RIP, my oscar wilde travel coffee mug from barnes and noble circa 2001

this morning i went out to the garage to retrieve my favorite travel mug from the jeep, walked into the kitchen to rinse it and dropped it on the tile floor.

it died.

i was all, "oooooh noooooes!"  i'd had this one since college.  it was a slim, tall, all-plastic travel mug from barnes and noble with pictures of oscar wilde.  i ran into the bathroom where jake was in the shower and wailed, "jaaaaaaaake i broke my mug!!!!!!!!! loooooooook!"  he was like, "um, okay, we have like ten more.  let me get out of the shower first."

i bought this one after i exploded its metal, insulated predecessor in the microwave one humid spring morning in 2001.  i had taken it to my 8:30am photography studio, and then come back to my apartment to sleep until my 11:00am lit class.  i woke up, groggy, and stuck the metal mug into the microwave to reheat the coffee, hit "2 minutes" and walked back to the bedroom to get dressed.

oopsy.

no more mug.  and no more microwave for that matter.

so i sought out to replace my zapped mug with a safer, plastic, melissa-proof mug.  it was a lot cheaper than the new microwave, which my mom refused to help me replace due to my own stupidity in ruining the first one.  my new mug didn't have an unwieldy handle, and it was slim enough that it fit my hand perfectly.  the lid was smooth and at the perfect angle, and the coffee flowed at the perfect rate.  i never burned myself, rarely spilled.  

it stuck with me for seven years.  and then this morning, i kilt it.

why are good coffee mugs so hard to find?  the simplest designs are the best.  i don't want to mess with lids that have open and closing mechanisms -- the get stuck, they break, they're hard to clean.  i hate lids that have big, thick lips to prevent spills - they're too hard to drink from.  the more spill-proof a travel mug purports to be, the less enjoyable it is to drink from.  i am ANTI bells and whistles.  why doesn't the travel mug industry understand this?

is there a travel mug industry?

as i'm writing this post, i'm doing a google image search, and i can't even find a picture of a travel mug i like.  am i that picky?

goodbye, friend.  my lips and my delicious coffee will miss you.

the weekend recap

we had a chill weekend at home. which is what we always do these days.

friday jake had an endoscopy on his stomach to try to pin down the cause of his ongoing heartburn-like problems. luckily they didn't find anything to cause concern. to do the endoscopy they had to sedate jake pretty soundly, so he slept most of the afternoon. erin picked up aislinn and kept her for the evening, and i picked up autumn from school and took her to erin's as well so that i could go out to eat dinner with some friends at Biga.

i usually love Biga, but i was not thrilled with what i got this time. i ordered the special, bay scallops with sauteed greens, and they had a greens-reduction sauce on top of the scallops that really just did not jive with the scallops. scallops are such a delicate, sweet seafood flavor and this reduction sauce was very green tasting - even slightly bitter. it overwhelmed the scallops. it would have been better on beef.

i picked up the girls and by the time we got home, jake was up and feeling much more alert. then, friday night (or early saturday morning, rather), i woke up around 2:00 a.m. and thought, oh my. i am going to be sick! i ran to the bathroom and spent most of the rest of the night, as well as all day saturday, either there or in bed.

by saturday evening i was feeling better, so i took care of aislinn while jake went to the casino to watch his brother josh play poker. by the time they got home aislinn and i were WAY asleep.

sunday we got new couches! i am thrilled with them. this has been a long time coming. jake had our tired old couches since before autumn was born. i had a totally adorable set of apartment-perfect loveseats when we moved in together, but those had to go because they weren't long enough for our house. or jake's naps.

and mom, erin, and jeff all popped in today to see aislinn for a bit, which was nice.

and now it's sunday evening and i'm getting ready to prepare for a hearing tomorrow morning while we watch the oscars and eat chili by the fire.

sigh. good weekend.

unimpressed

bucking tradition

jake and i usually don't celebrate valentine's day. the holiday isn't really what it was originally intended - like christmas, it's become utterly commercialized. also, it's not very eco-friendly for people to go around buying tens of thousands of roses that are completely out of season-the energy expended transporting those roses from their hothouses in south america is staggering. and not celebrating valentine's day in a big way has always been a sort of small, poignant reminder to us that we need to celebrate each other every day. not just hallmark-sanctioned days.

but this year, after a whole saturday of taking care of a fussy baby by myself, a fussy baby who's going through a growth spurt and is frustrated by her physical limitations and hungry every hour, while jake spent time with autumn because it's the only day of the week they really get a lot of quality time, and while i wasn't feeling very well -- well, by the time five o'clock rolled around and it was time for jake to take autumn back to her mom's apartment, i just had to say, "jake? can you please not go to wal-mart like you planned after you drop autumn off? because i really need some help."

and then, when five twenty rolled around, and five thirty, and five forty five, and he still wasn't back, and i sat in the chair with aislinn asleep in my arms and a lump in my throat, thinking "he went to wal-mart anyway," it was the worst valentine's day i'd ever had.

