recycling

i've always been a magazine junkie. always. there was that notorious car & driver subscription at 10, archaeology at 11, and let us not neglect teen, to which i subsribed long before i actually became one and wised up to the fact that bubblegum pink was not the most sophisticated of lipstick hues.

this periodical obsession has continued into adulthood, reaching its apogee (or perhaps its nadir) a couple of years ago, when i held subsriptions to two weeklies and something like five monthlies. ludicrous. the amount of trees consumed to feed my addiction was no doubt obscene. so i've scaled back. just the essentials. new yorker. domino. martha stewart (yes, she IS essential). and now, a mystery subscription to house beautiful that i myself did not place and will soon be canceling.

of course this doesn't mean my obsession has waned, just my personal investment therein (and that of the world's lumber supply). fortunately, i have hit upon something of a solution, one which exploits my packrat tendencies - i've started rereading all of the magazines i've saved over the past five or so years. and wouldn't you know it, it's like i've never cracked them open before.

i've been methodically working through the back issues of martha in particular, combing them for recipes to try, a list of which i now keep in my recipe notebook (which sounds more anal than it is). on saturday, abbs came over for lunch in the garden before we went to see "candida" at everyman.

i sprung no fewer than three new recipes on her: a warm spring salad with poached egg, bacon and peas; a potato and tomato galette (for which i inaugurated my mandoline) with fresh sage from the garden; and watermelon, blueberries and strawberries with feta and cracked black pepper. i served d the same when he got home from germany on sunday (yay), and added a peach and raspberry crumble that wasn't the biggest success (the topping was more crumb than crumble).

oh well. at least the garden is thriving, especially with all the rain we're having. the coleus in particular have probably doubled in size since i took this shot a couple of weeks ago. those things are off the hook.

in more exciting news, my friend melissa recently hosted a radio program in l.a., interviewing a prominent gay priest and one of my favorite essayists, anne lamott. you can listen to it here:
http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media/player/kpcc/news/shows/zocalo/2006/06/20060611_zocalo

appreciation

sometimes i have to remind myself that we live a very good life. like when i'm caught in the throes of kitchen envy at someone else's house, or we're confronted with evidence of yet another rodent invasion. drew would be the first to point out that i tend to lose perspective quickly in such situations, and make as if life were a pure, relentless hell of my own making.

but a lot of the time, i'm too busy living our good life to need to be reminded of it. such has been the case over the last couple of weeks. to wit:

• celebrated my birthday in unexpectedly high style - when drew surprised me with a birthday overnight in st. michaels, md - and comically low style - at medieval times, with 16 friends and family members
• had a gorgeous dinner with my center stage friends at indebleu in dc - indian fusion yum
• had a lovely visit with my mama, godmother and other friends at my mom's the sunday after my birthday
• discovered a new band, tapes n' tapes, thanks to sarah and jeff, who came over for steamed dumplings and tofu (better than it sounds) eaten al fresco before we went to see tapes n' tapes at fletcher's last thursday
• had a dinner and movie date with my st. john's friend shannon and her husband david as a send-off before they move to philly. before we went to see "cars" (completely charming), they came over for dinner - i made a "cauliflower puff" from a recipe found in the baltimore sun and it was so divine, like a creamy frittata, served with roasted asparagus, peppers and new potatoes and a green salad. shannon and david brought an insane tiramisu from whole foods for dessert, and a lovely bottle of pinot grigio. we again ate outside - the garden continues apace, though still smelly, thanks to our neighbors, but that may change, as they've recently come under the scrutiny of child services. we've also recently had a hose incident, as in someone amputated the end of ours and stole the spray attachment. very curious.
• i had six days off of work, because macy's 'rents were in germany and she was staying with her grandparents. i missed her, but loved puttering around the house, getting projects done, or at least started.

and that just skims the surface. to be sure, there are things that are, to varying degrees, not grand. loved ones sick, ongoing war, drew leaving for a week to go to germany (grand for him, of course!) but once in a while, it's good to remember that life is, in the main, swell. at least for now.

look what i done made

Painted Pottery 013
Originally uploaded by na_praha.

i'm unduly proud of this platter and four bowls i handpainted (using a technique cribbed from martha stewart, on ikea 365+ dishware) for our friends katy and brad, who got married in hawaii on new year's day. they're having a baby in october, so i figured it was time to get on the ball with a wedding gift. very fun. i have almost no faculty for painting and drawing, but little dots turned out not to be that difficult. now i want to paint everything that's not nailed down.

the big three-oh

in honor of my birthday, i guess i might as well blog a bit. it's been a while since i've felt writerly, which is of course the case because now i actually have time to write. and it's not as if there hasn't been much grist for the mill, including sailing around the chesapeake for a couple of days with drew's parents and a wonderful surprise birthday dinner cooked up by becca, featuring crabcakes, corn pudding and chocolate fondue - really lovely. and this morning, another wonderful surprise - kim had made a nectarine breakfast cake with three candles for each decade i've been around, and she, joel and i enjoyed it with homemade lattes before she decamped for work. i am so lucky to have such delicious family and friends.

i share a birthday with someone who was perhaps a little less lucky. marilyn monroe would have been EIGHTY today. can you believe it? i knew we had the same birthday but didn't know we were exactly a half-century apart. not that that's really relevant to anything; it's more intriguing to think of what she might be like now if she had lived, whether she might have ever come to be happy with herself.

on a less pop-psychy note, my mom's old friend jon katz has an article in slate today about "grunt and grumble," the patois of rural america. his work is always wonderfully funny - he often writes about dogs and life on his upstate new york farm. my favorite story about jon is that he met his wife, paula span - also a writer - at a vietnam protest. he was playing a war victim on a gurney and she was playing a medic. classic.