October 2002 Archives

Arianna Huffington wrote a column suggesting an add campaign to sabotage the Bush "War on Conservation". Apparently there was overwhelming response to this idea and there is now a non-profit fund where you can donate towards creating and airing these commercials. If you think the fact that car fuel economy has steadily worsened over the years is not necessarily a good thing and you like the idea of increased fuel efficiency, please support this non-profit cause.

Over the weekend, we (although - let's face it - it's mostly my toys) have greatly increased the gadgetry in our kitchen. Using my bread making as an excuse, I purchased the cool glass/chrome digital kitchen scale that I placed on our wedding registry full of hope, only to be disappointed. I think this is the third scale I have purchased since living on my own, and it is by far the best - I love the accuracy, being able to switch between metric and english units and the fact that you can reset the tare after each ingredient is added. Of course, browsing around today I discovered another one that has metric/english conversion for volume. That's OK, though, since mine looks cooler.

We also finally managed to find the extra 4.5qt bowl for our mixer. Although BBB has it on their site, they do not carry it in the store. Luckily Linnens'n Things had it in their store and they take BBB's 20% Off coupons (which, BTW, never expire).

And then Meredith O and family gave us a very cool and vicious looking herb chopper. It reminds me of those hopper thingies with rotating blades that damsels-in-distress-/James Bond in 007 flicks get pulled to on an conveyor belt only to be rescued/free themselves at the last moment. Needles to say, I'll get to play the villain to some parsley the first chance I get.

It's totally unlike me, but I actually already have a Christmas gift for Jennifer. And it's totally kick-as. She's going to love it, I tell ya, LOVE IT! And I've had it for a while, too.

OK, now that the pressure is on for her to reciprocate, I need to mention that her birthday gift may or may not arrive on time. That's the bane when you get stuff from halfway around the world.

Jennifer's birthday is coming up and I keep forgetting the things she mentions she might be interested in. Luckily, she wrote that she's in the need of a shawl to complement her outfit for her company's Christmas party.

So I headed over to NOVICA and found a very nice Pashmina shawl from India. I only hope that it will get here in time for her birthday - and she does not buy something before then herself. Also, since this thing is shipped directly from India, it's not returnable, so I really hope she likes it and that it doesn't clash too much with her dress (orange and pink, hmm...)

We spent most of Saturday getting ready for our Pumpkin Carving Party, baking 80 bread sticks and preparing dough for bread ghosts, cooking my potato mushroom soup and prepping for Jennifer's beef stew. Jennifer got up early on Sunday to get the crock pots started with the stew. She then went to church, only to promptly return for another quick nap before church stated for real - another victim of the DST time change.

On Sunday I finished the breads and we managed to get the kitchen and house look presentable by the time everyone showed up. And pretty much everyone did show up - we packed about 30 people into the house (a third of which we kids). All in all, there were about 20 carved pumpkins by the time everyone left. My favorite pumpkin was Luciana's devil (right most in this picture). The spookiest photo is the O'Reilly Family pumpkin - the spider web and the black-lighted masonry in the background give it the right gothic tone. Jennifer and I didn't really have too much time for carving - we may do some pumpkin prep work before the party next time. Her pumpkin is the one on bottom left and mine is the one between the scorpion and snake in this picture.

I read in the paper that King Arthur Flour is having free bread baking classes in Austin. I'll need to remember to go to the one in Round Rock which is closest to work. It would be nice to talk to someone about my flour "needs" - my Czech recipes call for coarsly ground flour you can't get at the store here, and my Swiss bread recipe book lists so many flour variants it's simply confusing. They probably don't cary what I need, but I hope someone will point me in the right direction.

Since I'll be baking bread this Saturday and Sunday for our pumpkin carving party, so that may bring up other questions as well.

As Kat has noted in her blog, Madrigal Dinner has merchandise for sale online this year. It's actually a good idea for them, especially since CafeShops makes it so easy.
Browsing around through their selection, I noticed my picture on a lunch box! Yea, the fame! Boo for using my photographs without acknowledgment or asking permission - not to mention checking with people in the photographs :-(
I don't really mind the usage or being a model and I doubt anyone will be actually buying the lunch box, but still...

Jennifer and my tastes in many things - be it art, furniture or the color of our walls, is often quite divergent. A local artist that we both like is Maria Lyle. We have admired her paintings when they were on the walls of a local cafe. As it turns out, Maria lives in the neighborhood and we run into her occasionally in the park with her dogs. I had been thinking about getting one of her paintings for Jennifer, but had never actually done that.

