that's my dad

Last night, as he has done many times, my dad sat outside in his yard, smoking his one cigar of the year, drinking Couvoisier and listening to jazz as he ushered in his birthday. This alone shows what a brave man my dad is. It's hot, muggy and buggy in East Tennessee right now, three things he loathes, but he faces them down with valor to see his birthday in right.

Poet, painter, sculptor and painter again, he pulses with the need to work, to create. Whether researching a new TV, watching the NFL Draft or re-crafting himself as an artist, he approaches projects with intensity and passion. He wants to go to Egypt, he wants to play the sax, he wants to play professional football. He taught me and he teaches me how to dream.

I've never met anyone, young or old, with his capacity for play. All of my stuffed animals had names and voices and personalities, and if he tired of playing with me (which, you know he had to!), I never saw it. He was ready to help me dig deep into any project, whether it was building a tent in my room out of blankets or a playhouse in our back yard. Once, when I was a little girl, a family friend warned him to be careful, that if he didn't watch, I wouldn't know the difference between real and pretend. My dad thought about this for a second, and responded, "I'm not sure I do." Now that I'm an adult, we shop together, cook together and watch TV together, generating an almost criminal amount of fun. That gift for play has transcended to grandfatherhood. Together they learn how to crash their XBOX Tony Hawk into innocent bystanders and boogie board bigger than expected waves. Callum has some of the best granddads a kid could hope for.

He bought himself a red sports car as a present for my graduation from college.

One of the greatest compliments he ever received came at a wedding he attended when I was a teenager. "Is that Mary Jane's husband? He looks like Ringo Starr."

He's reluctant to move from PC to Mac, no matter how much we push, because he doesn't want to give up Free Cell.

He's taught me about so much, like malts and Miles Davis and all-day baked beans and peanut butter and jelly potato chip sandwiches.

He has a model train running along the ceiling of his kitchen and he's painted Egyptian Tomb paintings on his stairwell.

He loves blueberries and for years my mom would make him a blueberry pie we called "Blueberry Delight" for his birthday cake.

When my September babe was born, he traded out his current earring for a sapphire, and I haven't seen him without it since.

Even though he hasn't smoked one for years and years, I can't smell pipe smoke without thinking of him. We wish he were here.

Happy Birthday Dad. I love you. Neel loves you, and Callum loves you too.

we interrupt this regularly scheduled blog to bring you...

Summer...

Oh my gosh, a lot happened today. Including a trip to the beach to start and a dog party to end. I'd tell you more, but it's late, we have a big decision to make (!) and karate early tomorrow. I'll be back...

the long slow march of the WIP

Here's what I should be doing:

~knitting

~the dishes (sorry Neel)

~folding laundry

~transplanting our hibiscus plants

~sorting through my 5,000+ (yes, more than 5,000) photos in iphoto, naming, deleting them, etc.

~sweeping

~moving the feather bed (and a few Christmas ornaments we found lying around) up to the attic since I've decided that it'll be more special to only have it on in the winter.

~writing a few over-due e-mails

Here's what I did today instead:

~watered the grass (using our Pirates kiddie sprinkler)

~chatted with some neighbors on the front porch while I watched the grass being watered

~paid the bills for the month (all of them! on time!)

~made lunch

~cleaned (almost) the sunporch

~checked in on some blogs

~sent and read some e-mails

~researched new digital cameras

~listened to Callum play 2001..."open the pod bay doors, Hal."

~tracked my dad's birthday presents. (I love the internet)

~marinated some fish for dinner

~hit the dog on the head with a hammer (no, really) (it's a toy that makes the sound of breaking glass)

~started today's post to bluerainroom



Here's what I'd like to be doing: (I'll leave out things like "reading a book by the beach.")

~flipping through this

~or this

~ordering a new digital camera

~starting a new sewing project

~what the hell, reading a book by the beach

~ordering some tags from namemaker.com

~playing in photoshop

sunporch, before

sunporch, after

Not too shabby, huh? Man, that was hot cranky work. I want to throw so much of that crap away, but truthfully, Callum plays with a lot of it. We're going to turn this spot, designed to fit a twin mattress, into a reading nook for the rest of the summer. Frankly, I just didn't have the energy to get to it today.

As I worked, I kept trying to come up with a way to combine the words "knit" and "apathy." It was going to be the title of this post, but the best I could come up with was "knitathy" or maybe "knipathy." Both sounded like they could as easily be combining "sympathy" as "apathy." And that feels oddly appropriate. I need some knitting sympathy. Because, frankly, someone who is thinking about knitting as much as I am is not apathetic. I'm doing a lot of thinking, I'm just not...well, knitting. I have several WIPs on the sticks right now (including the scarf at the top of the post), enough so that I feel I should finish something among them before starting anything new. I have interest in knitting, I just can't seem to muster the interest in those projects.

So do I start something totally new...abandon the things I started and still love (at least from afar). I have the sense that I want to work on something that has some meat to it, a fairly intricate pattern, for a sweater, perhaps. Of course this is a rationalization, but maybe it'll get me interested in doing more than thinking. So I've ordered some Knitpicks Shine Sport in aquamarine to make this:



The Josephine Top, from Interweave Knits, Summer 2007.

