Category Archives: Stuff I Actually Think

To the tune of “Seventy-Six Trombones”

4 Home & Garden/Food & Seasons, Stuff I Actually Think

“Seventy-six degrees on a Monday

With a temperature change on a Tuesday, you see

There’ll be 6 inches of snow

On Wednesday, o no

What a mess – is this really the best?”

I really wish I lived in a time when weather forecasts were not only made 3000 times a day, but everyone talks about them ad finitum.*  It would be more fun like when I was a kid (before the dawn of actual time) and I’d just wake up and : voila!   A winter wonderland.  How exciting!  Deal with it.

Is there such a thing as over-preparedness?

Us and everyone on our block blew out our watering systems yesterday for the winter season.  But a few days after the snow?  It is Colorado, it will be sunshiney and gorgeous and mild daytime temps will have me in the garden.  My goal this year was to have home-grown tomatoes at Thanksgiving.  It could happen.  They are winding down, yes, but they live and produce and they are still the sweetest things I have ever tasted.

Two types of tomatoes from my garden for lunch over the weekend.  Drizzled with Balsamic, sprinkled with Kosher salt, because who couldn’t use a few extra blessings now and then? Should I even mention how amazingly sweet, yet tingly-to-the-tongue they were?  No?  Ok, then.  The memory of the little yellow-pear tomatoes popping like taste-fire-crackers in my mouth…Ooooh, yum!  Must be lunchtime somewhere, yes?

As long as this little snow doesn’t hurt my tomatoes, I can deal with it.

*I talk weather, too.  Though I was mortified when I first heard of the Weather Channel 20 years ago, just troubled that people would be that interested in watching weather all the time, I have come to appreciate it, too.  Which also mortifies me. ;/

WEDDING PROJECTS ALERT: Never tea-dye paper lace doilies on a Monday morning for a possible Wednesday project and then try to short-cut by tossing them in the dryer for ten minutes…even on delicate.  Just take my word for it and don’t do it.  At least on a Monday.  *sigh…

“The autumn leaves are falling down…”

4 Home & Garden/Food & Seasons, 5 Songs I am Singing, 6 Looking Back // Memories!, Stuff I Actually Think

My Grandma Hallet gave me a Roger Williams piano music album when I was eight.

I don’t really know why, necessarily.  It was used, so she probably got it at a yard sale or a thrift store because she did not have money, really, to spend.  It was probably a birthday gift.  It wasn’t groovy or cool, but she knew I loved music and was never far from my little record player.  And so I came to love it.  And especially the song, “Autumn Leaves.”  I secretly danced to it…

 

This leaf drifted from a tree in my front yard yesterday and landed at my feet, like a gift.  I will probably play with it at www.picnik.com at some point, but this is just as it came.  And truly, the autumn produces colors like no other, does it not?  Glory.  That is the color of fall.  What started green and bright and light, unfurling after a stark winter, now reaches its’ full and most beautiful stage, and having held on with strength and determination throughout the summer, through both drought and drenching rains, now falls, now tumbles.  Now, peacefully and content with itself, dances right down before me, a gift.  Glory.

Missing my Grandma Hallet.  I wish she could know what her gentle spirit meant to me.

October Red

4 Home & Garden/Food & Seasons, Stuff I Actually Think

October is orange.  Of course.  But it is also a red that is so full of depth and dimension and fiery-varience it can hardly be described.

My neighbor’s Maple has languoriously (not a real word, I know), gone from deep late-summer green, the leaves still fully affixed due to mild fall days and nights, to a light-to-deepening golden peach-to-orange over the past week.  Then yesterday, I swear, as I walked back into the family room with with a hot cup of coffee, it went red.  Just like that, before my eyes.  It nearly took my breath away.  Moments before, a glowing, lovely amber-rusty orange, then, poof.

~

Red. A fully florid, cherry, sanguine scarlet.  A puce, a rufescent russet,  a bloody, blushing, gushing, infrared hot pink mixed with flaming chestnut and rubies and gleaming copper, all at once.  It is shimmering and irridescent fuschia, yet dense and heavy garnet, a ruby.  It is bittersweet in both color and the evoking of raw autumn melancholy.

October is orange.

 

October is red.