Jennifer, on the other hand, had a brilliant idea. As her wedding gift to me, she decided to commission Maria to paint our "family". It was a well kept secret, although the first time we ran into Maria after Jennifer initially called her, she made some comments that could have given it away, if I had not been so clue less. Jennifer also had a Polaroid of the painting in our wedding binder, but I luckily managed to stay away from that organizer. Also, everyone at her work knew about it and the painting spent some time sitting wrapped in her office but I never noticed it.

Jennifer didn't actually hand over the painting to me. Instead, she set it up in the Bed and Breakfast room that we were staying in. When we walked in after the reception, tired, sweaty and exhausted I looked around at the safari decor and then noticed the paining leaning against a table. "Hey, that looks like one of Maria's paintings" I said, and then the it dawned on me: man, woman, dog!

I really love this painting. This type of chalk piece is my favorite of Maria's styles. The best thing about it is that it's the perfect snapshot of where Jennifer and I are at this point in our lives. It's me and her and Homer - our little family. Years down the road we'll hopefully have children and there will be a time without Homer or with other pets, but this painting will always remind us of how our lives were when we were getting married.

Jennifer's sister Meredith has been a semi professional artist ever since finishing college. She has made her living off and on acting and singing on stage and is currently pursuing her dream in New York. She apparently had been thinking about a creative gift for us for a long time but only recently had the right inspiration. As her wedding gift she wrote us a very personal wedding song, had one friend compose the melody for it and then sang and recorded it at another friend's studio who, pretty much on the spot, arranged it for three guitars and also recorded three tracks of him playing the instruments. Wow!

She played her song for us when she arrived on Thursday before the wedding. Since the song has a lovely waltz tune, we promptly decided to make it our wedding dance. The lyrics really describe Jennifer and mine relationship very well, from our original meeting as friends, which we do not remember, through our continuing friendship and dancing, to our "dancing forever" together.

Meredith may try to sell the song to some recording artist (probably country). If she is successful, we would get to hear our song on the radio and might end up as a trivia foot note on some fan site. Plus we might even get a cut of the royalties!

My bothers' artistic talents are of the musical kind and piano is his tool. He is part of a jazz band in Switzerland and also has the occasional piano gig as an accompanist. If we hadn't found musicians for the ceremony, he was going to play before the wedding started (luckily it did not have to come to that, since he probably would have been a little rusty). After his compulsory military service this spring, he went on a 6 weeks back packing trip to Latin America with a school friend. Dominik and Remo spent some quality time in Peru, Ecuador and on the Galapagos Islands before arriving in Texas.

As his wedding gift, Dominik brought us an oil painting he bought in Peru (no doubt a few days before coming here). He gave it to us on the Wednesday before the wedding as soon as he arrived in Austin. I was very impressed that this fairly large painting survived the trip unscathed. The painting, depicting an anonymous group of traditional women from behind, is an example of a common theme in Peruvian art. This particular painting has a cubist element to it and we think it will look wonderful over our fireplace as soon as we get it framed.

My mom inherited the artistic knack from my grandfather and is always involved in some sort of craft project. Over the years she has worked in many different styles, but the last couple of years it has been stained glass. She meets regularly with some other people and they create stained glass stuff - mostly small items they sell at the church bazaar, but she also makes larger and more complex pieces. Last Christmas I sent her some patterns I found at Cathedral Stained Glass and then took her to the store when she was here for the wedding. She was like a kid in a candy store (and my dad was decidedly bored and ready to bolt).

My mom emailed me a few months before the wedding asking for suggestions about what she could give her future daughter in law as a wedding present. I wasn't very helpful but did mention that Jennifer would enjoy something hand made from her. Mom then sent me a photo of an icon she had framed with stained glass for my dad. I told her something like this would be a perfect gift since Jennifer likes religious images, I like Russian icons and we both like mom's work.

Mom tracked down the picture she wanted to frame, a traditional Mother and Child painting. It's actually a print of an icon (might be from a calendar) painted by Dan Siluan (a kriminal turned icon painting monk) based on the 12th century icon Vladimir Mother of God. Mom designed and built a lovely stained glass frame that incorporates and continues Mary's halo from the picture.

She gave Jennifer the picture on the same day we received grandfather's relief. For me she created a beautiful photo album consisting of photos from my first day at home in Prague (about seven days old) through my last evening in Switzerland before leaving for America (age 17).

