Missives from the Birdcage

New days dawning

Mr. P has graduated! Yay! I'm so very, very proud of him. He graduated, on time, with honors (magna cum laude, suckers!), while working, teaching, having shows, and making art. *And* the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts recently purchased one of his pieces from Flight Patterns for their collection.

Yay!

We moved to Richmond almost five years ago with the plan that Mr. P would be going to school. (There is a long, amusing story associated with the series of oblivious decisions we made in association with this. The take home lesson of which is that there are times when the universe rewards you for being oblivious). Now that he has completed that mission, wheels are in motion to send us on to the next chapter, new adventures, and a whole new part of the country. Details soon, but let us just say that it is perhaps a good thing that my years in grad school got me used to lake effect snow.

Honey bun

Well, most of the deadlines have been wrapped up (there's a couple of stragglers, but what can you do?), so I've let out a biiiiiiiiig sigh this weekend. As soon as the new year opens I'm back on the treadmill set to high, but I have a couple of weeks of visiting family and reading novels and maybe even knitting something, in store....

Mr. P's birthday was this last weekend, so I took him out to dinner at his favorite local restaurant. (They still haven't sorted out their seating issues, but the food is purdy darn good. And who can resist tater tots?). I attempted to surprise him with his birthday gift, but was foiled by logistical issues. I got him storage for his tools, but when the larger of the two chests (this one) came out on the palate I knew it wasn't going to fit in my car by itself, never mind with the second one. So I had to call Mr. P to come to the store to pick up his own gift. Not exactly the surprise I was going for....

I also took him to see the musical South Pacific. It had gotten a pretty good review in the New Yorker a while ago, and I must admit that I love the movie. (Yes, yes, it trades in all sorts of uncomfortable and icky stereotypes. But still. How can you resist 101 pounds of fun?)

 

Wellllll.... the ensemble numbers were good. And the guy who played Billis (though younger than he should have been) was funny. All the singing was good. But the leads for the traveling show.... Uhm.... let's just say that we know why they are in the traveling show.They both sang well, but they both had some major accent issues that were totally distracting. Nellie kept claiming to be from Arkansas, but she was sliding all over the eastern seaboard every time she opened her mouth. She was one part New Jersey and one part Scarlett O'Hara. And zero parts Little Rock. I might have been able to live with the Scarlett O'Hara thing (okay, maybe not, but it wouldn't have been quite so bad) if she'd managed to just stick with it. Every time she spoke it was a little shocking. (She was fine when she was singing).

But she wasn't half as distracting as Emile. He is supposed to be French, but before he'd finished his first sentence I was thinking, "He sounds.... Argentinian. Or Chilean....." And then I thought, wait, he sounds like....

 

And trust me.... that isn't good. During the intermission we looked in the playbill and discovered that the actor is from Uruguay. Mr. P thought he looked and sounded like Dracula, which puts a whole new spin on things (Emile does say he had to leave France because he'd killed a man.....).

We finished up the weekend by watching an absolutely terrible, I mean mind-blowingly-bad, movie, and eating red velvet birthday cake. Yeay, Mr. P! Happy Birthday, Love!

Birthday, fully capable edition

Yesterday was my birthday, so I took the day off and made myself a birthday giftie....

A cape! It's what all the cool kids and superheroes will be wearing this fall.

It's got split flaps so I can get my arms out.

I kind of can't wait for it to get cold enough to wear.

Extra special bonus-- Mr. P was home yesterday, so we got to hang out and have lunch together on a weekday, no less. Yeay!

Florid....

It's been a busy summer. No, really. Busy. Stupid busy. So we went on a road trip.

To Florida! First night plan: camping in Georgia, right on the Florida border. Plan scrapped when the skies opened up. Instead, we watched a giant puddle swallow cars from the safety of the Days Inn lobby in Stark, Florida.

Plan for day two: Weeki Watchee!

Success! Followed by a couple of days with my dear friend, Fran, with whom I have numerous wacky college memories involving a fair amount of Brooklyn hijinx and terrorizing Ireland. Sorry about that, Ireland.

After a scoot through the Everglades, we headed south. All the way south.

Camping in the Keys. I enjoyed it, though it would have been better if a) we'd had a spot on the beach side of the little road where there would have been a nice breeze. Cause it was pretty hot. And, b) the people next to us had SHUT UP. It is the danger of car camping, of course, that there are going to be people there. Other people, in the spot next to you, which is only fifteen feet away from where you're trying to sleep. And it is a danger of which I am well aware. And yet, I convince myself it will be better this time. Which, of course, it isn't. In the Keys our neighbor told camping stories well into the night. They all started, "This one time, we went camping...." Really. At one point, Phil rolled over toward me and said, "this one time, we went camping, in the Florida Keys, and the asshat in the spot next to us WOULDN'T SHUT UP." It didn't help.