In the meantime I'll try to make some progress on that scarf, and maybe do some reading to boot!

P.S. Sarah, if you're out there, I'm thinking of you kiddo! Yours is one of the e-mails that I need, no want to send! XOXO, Lauren

oh say can you see

Happy Independence Day, everyone!

We're off to the Bay for the afternoon and evening. It's our third year celebrating the Fourth this way, and it's by far my favorite way to spend the day. Fireworks, Sousa music, good food and friends - this year some old and some new.

Whereever you are, enjoy this mid-week holiday and have some serious summer fun.

dinner party

Before we left for Greece Neel and I were invited to join, of all things, a Gourmet Club. Go figure. I like to cook, and we do a lot of it around here, but gourment? No where close. Still, these are about 4 couples that we know and they seem to be fairly low-stress kinds of folks. This dinner's theme, for our first time together, was "Local Flavor." I'm not very good at stretching myself (be brave...), but I volunteered to do the dessert. We're fairly new to this area, and I'm not up on what I'm sure are thousands of locally famous desserts (please, tell me for next time!), so I decided on a pavlova with fresh, locally grown berries. And what's funny, is that when I logged on to write this post, I found out that some other folks were hankering for pavlova as well.

A pavlova is basically a meringue, but softer inside. I followed one of Ina's recipes (of course) and just let it sit in warm oven all day.

After it meringue-d (?) I topped it with locally grown blackberries and a triple blackberry sauce (blackberries, chambord and blackberry jam).

I love dinner parties. I love the whirl of anticipation as you get ready picking food, flowers and wine and the house gets all sparkly. We started having them when Neel was in graduate school and our closest friends were a group of gay men. Leave it to a gay man to have corn straight out of the can for his weeknight dinner and still throw a fabulous dinner party. (Remember our white linen party Mark? I'm sure I have some pictures of that somewhere. I'll have to locate them and scan them in.) Straight out of college, I was just getting my legs under me as a cook. We had a lot of casseroles. But I learned how to roast a chicken and make enchiladas. Oh, and noodles with peanut sauce.

I had just the best dinner set-up ever when we were living in California. We had a standing dinner with one friend on Monday nights and another standing dinner on Friday nights. We alternated houses and I had it worked out that on the Mondays we cooked, the Fridays we were out. This meant that every week you were given a fabulous meal and got to make one. And they were always more elaborate than your normal weeknight fare. Our Monday nights were with Neel's boss, and we had very similar tastes in a lot of things. Start off with a gin and tonic...funny, one of my favorite memories of those nights is coming into Anette's house and having her ask, "Bombay or No. 10?" and really trying to decide what kind of gin I was in the mood for that night. We'd munch on an appeitzer while we finished cooking. This is when I first started making tapenade. Even the Greeks followed my trend! And each week we'd work on a new recipe. Indian. Mexican. Grilled. You name it, we tried it.

Our Fridays were with a British family who had a son Callum's age. We had some lovely "roasty dinners" with those guys. The kids would play and we'd drink and drink and drink. Dinner would roll in a few hours later, and when the Brits were cooking, we always had trifle for dessert. It was a great way to start the weekend. My memories of those dinners were of softly lit rooms, softly playing music, kids romping and then winding down and being read to. Talking, talking, talking.

Oh little dinners, how much I miss you. There's so much I love about our life here in the little gray house, and while there's a lot I miss about California, I think one of the things I miss the most are those dinners. I miss sitting around our dining room table with another couple, eating some lovingly made food and talking about nothing. Picking out some music to last us through the night. Deciding what appetizer will best fit with the entree I can't wait to make. Lighting the candles and watching them sizzle and sputter as the shadows lengthen. I miss it. I miss doing it for friends, and I miss having it done for me. We tend to go out here. If we're getting together with another couple or two, we don't eat in. (Don't get me wrong, I love to go out for dinner. It's possibly one of my favorite things to do. Way, way better than orderinga veggie sub and watching The Great Escape.) I'm not sure what the difference is. We live just as far from some of our friends here as we did in California, so it's not the distance. Maybe it's having school-age kids as opposed to little ones at home. Lives are busy, for sure. I've tried a few times, but I haven't managed to get it quite right. Do I sound wistful? That's how I feel.

We've had some parties, and I haven't really enjoyed those. Not intimate enough maybe. Too much hassle, for sure. And really, I've had people over for dinner lots. It just didn't seem to take. I'm going to keep trying though. We have a couple of Greek dinners planned for later in the summer. A big one next week to thank all of our wonderful neighbors for their help with Lucy while we were gone. I can't wait to get out the cook books and start thinking about that one.

So the Gourmet Club felt nice to me. Nice to cook, nice to have some wine and nice to eat some good food. Our local flavor was heavily geared toward seafood. Crab dip with bruschetta.

Steamed crabs, along with corn and potatoes, asparagus and artichokes. The local flavors are pretty good around here.

So I'm not sure what I need to do to get the dinner-vibe really going. Maybe a karmic overhaul of the dining room or something. But I'll keep trying. Anyone free for dinner?