Published on November 7, 2009
in My Peeps.
Vincent and I work together. Larry is his partner. This evening I went to one of the restaurants here at the resort to get some dinner. I had decided to heck with the daily meal allowance and to get the prime rib buffet. Larry and Vincent arrived shortly afterI did, and after some consideration of their other options (including a more casual place here) they decided to join me.
The food was good, but that wasn’t what I liked best about the evening. The company was wonderful. Both men are so kind, and so friendly and so warm and accepting. I always feel like I’m in the company of brothers when I spend time with them. But that’s not what I liked the best, either. Every time I came back to the table after stepping away to the buffet, Larry stood up. How charming is that! Something about being treated with such gallantry really brought out my best manners too, I think. Being in the company of gentlemen makes me act more like a lady.
Published on November 30, 2008
in My Peeps.
Last night I went to a little pre-Christmas get-together over at the home of my friends Vincent and Larry. The deal was: help them decorate trees and they would provide dinner.
Not as many people showed up as they expected, which is a shame for those people because we had a great time! Vincent is way into Christmas; they had six (yes, six) trees they wanted to decorate. One tree is a normal 6 footer that has all their meaningful ornaments on it. It probably had well over 100 ornaments - we were running out of places to hang them. Another is their snowman tree. One is upside down (it hangs from the ceiling). Another is M&M’s. Yet another is the Vincent’s Grandma tree, with ornaments he received from his grandmother’s collection of interesting styles and shapes from the 50’s. The focal point tree is at least 15 feet tall, with white lights and white crocheted snowflakes (144 of them) and white ceramic doves held on by silky red cords. Vincent made ALL the ornaments. The finishing touches include drapes of red and gold curling cloth ribbon and a giant bow on the top.
Larry did not get the decorating gene, but he definitely got the entertaining gene! He cooked a wonderful dinner - tossed salad, bacon-wrapped filet mignon, shrimp scampi and honey-glazed carrots. Dessert was a chocolate peanut butter silk pie; very rich but not too sweet.
I really had a wonderful time. I did as I was told (Vincent not only got the decorating gene; he also got the organizing gene) and we visited and laughed and joked and I sang along with the Christmas songs and they didn’t even tell me to stop. It was a fabulous kickoff to the Christmas season.
Published on September 29, 2008
in My Peeps.
I didn’t get off to a very good start today, but by early afternoon I wasn’t hurting so much.
Saturday night, my pal Angie brought us dinner. Roast chicken, roasted potatoes with green beans, rolls, salad and brownies for dessert. Yum!
Sunday night, my pal Amy brought us dinner. Homemade beef stew, with carrots and potatoes and mushrooms and celery and parsnips. WTH is a parsnip? Homemade whole wheat bread and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for dessert. We ate leftover salad with it. There were leftovers for lunch and enough in the freezer for another whole meal. Yum!
I have good friends.
Ah, number five. One of my favorite people blogs (vs. blogs about ideas or Mormon stuff). Joe in and Around Las Vegas, aka VegasJoe, writes a really cool blog that’s a stream of consciousness blend of text and photos of Vegas life as lived by real people, interspersed with links to fun YouTube videos, travel, and his beautiful granddaughter, E.
I found Joe when he found me. He either linked to my blog or found it at random and I saw he’d been there by his IP address. We swapped e-mails a couple of times (remember my unemployed days, Joe?) and found that we are/were both actually FoxPro developers - a very, very small niche. He liked my blog and some of my friends’ blogs and after almost five years we’re still together 
What I like best about Joe’s blog is that it’s always surprising. He works for a company that has a huge convention center right on site. He posts photos of setup and teardown and sometimes of the shows themselves. His blog gives me a sense of being “on the scene.” His video blogs are also, to hammer the adjective into the ground, surprising. I’m always entertained and amused and often delighted by what he chooses to link. And anybody who can look at the unruly mop of hair on his beautiful, cheeky little granddaughter E and not be entranced has no soul.
Joe’s blog and his generous link policies have made him friends all over the globe. If you go to Vegas, look him up! But warn him you’re coming - I was there last fall, and didn’t give him enough notice, so we’ve never yet met in real life.
Feed Number 4 shall go unlinked, but not undescribed. Ms. K. (who calls me Ms. Banana) is an old, old friend from my early disaffected Mormon days. She is good people, a devoted mother, and a hard worker. She is a private person (a private person with a blog) which is why I’m not linking her. She writes hardly at all, but she stays in my feed so when she does write, I can catch up.
I’ve met a lot of people online through ex-Mormon and New Order Mormon discussion boards. One of these, “The Folk of the Fringe,” is where people whose level of belief ranges from “recently released devout Stake President” to “hasn’t darkened a chapel door except for funerals in almost twenty years” have vibrant and respectful conversations. From the Lily Pad is Froggie’s blog. I first ran into Froggie over on The Fringe, and we still keep in touch very rarely by e-mail and over on another ex-Mormon board, The Foyer.
