n o d d y b o o m

for whatever reason, i could not fall asleep last night until after 1:30 am and was woken at the usual early hour, so i am not myself today.  i need a nap, but i resist it because there is ever so much to do always.  oh well.  one of these days i will learn to let go and give in, etc.

the kids are older now and we can toss a frisbee around at the park/beach/etc.  it's nice.  i had forgotten how nice.   i remember always loving the same simple game as a child.  there's something about finally learning to flick the wrist just right and make the *perfect* toss.  fun.  chris and i actually met through a group that used to play ultimate frisbee together.  i miss that.  rough game, ultimate frisbee (i saw quite a few fingers get broken during that one) but fun.  gets the blood moving.  we had to quit when marley was born, because it was impossible (you can't hold a baby in a sling and run around chasing frisbees).  and now those people have long since moved away and grown apart, etc.  it would be nice to get a group together again, though.  for that or something else.  community gathering is nice.  i will plant that seed in my mind somewhere.

chris was right about that picture not being to scale (the one i put together for the yard).  i went outside and measured everything and put a new one together and it looks something like this:

quite different.  as you can see, it was rather wishful thinking to stick that "shed" up there above the garage and the umbrella i was drooling over is absolutely enormous (octagon center right)!  hmmmm.  i omitted the picnic table from this drawing, because it's being reassembled and i didn't have the measurements.  but anyhoo, look how squished the seating area is up there near the fireplace!?  so sad.  i really hoped to put some sort of shelter up there.  i had a whole plan in my head about how great it would be for the kids, but honestly, it's not like they need it for goodness sake.   no,  i'm going to have to re-draw this the way chris was envisioning, with the fireplace in the corner and the seating arranged around it.  maybe there's some other way to create a "shelter" without actually having a shed.  i'll have to put my thinking cap on. those hedges up there are really bothering me (green rectangles top left).  look how much room they take up!  and the fact that there's nothing in the corner??  why in the world did we plan it that way years ago?  oh well.  maybe we can sqootch them around and get more creative.  we shall see.  oh, if only i had a forest in my backyard.  i wouldn't need any of this.  not that i "need" it either way, but a forest would certainly be a fantastic alternative to concrete.  that, or a farm.  ;)

july twenty-eight, 2008

i am completely obsessed with our yard at the moment.  we started re-doing the landscape design last year and then promptly ran out of money, right after we had torn out the playground equipment.  the kids were a little disappointed because we had discussed all these plans of creating the *perfect* environment for all of us, and really turning it into a kid-haven (in exchange for losing the swing set), but those plans quickly got shut down when the money ran dry.  oops.  but now we have money to spend again and so i am determined, after ten years of living in this house and having done little-to-not-much on the yard to finally make it as enjoyable as possible for all of us before we spend the money on something else and then not have any left for the yard.  again. 

we are trying to do this without a designer and i have a difficult time making up my mind about things, plus i'm picky, so this project is a bit of a challenge, but i think i'm finally closing in on something.

this is kind of what our back yard looks like right now.  there is a small pool over there to the right, that you could maybe play volleyball in, if you had a net, but that's about it.  it's more like a glorified jacuzzi, but too expensive to heat like you would a jacuzzi, and without bubbles, so it remains a dipping pool.  on the left is a raised "mystery area" over our garage.  we have never known what to do with it and so it has remained unused all these years.  i guess we could have thrown a couple of lawn chairs up there, but oh well.

anyway, i fidgeted around on illustrator (this is my first time doing something like this, i have no idea how to really use that program) and put together this sort-of chart of a new design/layout idea i'm toying with:
 

chris has pointed out that this is not to scale.  yes, indeed.  i have no idea how to make it "to scale", but i will try later on today.

i have to put it all here in my "journal" or i will forget everything i spent the last couple of days weeks figuring out, so bear with me and my craziness, please. 

we have an entirely hard-scaped back yard, which makes my dreams of having a huge organic garden pretty much impossible, at least in this house, but i aspire to do the best i can in pots.

the tour:

so...  that rectangle with the "ball chair" pic. in it (top left) in it is one of those modern sheds, that I thought the kids and i could share as an escape pod.  a destination point, up there, if you will.  a club house/cozy nook/possible painting area.  those circles to the right of it would be citrus trees and the three light green rectangles to the right of that would be these "food map containers" i found in the back of the latest edition of dwell magazine.  they're pretty cool.  recycled plastic containers on wheels, specifically for growing food and mobile, so you can move them where the sun is.  anyhoo, those would be what i would grow my organic edibles in. 

