Oliver’s First Camping Trip

Ok, first of all, for you hard core campers out there – this is just one step more rustic than the Holiday Inn, but we’ll just call it camping and be done with it.

Last fall, Kevin, Oliver and I headed down to North Carolina for a great festival outside of Asheville:  The Lake Eden Arts Festival, also known as LEAF.  We had been to it in the past, before Oliver was born, and were looking forward to seeing it through his eyes:  Music…dancing…kid-friendly crafts…camping, and excellent food.  What other outdoor festival serves gourmet French crepes for lunch?

A few days before meeting up with our friend Mary at the campground, Kevin logged to the fesival website to get a time table and learned that it was sold out.  That’s right, no more tickets to be had!  Well, all three adults had taken time off of work, and the little one had his heart set on missing school, so we were not about to give up on our camping trip, so we set out on the long drive.

We had a great time:  Spent time with Mary, visited the Biltmore Estate and Table Rock, ate ice cream, and even visited his Carolina Cousins on the way back.   Oliver had never had s’mores before, an oversight we quickly remedied.  Now he’s a big fan.

Loving Cup, originally uploaded by MAKNJ.

My sister gave me this mug. I am a big tea drinker, and this matches a plate I gave her when she was starting her family. It says “You are Special Today.” I use it on special events, to mark occasions, and then, sometimes, I use its magic power to remind me that I am special on days when I am down.

This mug is not for everyday use. You need a REASON to use it.

That is, until my parents moved in with us. My mom used the mug indiscriminately, any day of the week, making it lose its specialness and power. I considered telling her the problem, but I knew she would not understand, and might laugh at me. And there is nothing as not-special as being laughed at by your own mother.

And then one day I came home and it was broken. There were several chips in it, as if it had fallen to the floor. And bounced. Noone owned up to it. I have not used the mug since.  I wanted to throw it away, until I looked at it from a certain angle and saw the shape made by the largest chip.

I guess you can find love anywhere if you look.

Baked Sweet Potato Falafel Recipe – 101 Cookbooks

Seriously…I am going to beg my sister to make this with me this weekend.

My friend Marie has started a new blog called The Shore Bookworm.  Here is the meme about books, and I will answer it on behalf of the whole family:

1. To mark your page you: use a bookmark, bend the page corner, leave the book open face down?   Kevin uses dogears a lot, so I do, too, when we are reading the same book.  For hardcovers,  I use the dust jacket flap as a bookmark.  Oliver reads books that you finish in one sitting, so he doesn’t use bookmarks, but he does love to collect them!

2. Do you lend your books?  We usually give books away, or trade them.  We’ve made a promise to ourselves not to accumulate  books, so we only keep the very special ones.

3. You find an interesting passage: you write in your book or NO WRITING IN BOOKS!   Usually, no writing, but Oliver has been known to color ina book.  Not so much now that he can read.

4. Dust jackets – leave it on or take it off?   Oliver and Kevin get rid of them as soon as they open the book.  I try to save them before they get stepped on, because some of the kids books have great art.

5. Hard cover, paperback, skip it and get the audio book?   We like to wait for paperback if we can.  Audio books are great on roadtrips, and for falling asleep, but only unabridged ones.  I love iTunes!

6. Do you shelve your books by subject, author, or size and color of the book spines? Before Kevin:  by subject, and then alphabetically by author within subject.  Fiction all by author.  (I used to work in a library – I’m lucky I don’t use the Dewey decimal system.)  After Kevin:  Which ever book you just read goes i the open spot on the shelf.

7. Buy it or borrow it from the library later?   Our procrastination makes library books very expensive.

8. Do you put your name on your books – scribble your name in the cover, fancy bookplate, or stamp?   We both have books from our childhood, in which we proudly wrote our names.  Now, we don’t bother.  But I do still have the book stamp my parents gave me for Christmas one year that crimps the paper like a corporate seal. So cool, I was thrilled.  except for my name being spelled wrong.  So I don’t use it.

9. Most of the books you own are rare and out of print books or recent publications?   The only way we have stumbled into a rare out of print book is if we owned it when it was new, and now it’s out of print.  All the value in our books is in the words, not the pages.

10. Page edges – deckled or straight? Straight!
11. How many books do you read at one time? Usually one novel at a time, but several non-fiction.  Oliver has one “bedtime reading” chapter book that we read to him, and any number of books he reads each day, one after the other.

