Dear Disney Channel,

Though we truly LOVE your programming (& this is not the letter awaiting you about your introduction of outside advertisements) I have a bitty issue to pick with a couple of your movies; specifically Halloweentown and The Thirteenth Year.
In Halloweentown, Grandmother must induct Marnie into witchcraft by her 13th Halloween. In the film, Marnie is 13. That means this is her 14th Halloween. Gramma's a whole year too late.
The Thirteenth Year begins with Cody's 13th birthday, which means he's just begun his 14th year of life.
Here's how it works, just so you can no longer use ignorance as an excuse not to count:
At the end of one's first year of life, we celebrate 1 year, beginning one's second year of life.
When I turned 40 this year, I celebrated the completion of 40 years, not embarking into my 40th year!
As adults who run an entertainment giant directed at children, please model proper accounting of years of life.
Sincerely,
a mom with kids who know how to count (no thanks to you)

Audio Book Madness

Scotty's long been a big fan of audio books. Not me, I prefer the tactile action of reading. Auditory vs visual learning, I guess... Initially, I found that listening to books is great when I'm knitting (especially bags) so I can *do* while I *listen.* For my birthday, my family sent me a baby mp3 player, which I promptly loaded with Harry Potter books*, to listen while I walk the dog... I'm hooked!! Now that I have Super Phone (with 2 extra G of memory) I've been listening while baking, while walking the dog, while cleaning up the house, while doing anything that doesn't require conscious brain efforts!
I've not been very brave about venturing out beyond books I know, beyond voices I LOVE. Then Scotty recommended Dune. Yeah, I've made it through 40 years of life without the books nor the movie (not a big Kyle MacLachlin fan, excepting his role on Desperate Housewives, which still gave me the willies!). One has to get past the fact that Connor (somebody) sounds much like Steven Hawking (I just looked on line, there is actually a version available read by Frank Herbert, I'm gonna have to check that one out!!). Now that I'm through the first book and on to Dune Messiah, I'm used to the way he sounds and I don't mind so much -- the story is rich enough to keep my attention beyond his monotone delivery (it's almost as if I can pinpoint the "takes" where he starts out flat and gets more animated as the story goes... until the next "take" begins). I can't wait to explore the universe of 10191 C.E. even further!
Also on queue: Complete LOTR, Complete Douglas Adams, some Wayne Dyer, Abraham Hicks & Ekhart Tolle.
Me & Charlie are gonna get some serious exercise while mama listens to all of these amazing stories ♥

*Harry Potter as read by Stephen Fry. I used to be a big Jim Dale fan & then Schuyler convinced me to give Stephen a chance... OMG! Jim is good, Steve is Freaking Amazing!!! If, like me, you are not sure who that Fry Guy is... Last night, surfing the web, I stumbled across his web page - he's the gay boss guy with the Koran in his safe from "V is for Vendetta" -- yeah! the guy we all love in that movie. He could read me the Wall Street Journal every morning and I'd be enraptured ♥

The space inbetween James Concerts

Mary is revving up for her *next* James Adventure... make that her next *TWO* James Adventures -- Anaheim AND San Francisco!! I thought I'd post my long-lost phone videos to tide her over until October :)
*Whilst there is musician fumbling, Mr. Booth uses his sense of humor to keep us from rioting ;)

*And here's the all-time favorite (famous) James song, Laid (and no, that is not my horrible singing in the background, I know better!! There were plenty of other folk in the talentless background singing pool to take my place :) as you will soon hear)

*I sure hope Mary's next trip to meet her (totally worthy) favorite musicians, she has this look on her face again... I don't know how she couldn't! 'specially with that craaaazy dancin' goin' on!

And thanks m'friend for an amazing introduction to amazing people who happen to make amazing music ♥ I'm sold!

