Friday

Completed Christmas-themed exhibit case we composed at the Archives, using 1950s photographs of Christmas decorations (TVA-documented) and old newspaper clippings, photos, and WWI draft cards featuring the names of reindeer (Blitzen, Rudolph, etc.) and other holiday-themed names (Chris Kringle, Santy Claus, Partridge and Peartree).

Single Girl quilt: Home from work, I needed to see four of my sixteen squares sewn together.

Ormsby's for friends catch-up, drinks, and beet salad (yum).

Saturday

Root House visit, Saturday morning, to see Katie and smell the delicious smells of an 1850s Marietta kitchen. They were all in dress for the Marietta pilgrimage tour of homes.

Then, to the High Museum to see the Picasso to Warhol modern art exhibit (we got a deal on tickets). Ben ponders some other art. He approves.

Saturday, 2 p.m. Ben is angry at this, the piece of art he hates most: the white canvas painted white, on a white wall. Ben is very angry!

Pablo Picasso, Girl before a Mirror, 1932. All the paintings in the exhibition are owned by the Museum of Modern Art. Pretty impressive, as I would expect.

We "make" art, by adding fingers pointing to circles. Pablo Picasso.

Henri Matisse, Woman with a Veil. It was one of my very favorites of the day.

Henri Matisse, another favorite. The colors!

A Jackson Pollock classic! This is another that Ben is skeptical about, but I was just excited to be seeing a real Pollock. It was interesting to see some of his work before this famous "drip" phase of his work, of which they also had several.

I loved the work of Romare Bearden, who does a lot with mixed media and collage. I'm really drawn to pieces like this. Google his stuff!

Another Romare Bearden, using a very old and battered patchwork quilt against a woman who's made to reflect the ancient artistic body form that we know as Egyptian.

Jasper Johns, a Georgia-born modern artist, works in familiar images and print-making to make you think about things that are everyday in more conscious ways. Loved the numbers.

The Real Andy Warhol Version Of This Super Famous and Much Reused Image. So cool to see the image the started this iconic pattern. Then again, Warhol would ponder how much of him as the artist is really in these, "the originals," anyway. ;)

The Soup Cans. All along a whole wall dozens of times, so emblematic of all that is Warhol's pondering of the reprint.

And again

And again. Am I Warhol yet?

Pretty tree in midtown

Coffee break at Octane

Snowy winter cupcakes (with advent-gift decorations), episodes of Parks & Rec, and one-person sewing bee to round out Saturday night.

Sunday

The binding goes on Ben's Christmas present, so near to the end now.

New undies and popcorn for advent! There is nothing better than new underwear for Christmas, really.

Some of Ben's awesome advent gifts from my mom, including a half-zip sweater and requisite fun Star Wars items.

Paul's advent, Upper Peninsula Michigan playing cards, with photos of Yooper things. The Iron Mountain ski lift where we used to live, there.

Avery helps Ben cook Cheater's Chili, our all-day-stewing best-chili-ever recipe.

We document the damage of earlier burns to my hands, from the hot oil when browning the meat for chili. See the bulbous blisters?!

Homework and another advent, a yummy candle. Organizing the many documents that compose our Atlanta History exhibit for the Atlanta airport, making sure we have everything we need to print this hundreds-of-pages document on Monday. And Ben helped too.

Then, finally, Dexter on Showtime at 9, one of the best reasons to start a new week. Season 6 is so, so good. I forgot to take a picture because the episode was so good.

Happy week, everyone!

I told her I love the headboard she made for her own room, and that I wish to make my own as soon as I can afford to put more money into my own bed/frame/headboard situation, and she said, “Oh, if I can make it, you certainly can, I’m not that crafty.” Uh, ma’am? You created Design*Sponge. There’s at least a little crafty in you.

Cool to meet her!

My signed copy

Wanted to share one funny little quip, in which she is reflecting on her several-month escapade back in the fall of 2008, when she made a series of guest appearances on Saturday Night Live as Sarah Palin during the months leading up to the election. She’s talking about how the vice presidential debates sketch was her favorite, and why.

One, I felt like I contributed a lot of jokes to this one, so my writer ego likes it best.

Two, Queen Latifah was there.

Three, I thought the speeches that Jim Downey wrote for Jason Sudeikis as Joe Biden were brilliant. Especially the stuff where Biden is trying to prove that he’s not some Washington elite by talking about how he’s from Scranton, Pennsylvania, “the most godforsaken place on earth.” I thought that was ingenious, becuase not only was the ad hominem attack on Scranton a hilarious comedy left turn, it also exemplified what the election had become. Instead of talking about issues, everybody was trying to prove how “down-home” they were. “I’m just like you” was the subtext of every speech.