the three large dark green squares to the right of those would be apple trees that i could try to espaliate on the fence (not sure if it would work, considering they're in pots, but it's worth a shot).  to the left, back in front of the shed, is an orange couch (yet to be found) and two vintage metal chairs that i had powder-coated orange which would be surrounding a little table (yet to be found) adjacent to my dream fireplace (quite necessary for roasting marshmallows and such).  below the couch, the 5 small green circles represent pomegranate trees.  the four circles, both large and small, below that are all citrus trees (they seem to do well in my yard, unlike other things we have tried, like roses.  plus, they produce fruit).  below that is our orange picnic table (it used to be red.  we had the metal legs sand-blasted and then powder-coated orange and we're replacing the wood and painting it orange as well).  Below the table, the three squares are blueberry bushes with citrus trees on either side.  And to the right, those two light green circles would maybe be native grasses - not sure.  they currently house strawberry plants, but the kids have lost interest and they get attacked by rats and snails, mainly, so i think a change is in order.   I don't want anything too tall, because they're right in front of our den window and i need to be able to look out and see the kids in and around the mini-pool (big blue rectangle, upper right).  The green circle to the far right of that is another citrus.

i'm going to go measure the yard now and see if i can figure out how to make this more to scale and thus, see if any of it would really work.  chris isn't a fan of the shed idea up above, he just wants a fireplace and seating area, but i've always fantasized about a hide-out for both the kids and myself, so we'll see.  it's all just floating around in my brain at the moment trying to work itself out.  i warmly invite any suggestions from anyone who has an opinion on the matter.

have a happy day!

oh, p.s., that rectangle with the circle in it to the left of the orange picnic table is the would-be barbeque and those hexagon things are umbrellas.  just to clarify.  cheers!

p.p.s., may i just say that there are no truly great parks to go to with kids in los angeles and i am really feeling that, this summer?  i am having a very hard time coming up with cool outdoorsy things to do.  i mean, how many times can you go to temescal or to the incredibly crowded, public beach?  dammit, LA!!  how could you only dedicate 6% of your land to parks!  even new york dedicates 16% of its land to park land and has that incredible central park filled with wonderful places for kids to play.  sigh.  i wish ever so much that we had time to do a road trip up north to the redwoods, but alas, it's not looking like it's in the cards.  boo.  hoo. 

a typical ADD moment.

i can't find a library book.  i know we had it.  i can remember checking it out with the kids and wondering why they wanted that one, since we have the same one at home, but oh well. 

it's gone.  i can't find it anywhere and we're about to leave on vacation for two weeks and i wanted to return all the library books before we left.  it's nowhere to be found.  i ask our housekeeper to search the house for it while we're in colorado.  for two weeks she searches but can't find it.  we get home and i begin searching again.  i can't imagine where it must have gotten too.  i swear to devise a library book system so this won't happen again.  i show our housekeeper the copy of the book that we have, "eloise at christmastime", that's just like the library book.  i know the book i show her is ours - not the library's -  because it's signed.  i never have anything signed, but i did that day, because a friend of mine was going to get hers signed and she was raving about this book that i'd never read before and so i went to the signing. my friend never showed up,  but i waited in line anyway, and now i have all these eloise books inscribed by hilary knight.  anyway, we can't find the book.  so i go to the library and admit defeat.  no problem, the librarian says.  just buy a new copy to replace it.  fine.  i write down the title on a piece of paper and stick it in my purse.  how funny, i say to her.  we have "eloise at christmastime".  i wonder why they would make that and "eloise's christmas".  strange.  oh well, i hope it isn't an old edition, because the library wants me to replace the book with a NEW copy.  the librarian shrugs.  this morning i'm cleaning out my purse and i find the note with the title written on it.  oh yeah, i think, i'm supposed to replace this book.  so i go onto amazon to order it.  i type in the title that i've written on the piece of paper:  "madeline's christmas".  the picture of the cover pops up.  wow, i think, that looks completely different than the one we have...  wait a minute. 

bam.  i make the connection.  finally. 

this whole time we've been scouring the shelves for an eloise book and really, the book that was missing was "MADELINE's christmas".  and what's amazing is that the librarian didn't even catch it yesterday, not to mention the fact that i didn't catch it yesterday, even as i wrote down the title, "madeline's christmas".  i still thought i was searching for an eloise book.  isn't that amazing?  so i went upstairs and found the missing library book in under a minute.  there it was on the shelf the whole time.  unbelievable.  this is the brain i live with, folks.  you've gotta love it.  just thought i would share.

