BIG NEWS

Yes... I'm moving! To D.C.! I've accepted a job at a beautiful non-profit organization, and I am so excited. I'm very hopeful that it will help me to build a career, doing work that finally fits who I am and who I want to be.

I know. I'm so lucky to have a chance to do work that, I think, will contribute to my enjoyment of life, and maybe even, in some small capacity, others' joy as well.

So I went out for a little Thai food in celebration of my impending D.C. adventure, and when I tried to take a picture of the volcanodumplings, this happened:

Coincidence?! Well, maybe.

So I may have written "KAZAAM" on there, but the lightning bolt of wonderful, electric, life-change just... struck. I thought it was funny, and fitting, since I'm kind of hoping that's what this news will do to mine.

WAFFLES AND LIGHT

...But not light waffles.

We added zizzed-up oats! I liked the flavor it added to the waffles, but I think we still have a few steps past buttermilk to get the Ultimate Crispy Waffle.

The packaging said the bacon small pork chops were a special, inherited Bavarian recipe.

I don't know if I buy into that, but they were very satisfying to eat.

(Had to get a glamour shot of Mrs. B...)

Actually, it was a pretty glamorous breakfast because we had mimosas, too. Everyone knows that Asti + Mrs. Butterworth's = unparalleled dining refinement.

Even though I grew up in Central NY where there is no dearth of good, real maple syrup, I might still prefer the fake stuff... Like when it comes to peanut butter, I just don't want to choose the healthier, more mature option.

Despite the mostly cold, gray skies, that harsh kind of winter light reflecting off of last night's snow flurries infused some of my photographs with this fuzzy glow (see bacon above).

It made everything seem a little bit warmer. (Thanks guys!)

GOOD MORNING

Do you ever get so SO excited about things that other smart, curious, creative people are doing in the world that you think your whole being might explode?

Well, I do sometimes.

It's the projects that excite me because they are just brilliantly delightful, or subtle, or honest, or complicated. It's work like this, and explorations like this, or reflections like this!

It probably sounds like I'm exaggerating but I promise I'm not. An almost-explosion is just the most accurate description I could think of to explain how intensely I perceive - in all of the cells of my body - joy and beauty and importance in humanly experienced phenomena as they are observed, connected, painted, sung, questioned.

Usually it's just a fleeting sensation, but it makes me feel giddy with optimism and then immediately afterwards somewhat melancholy. Because I'm not right-in-this-moment doing something equally awesome, even though I want to be.

It's about exploring the things of our existence that we know well, like our scars and our favorite foods, or not so well, like, say, why owning a couch is so important, because we just haven't taken the time to think about them yet.

I think this is why I entered into a graduate program in Ethnomusicology. It's why I love to listen to NPR programs. It's why listening to a lecture about whale songs could make me cry. (This isn't it but she is incredible.)

A lot of the time, these moments seem to coincide with sunny days.

Sunshine makes it so much easier for me to recognize the world as one, big, marvelous sphere for all kinds of opportunities.

Actually, these reactions to explorations of human life feel kind of like a sharp, glinted ray of sunlight. They are bright, and lovely, and fleeting.

It reminds me of how I used to feel every morning as a kid. When I woke up I was excited to start the day, as if something had spiked my adrenaline.

Sunshine is a good catalyst.

And so is coffee.

This is the soundtrack: "Everything is Everything," Lauryn Hill, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

LOOKS LIKE THEY DIMMED THE LIGHTS

These pictures are super edited... but, doesn't everything sort of become edited when they dim the lights as you down the libations? Shapes may shift and objects may blur - my argument is that your surroundings are probably being filtered out anyways. (So this is how I'm making up for the limitations of my camera and my camera-knowledge when it comes to low light situations.)

I had a great happy hour with some great girls -

which ended perfectly when a favorite song came on the radio as we all drove off in our separate directions.

I'm sorry I didn't get a good picture of you, M! But I am glad we got to share a galway hooker. See also: what they're really talking about when they throw "galway hooker" on the menu at Claddagh .