Politics and prostitution have to be the only jobs where inexperience is considered a virtue. In what other profession would you brag about not knowing stuff? “I’m not one of those fancy Harvard heart surgeons. I’m just an unlicensed plumber with a dream and I’d like to cut your chest open.” The crowd cheers.

That continues to strike a cord these days…

I recommend her book highly–mostly to women, I might add, but many men will get some laughs as well. You can skip over the parts about stages of being fat and skinny in her life, and some of the motherhood bits–although those are some of the very best bits.

I have also started in on priming my whole apartment, which I painted in its near entirety last summer, when I anticipated staying here for two years at least. Rent increases have made that impossible, and I am fully feeling the pain right now, in the time it takes to return these walls to white. I’ve decided that my energy and determination to paint a new space is directly related to whether or not I have recently had to paint a room, since last summer I didn’t have to repaint anything when I moved out of my previous townhouse. This summer, I am taking a much simpler approach to my new apartment: beige walls, no work required. I’ll take my mom’s advice: just cover it with so much art, it feels like home anyway. Perfection.

Maybe the most indicative hint that it is summer (and the most fun) is the vast increase in alcohol intake compared to my regular, super busy semester life. Spending two weeks in Cuba, where the mojitos are the same price as a bottle of water (and you got to have something with lunch, right?) certainly helped kick that off right away. Since I’ve been back though, I have had time to visit lots of friends, and have taken a new approach to dinner: why not have a beer with that? In fact, why not just have beer for dinner instead?

Only working, and not having class, has been truly joyful. Relaxing. Only ONE thing to focus on in my life. Is this how real people live? It’s so much fun!

I’ve also been absolutely obsessed, all of a sudden, with M.I.A. and Dengue Fever, two artists I’ve long known, but they are seriously hitting the spot right now. Exactly my mood. A bit rebellious, no?

Did I say, also, that since I’m moving, I am really excited about shaking up the way all my stuff is arranged, and in further simplifying my space. Might get rid of a bunch of stuff. Might put the bookshelves in the dining room. Maybe put my art/fabric/inspiration board right out in the living room. Why not?

I pretty much just want to pay homage to summer:

to having a tan and wearing a skirt to show it off,

to last year’s dirty, broken-in flip flops,

to pleasure reading (YES!),

to no make-up,

to keeping the frig stocked with good beer,

to the pool,

and cook-outs,

to margaritas with great friends,

to MOVING (even though it’s a lot of work),

to less stress in the classroom (and if you’re really lucky, no class at all–jealous),

to the windows down!,

and the heat suffocating you (I do kind of love Georgia heat the way it does that),

to sweating so much at my job, I don’t feel guilty about not going to the gym,

and to spending too much time watching TV shows.

Among other things.

Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) is the son of the wealthy CEO of the “big bad Fox Books superstore,” and Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) is the owner of the independent children’s bookstore Shop Around the Corner. His newly-opened location just up the street from hers forces her out of business, but little do they know that these real-life enemies are each other’s online crush. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve understood elements and little quips that I had missed in years prior. Kathleen’s boyfriend Frank (played by Greg Kinnear) fully supports a neo-Luddite movement, for example, a term I learned once I got to college. He hates technology with a quirky vengeance.

Anyway, it is one of my all-time favorite movies. And I wanted to share a lovely quotation from Miss Kathleen Kelly herself, that really rings true in my own life and my memories of childhood and books. Beyond her comment, though, I think the same holds true in a life-long reader’s experience; each book I read becomes a part of me, in some way making me the person I am. Those of my childhood hold particular warm spots in my heart, as images and stories from them can bring back a rush of emotions and memories when they resurface in my world sometimes. My love of books as a child has translated into the same kinds of emotion with and while reading today, though I can’t say whether it was the chicken or the egg that lies at the start. (As in, Do I like to read because I had and read books, or did I keep reading because of my own interest?)

Kathleen’s rant comes over her frustration with the newly-opened Fox Books, and her insistence that it won’t affect her negatively. But she wanders from there in her characteristically charming way…

You know, the world is not driven by discounts, believe me. I have been in business forever. I mean, I started helping my mother after school here when I was six years old, and I used to watch her. And it wasn’t that she was just selling books. It was that she was helping people become whoever it was they were going to turn out to be. Because when you read a book as a child, it becomes part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does and I… I’ve gotten carried away.