p.s. typepad, you are pissing me off.  you are very slow and spinny today.

i am fiddling with my blog and trying to settle on a design (or at least a design for the season or month), so bear with me.

we are back in our house, but still busy with patching and mending, etc., not to mention the many things families do on summer vacations, and so, not a lot of time for blogging, but i'll be up and running again in no time.  i enjoy it too much.

anyhoo...

i realized one day that i have adult ADD (i don't have the hyperactivity part, which would be classified as ADHD).  i realized this when i read one of "one good bumblebee's" posts about it one day and found that i could relate to just about everything she was saying.  i conveniently forgot very shortly thereafter, but i realized it again recently during a conversation and looked it up on wikipedia, which lists all of the following behavior traits:

1. A sense of underachievement, of not meeting one’s goals (regardless of how much one has actually accomplished).
2. Difficulty getting organized.
3. Chronic procrastination or trouble getting started.
4. Many projects going simultaneously; trouble with follow through.
5. A tendency to say what comes to mind without necessarily considering the timing or appropriateness of the remark.
6. A frequent search for high stimulation.
7. An intolerance of boredom.
8. Easy distractibility; trouble focusing attention, tendency to tune out or drift away in the middle of a page or conversation, often coupled with an inability to focus at times.
9. Often creative, intuitive, highly intelligent
10. Trouble in going through established channels and following proper procedure.
11. Impatient; low tolerance of frustration.
12. Impulsive, either verbally or in action, as an impulsive spending of money.
13. Changing plans, enacting new schemes or career plans and the like; hot-tempered.
14. A tendency to worry needlessly, endlessly; a tendency to scan the horizon looking for something to worry about, alternating with attention to or disregard for actual dangers.
15. A sense of insecurity.
16. Mood swings, mood lability, especially when disengaged from a person or a project.
17. Physical or cognitive restlessness.
18. A tendency toward addictive behavior.
19. Chronic problems with self-esteem.
20. Inaccurate self-observation.
21. Family history of AD/HD or manic depressive illness or depression or substance abuse or other disorders of impulse control or mood.

it says on there that if a person has twelve or more of these behaviors, they should consider professional diagnosis.

well, i can relate to all twenty-one of these. all twenty-one. 

isn't that wild, all this time, i thought it was just me being ridiculous?  but no, this is clinical behavior.  i'm not the only one who suffers with this.  this really exists.  phew.

my doctor says it's as if my antenna is on crooked and therefore, the information i receive tends to twirl around in my brain for a while before it finally gets re-directed to the appropriate spot.  he is sending me to a brain clinic where they look at how my brain does things and then gives me various treatment options based on how my particular symptoms (or something like that).  i'll let you know how it goes.

i'm just so happy i can put a label on things.  now that i know what i'm dealing with, i feel like i can be more proactive in resolving the things in my life that (i do that) drive me insane.  how lovely.

anyway, i just thought i'd share.  other than that, everything is dandy.  the kids are sprouting like weeds and i recently spent more money than i care to admit on legos, which is a first for me (did you know that they make a harry potter set???  now honestly, who can turn that up?).  man.  just googled "harry potter legos" and found way too many things, so i won't bother putting a link.  you can just google for yourself.  obviously i'm quite slow on the draw.

i'm off to bed with a beer and a book.

sleep well.

 

more photos from our colorado trip.  i have been meaning to post these, but the days keep running away from me and as we are still not back at our house (we are staying elsewhere while the repairs continue),  i am less inclined to get on the computer, (not having my own space, etc).

you get an idea of how beautiful it was.  one day i will put a photo album together of all the trips we've taken, so the whole family can enjoy it, like my cousin does (writing blog entries such as this about our trips makes me think of this).  i'll get samples from different publishers until i find exactly the quality i'm looking for in a photo album.  thick, matt pages.  excellent quality prints.  simple, clean format.  flawless design.  i've heard blurb is good.  and i really like the quality of the books the black apple has printed out, so we shall see.  there is a mountain of photo albums in my basement that either needs to be assembled or scanned and sorted out.  it is a lot of work.  i really wish i had kept up with it as we went along, but that is just not how i seem do things.  yet.  (i am hopeful)

tun•dra
a vast, flat, treeless Arctic region of Europe, Asia and North America in which the subsoil is permanently frozen.