“The well of nature is full today.  Time to go outside and take a drink.”  ~ Diane Ackerman quote.  Photo, piknicked, of course.  Vignette.  Cropped, etc…This photo was taken Oct. 22, 2010, but it looks almost exactly the same out my window today.  Almost.

October is Cardinal.  See?  RED!

Holy matrimony, Batman!

2 Mi Familia, 3 Celebrations & Festive Events, Stuff I Actually Think

44 days.  FOURTY-FOUR days!

Yikes.

Interesting how many little details still need attended to even though Tredessa and Ryan have decided to have a tiny, intimate family wedding and a small happily-ever-after-dinner-and-dance celebration following.  Two large families = still almost 100 people and a thousand details.

  • Dress – drop-dead stunningly gorgeous on  my little girl!  {check!}
  • Cute little church, where they will whimsically and reverently speak the vows that begin their new life together  {check!}
  • Cute little barn loft where two families will become one giant family and eat and drink and be merry with the newly marrieds  {check!}
  • Lots of amazing brothers and sisters and lifelong friends as attendants  {check!}
  • Family as witnesses:: parents and grandparents and aunts and uncle and cousins – bunches will be  there  {check!}
  • Singing. laughing, crying – followed by awkward, but enthusiastic dancing {check!}
  • HONEYmooooooooooon!  Oh, baby!  {check!}

If we’d invited everyone we love like fam and all our good friends, they wouldn’t be able to marry until 2013 – because it would take us that long to be able to get ready and there’d have been hundredssssssssssssss of people.  Ryan and Dessa are LOVED.  And they were just not open to waiting that long.  Because of the, ya know, HONEYmooooooooooon!  *smile.

So, small-family-wedding, it is.

They do have a website::

http://www.mywedding.com/ryanandtredessa/index.html

Stories, pictures, a place where you can suggest music for the wedding and reception.  There is a blog they are calling He Said//She Said* and they will answer posed (perhaps even imposed) questions to see how their answers line up…or don’t, just for fun.

Check it out and cheer them on!

Ryan + Tredessa = true love and kisses and lots of kids (more grandbebes for me!!)

Oh…and if you are on Facebook, Tredessa posted a video from their Florida trip, where she went to meet his wonderful family.  They were out in the blue, blue ocean and Ryan caught – – – a SHARK!  Yikeronis!Ryan catching his shark.

Tredessa just watching Ryan catch his shark.

In the golf cart heading out to hunt for alligators on the Florida trip.

Weekend wedding

3 Celebrations & Festive Events, 5 Songs I am Singing, Stuff I Actually Think

Dave & Tara did the pre-ceremony music for Patrick & Tia’s wedding

They sang and read scripture out on the Red Lion Inn’s grassy lawns.  It was early evening and the canyon was clear and lovely, fall just barely beginning to make its’ presence known causing lovely texture in the hint-of-changing leaves.

 

Tia’s amazing smile was absolutely contagious.  It was a lovely setting for a beautiful wedding with amazing food!  Congratulations, Patrick and Tia.  Love you!!

Um, ok, yes :: it is a bit shaky. It was my iPhone and I was trying to “peek” around the shoulder of another guest to get the footage. How about that sound, though, huh? Between those super slim and gorgeous Bose speakers and a handy little piece of Apple genius, not too shabby. :)

Music on a Monday – the Burt

5 Songs I am Singing, 9 TV & Movies/Books & Entertainment, Stuff I Actually Think

Today I Bacharached.

Yes.  I pulled out the Burt Bacharach albums (old vinyls – LPs!) and listened while I worked.

With all the great music there is to listen to, it isn’t often I get to Burt, but he has undeniably written a truckload of great stuff in my lifetime.  “Wives and Lovers, “Walk on By,” and “Any Day Now,” to name a few.  Also, “What’s New Pussycat?” and “What the World Needs Now is Love.”  I love “One Less Bell to Answer, ” and “This Guy’s in Love with You.”  Of course he wrote, “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”  Great songs!  “I Say a Little Prayer,” is fun and “Alfie” was a big hit.

This is my all-time favorite Burt song, though it is much less know.  And it is newer, not on my vinyls.  It is from the  movie (“the” movie) “Grace of My Heart.”

God Give Me Strength