12. Be honest, ever tear a page from a book?  Never.  (‘Cept for Oliver, but that doesn’t count, he was just excited about the fox and the box and the house and the mouse)

Please let us know your answers.

I just commented on a post at NOLA Notes, who has this function where it posts a link to your last blogpost (cool).  And I realized I had been silent since my birthday.  Silent, me?  Unlikely.  But true.  I somehow let three months pass by without noticing.  I will endeavor to be more regular in my posting.  After all, I do have a lot to say!

Coming soon:  Photos from the Doo Dah Parade in Ocean City, results from Oliver’s standardized tests, and life with our new dog.

Since leaving New Orleans, we’ve been forced to get our King Cakes by mail.  It’s expensive, but worth it.  I favor Manny Randazzo’s, plain cinnamon.  This year, my loving spouse ordered one as a birthday cake for me.  Saturday, he told me, “I have good news and I have bad news.”

Uh-oh.

“The good news is, the King Cake was delivered.”  Mmmm.  That’ll soften the blow for whatever his bad news is.  I was still thinking about yummy sweet icing and crunchy sugar when he gave me the bad news.  “They left it by the front door, and the critters got at it.”

Wha?  No, not MY birthday king cake.  But there it was, a cardboard UPS box decorated with Mardi Gras colors, with a huge hole in it through which I could see bite marks taken out of the cake!

And no, I didn’t cut that part off and eat the rest!

But I thought about it…

In case you can’t read it, this is a letter my son wrote to the president. First of all, he is very proud: It is the first time he signed his name in cursive script. That is a very big kid thing to do.

The assignment was to help the president by telling him how to help kids.  Oliver wrote “by making school every day of the week.”  Yep, that’s our kid.  Loves school so much he doesn’t want to take off on weekends.  We at least that’s how he felt the other night…

PJ Close Up , originally uploaded by MAKNJ.

This is our cat PJ, taken with my brand new Nikon D60. I could never get a decent photo of her with my point and shoot. Imagine what I can do when I learn to use the camera!

PJ was born in Jefferson, Louisiana in the fall of 1992.  We celebrate her birthday at Halloween, but I always forget it.  She is a grand damme of 16 years.  her eyes are hazy now, and she’s lost most of her teeth, but she never complains about that.  Well, at least, I think she doesn’t.  She only complains when we lock her out of the bedroom, or when her bowls are empty.  Kevin grooms her often, and she revels in it.  As a toddler, Oliver was gentle with her, so he is one of the few people she trusts (the others being me, sometimes, Kevin, and my dad, who feeds her when we go out of town).

When PJ was a kitten, I could not find a name that fit her.  She was a nameless one for quite some time.  Rather than just call her “Fluffy” or some other basic cat name, I wanted to give her a moniker that fit her personality.  So I waited for her to show it to me.  I was in law school at the time, living in an apartment overlooking La Freniere Park in Metairie.  it had one bedroom, one bathroom, and two closets.  What I am getting at is that it was small.  Apparently not too small for a petite kitten like this one to get lost in.  I was on my way out, and went to say goodbye to my new kitten, but she was nowhere to be found.  I looked in the bathroom, the closet, the other closet (even though I hadn’t opened the door on that one all day), the kitchen, the oven (the story behind THAT one later), the bathtub, under the bed, behind the books in the bookcase…to no avail.  I rattled a box of cat food – nothing.  I would have called her name but, well, she didn’t have one.

So I did what every normal cat lover would do in the situation:  I called my sister.  In New Jersey.  Because when you have lost a cat, talking to someone thousands of miles away who couldn’t possibly help you look for the cat, or have seen her at all, is who you need to talk to.  Well, my sister asked me “Did you look in the dresser drawers?”  Well, don’t be silly, of course of though of that.  The thing is, the drawers are not left open, so there was no way she could have crawled into a drawer and I closed it on her.  (I am OCD about things like keeping drawers closed, so I knew what I was talking about here.)  However, I had bothered my sister and wanted her to feel as if she was helping, since she did try, so I had to let here hear me open and close the dresser drawers.  I opened the top drawer…and there slept my tiny kitten, nestled in my PJs.

That’s how she got the name PJ, and see, it WAS a good idea to call my sister, because she did know what to do!