October 2005 Archives
Our Pumpkin Carving Party was pretty successfull. The turnout was lower than usualy, partly due to our late anoucements. This means that I'll be brownbagging my soup for lunch for pretty much the entire week. I'll need to remember to have it on Sunday next year -- waiting until after standard time returns would allow me to take better pumpkin pictures before people left. I forgot to take picts during most of the party, so I only have a few of the finished creations.
Once again, I put off coming up with a pattern until the last minute and so did mine freehand. I based it on Magda's toothy grin, but it looks a bit like an offensive WWII caricature... While surfing for inspiration, I came across Villafane Studios -- now that's pumpkin carving!
We spent Halloween at home, handing out candy to kids in cute costumes and, later, to pretty much anyone who'd ring the door bell. Jennifer created Magda's costume from a Statue of Liberty hat she got her in New York and from an old T-Shirt of mine. The hat stayed on for less than a minute, but Magda had a blast playing with it, none the less.
It's that time of the year -- our annual Pumpkin Carving Party is rapidly approaching! We've managed to finish the first task, the annual making of the Gingerbread Skeletons. This year, I decided to branch out and use some other shapes. So we now have Gingerbread Ghosts and Gingerbread Bones (thanks to a doggie treat cookie cutter I found in the pantry).
These cookies are very involved, I made the dough on Saturday, spent several hours baking them on Sunday and then we decorated all 190 (hundred-frigging-ninety!) of them last night. I thought the recipe made 50 cookies, so I always double it. Maybe I rolled 'em out thinner this time or I have the magic touch, but we got almost twice as many. That's not a problem, though. They keep forever (I've discovered lost gingerbread Christmas cookies the next July and they were still good), but they usually disappear pretty fast. And they'll make great party gifts.
Last night, the phone rang and I got to listen to the recorded message from the folks at Save Texas Marriage. I find their approach quite amusing -- they probably actually have a point about the wording of the proposed amendment, but I have a hard time seeing a Texas judge interpret it literaly. Beside, the reason I'm against the amendment is not because I feel that my marriage would become invalid.
On the other hand, the Families Matter video from No Nonsense in November exactly expresses how I feel about the issue. The proposed amendment would encode discrimination into Texas' Bill of Rights without making gay marriage in Texas any more illegal than it already is. The amendment is not about defining what the term "marriage" means -- it's about preventing any sort of benefits that many of us take for granted (domestic partner insurance, for example).
In my view, the whole protecting the "sanctity of marriage" is pure BS and hypocrisy. I don't see how two commited people marrying would affect my marriage in one way or another -- except maybe as a positive example of mutual and lifelong devotion. How many of the vocal advocates of the amendment are on their 2nd and 3rd marriages? I betcha there are quite a few and I doubt that many of those breakups were caused by some random gay couples trying to make their lives together.
Magda has had a full head of hair since pretty much her birth and it only keeps getting longer. Grandma Rita trimmed her bangs a couple of times, but not really noticeably, and the hair keeps falling into Magda's eyes, as this picture from a week ago shows.
We decided to trim her bangs a bit more. I figured it couldn't be all that hard -- Rita can do it and my mom used to do it, so why not us? We sat Magda into her highchair in the kitchen (cutting hair over carpet would be pretty inane) and set to work. Except, it wasn't easy at all. Magda kept wriggling, I couldn't pick up her bangs with a comb and was afraid to get close to her face with scissors (not that we have hair-cutting scissors). So I decided to use my beard trimmer.
Well, the wriggling continued and I only managed to hit her bangs twice before Jennifer recoilled in horror and Magda got too cranky to continue. Magda now looks like some war refugees with her partially cut, short uneven bangs. But they stay out of her eyes and she still looks cute as hell. I'm not sure that Jennifer will ever let me try this again.
P.S. I've finally started using my Flickr account again, since I recently discovered the pretty cool iPhoto Flickr Exporter.
On Wednesday night, Rose graduated from her 8 week obedience class at PetSmart. All of us, including Magda and Rose, enjoyed the class. As usual, obedience classes are more about training the owner than the pet, and I think Jennifer and I learned at least as much as Rose did. We'll just need to keep up with her training and not slack off.
Rose has become a much better behaved dog over the months. Partly that's due to the fact that she's losing some of her puppishness, but also because she now knows what's expected of her. This morning I took her on her walk just using her collar instead of the Halti and she hardly pulled at all. She's also turned into a great frisbee catcher and I got her a new Hover Craft for graduation.
Magda is as fascinated with the dogs as ever, but we've succesfully managed to direct most of her displays of affection at Rose and away from Homer. It's not uncommon for Magda to crawl to the dog and give her a kiss -- on her head or nose or butt -- and then to receive a tongue bath in return. Today in the kitchen, Rose was sprawled in Magda's way so Magda simply crawled over her. I don't think Rose even bothered to open one of her eyes.
Jennifer already blogged about Magda's 1st Birthday, so I won't be repeating myself. We had a good time with good company, but while the cake Jfer made was tasy, it was too healthy to be worthy of a Birthday (just IMHO) and I'm planning to do bake something more sinful next year.
