if there was ever a reason to take a day off from being vegeterian/not eating pork this might be it:
more here at the NY Times: Take Bacon. Add Sausage. Blog.
i am totally intrigued and disgusted at the same time.
Archive for January, 2009
Ok, I laughed at this so hard that I cried and it took me a few minutes to read it to Slanky. Perhaps it’s not so funny, I mean I hope the woman was ok, but how the hell could she have gotten up after the first run-over?
Shoplifter gets run over twice by her getaway car
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
1/16/09
CAPE CORAL, Fla. — Authorities are looking for a shoplifter who was run over twice by her getaway car after stealing $1,200 worth of designer purses from a Cape Coral store. A T.J. Maxx security guard told police she saw a woman stuff six designer Dooney & Bourke purses into her pants Tuesday morning and walk out of the store. The guard said she was confronting the woman when a car pulled up.
A report said the shoplifter tried to get into the vehicle but fell out and was run over by the car. She then got up and jumped onto the hood of the car. As the car was driving away, the report said the woman fell off and was run over again. On her third attempt, she finally made it into the vehicle.
Police are using the car’s license plate and a check the woman dropped to track her down.
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Information from: The News-Press, http://www.news-press.com
I’m just so proud to be a part of this organization. I can’t wait to see the parade!
Gay band will march to the beat of Obama’s drum
4 Seattle musicians join historic moment
By CLAUDIA ROWE
P-I REPORTER
1-14-08
If perception is reality, the sight of 177 gay and lesbian musicians in silver baseball jackets and blue berets, playing “Ode to Joy” as they march up Pennsylvania Avenue during Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration next week will be no mere gesture.
Four horn players from Seattle’s Rainbow City Band will walk among them, each willing to lose a week of work and put up about $1,000 to participate in the event, the first time in history that a lesbian and gay group will officially march in a Presidential Inaugural Parade.
“It’s symbolic, but symbolism is important,” said Will Dean, 42, who works in administration at University of Washington Medicine and will lead the 26-piece trumpet section. “You need things that are milestones to represent where you’ve been and where you’re going, and for the gay community this is an important milestone.”
Members of the national Lesbian and Gay Bands Association have participated before — specifically during the Clinton inaugurations — but only from the sidelines, where they received a “thumbs-up” from the former president, but never as sanctioned members of the procession.
“Obama just signals a generational shift,” said Scott Rinnan, 25, a math student at the UW who sports a nose ring and plays baritone. “This is the first time I’ve felt inspired by a politician and proud of a president.”
Presidential politics has often been high on Rinnan’s radar but more as something to protest than to celebrate. He has never been to Washington, D.C., nor watched an inauguration on television (partly because he doesn’t own a TV). But Obama’s personal style — one Rinnan called inspiring and inclusive — galvanized him.
“It seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime to take part in history,” he said.
The presence of Pastor Rick Warren, who has preached vociferously against gay marriage and will give the inaugural invocation, dissuades the Seattle musicians not at all.
“Yeah, some religious figure opposes gay marriage — big surprise,” said Liz Eaman, a 32-year-old trumpet player who will be marching. “There are going to be 177 gay people in Obama’s inauguration parade, and I think that speaks for itself.”
Getting an invitation to the dance was no small feat.
When word went out through the national gay musicians association that Obama’s inaugural committee wanted representation from the group, organizers invited musicians from across the country to register online on a first-come, first-served basis.
The ensuing frenzy, akin to that of “tweeners” trying to get tickets for a Hannah Montana concert, crashed the server.
Chastened, the organizers regrouped and the next day suggested that musicians register instrument by instrument. It was slightly more manageable but still, only four players from Seattle made the cut.
“It was like 6 p.m. on a weeknight,” said Eaman, who works as a medical resident in Tacoma and squeezed in a few extra shifts at work to ensure that she’d be home early enough to log on during the first, unsuccessful attempt. The next day, she was darting onto the site in between patient visits.