"Storybook lady" reads to guests at her children's bookstore, in one of my favorite movies of all time.

Along my 3.5-hour walk today, I finally found the spot where the train passes my home. This seems strange, maybe, but it’s extremely hilly around here, and the steep cliffs where the trains pass are for serious hikers or crazy people, only. I have always wanted to go exploring off the concrete and previously-trodden tracks through the woods, but they seem to be untouched for intelligent reasons–for keeping bones intact and not looking like a 5-year-old crawling up a steep edge. Somehow the snow makes all that OK, so I was literally on my hands and knees, shoving my boots firmly in the snow and using the spare limbs to pull myself up this high spot without slipping. I was rewarded with what I expected might be at the top of that cliff: the tracks! The place where that phantom train I always hear but never see crosses into my neighborhood.

Trusty snow boots

It was a bit surreal as I was following the tracks back home to see only one other set of footprints–the ones I had left earlier that day. I love the fact that in metro Atlanta, I was the only person who enjoyed this stretch of the city on this day, during the crazy snowfall of 2011.

The unexpected extra free time has allowed me to finish a duvet cover for my bed that I had long been planning to put together, and also gave me no excuse not to clean up the whole apartment. I also organized months of backed-up paperwork, loan and bank statements, grad school stuff, old classwork, things I’d pulled out of magazines, and everything else that had seemed to pile up in drawers and corners near my two desks. I’ve also started to watch the second season of Modern Family; what a great show.

Only two sets of tracks, the ones I left on the way to town, and the ones I left on thr return trek.

Leaving no opportunity to capitalize on my generation untapped, Warner Brothers and Universal Studios created The Wizarding World of Harry Potter to make the snow-capped shops of Hogsmeade and the flavor of Butterbeer quite real. I waited six months after its opening to make the trip down to Orlando to see Hogwarts castle for myself, giving the crazies enough time to see it first. This had the added benefit of wintertime, which meant the fake snow looked much more believable than I imagine it did to those July visitors, cursing the heat and peering wistfully at the white stuff. When I dipped into the Three Broomsticks for some shepherd’s pie, it was an unusually chilly day in Florida, and I was grateful for the warmth of the fire and the cozy, dark pub atmosphere.

I devoured the first three books in the Harry Potter series in a matter of weeks, checking them out in succession from the Shuman Middle School library (Savannah, Georgia). I was twelve. When Tom Riddle reveals his true identity to Harry inside the Chamber of Secrets, I was absolutely blown away. I have a vivid memory of laying on my bed, flipping the page over and back again, taking in the revelation that Tom Riddle was the younger version, the memory, of the man who would become Lord Voldemort. I had never in my life read such literature, with so many wonderful twists.

Fast forward to 2007, when the seventh and final book was published, and we Harry Potter kids knew much more about the arch-villain of the series. We knew he and Harry shared a strange connection, and we were about to find out just how big. I recall feeling so anxious imagining how J. K. Rowling would end the series, as pundits predicted both Harry’s death and survival. Harry Potter’s death would be the better literary ending, and would certainly solidify his place as hero and martyr. But I honestly didn’t know if she could do that and survive (maybe literally) the angry fan backlash. Yet the option of Harry surviving seemed much too… fairy tale, and depressingly “happy ending,” kids’ story cop-out.

I won’t spoil the ending, but Rowling blew me away. In the midst of some very, very high expectations, as well as many anticipating a let-down, she wrote an ending that went so far beyond anything I could have imagined, I almost couldn’t believe it. At the end of it all, I loved the series even more, more than I thought was possible. Even with some of the predictions spoiling certain aspects, and with all of the speculation surrounding it, she managed to surprise and entertain, and bring plenty of tears. She certainly proved Severus Snape to be one of the most interesting literary characters in the modern era.

Without dragging this too far into a nerdy tangent, I simply felt awed and blessed to be able to walk through a city that had existed only in my imagination since that twelve-year-old girl laid on her bed and was transported. Eating one of Hagrid’s rock cakes and visiting Zonko’s Joke Shop were utterly blissful, and I was an unabashedly happy consumer of the created worlds that thrive on imagination in Orlando.

Strolling through the wizarding Hogsmeade

I tried regular butterbeer, frozen butterbeer, and the Hogsmeade house brew (that one was actually beer).

Hogwarts Castle, where you cannot bring a camera, but where you can visit Dumbledore's office and chat with the famed talking portraits.

The twelve-year-old in me nearly bursting out