Thursday, May 24, 2007

Whoas. Another new low.



I have no idea what possessed Courtney Love to think this was a good idea, but here is a new ad campaign for Doc Martins with Kurt Cobain selling shoes from a cloud up in heaven. It is almost as bad as when I saw scenes of my beloved, Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face pieced together for a freaking Gap commercial! (Ms. Hepburn was one of the classiest ladies of the last 100 years, she was a style icon! I highly doubt she would wear Gap jeans much less be trying to sell them if she were alive today!)

As for Kurt selling shoes; that man did the most selfish thing a person could do when he pulled the trigger and left his infant child behind with a drug addled mother. I don't care what he meant to music, his image doesn't need to be selling any vanity products to today's youth. If Courtney wanted to use his image for anything maybe it should be donating it for promoting suicide prevention or something useful like that?
But, I guess she would not make any ca$h from that now would she?

Just a quick post this morning to say....

Happy Birthday Mom!

Now here is some cuteness for you:

loves
xoxox

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Big Love

This is the time of year that I start renting full series on DVD.
Mostly for two reasons;
A: All of my favorite television shows go on their summer hiatus
B: I'm not particularly fond of hot weather. I grew up in some of the coldest places in the US. I wilt in heat and would prefer to stay home in my skivvies, with a fan pointed directly at me, while sipping Mohitos and watching DVDs. (Wow, that paints a pretty picture doesn't it? I'm really not that lazy. Am I?)

Last week I started watching a series I've been very curious about called Big Love.
I know, the title totally sounds like Plus Sized Porno doesn't it? Well, it is quite the opposite. It is a series about a Polygamist practicing Mormon family in Utah. One man, three very different wives, and a whole bunch of unremarkable kids.
Nearly every episode starts with some kind of HBO style sex scene which I think they do to try to keep it less vanilla, but other than that it is pretty... well... vanilla.
In the first few episodes I was getting pretty excited that it was going to be good, but now I am on episode six and I am already bored with the main story line.
They have introduced Juniper Creek which is, for all intent purposes, the Mormon Mafia. It has quickly turned into The Sopranos light. There isn't as much of the threat of death implied as there is the threat of excommunication. (Oh No's!!)
I'm finding myself not really liking any of the characters with the exception of the crazy mom Lois (played by the creepy and talented Grace Zabriskie) who I think I like because something about her character reminds me of some of my relatives. And I like the oldest daughter character, Sarah (Played by Amanda Seyfried) because there is something bewitching about her almost unreal doe eyed expressions. She's so striking looking it is almost scene stealing and the director takes advantage of that by giving her scenes where she uses batting eyelashes and coy head cocking more than actual dialogue.
Mid way through episode six I found myself wanting to hit fast forward to get through it faster. I'm going to try to wade through the rest of season one because I already rented it, but it will probably be with one eye on the screen and one eye on my laptop... Who knows, maybe it will pick up soon? It has not reached irredeemable for me just yet, but it is quickly getting there.


Next up I will be catching up with one of my favorite shows, Curb Your Enthusiasm. I can hardly wait!

Lost and Found update!

So, I wrote this blog back on Saturday, November 19, 2005.

Click here for the original post.

It is about a letter I found stuck in the door of my car. It was a letter from November 29th, 1958!

Today I got a comment on the post that was very interesting and cleared up some of the mystery:

At 12:02 PM , Steph F. said...
Postscript to your blog: Steve and Hazel Eastman were my grandparents..I was just surfing to look up some articles on Steve as he passed away Sunday May 20th at the age of 96. That New York trip sounds about right; they relished air flight, his hobby was restoring airplanes for the Boeing Museum of Flight, and they made sure they were on the inaugural commercial flights of the 707, 727 and 747. As of last month Grandpa was still campaigning for a seat on the first commercial flight of the new 787, and he also got a little press from his 94th birthday skydive out in Redmond a couple of years ago. He knew how to party! Grandma Hazel made it to 92 and passed on a few years ago, now Steve is with her again.
Best Wishes, Steph F. Seattle.