“I didn’t realize how much I wanted to go until I didn’t think I would be able to,” Eaman said. “At first, I was devastated.”
With the Rev. V. Gene Robinson — who is gay and bishop of the New Hampshire Diocese of the U.S. Episcopal Church — giving an invocation at the opening ceremonies Sunday, several of the Seattle musicians see a brighter-than-ever future for their interests in an Obama administration.
” ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ is pretty much out the door,” Karin Riggs, 29, said of the Clinton-era policy regarding gays in the military.
Dean expects a civil rights act explicitly protecting gay and lesbian citizens and likely action on gay civil unions — if not gay marriage.
Though he never imagined being able to come out and play for the president as an openly gay person, Dean said marching bands have long held a special place in his political development. As a high-schooler, closeted and scared in small-town New Mexico, Dean and his fellow student musicians elected an Apache girl to be his high school’s “Band Sweetheart.” Her elders, stunned, said it was the first time anyone from their reservation had won any sort of popularity contest in town.
“It was a big wake-up call for me when I first realized that I was living in a racist little place,” Dean said. “Now it feels like I’m coming full circle, to celebrate a new era in American government and doing it by marching as an openly gay man in an openly gay band.”
The Seattleites have been practicing — working over the weekend on selections such as “Brand New Day” from “The Wiz” in order to blend with the larger group, men and women coming from across the country to become one voice heralding the new president.
“It feels,” said band conductor Michael Clark, “like we were standing out in the cold for so long and somebody opened a door and welcomed us back in.”
happy three months, sweet muriel!
she’s now moved into her own room, and it’s going surprisingly well all around. rowan and niamh seem completely unphased by sharing a room. whew!
blowing bubbles is quite fun these days. working on holding that head up. we get lots of smiles, and she’s very giggly at night before and during bath. still working on catching both on camera!
i love her mohawk (in fact, i may give her hair a bit of help to get it that way), and her chubbalicious cheeks that are so ample they hang when i hold her in the air above my head.
breastfeeding has become quite the struggle. in fact, i whipped out the formula yesterday and was ready to throw in the towel. she refused the formula though, which i am happy of today. about 40% of the time she acts like i’m trying to poison her when i try and feed her. it’s not what i’m eating, as she’s always willing to take pumped milk from a bottle. but that is not going to fly–since returning from barcelona she only gets a the bottle at night before bed. you’d think after nursing the other two with no problems that the third would be a breeze. hopefully this is just a rather long phase that will end soon.
so today niamh cried herself to sleep during her two hour stay. i got there and she was passed out on some pillows, her arms wrapped tightly around the stuffed kitty she had brought to school. could it possibly get any worse than that? her teacher asked if we wanted to continue, and i said yes, if it was okay with her. which it was. we both took it as a good sign that when i picked up rowan an hour later, and she said hello to niamh, niamh just looked silently at her feet, instead of howling. i think we’ll keep at it for another two weeks or so before calling it quits.
the good news is that today rowan did not cry at all, and was back to his normal self. whew!
here is a picture that really has nothing to do with this post. but look! i added a border, how fancy is that? okay, not so fancy, but i like it. it was one click on photobucket. someday i will figure out how to use elements, but i have a feeling that won’t be until sometime in the hazy, far-off future. anyway, these are niamh’s new boots, which we bought for her today while we were waiting for rowan to be done with school. she is thrilled with them. not only are they great for the normal things boots do, like, you know, cover your feet and look pretty—you can also stuff toys in them! what more could a girl want?
We eat a lot of squash in the Dahlia/Slanky household (well ok, Mr. J eats a lot of squash and since we have it around so much I’ve been trying to think of more ways to use it for our meals as well) and I’ve noticed that I’m pretty one-note with my uses. I’m wondering if anyone has ways they like their squash. I mostly use pumpkins and butternut squash and I either make soups or I stuff them with some sort of mixture, usually made up of stuff I have around, and bake them. Last night we had acorn squash baked with a concoction of garbanzos, onions, rice, spinach and some spices. It was pretty good but nothing spectacular. Can you get spectacular from squash? Anyway. What say you?