Diana's Glamorous Past

My first ever trip to the Beverly Center, the mall that sits between LA and Beverly Hills & just across the street from Trashy Lingerie, and I had a gift certificate to have hoochie pictures taken... remember those? I can't remember the name of the place that actually took my picture, just that it wasn't the same as the place in the malls for the lesser people like the Northridge Mall. I had hair and makeup and a full-on photo shoot (am I the only person who didn't know the artisans work for tips? I showed up with enough money to park and grab a snack; I was a baaaaad client). I went alone, as I had no idea what to expect and I wasn't about to be humiliated in front of anyone I knew! Once we got past the I'm not stingy, I'm poorly budgeted thing, it was actually a great time. Mostly I remember my eyelids heavy with gunk and my hair parted down the back and pinned, to give me big hair in the front. Seriously, the back of my head is totally flat in these pictures, I could lay down on the bed and still look good, I could drive my car home and stun the other drivers with my big-ass hair... of course, I'd move, they'd see the pins and they'd pee themselves laughing. The eyeshadow was gone before I crossed the threshold into the big wide world, too! Somewhere I'm gonna find one of those wandering wallet-sized glamour shots, so you can see which one I chose, in full-color & probably autographed (it's the origin of the small d, diana signature, with the tail of the a making a heart over the i); I looked in the thought I last saw it in here box, and alas, no color for you today. Yay! Another photoshoot post someday!
So to preserve for future generations, I give you the edited and light-level-adjusted versions of the (over-crinkled and spilled-upon) light-sensitive paper pix from 1993...

Quinoa

"Kwin-oh-ah," that's what I've read each time I see it in the grocery store. That's what the first grade foniks taught me!
Last night, at another amazing gathering of unschoolers, I was offered a tabbouleh-like dish, ah but it wasn't quite tabbouleh (just how it looks - tah-boo-lee), it was this Quinoa with tomatoes and cucumbers -- yum! I heard them say it was "Keen-wah" "WHAT??!! Spellit!" "Q.u.i.n.o.a." -- "AHA! Kwin-oh-ah!"
Big burst of laughter (the safe kind, among friends) and poor Kat, she'd already been laughed at by her (different, not so nice about it) friend for the same mispronunciation and was feeling bad about the diana-directed laughter. I laughed along and assured her that the girl who can really appreciate Chopin (as in "choppin") can appreciate anything!
Chopin is at the top of my list for embarrassing mispronunciations, I said it in front of my boss and many coworkers -- at an educational co-op!! oops! Second on that list is Macabre (yeah, mah-cob-ray) a word I'd only read and not heard... I guess lots of people hear that word and actually know how to say it (aha! but do they know how to spell it? My way gives each letter it's due!) Mah-cobb. Now I've got Quinoa....
Chopin the macbre quinoa. That's what I'll be doing today!

Obama Buttons

Hey,

Want a free Obama button? MoveOn's giving them away totally free--no strings attached. I just got mine, and wanted to share the opportunity with you.

Click this link to get a free Obama button:

http://pol.moveon.org/obamabuttons/?id=-8075508-FWl2TTx

Thanks!
******************************************************************

I would totally love to spend the $2 and get all three buttons, but the free Obama bumpersticker they sent was cheezily cheap. I hope the buttons are better :)

It's all in your head...

I knew it!

What I do on the night shift...

I knit and felt a backpack for a supercoolbaby I know...I turn the intended pocket for aforementioned backpack into a supercoolphone cozy...I take blue pictures of the cows, Lenny & Lenny, across the street...and blue pictures of the waterfight happening just outside my bedroom window...And I listen to three Harry Potter books while walking the dog; no matter how amazingly brilliant the delivery by Stephen Fry, the same really horrible stuff still happens. Every time. I cry a lot. I've now moved on to Dune, read by someone sounding amazingly like Steven Hawking, without the hardware.

The Boys are Back!

I have new cows & a new camera phone!
They're not mine for keeps, they're mine for peeks.
City Cows bring me joy. A gentle lowing at dusk sends me giggling ♥I just wanna look at them and take their pictures...
With the cool and perfect for cows sepia feature.And I wanna make up funny stories about their days.
My human boys (and the canine, I imagine) think I'm nuts are very grateful for the entertainment I provide.I called them Hamburger and Helper.
The boys took an interest then!Scotty recommended Lenny & Squiggy, which led to Hayden recommending Lenny & Carl. I think they shall be called "Lenny & Squiggy" and "Lenny & Carl"
...for today!