Wow! Almost 50 years from the time the letter was sent, it managed to make it's original destination, get carried around until it somehow ended up in the door of my car, I post it's contents on the internet, and a couple of years after that I get the back story and they sound like they were very interesting people who lived full lives!

Crazy!

I'm going to see if I still have the letter, if I do I will try to get it back to the family it belongs to.

I'm still baffled at how it ended up stuffed in the door of my car. I guess that part will remain a mystery.

My top 6 commandments of blogging

1- Thou Shall Not drink and blog. This is the golden rule. Nothing good has ever come from drinking and blogging. And even though you may delete it the next morning the second that you realize what you've done, I guarantee that the ONE person you didn't want to read it had insomnia that night and has already committed every embarrassing word to memory.

2- Thou Shall Not complain about work on their personal blog. It is one thing to post shows or parties your office might be sponsoring, but never write about how you are mad at your boss or your failed office romance or whatever it is people write about work on their blogs. I've read an uncomfortably high number of blogs where people were caught writing about work and were reprimanded, or worst, fired for doing so. (Probably not a good idea to blog during office hours either) Always write with the assumption that your boss and your mother is reading every word and you should be OK.

3- Though shall not slag off one's own family no matter how far removed you are from them. You may have some hayseed cousins that you have heard a million crazy stories about. Stories that you love to tell at parties when the "You think your family is crazy, well listen to this!" subject inevitably comes up. Those stories are fine for parties, but if you write them on a blog, that will be the week that the hayseed in question buys a computer, and guess where the first place he goes will be? That's right, your blog!

4- Thou shall not post anything that you would not want the world knowing about on a blog. I don't care if you do LJ or you have a Myspace and you switch it to private/friends only. There are so many blog search services nowadays that will show at least a portion of ANY entry on the internet, private or otherwise. Any person with a little tech savvy has already discovered these tools and has read your "private" blogs. Nothing on the internet is ever private. (And this goes for Myspace as well, even if your profile is set to private AND your blog is private, your blog is still readable if the person knows the right service to use.)

5- Thou shall not blog details about where your children go to school, where they catch the bus, their friends names, photos that show details of places they may frequent. This should go without saying, but I read a lot of parenting blogs and you would be floored by the amount of information people post about their children's lives. (And this is true for teens with blogs. Don't give a possible predator a map to your day to day life. Blog with caution!! I can't stress this enough!)

6- Thou shall not complain about your relationship. You may think that a nice little passive aggressive blog targeting your partner in life is the way to go to get your point across, but it is really a bad idea. You must remember that not only your partner is reading this but so in your best friend, mom, cousin, boss, co-workers, guy who sells you coffee, their ex, your ex.... (You get the idea) enough blogs like this every other day when you get your nose bent out of joint and suddenly people will think your relationship is a joke and you won't understand why no one seems to respect the person you have decided to share your bed with. (Or you for putting up with them for that matter.) You won't understand why people don't invite you on double dates and none of your friends and family seem to like your significant other. Sadly, you will only have yourself to blame. If you are mad at him/her and don't have the balls to tell them face to face, maybe writing a private email to them is the better way to go. Keep in mind that people tend to have a much longer memory for the bad stuff than for the warm and fuzzies. Why do you think scandal magazines are so popular?


Now, Blog on my friends... Blog on.

Monday, May 21, 2007

Adios



An animated video I created for one of Jon's songs. I was just messing around with an idea I came up with late in the afternoon and became a little obsessed with it until it was done. Now I can sleep...

There is gone and then there is gone...

Every now and then, out of the blue, memories pop up in my path and ruin my day like a car wreck. You are just cruising along and WHAM, you get hit in a blind spot and you are down for the count.


