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Saturday
Happy Saturday! It’s been rain-city around here lately so we’ve reverted to our college days and started working from Starbucks. But it’s supposed to be nice today!
I’ve also been trying to update my scrapbook and get the assemblage of saved bits down to a manageable size (see photo, with eerie shadow-stick-figure, that’s me).
After pancakes, I’m hoping Joe and I make it to MIT’s European Film Festival. It pays to live near universities with lots of event funding floating around. It also costs to live near them, now that you mention it.
I watched this funny Pregnant Woman are Smug video, and grimaced because it’s inevitably me, to some extent. (Isn’t smug just the perfect word for some things?) Someone in the comments points out that engaged women are also awfully smug, which I think is
fairspot on and made me feel better. Also, people who were just proven right by Alex Trebek. Maybe we should all privately write down the most smug people we know and then show each other our answers.Joe says this color app is what all the cool design kids are talking about. Anyone using it?
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Fireworks!
Way lovely album cover for Son Lux’s new album. Made in under 28 hours.
(I might like it so much because Lux is currently contender #1 for baby’s name.)
You can watch the family-biz kids that concepted, designed, and created it, buying firework supplies, wandering around Home Depot and even stopping for a snack* right here. Don’t they seem like cool folks?
*joe and I are total snacking-shoppers, are you guys? Every IKEA visit begins with an energizing visit to the snack bar. Then we have T-minus 45 minutes before the energy runs out and we wander listlessly from plywood corner to meaningless map.
seen first on Amanda Antunes tumblr.
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Photos from California
California spent most of the weekend cloudy. My sister and I rented bikes on Santa Monica beach and biked under the sun while we had the chance (but I’m still wearing two sweaters).
We ate at Son of a Gun. It’s so popular that people start lining up before they open. The funny thing was, the crowd waiting was comprised solely of super cute & hip girls. I guess they are the ones who bother to try new places.
We ate at the communal table and split all the small plates, and just kept ordering, which made for such a fun date. The very very best thing was this dessert:
all of the menu options were phrased with just the elements: “Flourless chocolate cake, banana, peanut, coconut ice cream”* so you never had any idea what the food would look like when it came out. Sometimes it was tiny, sometimes it was enormous, like this chicken sandwich:
“Fried chicken sandwich, spicy B&B pickle slaw, rooster aioli” *
We shopped at Shareen Vintage. Because no boys are allowed, there are no dressing rooms and you just change in the middle of the warehouse. At first it’s weird but soon it starts to feel like everyone is getting dressed for a party together. I bought a dress that will fit through the third trimester and reminds me of Marc Jacobs. Good vintage is amazing to be around.
They now have clips of the show up, watch them, but I’ll warn you: some of them are a little drama.
I took this photo at the farmer’s market for you:
yes they have a farmer’s market, but no tomatoes, just like us.
*Great food photos from KevinEats. I was too eager to eat everything as soon as they put it down.
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Portlandia: Trying to Buy a Cell Phone
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLlOkKskBqU]
I’ve never watched an entire Portlandia episode, but there are snack-size clips on Hulu that make for tasty afternoon bites. Most of the skits revolve around the ridiculousness of conscientious-hipster-culture, but sometimes they broaden it to consumer culture in general. I loved this riff on complicated cell phone plans.
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Girl Humor: Kristen Wiig Writes
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ124pbRMJs]
I know there are some avid Kristen Wiig fans in the audience. Bridesmaids, coming out May 13th, stars her and was co-written by her. A good sign.There have been rumors of female-appealing versions of the enormously successful male-orientated comedies that have lately shown up, for better or worse, every six months in theaters. Because we females are complicated, it’s taking awhile. What can they possibly find funny, tortured writers are asking themselves, if not jokes about pot/sex/performance/crashed cars/your lame friends??
This one looks like it might hit it, as I laughed at least three times during this trailer. The stamp of Judd Apatow-produced (Superbad, Pineapple Express) means it will safely include a few guy jokes, so the turnout in theaters shouldn’t look like another Sex in the City the Movie Part III.
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LAX Land
I’ll be in LA from now through the weekend, visiting Joanie, seeing Shareen Vintage for the first time, eating at Son of a Gun (“smoked roe, maple cream, pumpernickel” sounds delicious!), snacking on as many food truck offerings as possible, and seeing friends.