(even though we don't celebrate valentine's day.)

and then at five fifty, when he walked in the door with these

and a bottle of champagne, and dinner from our favorite restaurant that he'd ordered hours before so it'd be ready on time, and i forgot all about why we don't celebrate valentine's day as he took care of aislinn while i took a blessedly long shower and emerged feeling more refreshed, loved, and appreciated than i have in a long time.

it was my best valentine's day ever.

(even though we don't celebrate valentine's day.)

Fidelity: Don't Divorce Us

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

nadya suleman

all week long i've been watching as the octoplet mom went from miracle worker to maligned.  one one hand, i'm disgusted with the woman.  how dare she bring fourteen children into the world when she's single, unemployed, and living with her mother?  i mean, having a child - even a single child into a stable household - is ultimately an act of narcissism.  we all want to have a little piece of ourselves to hold onto.  otherwise birth rates would plummet and adoption rates would skyrocket.  why did i decide to get pregnant instead of adopt?  because i'm a little narcissistic, too.  but this woman took it to the fourteenth power, and then some.

and on the other hand, who am i to criticize this woman's decision?  i firmly believe that marriage and family are two topics that the government should be strictly uninvolved in.  that extends to the right of two loving people to marry each other regardless of race or sex.  and it also extends to the right of a single woman to birth fourteen children.  indeed, one of the foremost tenets of my political beliefs is that the government should be amoral, and should not legislate religion.

and i also firmly believe in social programs.  i think that they are wonderful, and wonderfully important, and wonderfully beneficial for people who have a true need.  and this woman is going to need a lot of them in order to raise these children.

and as much as i believe in social programs, i believe equally in personal responsibility, and the duty of each person to try as hard as possible to avoid needing social programs.  and nadya suleman has failed miserably in that respect.  

but most of all, my heart breaks for these fourteen children.  i read in the news that she holds each of her eight premature babies for forty-five minutes a day.  forty-five minutes.  when aislinn was a newborn, i held her nonstop, spending hours on end just watching her breathe.  she's almost six months old and i STILL do that.  it's increasingly clear that nadya suleman's children's physical needs will be met by the state of california, but who is going to meet their emotional needs?

i think that for the sake of the earth and the precarious position it's in, we have a responsibility to be prudent in our decisions to have large families.  but that's a personal choice, which ultimately shouldn't be stepped on.  and at the same time, how did the medical community allow their standards to become so lax that a single mother on state aid became the mother of fourteen artificially conceived children?  we can allow chronically and terminally ill patients to wither away due to the prohibitive cost of heath care, and in the same breath we can allow a woman to use her federal disability payments to add eight more children to her existing brood of six who are already on state aid and half of whom are disabled?  where is the justice in that?

it's a situation that sets forth a lot of concepts that are difficult--if not impossible--to reconcile.

hi there!

i haven't been blogging, but it's not because i haven't wanted to.  i have this bad habit of sitting on the sofa in the evening after aislinn's gone to sleep, reading each of the ten trillion blogs that have popped up in my reader, and every news website known to man, and a few gossip websites, too.  well, jake's had his fill of it and requested that i put down the laptop and actually interact with him in the evenings.

i guess that's fair.

so i've been leaving my laptop at work during the week, which is working well for our relationship, but not so well for my blogging.  although last night jake pointed out that leaving the laptop at work doesn't count if i sit on the sofa and read cnn.com on my blackberry all evening, which is what i was doing instead of paying attention to The Colbert Report that i'd agreed to watch with him.

i'm just a peripheral tv watcher, you know?  unless something REALLY grabs my attention, i can't sit down and give it my full attention.  i have to be doing something else, too, or i get bored.  like folding laundry, or making blueberry bread, or YIM'ing on my blackberry, or starting a fire in the fireplace so we can make it one more night before we turn the heater back on.  all of which i was guilty of doing last night when i was supposed to be spending QT with jake.

hopefully someday all of my obligations and duties will even out and i'll have time to do everything, including blog.  like, when aislinn goes to college?

aislinn's found her voice

and decided that she's not a mogwai - she's a howler monkey.

and now that i've figured out how to post videos, this blog will never be the same again.

and i apologize for that.

my mom is the coolest

i would just like to give a shout-out here to my mom who, after unlocking a new rock band song by nirvana, called me and asked me if i'd bring one of their cds to sunday dinner to loan her because she "liked listening to them when i was growing up," and "kind of missed them."