Ted Koppel & China

Check your listings for a replay, the second part of an amazing 4 part tale is on & recording right now. It's called The People's Republic of Capitalism. Powerful, moving, honest, scary... it's a big picture look at an epic consumer driven revolution on our planet. It's not how you feel about it, it's happening and it's time we took a look at whatever it is between American Consumerism & Foreign Labor.
It's all the fault of Jon Stewart. He was his adorable, hilarious self and out walked Ted Koppel & a little black dog. Who is a really funny guy. I love it when that happens on The Daily Show. He said the network had threatened the poor pooch, if we didn't all tune in and watch his series. When he got to the seriousness of the interview, I was mesmerized by his telling of his experiences. (Is it the hair? am I just sucked in because he's a familiar face? because he does have one of those trustworthy faces, ya know. Of course, Jon Stewart is a trustworthy news source & he seems to like Ted... and) I wanted to hear more about the growing middle class of Chinese who are shopping for Ethan Allen furniture at almost 1:1 with the Americans.
So I watched it in the wee hours of today... holy freaking mother of jesus, mary & joseph!
We're fabric. We're bound. We rely almost exclusively on some part or 'nother made/assembled/processed by cheap labor, provided joyfully by Chinese citizens. Never mind that the folks can't even afford to purchase what they're putting together for Waldemart or Ethan Allen. Never mind that people spend half of their meager $600 annual income to send their daughter to boarding school in the city, to get a life beyond the harvesting of lotus root to sell at the city's market.
Wal-Mart is upscale in China. It's where the cool folk, who can afford to emulate Americans, spend their money. They have just as many middle class people, benefiting from jobs provided them by American corporations, as America does. They live in big beautiful houses and drive BMWs and have big two door refrigerators. And still the things they buy are made/assembled/processed by their neighbors, right down the road. The ones without electricity or plumbing. And I can't even wrap my head around the big perspective, the earth wide ripple of cause & effect...
tonight, I shall enjoy:

Part 2: MAOism TO MEism — Thur., July 10, at 10 p.m. ET/PT

Chongqing is a city of 13.5 million people — it could be the most populous city that most Americans have never heard of. The largest migration in human history is underway as millions of peasants are on the move from China’s countryside to its booming industrialized cities.

The central government has plans to increase Chongqing’s population to 20 million. This population redistribution, combined with the emergence of capitalism, is having a dramatic effect on Chinese culture. In this episode, we'll profile a cast of characters in and around Chongqing to examine the central issues of traditional values, religion, sexuality and political freedom.

I'm tellin' ya, check it out. It'll rock your world. And he's got great hair :)

Dear Safeway,

Thanks!Love, the people who stand near to diana ♥

It just came to me...

I was responding to a post at AlwaysLearing & suddenly it became a vision statement about Mitch's mother... It deserves more exploration than the list is intended for, and perfectly in line with what this blog is for...

I guess I'm also looking for ways to attempt to repair my relationship with her as well. I've never had a good relationship with her personally because I march to a different drummer (her words) and I've been unpredictable in that sense.
__,_._,___

I'm at this kind of precipice-as-it-were with my MIL. I want to have a good relationship with her, especially as a gateway to my dead husband's family for my son. She doesn't get *me* let alone any feel-good, weird schtuff I'm doing to her only grandkids. I'm coming round to realize she still needs *us* - as a gateway to her dead son's family. It's a pretty important role, I'm only coming to realize as Hayden gets older and older before my eyes, to be grandmother to Mitch's kid. She deserves a chance to honor Hayden in her own way, as the kid he is, on whatever terms the two of them come up with.
And well, I sure thought her son was cool enough to marry and replicate, twice even!, so ya'd think I'd find something or other I'd like about his mother, too. I happen to think that Mitch picking me for the same things gives me a pretty dang good standing in her mind, too.
We've dealt with our years of pain in very different ways. Just as we once came together over a love of Mitch, I believe we can come together over a love of Hayden. We don't need to be the same, or even like one another's differences, to love the same person. She is awfully nice; misdirected and still awfully nice.
The unschooling thing, should become less and less of an issue as their topics of conversation mature and the focus of the relating becomes human to human instead of child to old person. Our way works for us and it's apparent. Hayden's easy to talk to, interesting and intelligent. His grandmother can figure that one out herself. Given the proper chance and channels.
It's up to me, I suppose, to get that set up. It's obvious I can hop in a car and get to LA without much problem ;) Her house is even an hour and a half closer than Spaceland & James.

I Dare Ya!

