Nourishment

Ken had a cold, so Julia and I left him at home and spent the morning at the Air & Space Museum, aka the "rocket ship museum," where we saw rocket ships and two planetarium shows. Julia tolerated the movie about black holes, but the narration was a bit over her head. She enjoyed the night sky show, however, and knew many of the answers about the planets, clever girl.

Then we inaugurated our new bento boxes with lunch in the cafeteria:



Despite the fact that's March tomorrow and spring is theoretically 3 weeks away, it continues to be unrelentingly wintry. The only answer is to make warm foods.

So tonight, for dinner, I baked up my small "confetti" bag of potatoes with a favorite recipe for herbed roasted potatoes from the Working Stiff Cookbook.



And the (cholesterol free!) milk chocolate Betty Crocker Moist cupcakes just came out of the oven for cooling.

My girl at the salon

Julia came with me today to my hair appointment at my salon in Bethesda, Chaos. When I was done, she got a Dum Dum lollipop and a trim by my awesome stylist dude, Mike Cao.

(P.S. Hey, Google visitors: looking for Mike? Chaos Salon is at 8005 Norfolk Ave., Bethesda, MD 20814 or call 301.654.7979.)

To dance in the clouds

Just finished watching "Man on Wire." (Thank you, Netflix Watch Instantly.)

It's the story of a Frenchman, Phillippe Petit, who dared to dream of walking on a wire between the World Trade Center towers, before they were even built, and how he brought his impossible dream to life.

There are many moments of poetry in the telling of his story. Petit has a gift for speaking in complete, beautiful phrases and you can easily see how his friends were captured by his vision, as insane and improbable as it seemed. There was the event itself: 45 minutes hundreds of feet in the air with nothing but a balance bar and the cable to stand on.

And then there are the Towers. They are as much of a main character in the story as the wire walker himself. As he describes the planning and training process over weeks and months (and amazingly there is home movie footage of it, too), you see the Towers rising. Which is more impossible, to walk between these buildings that reached into the clouds, or to build them in the first place? Just looking at the photos taken from the top was scary.

It's fitting that the film never makes mention of the fact that they no longer exist. It's better to remember them this way, as part of a piece of performance art that can truly never be replicated.

[2.28 update: Scott Simon interviewed Phillippe Petit on today's Weekend Edition Saturday.]

Snikkety snak!

As excited as I am about my Second Husband, Hugh Jackman, hosting the Oscars this Sunday, I'm even more excited about this:

A taste of summer

Bethany Beach, DE in August 2008. Photos by Kenny Moon.

Cupcake girl

Julia with cupcake at the preschool family picnic last June. (You see, I just discovered these photos on Ken's camera ...)

How beautiful is my child?

Sky Pyramid

National Gallery of Art Pyramid, originally uploaded by moonheids.

This is how beautiful it was at the National Gallery of Art last Sunday, a tantalizing taste of spring that will have to tide us over for a few more weeks.

Love + Complaining

First of all, happy Valentine's Day. Love, kisses, etc. My husband is awesome, my child is beautiful, blah blah blah.

Now, on to the complaining, because I have some bitchiness that needs ejecting.

* Complaint! It took me way too long to edit all of the movies from last year that were sitting around on my computer.
* Complaint! I should have been editing them and making smaller DVDs as I went along. Why didn't I realize this?
* Complaint! Now that I finally have them as iDVD projects, my hard drive is too full to render one of them for burning DVDs. Because I wasn't cleaning off my movies as I went along last year.
* Complaint! I have a basket full of stuff that used to be in the huge diaper changer armoire whatever-it-was piece of furniture in Julia's room that I sold and replaced with a regular old dresser, and now I have to figure out where to put it.
* Complaint! Because of all the aforementioned movie wrangling, I still have 500 photos I got off Ken's Canon Rebel that need to be edited and uploaded to Picasa and Flickr.
* Complaint! There were 500 photos on the camera because he hadn't downloaded any since last June.
* Complaint! I still have a whole bunch of crap that needs to be Freecycled and/or sold on eBay and/or taken to the consignment store and it just want it to be GONE.
* Complaint! February is already half over and oh my God I have to ... get the taxes together, start planning the garden for spring planting so we'll know how big of a raised bed to build and what seeds to order, figure out when to fertilize and reseed the lawn, and, and ...