a hipper mom there never was.

your body is a wonderland

i majored in fine arts in college, as most of you know.  how i made the leap from the art department to a law office is a story for another day, but for four years i spent my time in phillips hall at the university of tulsa, taking classes in photography, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, and arcane art history classes with titles like "visual art of post-world-war-II great britain."  of course, i was simultaneously pursuing a degree in literature, so i was also taking english classes with titles like "apocalyptic prose of post-world-war-II great britain"

point being, i came from a very small conservative town and found myself, at 18 years old, right smack dab in the middle of the two most liberal departments of the most liberal college in the state.  to say it had an impact on me is an understatement.

in the art department, you are required to take several courses (painting, drawing, or sculpture) with live models as part of your core classes.  i remember my first day of life sculpture so well.  it was the second semester of my freshman year.  we each sat around on our wooden stools with tiny round tables in front of us, and a big bin of dried-out communal clay.  it didn't really occur to me as i sat there that "live model" would mean "nude model."  when class began, the professor gave some cursory instructions as he waited for the model.  

she walked in wearing a silk robe, stepped up on the platform, and disrobed.  i was taken aback by the frankness of it all, but by the second or third class it had become completely normal.  the feeling was probably aided by the model herself, who was the best figure model out of all of the different models who worked at TU while i was there.  she could hold a pose for what seemed like an eternity, and she never moved an inch, unlike the department's sole male model who would twist around and screw up my drawings.

but the most notable thing about helen is that she wasn't what you would expect from a nude model.  helen was a seventy-five year old black woman.  she had been modeling for the art department since the 1960s.  i hesitate to even use "black" as a descriptive here, because her race should really be irrelevant.  but somehow it's not, because when helen started modeling, the world was a very different place.

watching helen through my years at TU really had an impact on how i think about the female form.  my body is obviously not what it was this same time last year, now that i'm a mom.  but every time i pick up a magazine and start to feel bad about the way things are vs. the way things were, i think back to those days when my 105-lb-self saw grace and beauty in a woman whose body was dramatically inapposite to popular definitions of beauty, and i feel much better about the current state of things.

i wish more women could do that.  

blinking lights and other revelations

so i bought an ipod.

i've always been a little slow on the uptake when it comes to new technology.  i was one of the last of my friends to buy a digital camera, even though i majored in photography.

i think it's because i'm a little obsessive-compulsive, and once i journey down a road, i don't like to stray.  i journeyed down the old-fashioned-film photography route, and was loathe to learn the new technology.  also, i was a skosh snobbish about it, preferring to stick to my art school roots.

and so it goes with the ipod.  i've spent years cultivating my cd collection.  never owned a cassette tape, the first cd i ever bought was m.c. hammer, circa 1990.  my sister bought a vanilla ice cd the same day in the mall (we agreed to share), and thus began our forays into pop culture.

nineteen years later (nineteen? is that really possible?  i remember BEING nineteen like it was yesterday) my cd collection is a monster.  i attribute it all to my dad, who had a similarly monstrous l.p. collection.  and i'm a purist about my collection - there are no giant cd cases in my car.  a cd is nothing without the liner notes and artwork, and singles are pointless - you have to listen to the whole album.  i'll take one or two cds out of the cabinet and listen to them all week, and then put them back.

thus has been my dilemma with the ipod.  i knew once i bought one, it would drive me crazy to just rip one or two cds into it.  no, i'd have to methodically rip every single one of my alphabetized collection.  all or nothing, baby.

so here i am, about a week post-purchase.  i've been ripping cds faithfully every evening, and right this minute i'm up to "outkast."  so far my collection is 9,344 songs lasting 92.4 days.  i'd estimate that i'm 40% done, because my alphabetized section doesn't include soundtracks, classical music, musicals, box sets, or compilations.

what's the point of this? absolutely nothing.  but i've been spending an inordinate amount of my time on this project the last week, so i thought i'd give you a little glimpse into my latest obsession.

don't ask me how i like the ipod, because i haven't even had time to listen to it.

breakfast at mommy's

here's a video of aislinn eating cereal for the first time last week, starring aislinn, jake, myself, and gatsby. i realize that many of my blog readers aren't here for ten-minute youtubes of a five month old dribbling cereal down her chin, but:

a) i started this blog to give my distant friends and family a way to stay updated on aislinn's progress;
b) my ability to spew ascerbic sociopolitical commentary has become seriously eroded since i gave birth; and
c) i haven't had the time to figure out how to edit down videos to the more pertinent and/or entertaining parts, so you guys get the full ten minutes.

enjoy!