from our aspen trip.

we have arrived home safe and sound after hours of traveling and reveling and delighting in friends and family and the world around us to find our house in near chaos as we are currently patching and painting and fixing and so on.  things that need to be attended to, but... still.  a lot to come home to.  i am more than a bit overwhelmed by all the people in our house and everything we are trying to do (all at once) and i am missing our daily nature hikes and absence of responsibility and the closeness we always experience as a family when we go on road trips, but amidst everything that is trying to pull me apart are our children who consistently help me pull it together with their laughter and their free spirits and their craziness and the way they move through life unabated.  they keep me grounded when i least expect it and always make me smile... eventually.  i am so grateful for that.

make: origami balloon tutorial

I meant to post this before we left on Tuesday, but in the scramble to pack and get out the door (not to mention the more-than-a-few blogging snags I ran across while trying to upload the 30-some-odd photos I needed for this- egads) it simply wasn't possible. 

So now, rather than showing you photos of our lovely two-day road trip and the photo of the creepy hotel we stayed in along the way and of the lush Aspen surroundings we're immersed in currently (I promise I'll post those soon), I instead offer you this origami balloon tutorial that I had meant to post as a sort of *gift* prior to leaving.  I get such a kick out of making these things and I hope you will too (in any case, it sure is a great thing to do while you're procrastinating cleaning and packing and stuff like that.  Plus it makes great use of all the "practice" drawings the kids leave lying around the house -  or junk mail or bills or whatever - I'd love to get my hands on one of those Japanese phone books and use that).  Anyhoo...

Cut a *practice drawing* into a 6 inch by 6 inch square (or you could just use traditional square origami paper - actually, any size square will do, it doesn't have to be 6 inch by 6 inch, that's just what I started with, myself).

There.

Now, take your square and fold it in half (I sometimes like to use my bone folder to help with those creases just because I have one and I have one and I admire it so much, but you can certainly just use your finger).

Open the paper back up and fold in in half the opposite direction.

Open the paper back up into a square and fold it diagonally like so...

Then, open the paper back up again and fold it diagonally the opposite direction.  Now leave it folded like this facing up, as if you're staring at a mountain or pyramid.

This is kind of hard to see below, but take the bottom right point and fold it up to the top point.  Do you see how I've done that below?

Let me move my hand so you can see it better.

There.  See that?  Now do the same with the other side and you'll have a square shape.

Now, I've completely blown it on photographing this step, but you basically unfold the whole thing so that it's a large 6 x 6 square again - with all those lovely folds that you just made on it - and then you fold in the sides of the square toward themselves (they will fold in fairly easily because of all the folds that you made in the paper) so that you end up with this triangular-ish shape below, see?  I hope you can see.

Then just flatten the triangle down.

You're doing great! 

Next, take that top right point and fold it down toward the center point (we're making a square shape kind of  like we did before).

Do the same to the left side.

 

Good!  Now flip it over and do the exact same thing on the opposite side and you'll have that square shape I was talking about earlier.

 

Now... take the side (point) of the square and fold it in toward that center line.

Repeat on the opposite side (as you see below) and then flip the whole thing over and repeat on the opposite side.

 

Almost there!  Now, I think I photographed this better the second time around, but anyway, you take those top two points and fold them down toward the center of the shape (see there above my fingers?).

 

Then, you fold them down again and tuck them into the little pockets there.  You do this on both sides.

 

See (below), here the left side has been done and the right side is folded down and waiting to be tucked into its little pocket, like so.

 

And here it is getting tucked into its pocket.  See?

This is what it should look like when everything's all tucked in!

  

Now, let's do the other side.  Flip it over and we'll begin.  Take the top point on the left side and fold it down toward the center.

 Here's another angle so you can see what I'm talking about (see, better photos this time around, eh?).

There!

Now do the same to the right side.

 

Good!

 

Now we're going to fold those again down toward their "pockets".  I'll just show you the left side, but do it on both sides on your own.  (See, in this photo - below - the right side has already been done and the left side is waiting to be folded and tucked into its pocket).

 

Now, fold that left side down...

 

There's the pocket I'm talking about...

 

There is the fold, about to be tucked in...

 

Almost tucked...

In!  So nice. 

Done with folding.  Good job!  Now, find the hole on one end and blow.  Harder.

 

You did it!  Wasn't that fun? 

 

Now go make more and have a very, very nice day!