TO MAKE BREAD IS LOVE.

Once an unexpected acquaintance said these words to me, in a very unexpected setting. I don't think I'll ever forget them.

It happened when, for 18 hours, I ended up on an island for an alternative lifestyle retreat... of sorts. After a bus-ferry-van-boat ride, I landed with a group of study abroad friends at the Praia do Coqueiro.

As we neared the beach, the moon and the sun sat across from each other in the sky. In the lingering sunlight, and the growing light of the moon, I saw the people on the beach start to greet us from afar, jumping and dancing arm in arm. A woman on our boat kept yelling, "My Family! My Family!" There were lots of introductions. People on the beach were from Italy, Israel, Brazil, Spain.

I had inadvertently entered into a Rainbow.

I suppose I had a number of different visceral reactions to the situation. (Thanks to my journal, I can tell you that "other people also like to howl at the moon," and "english is more universal than I realized --> so is being a hippie" were two of them.)

Anyways, there eventually came a tour of the education/entertainment tent wreathed in peace flags, the sleeping area, the bathing stream, the communal pantry. As we wandered through we met a man from Israel, who sat - free of all clothing except for the minimal protection afforded by a swath of fur - carefully baking flatbread over a pile of coals in the sand.

I don't remember his name, but I do remember this: some time later a few of the "family" were kicking around a soccer ball under the light of the now full moon. Suddenly the Israeli baker arrived, (this time, thwarted by neither pants nor fur-swath). He joined right into the game, compelling someone to ask, "Aren't you tired? You've been baking bread all day!"

"No," he said. "Fazer pão é amor!"

He may not have said it with the verve I'd like to associate with such a bizarrely profound utterance. Perhaps his words carried more weight for me because the whole experience was like visiting an alternate universe, in a lot of ways. Still, I think about what he said every now and then. And when I make bread, I like to think that in a way, it is love.

The bread he made was absolutely delicious.

This weekend I decided to make focaccia for the first time. The gentlemen at Hot Knives make every recipe seem pretty badass - "Our Friend: Focaccia" included. If you have a whole day to spend at home, make this. My only regret is that I didn't eat it right out of the oven.

Mise en place, they said, is important. This is not my forte...

Getting my paws dirty, however,

and resting, I can do.

It's a beautiful thing, no?



P.S. - You can tell by the different types of light in my pictures that this whole focaccia-journey can take you through an entire afternoon/evening into the morning.

America loves BEFORE and AFTER. Right??

Me too. I love BEFORE and AFTER specials! They're so satisfying. Maybe I have a thing about watching people and places as they're sculpted or cleaned into tidier, sleeker, shinier versions. (Hopefully I'm not this bad, but still, he's pretty amazing...)

I think it's partly the satisfaction of watching something or someone be reformed. But it's also feeling like you've been let in on a secret, on someone's most private life. It's comforting to know that other people are also flawed, and sometimes, desperately in need of help to improve some area of their life. It's sort of like finally getting to see behind the public veneer of that really-put-together person, into their terrifyingly messy closet after it has exploded into an entire room!

The shame! The horror! The delight! It's a distinctly guilty pleasure. And I think it wins us all over in the end because BEFORE/AFTERs always have a happy ending.

So, in honor of the peculiar guilty pleasure that is BEFORE and AFTER, here's one of my (small) happy endings.



BEFORE:

DURING:

I was even patient and methodical and I washed my new, squat little containers first.

AFTER!

All my ducks in a row... No bags, less mess, more beauty. These have lovely wide mouths that you can actually fit a measuring spoon into! But, I wanted better light for my pictures. So I waited. And then I waited too long, and my battery was dead. So I had to use my old camera to capture the brief moment of golden sunshine that so brilliantly surprised me on Sunday afternoon.

Thanks to Smitten Kitchen for providing a better-spice-storage model! I guess you're supposed to store them somewhere that's not directly in the sun. That's the next step. (And thanks to my very dirty window sill for presenting another area for improvement...)