The best part of the Birthday weekend, as far as I am concerned, was that Grandma Rita came to visit and allowed Jennifer and me to have two dates by ourselves!
On Sunday, we got to take off to the movies to see Serenity. Whenever Jfer goes out of town, I usually catch a flick, but this was the first time for her to the movies since Magda was born (not counting a couple of Crying Babies Tuesday's at The Alamo). It was a bit surreal -- we used to go see movies on an almost weekly basis, and being there again seemed strangely familiar yet I fell "out of practice". Anyway, as expected Serenity kicked butt. BTW, while the movie stands on its own, I'd recomend people to see the Firefly series, first. It makes the movie more engrossing and the ending more shocking.
On Monday night, Jennifer and I got to go out again, this time to see Il Travatore at the Austin Lyric Opera. It was a good enough performance -- but while I know it shouldn't matter, the lead soprano just didn't look the part of someone two guys would obsess about so much. An unusual part was the staging -- a very minimalist raised stage with a couple of stairs and some creative lighting of the background. The ALO stages are usually quite involved, but the one they were going to use for this piece came from the New Orleans Opera and got damanged by Katrina. I definitely liked what they ended up doing, though.
Before the opera, Jfer and I did appetizers and drinks at Reed's Jazz & Supper Club. The drinks were fine, but I was disappointed by the food -- I'd eaten there much better before. Jennifer and I decided that next time we go for pre-opera snacks, it'll involve caffeine instead of alcohol so that both of us stay awake during the show...
I've actually managed to read a couple of books not assigned by my book group. I really enjoyed the most recent one, The Paradox Of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz. It's a fascinating analysis of how the many choices that we face -- from the number of cereal brands to careers and life styles -- limit our ability to enjoy the ones we make.
Schwartz categorizes people into "maximizers" -- for whom only the best will do -- and "satisfizers" -- who stop looking for other choices when they find something that's "good enough". While the former group may end up making more "optimal" choices, they tend to spend an inordinate amount of time seeking the perfect thing and are then less satisfied with it because, subconciously, they know they could have found something event better if they had looked longer and harder. Like most people, I'm a maximizer in on some things (gadgets and such) and a satisfizer on others (cloths, for example).
So what's the problem with too many choices? Schwartz says that each additional choice we examine, makes our ultimate pick a little less desireable because it will lack some aspect of the new choice. I can completely relate to that. When I was buying my digital SLR a couple of years ago, there really only was only one choice in my price range so it was a no brainer and there was no buyer's remorse. When I was getting Jennifer a small digital camera for Christmas last year, the number of brands, models and features was overwhelming. I took a lot of time examining different cameras, deciding which were more important in size, resolution, price, speed, zoom size, manual control and many more aspects. I got her a great cameras, but I had looked at others that were smaller, with greater resolution, cheaper, faster, better zoom, with more controls, etc. -- of course, none of these in a single camera.
The Paradox of Choice is not a "self help" book -- and is not intended as such. But I think that being aware of how we make choices, about opportunity costs and regret, makes it easier to not get all hung up on things.
BTW, this is one of the reasons I like to shop at Costco. Sure, they have good stuff at reasonable prices, but more importantly, they usually only have one kind of a product, which takes a lot of the decision making out of your hands.
The lowly prune plum (prunus domestica) is a fruit I grew up with in the CSSR. These plums were easily available and fixture of Czech cuisine, playing an important role in many fruit dumplings, kolaches and, of course, slivovice. However, the typical and most Czech use for prune plums is in povidla, a plum stew that's used as jam on bread or as filling for cakes and kolaches.
Povidla is one of those things that you just don't find at the local HEB or even at Central Market or Whole Foods. You either smuggle it in from the CR or you make yourself. The problem is that prune plums seem very seasonal here, and only make a brief appearance in September. I missed out on buying some last year, but when I saw Costco carrying them in bulk a couple of weeks ago, I bought five pounds of them.
Now, true povidla are simply plums and nothing else. However, for that you'd need very ripe (or even over ripe) fruit, and the imported and chilled Italian Prune Plums I got a Costco hardly qualified. Luckily I found some recipes that included sugar and after letting the plums ripen as long as possible at home, I pureed them, added the sugar and lemon juice and boiled the heck out of them, reducing them to what looks and tastes like real povidla (it's got to have the texture and appearance of old axle grease).
I ended up canning two jars of that stuff and recently opened one of them to use in a gingerbread I made. It turned out quite good and I plan to make a bunch more next year around.
It was three years ago, following a stressful week of last minute preparations, that Jennifer and I tied the knot. I guess I really don't have a very good sense of passage of time -- it feels like we've married forever. But I still sometimes startle when I hear myself refering to her as "my wife". I guess I just think of her as "my Jennifer".
I have the same issue with Magda, who's turning one next Sunday. Whenever I see other people with small kids, I try to imagine what she's going to be like at that age. And I find it strange that when someone seems me with her they think of us as "father with daughter".
I dunno -- somehow I feel like one needs to be all grown up before being married and having a family and I still keep waiting for that sense of being grown up.