As per Eve’s request!
It did not go well. She was cheerful during the entire walk to preschool, but when we walked in the door she fell apart. I stayed for an hour at the beginning, and even so she cried for the first fifteen minutes and then stuck to me like glue for the rest of my time there. Rowan on the other hand hated having me there and kept telling me to go home. Sheesh! Where’s the happy medium?
When it was time for me to go Niamh’s howling began again. I came back for her after one hour, and her eyes were all red and blotchy from crying. Poor thing! I gathered from the teacher it had been a hard hour. There was another hour left before it was time for the other kids to go home, so I was going to take Niamh home and have Pat pick up Rowan. But apparently Niamh’s distress had been hard on Rowan too, because when I started getting Niamh dressed to go home (shoes, coat, backpack, etc) his little lip started quivering and he told me he wanted to go home too. Hopefully tomorrow goes better. I won’t stay with her at all, but she only stays for an hour. Then on Thursday she stays for two hours. And then next Tuesday she can stay for the full three hours.
My Swiss friend, Sandra, gave me this tout naturel potion from her pharmacy in the Jura (she grew up there and her parents still live there) that she said would help Niamh be calm, not cry so much, and be more independent. She told the pharmacist all about Niamh and so they whipped it up according to her personality–2 sprays, 4 times a day. I wish it had worked. Or perhaps I shudder to think of what the morning would have been like without it!
one of the hardest things for me about traveling with three small children is not being able to go out to restaurants. on our recent trip to spain there were so many cool restaurants i wanted to go to, but couldn’t. i suppose that’s technically not true. we could have gone to restaurants. but the probability of misery at restaurants is high, especially when the hours are funky, the focus is on quality not speed, and the children are already on the cranky side from spending the entire day being culturally enriched at museums, cathedrals, and the like.
however, as most of you know from pat’s blog we still managed to try some spanish gastronomic delights. this somewhat, though not completely, made up for eating more oscar meyer hot dogs in five days than we had in the past two years. we bought a few (perhaps i use that term a tad loosely, haha) cheeses, some chocolates, world class ham and….drumroll…polvorons.
these cookies, which are a traditional spanish christmas cookie, were divine! the flavor was fairly mild, though rich, and the texture was quite crumbly. a bit like a shortbread cookie, only much more tender. the cookies practically melt in your mouth without really having to chew. so dangerous! they are made primarily with lard, sugar, eggs, and some sort of ground up nut. i’m not sure if it’s almonds or hazlenuts. the word on the ingredient list was ametlla torrada, which i can’t find a translation for. but from doing an internet search on polvorons i’m guessing it must be one of the nuts i mentioned.
i need to experiment a bit and try to make my own. i think this russian tea cake recipe will be a good starting point, though sadly it will probably be a while before i get the energy to try it. perhaps next christmas.
just so swiss, isn’t it? this is up right near the train station, we pass it when i walk ro (and soon niamh!) to jardin d’enfants. rough translation is our valais raclette is reversing. not so cute as the picture, which makes me wonder if it loses something in translation?
speaking of things swiss, i am so happy that the stores open back up tomorrow after having been closed today (friday) and thursday for the new years holiday…open back up for one day before closing up again on sunday. so bizarre. and annoying.
and speaking of annoying, after almost two years here i managed to track down a laundromat with a commercial size washer for items that won’t fit in our itsy bitsy washing machine. there are none in morges, so on wednesday rowan and i went to lausanne to wash the almost brand new down comforter that muriel peed on. there were a few minor snags (torrential downpour, took me a while to find the place, cold/whining 4 year old, too much soap in the machine, etc.), but finally got the thing washed. drying cost one franc for four minutes. i had to stand there and put a one franc coin into the machine every four minutes. seriously.