They Keys are purdy purdy, I must say. Wish we'd been able to stay longer.

Then we drove home. The rest of Florida kind of blends in together. We stopped for a dip briefly at the beach in St. Augustine. We spent a night in Palm Beach. We contemplated camping at the Georgia camp site that had been rained out on the way in, but when we got to the exit for it, it was raining. Again. So instead, we stopped in Savannah. Lots of people have told me how nice Savannah is. And the historic part is awfully pretty. But, it became quickly apparent that everyone had failed to mention that the historic part is surrounded by many blocks of serious urban blight. It was a bit of a shock.

We stopped at a wacky flea market on the way out of town, browsed and browsed. Mr. P picked up a couple of neat things, we saw other neat things we couldn't afford, and then we skidaddled on out and headed home to the Mr. Tibbs welcoming committee.

And then there were so many emails in my box it has taken me a week to get through them. Sigh.

New Art!

We've got new art!

Mr. P's gift for Valentine's Day this year was a new piece of art! A fabu, eight foot painting. Eight foot = logistical problem, so it took a while for him to find a way to get it home. He put it up this weekend! Yeay! I love it-- and he's delighted that it can be seen from the street :)

Meanwhile, kitty is loving the view out the door....

The Unbearable Cuteness of Being

The boys took a nap.....

irresistable, no?

Whole Lotta Love

A picture from Mr. P's and my first date. Even more appropriate than I'd realized at the time.

Same first date, this time moonwalking. Mind you, our first date involved me flying to California, driving to Arizona, four days in the desert, and an Art Car party on the Mexican border. Best. First. Date. Evah.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Whizzzzzing by

I was trying to make a picture of Mr. P and Mr. Tibbs, but Mr. P was feeling uncooperative, so this is what I got. It is, however, a painfully accurate rendering of what life is for both me and Mr. P at the moment. We are both kind of ready to get off the roller coaster. Life for Mr. Tibbs, however, has not changed. It is still mostly like this:

On the upside, many of the things that are making life a blur at the moment are good. Sadly, not all, but for the most part those will pass. Not soon enough, mind, but they are temporary. Or that's what I tell myself....

Happy birthday!

Today is Mr. P's birthday, so I made him chocolate pie with homemade whipped cream. Yum!

I just love that man :)

Anniversary! And things that kind of suck

Today is our anniversary, and I am soooo happy to have the super awesome Mr. P in my life, and to have had him as a husband for three years. Has it already been three years?! I can't even remember life in the pre-Mr. P period, and that's just fine.

Here are things that, today, came to my attention as being suck-a-licious:

1) The police in Richmond are completely useless. I knew this already, and it is never a surprise when I witness them being useless, it's just that often when they are being useless it produces a scenario of great inconvenience. For whomever might end up being collateral damage in whatever piece of poorly executed theater is going on. I do hope to get through my time here without any actual need for the police, at which point one assumes that inconvenience and annoyance would be ratcheted up about eleventy thousand percent.

This morning I came up the Cary Street exit off 195. Cary street was blocked, but not at the corner, not at a place where one could see that it was blocked off until they had committed themselves to the turn, and had missed out on the opportunity to completely avoid the blockade across Cary by going straight. This in addition to the ridiculous one way street system that they have going on, and you have a goat rodeo in the Ukrops/Martins parking lot. Someone needed to a) divert traffic on to a STREET-- an option were one to do so at the corner, rather than assuming that everyone will simply slip through the parking lot, and b) start, you know, directing traffic. The blockade had an actual reason (for once)-- some building was on fire on the next block, smoking away in the distance. But fires are the purview of firemen and firewomen. Traffic diversion? This is the po-po. Which is why, when I was inching up to the half hour mark trapped in the Ukrops parking lot watching the authorites chow down on donuts in the middle of blockaded Cary Street while we all sat there waiting for salvation, I became Really, Really, Annoyed. 

b) The next thing that sucks is when you have a recollection of having completed your homework but for that one nagging question, only to discover that you had written out all the formulas in longhand, but had failed to take the next, crucial step of typing them into your homework assignment. My zipping of the data through SPSS and bob's your uncle homework assignment just got way longer, and I have no one but myself to blame. Le Sigh.

c) When it is your anniversary and your husband is in class until ten of the pm. :( Sad clown. Perhaps we can celebrate this weekend on the third anniversary of our being married for, like, five days.

On the upside, we're going to see Built to Spill this weekend, which I'm pretty psyched about, and then going to visit friends and their brand spanking new sprog, just home from the hospital. Looking forward to it!