We don't play well with others.

We had an early "celebration" for our Memorial Day. For the first time ever we swallowed hard (ok, not the first time, but....) and went camping with people other than our families. We knew we would hate it. And we did.

About a week before we were to leave, I e-mailed my friends and asked what their al fresco dining preferences were and offered (because I'm a former chef and because I'm a control freak) to do all of the cooking for the trip. No dice. One of them, who most definitely is a great cook, said that she had already planned the menu in her head and loved to cook outside also. Fine. Technically, they invited us, so I thought it would be rude to quabble.

However, she was planning on doing the most unexotic of all campfood (besides beans, I suppose): hobo packets. You know, potatoes, onions, bell peppers, etc. wrapped in aluminum foil and thrown in the fire. Well, I hate that shit. So, I just said we'd fend for ourselves and do it sort of potluck style.

We left early on Friday (or, we intended to leave early, but ended up getting out of town at about 5). They weren't coming until Saturday, so we thought we'd at least have one night of al fresco dining to our own tastes - with our prefered dessert. We drove east listening to hardcore eighties punk, and were just tickled to get the heck out of dodge.

When we reached the camp site, however, things got a little ugly. Of course, it was MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND and all, so what, really, did we expect? PEOPLE, PEOPLE, PEOPLE. Of the Red variety. There was so much smoke over the river from all of the campfires that it looked like fog, or a forest fire.

And then it started lightening. Big time. So, with no room in the "inn" and an approaching maelstrom, we decided to just drive on in to town for the night.

TWO HOURS LATER we ended up in Polaski, TN with the very last room for miles and miles. It was a beautiful, if a bit frightening, drive through the hills of south central Tennessee. The lightening was like a club strobe, freeze framing white clapboard houses and oak trees as we zoomed down highway 69.


I'll have to write about the rest of the weekend later. Sweet K is spending his Memorial Day ill and working, but horizontally. He's downstairs in bed hacking and snorting while trying to speak spanish to some "guest worker" on his radio while holding a phone in his other hand trying to speak "east memphis" to some prim lady out in her yard for the holiday with a yardstick checking on the length of her grass...bless his heart.

Y'all Come!

check out more of his stuff at www.lamarsorrento.com

Schoooools Out For Summer....Sorta

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so, i'm finally done with my first year of grad school.....sorta. i still have four small papers to write. sound familiar? (see my posts from about this time last year. actually, don't, it's really rather embarrassing.) it's not that i'm a procrastinator, maybe, it's that there is just too much shit to do and, at about 4pm every evening there are cocktails and backgammon games to be played. a girl's gotta have her priorities straight, and, frankly backgammon and cocktails with K somehow seem to almost always trump studying. this is going to be a problem if i'm gonna be a real live writer one day i guess. but, i'd rather have a happy marriage than anything else. the flip-side is that my happy marriage is invested in getting me to the point where i can write or teach or whatever the hell it is that i'm going to school for, so i need to figure out how to get there and maintain all of the above.

in other news: i submitted my first (for grad school) conference panel proposal. it's called "Blogshop: The New Blog Culture and Writers That Love It." it's for the 2007 AWP conference in Atlanta. i really, really hope the proposal gets accepted! cross your fingers. i got Steven Church, author of The Guiness Book of Me: A Memoir of Record, which i thought was really interesting, to agree to be on the panel ..... yehaaa. i'm pretty excited about that.

and still other news: i love shawn mullins and he's going to be at the peabody rooftop party tonight (barring the ubiquitous memphis in may rains, i suppose), so, if you want to see me drool and squeal like a teenaged girl, come on down!

bu-bye ;)

TODO

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I am so proud! I just eeked out 994 words of critical crap, er, analysis of How to be Good. And now I'm going to do a to list:

1. pay s.t.
2. pay artists
3. find a new epithet for business partner (motherfucking, cocksucking, asshole, piece of shit just seems so inadequate)
4. sweep up the dog hair
5. get photos printed for upcoming show (my very own show at NOT my very own gallery, they like me, they really like me)
6. mat and frame said photos
7. mat and frame bean's december birthday present (i haven't forgotten, just lame)
8. frame e&s's painting that i've had for a year
9. drink three or four more draft ciders before bed
10. take two or three valerian pills before bed
11. go to sleep on k's chest
12. wake up at 2am with a start; think of things that i forgot to add to this list; roll over twenty three times before drifting off at 5:33am
13. wake up at 5:50 am
14. brush teeth
15. take a shower with k - nice, big, new shower!!!
16. don't forget cooler and thingymabob for stuff for party tomorrow night
17. meet with death penalty dude (why did i have to squeeze that in?????)
18. party in the wonderfully unairconditionedplace that is my gallery
19. bitch at business partner about unairconditionedness of the place and use new epithet under my breath as he consumes an entire county's share of wine and cheese that i've paid for while he opines on and on about the virtues and contemporary need for recognition of ayn rand's atlas shrugged and brags about the "fact" that he is just as skinny (not) and fetching (not) as k.
20. go home with k -maybe have sex, maybe just play backgammon.

g'night.

