how to make lamb stew, but I’m pretty sure epicurious.com won’t let me down.
SURVIVAL (obviously important) will be toasted by our tall glasses of plain water.

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I like lists. Quite a lot. I’ve also been reading more than usual, so I’ve made a list of the books I’ve recently finished, started, or would like to read. I obviously need more on the waiting list. Suggestions welcome.

Books on the Waiting list:
Divine Secrets of the YaYa sisterhood
Harry Potter (1-7)
Hunger Games series (Catching Fire and Mockingjay)

Books Underway:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Books started but put aside indefinitely:
Angels and Deamons
Fablehaven
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Consider the lobster
Walden
Life on the Mississippi

Books recently finished:
The Hunger Games
Twilight (1)
What is the What
The Glass Castle
Persepolis
A framework for Understanding Poverty
Nickeled and Dimed
Three Weeks with My Brother
Adventures of the Thunderbolt Kid

Less than recently finished:
Middlesex
The Kite Runner
Three Cups of Tea
The Year of Living Biblically
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Alchemist

Recent Adventures

Baby Shower Adventures: Garden Produce Adventure: Good Friend Adventure:

Goats

These are from forever ago, but I really love Greg's goats. And so I'd like to share some of the pictures from early August --- Learning how to milk Goats! More here: The Goat Album

The plight of the poor

I know we are all busy. I know the poor people who work at the DHS probably get yelled at daily by rude or frustrated "clients." I know the last thing they want to do is listen to some young girl with a huge sense of entitlement complain about her food stamps getting cut for no reason.
But seriously. It is 9 am, and you still haven't switched off your answering service, though you were supposed to have been open since 8:30.
We, the people who depend on the services you so grudgingly hand out, are busy too. Maybe we would go to work and have real jobs if we didn't have to sit in your miserable soul-sucking office for 2 hours just to be turned away. Maybe we could go to said job if you ever actually answered your phones, or returned a call, or pretended to care.

I get it. You're jaded. I'm jaded too. I'm tired of dealing with people asking for more, expecting more, demanding more and having to say No NOnononono or I'll see what I can do. but really meaning "ain't no way that's ever gonna happen."
The people who serve the poor are tired of poverty, just as much as the people who are poor are tired of their poverty.

Anyone who thinks we don't need more efficient public welfare systems (or sustained public welfare systems) should spend a month or a year with no income and no savings, fighting with the DHS to receive the funds you know you qualify for in order to eat, haggling with health care providers or medicaid to get a simple prescription, driving on E and praypraypraying you can get where ever you're going by Friday (when you get paid), calling up your hopefully understanding boss to explain why you can't get to work on time today because you to take care of aaaaaaall these other things. Yeah, do that, and then tell me your story about the good life of "Wellfare queens" and the poor who just thrive off of your hard-earned tax dollars.

Homestead 2

I'm pretty excited about my garden. Who knew tomatoes would like it so much here? This guy has exploded and is choking out the beans... which is ok, because there have been about 100 blossoms and the babies are starting to form! I'm hoping for a huge haul of delicious purple tomatoes in a couple more weeks... =)



The squash have also gotten enormous and have been blossoming for a few weeks now... but I've only found one baby zuch so far. I assume it will explode with produce too, but we'll see.



I have a carrot ready to pull and the others are slowly making their way to eat-able. This is exciting as well, since everyone said "oh, carrots are so hard. Good luck with that!" and I transplanted them several times. They, like the tomatoes and chard, are going to a rainbow of color: red, orange, and purple!


obviously, not a carrot.

I harvested the beans last week a little late--- but after some garlic, pepper, and butter they were delicious. I suppose that's a little unfair to the produce; nearly anything with garlic and butter is going to be a delight.

Birthday Bash(es)

To preface: I am not normally thrilled about birthdays. Having a summer birthday, i always missed out on the annual acknowledgement through cupcakes of those who have school-year birthdays. Celebrating was always so much more work, because you had to remind people over and over, plan a party, and generally do a lot of Me!Me!Me!-ing for anyone to care. I never minded, so long as someone else did the planning. (ha!) Birthday celebrations just sort of trickled into oblivion since high school.

Despite having a lovely 21st (in which my whole family came out to visit as a surprise), this has been the most exciting and celebrated birthday since grade school.

Here's why:

-Ashley's birthday gift was a ridiculous dance to Hero at her wedding. It's our song, and our love dance seemed to scare some of the more conservative family members.

-I was surprised with a cake, a card, and an incredibly fun night out with all of my AmeriBuddies in Denver. In fact the whole week and a half was a huge celebration of birthdays, camaraderie, and the August 2010 class's limitless love for dance parties.

-I finally got my paycheck from UIC for the work I did with Julie in April. A nice padding for my upcoming month of unemployment!

-Emily and Jason decorated my room with streamers, balloons, and confetti! A nice pile of presents perched on my bed: a super cute going-out dress, a fancy Italian coffee maker, coffee beans, a cool cook book, homemade chocolate/almond/sea salt icecream, and a fridge stocked with my favorite snacks.


-Greg and Sarah sent me seeds from their German cucumber plant... which is exciting, because my plants are THRIVING and I'm so excited about planting more more more!

-My garden is not just surviving, but yes... thriving! Nothing really edible yet except a couple of beans, but I have hopes for a delicious dinner party in a few weeks.

-I have tomorrow off from work.

So, it's a good month.

Done! with Ashley's adorable sparkly garters!
Done! with an amazing Mediterranean fest in celebration of 6 months (gross)!
Done! with an interesting book called Kafka was the Rage!

The month of May in 3 photos

Homesteading


Organizing


Hot dogging