My grandfather was an artist and artisan who worked in all sorts of mediums. He used to build us large and elaborate kites, painted with brilliant acrylic paints - they'd look wonderful but didn't fly all that well.

When my mom asked what we would like as a wedding present, I said I really would like to have something that my grandfather had made. My mom looked around and sent me several options from which I should pick (obviously it would have to be something they could bring on the plane). The pieces included an abstract unfinished plaster statue of a reclining nude, a wooden marionette, a carved cuckoo clock and a plaster relief of a woman. The choice was quite difficult. We don't have any statues in the house yet and the one mom suggested was very "early Picasso". Wooden marionettes really are a trademark of my grand father's work and something that I and everyone who knew him identifies him by. The cuckoo clock used to hang (and I assume still does) in our house in Switzerland, so it would have been a reminder of that as well. And the relief reminded me of a much larger three-piece relief ("Grape Harvest") that used to hang on the wall in our apartment in Prague. Eventually, Jennifer and I decided on the relief, since we both liked it and it will look good in the house.

My mom gave it to us on the Saturday they arrived in Dallas. The relief is actually quite small, just about 12" wide and I am not sure what the five stars are supposed to symbolize. From the signature on the piece says P.F. 1945 VITEK J. Grandpa might have made it for (or around) New Year's 1945. That's the year that WWII ended as well as the same year my mom was born. I think my grandparents were in their early 30s around that time and would have already had two small daughters in war torn Prague.

In our house, most of the walls have something on them, be it prints, photographs, framed posters or paintings. Most of the paintings are lithographs, although we did have some original drawings. Of course, most of my "originals" are of the inexpensive kind, costing less than the frames that I had them framed in. Still, some, like the abstract piece I bought at an Art From The Streets event, are really neat. During our wedding, however, our original art "collection" grew dramatically. Not only do these pieces look (and sound!) really great, but they will remain dear to us because of the people and the circumstances in which we received them from. I'm going to describe these pieces in the order we received them.

Halloween is coming up and I just sent out invitations to our Annual Pumpkin Carving party. It's going to be our first "married" hosting event, so it's kinda exciting. We already have replies for over 20 attendees (many of which are small children) so I'm sure our house is going to turn into another zoo - I guess the wedding was not enough.

When I started having the Pumpkin parties (four or five years ago?), I only knew a few people with kids and those were just babies, so it was more of an adult thing. Now all but a couple of the old-timers have families and some of the kids now actually participate in the creative process (as opposed to just spreading pumpkin guts across the carpet). I rather wish our house were bigger so that we could invite some more kid-less friends, because right now we're almost at capacity. We already have two more families in mind that we want to invite next year and the current crop will have probably sprouted some more rug rats.

It looks like this is going to end up being a with-kids only event. So, if you want a future invitation to a Riha Pumpkin Carving Bash you better start procreating - and hope that we have a bigger place when the time comes.

We're back in Austin and busy at work (recuperating from the wedding and honeymoon). We had a blast, both at the wedding as well as spending a week with our families in Arkansas. Over this week, I'm going to retroactively blog both here as well as in the wedding blog. After we send off our last thank you note, I'll stop the wedding blog - we'll see if that happens this year or next.

In the meantime, I have finally brought my online photo album up to date with pictures from the Cinco Ranch Triathlon, our trip to Arkansas, our stay at Hot Springs, the visit to Hurricane River Cavern, the long hike along the Buffalo River, our trip back to Texas and finally saying Goodbye at the airport. It's nice to have the camera back...

In ten minutes I'll be heading to the church to get ready to be married. Unlike yesterday, today was quite relaxing. We finished the things we still needed to get done and I even had some free time to take Homer for a short walk. Quiet time without worries felt very good.

So in about three or so hours I'll be married to Jennifer. Once the ceremony is over and the pictures are taken it's gonna be party time and then peaceful rest. I can't wait for both!

I have some many things to write down that I don't want to forget, but I'm just too busy. Last night I woke up in the middle of the night and started stressing about the wedding and had a hard time falling back asleep - something that never happens to me. It was better after I got up in the morning and Jennifer was back home. She had her own little stress attack this evening. I am so glad that I have absolutely no qualms about getting married to her - it's the thought of us being together after this weekend is over what makes all the worries and last minute preparations and emergencies endurable. If you happen to have called in the last couple of days and I seemed a bit rude, please understand that it's nothing personal.