Whew ... that's enough for now. Also, I'm running out of ellipses.

And did anyone notice that a lot of these complaints have to do with clearing out or removing things? If it was all done tomorrow, would I feel better? Or would I just find something new to have angst about? (Discuss.)

P.S. I really do think my family is awesome.

What Are You Wearing Today? 2.12

One of the reasons I'm shopping fasting is to get more wear out of the fabulous items that are already in my closet.

To that end, here's what I'm wearing today:

* Ann Taylor ruffled-yoke V-neck shirt, button front, white, 3/4-length sleeves
* Ann Taylor Loft above-knee black/white print wool skirt
* Black, knee-high Aerosoles flat heeled boots
* Silver Elsa Peretti horoscope sign Tiffany necklace

(This leaves a few inches of knee peeking out to enjoy the 58-degree day.)

What are you wearing?

The Best Super Bowl Ad

Alec Baldwin, parody and aliens. The best ad of the Super Bowl, hands down.

I dare you to disagree.

The Me Meme

The "25 Random Things About Me" meme started going around Facebook, and at first I resisted. I don't know why. Maybe to not be part of the crowd. But the more I tried not to write the list, the more the anal subconscious part of my brain started writing it for me.

So, as I said on FB, I've got your 25 things right here ...

1. I have a second degree black belt in tae kwon do.
2. I weighed 108 pounds when I graduated from high school (I’m 5’7”). I hated being skinny and wished I weighed more. God, unfortunately, answered my prayers.
3. I am shy with strangers and loudmouthed and outgoing with people I know.
4. When I was about 8, I decided I was going to be an author and illustrator because my two biggest talents were writing and drawing. Once I graduated from college, I didn’t really write or draw for many years.
5. I miss my dad every day, but the thing I’m most sad about is the fact that Julia will never really get to know him.
6. I colored my hair red for 10 years, even though I didn’t have any gray hair; I just enjoyed being a redhead. Now that I’m getting gray hairs, I can’t be bothered to spend the time or money any more.
7. I don’t have any tattoos and I never will.
8. I wasn’t allowed to get my ears pierced until I was 18, and then I got 3 holes in each ear within 18 months.
9. Throughout my teens and 20s, I was adamantly opposed to having children. Then I turned 30 and realized I was changing my mind; I had my daughter, Julia, at 34. Now I find myself on the verge of 39, wanting and trying to have another child and fearing that it may be too late.
10. I will never create anything as amazing and surprising and incredible as Julia.
11. When I first registered to vote in 1988, I registered Republican and voted for George H. W. Bush.
12. The year I studied abroad in the U.K. was one of the best years in my life.
13. I used to love flying, but on my last trip to London, in 1998, we hit some strong turbulence at the beginning of the flight and it has made me anxious when flying ever since. But I do it anyway. Sometimes on long trips I take Xanax.
14. On Sept. 11, Ken and I were on our honeymoon, in Paris.
15. I can speak very basic conversational French. If the conversation is with a kindergartener.
16. I am a fashionista on the outside and a geek on the inside.
17. I forget people’s names too easily, yet I remember masses of unimportant pop culture trivia.
18. My favorite band was, and still is, Depeche Mode.
19. It’s taken me a long time to realize that writers write because they make themselves, not because some lightning bolt hits them from the muse on high.
20. I should exercise more, eat better, pray more and be more patient.
21. I’m a loyal friend, to the point of stubbornness. Once I make a friend, I am loath to lose them, no matter what the circumstances.
22. I can’t imagine life without the internet.
23. I wish I’d tried harder to make new friends when I was in my 20s. The friends I already had lived elsewhere in the country, and Ken was in medical school and then residency, so I wasted a lot of time being lonely and alone.
24. My favorite author is Dostoyevsky. Reading “Crime and Punishment” in high school blew my mind.
25. I have a potty mouth if I’m not careful. It’s sometimes a f*cking challenge when driving the godd*mn car with Julia in the back.