Mission

I just spoke with K. who tells me that he took Sadie, our 9 year old lab, with him to work today. He had taken the 2 year old yesterday, because one of his clients had wanted to meet her, bu Sadie was so sad that he had to give her a turn. Now this dog is the best dog ever - even better than Dooce's Chuck I'd wager.

But, in reading about Chuck today, I remembered a funny picture we have of our little darlin'. We always close off the kitchen because we have open cabinets instead of pantries (comes from years of cheffing) and Sadie, well, she gets hungry when we're not there. So, we, like I said, always, always close the kitchen off. Well, not always apparently.

After returning home from a big ole party a while back, we found that she had eaten an entire bag of tortillas. Nope, I don't know why they were sitting out, other than the fact that I am one heinous housekeeper. But Sadie seemed to enjoy them, and so we decided to punish her by making her wear the bag:

Wasting Time

I cannot believe that I have just sat here in my office and wasted at least an hour reading, not a blog, but the comments on a blog. On sleep methods for six or something month olds. What the hell?! I mean, I do not give a rat's patooty about the subject and I certainly don't give one about what other bloggers think about the subject. And yet I scroll...... hanging on every meaningless (to me) word.

I think I'm mentally ill. I have two books to read for next week, an essay to revise (one that I'm reading in public in Oxford on Saturday, no less), four papers, no five, that are already past due. I think I'm mentally ill...oh I already said that. Must be true.

How in the world can I get on track?

Is there a support group for blog addicts???? Apparently it's a real thing: I googled it (the phrase "blogging addiction") and came back with no less than 13K hits. Yep, that's thirteen thousand hits, like this one, for instance.

So, I'm off to read EVERY SINGLE MEANINGLESS WORD OF THEM.......... grad school will have to wait.

She couldn't wait to say..."Are You Nick Horn-by?"

Yesterday I got to have lunch with Nick Hornby. Yup, that Nick Hornby.

His appearance was disarming for some reason. I suppose that it is because the way that I most commonly see his image is the cartooon bust in The Believer (a t-shirt for which he was wearing - give 'em a raise Eggers!). He's not very tall; his face has a sort elastic softness that I found very interesting and appealing; of he's bald, of course - we can see that at least in the cartoon; and he carried himself with a sort of slouch that insinuated a shyness or reticence, that was present during the lunch but which disappeared when he stepped on stage later in the evening for a reading to about 1000 people.

He doesn't sound like John Cusack, which, though I thought I would be terribly sad about having to let go of Cusack's voice when reading Hornby, was actually a very cool thing.

The best thing about it all, besides one of the most excellent readings I've ever heard, is that I came away liking Hornby's work more. I mean, I already really liked it, but I'm so often put off by "famous" people (in my glee I've mentioned my lucky lunch to several people who had not heard of Hornby - go figure - so I guess maybe he's not universally famous, but anyways....) who seemed to want you to only come to them as a sycophant or who attempt to capitalize on their notoriety by acting inappropriately or narcissitically.

I liked him. He was cool.
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I'm a very bad juggler

I'm juggling again...trying to keep about ten breakable balls in the air. One of these days I'm gonna get caught up. I hope. Maybe it's my personality, a problem with the way I take on the world.

...

It was a perfect weekend. Friday night we had the grand opening of the newly remodeled gallery. It was a HIT and I can't believe that it actually came together (I was hanging pictures right up to show time). We had lots of new people visit the gallery and we sold more than we have in a LONG TIME! Whew!

And then K and I went hiking on Saturday at the Wolf River Trail in Germantown. It was a really beautiful day and we found about four or five rope swings that people had hung. This one even conveniently had steps. Made me wish for summer, though I never would have thought I'd even consider swimming in the Wolf.

Sunday was a rainy day - great day to veg on the couch and then work on art projects, which is what we did. Then dinner with the parents. We had gin martinis - first time I'd ever had one. Yummy! (But, oh so stout!)

I'm wishing I could go back and do that one all over again.

Thinking about a friend

K's best friend K2 is having brain surgery today. He has cancer, and we're crossing our fingers for him.....

He's already really a living miracle. When he was diagnosed his wife was pregnant with his second child, a son. The doctors told him in May that he would not see his son born. That was six years ago.

So, K2, I'll put on some Al Green and say a prayer for you. Hang in there. We're all proud to know you.


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The surgery went well!

Austin Rocks

Man, oh man, does Austin rock! I just spent a week there, well, actually five days, and was so thrilled with the city. I love that there are hiking trails right in the middle of the city and a river (resevoir, actually) on which people were canoeing and kayaking and rowing. How cool, how cool, how cool!