Knowing me, the only photo I will take will be something like an off center shot of somewhat unique, though in hindsight not so great, doorway. But if anything good comes out, I promise to share.
in the meantime, some longer things I’m reading:
just why do we all want posters about Japan’s tragedy?
interview with CrewCuts design director, about her Moming-style (I like their questions, and their web design)
Lovely photo from ledansla.
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Boob Jobs on the Up and Up
I liked Scott Alden’s disappointed “Breast Implants Are On the Rise (And It Makes Me Sad)” post over at How About We. Responding to the news that breast augmentation is up 40% in the last decade he says,
I always assumed that breast implants were just a phase we were going through. Fake boobs, to me, were like overalls with one strap off or oversized sweaters with tights. I thought that, at some point, we would all look back and laugh at ourselves. “Oh, breast augmentation,” we’d say, “that was silly.”
I know this is totally obnoxious to say to girls who carry a lighter weight around than I do, but I’ve personally always liked the Kate Hudson look. How bland if we all start looking like Lara Stone.
can’t decide if this visual is unrelated. But I liked it. By Chris Silas Neal, from the opinion pages of the NY Times.
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Radish Snack
MAV posted a lovely little how-to for eating radishes with butter and salt. I associate this snack with summer, when their crunchy cool heat is more refreshing, but radishes are in stores these days too and their red is so cheerful.
ps: Don’t forget to cut off the greens as soon as you get them home. The greens are water hogs (dehydrators), and grocery stores just leave them on to prove how fresh the vegetables are.
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THIS. SO MUCH.
A billboard turned into a swingset!
by architect Didier Faustino.
If I passed one of these on the open road, I would pull over and get in line (because there would be a line).
Seen on Chris Glass.
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reflections on 25 Weeks
Joe made me this postcard for Valentine’s Day. Later on, he noted that she is either emanating color out into the desert world, or being attacked by a storm cloud of rainbows. Ultrasonic images have that mysterious way about them. What is she thinking? you wonder.
If I have to bend over and pick things up, I start panting, ohhing, and ahhing, like taking out the trash might be the last effort I donate to the day.
My mom told me that in her first pregnancy she started eating foods from her childhood. It might have just been those “crazy woman cravings” that society is obsessed with attributing to pregnant women, or she suggested, she was struggling with the transition of being responsible for someone and wanted to revert back to being a kid again. I can’t really think of another reason why kraft macaroni and cheese will be the food I end up associating with this pregnancy.
I have been struck by the strange fact that though every woman must map the tricky route of how she will balance her baby and her hopes for her engagement with the outside world, it is difficult for us to talk to each other about it. We each have our own notions of what the other must assume, and speak hesitatingly only for ourselves. For what has been a dynamic issue for the past forty years, it has not resolved in any useful way.
Desperately needing cheats to eat vegetables every day, I jumped on the green smoothie train. It has saved me, and probably a few red blood cells too. Banana, frozen wild blueberries, bunches of raw spinach, almond milk, blend. You don’t really taste anything beside the banana and the milk, and there is none of that flat-tongue-leaf-spinchyness texture that I lately despise. Saved.
The hormones have begun to occasionally swing away from blissful mother o’ peace to those of a cranky perturbed five year old. Not only are things wrong, things are cryably wrong. You experience things in pregnancy that make you relate to an infant—the desperate, overwhelming desire to eat right now; the frustration of not knowing or understanding where emotions well up from and deciding to just express them anyway; the fulfilling occupation of simply gazing off into space.
My trusty shirts are, one by one, waving a hand of fond farewell and retiring to the corners of my drawers, hoping I will not ask them to experience that again. I just went through all the clothes I own, and was surprised to meet a few new candidates for favorite shirt. At least for the next week.
She kicks when I do yoga, when Joe plays the guitar, when I eat peanut butter, and when I think it might be a nice time for a little peace and quiet, she practices her routine for a kicking brigade dance show. These are just the kicks I habitually note, the others are faintly scribbled on an EKG reading somewhere in my brain that I recall when I have a moment of panic, thinking she’s been silent for days.