Today it was the thought of my first boyfriend. He introduced me to coffee and a lot of my favorite music and he taught me Italian and Polish phrases (He was fluent in several languages as he only moved to the US when he was 11, yet he spoke perfect English and had no accent.)
He liked going on adventures in our city. On our first date he found out I was not fond of heights so he convinced me to conquer my fear and took me on a date to the tallest building in Anchorage. He found a way for us to sneak on the roof and he held my hand as we stood as close to the edge as possible. It was as terrifying as it was exhilarating. That is where he kissed me for the first time. He said since I was brave enough to do something that frightened me, he would be brave too.
He told me stories of places in the world that he had seen and lived that I have yet to see. He painted pictures of a world outside of our small town that I never imagined but could not wait to be free to discover on my own.
We planned a three month trip to Belize the summer after we graduated. We bought tickets and got shots and studied all of the areas we wanted to explore, but at the last minute I chickened out. I cashed in my ticket and he went without me. While he was gone I got together with a man who eventually became my daughter's biological father. While he was gone, he rediscovered his love of travel and life and he heard an inner calling that lead him to travel all over the world again.
I moved to Seattle, he got married, I had a baby and moved back to Alaska, he moved to Seattle.... two ships in the night. We stayed in touch for the first couple of years, but over time the calls and letters were fewer and farther between.

We grew up and became very different people.

Eventually I moved back to Seattle. I would run into him around the hill every few months. I was all Rock-n-Roll mommy, while he had morphed into a totally happy, earth loving, hippie. He had become really involved in yoga and meditation, and drum circles and that sort of thing. We had very little in common anymore, but we enjoyed seeing one another in passing. There is a certain comfort in knowing that someone else shares your positive memories of youth no matter how different you become as an adult.

Years later I heard that he vanished. He had gone to another country to teach English and in his first few days there he went missing. They searched for him for a very long time, but nothing ever came of it. There are a few theories on what might have happened to him ranging from an accident and getting swept away by the river to being murdered for his US Passport.
Whatever happened to him, he is gone. And not the kind of gone that allows your heart to mourn when you lose a friend to death and you go to their funeral, you grieve and you move on. I've been through that sort of death so many times, the process of mourning is a fixture in my heart now. It is a part of me.

This kind of gone is a question mark. An unfinished book. An opening that leaves room for hope and imagination.

When he creeps into my consciousness I see him meditating in a mountain monastery for tens of years losing track of time and wandering back for our twenty year reunion surprised at his "Death" status in the US. I see him slipping and hitting his head during a hike and losing his memory and starting a new life with a wife and children, a clean slate. I see him joining the CIA with his multiple languages and love of adventure and being forced to vanish for national security purposes.
But what I never see, when I think of him, is dead. I never see gone. I only see him as just not here right now.


Missing Since May 21, 2003

Sunday, May 20, 2007

I'll Never Leave You



Last evening we went and saw Nelson Sings Nilsson. This is something that has only been performed live three times as far as I know, and we have managed to see all three of them. Our lovely friends Mark & Suzy are visiting from the UK right now and they said they wanted to "See things they could not see at home"
It was a pretty amazing show, so much so, we ended up staying for both sets.
I made some Youtubes of it. I actually got told that I could not make videos, which I didn't realize was the case as I didn't see any signs posted anywhere and nobody bothered me at The Posies show the week before, so apparently I broke the rules by taping parts of this show. Oops. (You actually hear me get called out on one of the videos.)
There was a really strange Bollywood type opener on the 2nd set. I suppose that was good for the type of music it was, which isn't a type of music I've ever heard outside of a yoga studio, and the strangest mix with Harry Nilsson covers, but it was interesting. I will post a video of that later today when I get it up on Youtube. For now I have about 6 songs already posted, still have 3 more to post. Check the out HERE if you like!

Here is a photo I took when I borrowed Suzy's camera. This just proves to me that I REALLY need a high end camera ASAP!
 

Two going on twenty. Template by Ipietoon Cute Blog Design