It's time once again to document how much I love my orange phone; the Orange LG enV. This phone does most everything (except take good pictures in dark bars!), I can take pictures and e-mail them, I can make videos (which actually look pretty good for a dark bar), text message & get calls -- oh! and play mp3s. Everything a girl needs, in one machine! As fate would have it, I dropped it. Hard. The front screen doesn't work anymore. So I call the insurance company, to whom I've been paying $5/month for the past 20-some months, to get my phone replaced, easy-peasy. "So sorry, ma'am, LG no longer makes your phone in orange. We'll gladly send you a replacement in black or silver." WTF? Sure, it has *most* of the same features in those boring colors; it certainly and painfully is missing the important feature, the feature worth insuring: Cute feature! I ain't giving them another cent for a boring phone, that's for dang sure! So I call Verizon. I know there's nothing they can do about how the insurance company handles things, but by-golly, I want it documented that I am not receiving an appropriate (in my not-so-humble opinion) replacement for the cash doled out; cute has no cash value, I discover. It can't be insured either. Too bad. Somewhere in my kvetching, there came the sales pitch. The hey, have you seen the super cool newest phone on the market? conversation. I've been known to say that I won't be ready to upgrade for anything less than a larger than 2.0 megapixel camera. The LG Dare has a 3.2! Oh, wait, it gets *so* much better... I'm not completely sold on the deal, it's a big chunk of cash, even with my new every two promotional discount. Ah, the online discount. And how about another discount for your trouble with the insurance company. You have another line eligible for a cheap phone, too, Hayden's.
I am a bit of a phone whore lately. I think I'm still traumatized by the time I had to spend in a plain ol' flip phone. While poor Scotty has been dealing with no 9-key capabilities, nor an end key, ever since he washed his Razr back in October. Yeah, last year. Hayden inherited my personality-less flip phone, which now goes dead 30 minutes after a full charge, whether used or not. And I'm whining about a front screen that doesn't work on an otherwise perfect piece of technology. Wah!
On Tuesday (or maybe Wednesday, depending on Monday's hangover stats) afternoon, I shall be officially Dare'd, Scotty will be EnV'd and Hayden, well, my lucky, lucky boy will be Black Cherry Chocolate'd ;) all for :::::drumroll::::: $129.98! For an additional $18 (including 3 day shipping) the boys have 2GB microSD memory chips on the way from NewEgg.com for their super cool new phones.
Should Scotty decide Black or Silver (with fully functioning front screen) would meet his needs better, we can invest $50 and swap them out for him.
Here ends my free advertising spiel :) I'm sure it won't be the end of the new phone gushings, however ;) I'm thinking I'll be doing some serious photoshoppin' next week! Oh wait, the phone comes with editing capabilities ♥ ...

Boys, Bikes & Big Dogs

When my 9 year old son was ready to venture out on his first solo bike ride in Corvallis, to the neighborhood 7-11, I made sure to cover some important safety/consideration points. As it is all-too frightening to cross S. 3rd Street without the help of a crosswalk light, he was left with the option of riding his bike on the sidewalk to the nearest crosswalk; which happens to be just north of the 7-11. I carefully explained that the Sidewalk was intended for people to walk upon and should he encounter pedestrians on his ride he should either 1) stop his bike and wait for them to pass by, or 2) get off his bike and walk past the crowd (we'd just seen "Stranger than Fiction," we know the consequences of riding past a crowd). As he was riding opposite the flow of traffic, I explained the danger of wrong-way bike lane riding, though if he was riding with the flow of traffic, the bike lane is exactly where he belongs. He's now been riding & walking that route happily for months!
Then we got a big dog. A really big, really sweet, black dog. A pretty fuzzy intimidation, who happens to be a bit freakish about bike wheels. So we keep him off the bike lanes and walk him only on the sidewalks. The South Corvallis sidewalks, which happen to be filled with bicycles. Worse, those bikes are ridden by some of the rudest folks I've encountered in my 9 months as an Oregonian. For our part, we tend to walk on the with the traffic side, so we can see ahead for any bikes we may encounter and bikes coming from behind will be in the *specifically designated* bike lane. We are also so kind to step aside and ask the dog to sit when encountering small children or any other citizen who has that "OMG it's a DOG!" look on their faces, so they may walk past in peace & my doggy's good citizen reputation remains intact. What we heard a lot of was, "On your left" as a bike zoomed past us without enough warning, sending the dog into a panic. Or worse, someone riding right toward us, expecting the pedestrians to get out of their way. One woman saw the dogs plight as she rides past us and asks, "Oh, is he afraid of the noise?" "NO," I reply, "it's bikes he's afraid of!!" (for the record, I am taking the dog on regular runs with me on the bike, building trust through calm exposure to a SAFE person on a bike; he's getting much better)
We all deserve to enjoy this beautiful weather in our beautiful hometown; in safety and comfort. Please show my son that I am not asking for more consideration out of him than he receives from his fellow citizens of this fine city. And the next time you see a redhead with a big black dog, feel free to say hello and give the furry beast a good scratching behind the ears, off your bike of course.
(to be submitted to our cool local indy magazine, Corvalchemist)