(Full disclosure: I am not an ex-Mormon.)
When I read blogs about people I know primarily from a fairly one-dimensional space (i.e., ex-Mormons), I learn a lot about them as whole people. We are all multi-dimensional; nobody is only “ex-Mormon” or “straight.” Froggie’s blog does a great job of showing all her dimensions. For example, she loves the outdoors, takes wonderful photos, and is a killer cook. If you visit the link, check out “Froggie’s Recipe Box.” Yum!
This is number two in a series of posts about the blogs that are in my feed, and why I read them. I will write about the blogs in the order they show up on Google Reader and no preference or ranking should be inferred from the order they show up here in posts.
MikeandJohn.com is the blog of my friends Mike Karpowicz and John Hamer. John is a cultural Mormon; a writer, editor, historian and mapmaker. Mike is his partner, a software developer and business owner. Mike has never been a Mormon, but John’s interest has rubbed off on him. They are co-Executive Director’s of the John Whitmer Historical Association.
They are both great guys, smart and fun. And handsome! They are both just delightful to look at, albeit a little young (maybe that’s why they’re so beautiful). They both have great hair and neither exhibits any signs of encroaching male pattern baldness. I’ve met Hamer (why do I call him Hamer? He’s never John; always Hamer) twice; at the annual Sunstone Symposium last August in Salt Lake City, and for dinner in Ft. Wayne, Indiana on one of my occasional midwestern Mormon meetups. I met Mike for the first time at the Ft. Wayne dinner and I had a lot of fun talking with him about computer stuff.
John and Mike write separate and very different posts. John’s most recent post was a video that VegasJoe would get a kick out of - A YouTube video that’s an image montage of the “Nixon Now” reelection song. Mike’s is a photograph of SBBRPC 85 Pork Coating. John writes a lot about politics, while Mike writes about adventures - scroll down from the Pork Coating post to get a taste.
I read their blog to keep up with their interesting lives; which are very different from mine. They travel, they write, they have adventures. I, on the other hand, rarely leave my house. They don’t update their blog as often as I would like, but that’s not surprising, considering how much time they spend actually living their lives (vs. living vicariously through others).
Published on February 16, 2008
in My Peeps.
Ever since I put an RSS feed on my iGoogle page, I rarely click visit the sites of the blogs I read. I just “read with the feed.” The upside is greater speed and efficiency. The downside is that I rarely comment on people’s blogs any more.
Here are the blogs I read every new post on:
- Behind the Infamous Veil - BIV’s personal blog is on hiatus for safety reasons.
- Brain Barf - Keri is an ex-mo friend in Eastern Washington whose rare posts read like a brilliant stream of consciousness riff using words instead of a guitar.
- Joe in and Around Las Vegas - Vegas Joe is a programmer, gardener, and handy fellow who takes lots of pictures and writes really interesting stuff about parts of Vegas tourists don’t see.
- Joy in the Journey - Hope is a Fringe-y friend whose journal/blog recounts her day-to-day life. Best part is her “happy today for” daily comment.
- Michael Homan - Michael is on the faculty at Xavier. Our youngest children were in the same pre-school for a year. Michael’s house was destroyed by Katrina, and he is very active and engaged in rebuilding New Orleans right along with his own life. I stumbled on his blog by accident, and he doesn’t know me from Adam.
- Open Vein - Caroline is an ex-mo friend and wonderful writer who has excellent insights into feminism. She doesn’t write much, either.
- PsyRel - Michael Nielsen’s posts and announcements about the study of the psychology of religion, which subject he studies and teaches at Georgia Southern University.
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Puddle of Nothing - Randy’s blog. Randy is my very dear friend. He blogs about movies, television, dreams, and his two sons, A and T.
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Stephen M (Ethesis) - Stephen is a Mormon who blogs with perception, gratitude and candor about life after grief.
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the adventures of - very few posts from a lovely red-head ex-Mormon woman friend graduating from a big school in the desert very soon.
- trail seeker - Alan is a farmer who lives in the PNW and loves to hike. He stopped writing ages ago, but I can always hope!
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Wry catcher - brilliant feminist ex-mo buddy
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Gardner family - fun musical friends here in town
In addition to these “people blogs,” I also have in a feed: Pound (Wendy McClure’s blog), I Blame the Patriarchy (radical feminism at it’s cutting-through-the-crap best) and NO Notes, a New Orleans/Saint James Infirmary Blues blog by Rob Walker, who wrote the amazing little book Letters from New Orleans. If you don’t own it, you should buy it.
So, if you are writing posts, but wonder why I don’t say anything, it’s not because I’m not reading, or because you aren’t interesting. It’s because I’m reading you efficiently. Furthermore, I’ve discovered that I really needn’t comment on everything, and the world still spins just fine without my editorializing.
I am thinking of adding a blogroll. If you want to be on it, just let me know.
Today I spent most of the day working on The Kid’s bedroom. Gosh it was a mess. We cleaned out old toys, sorted, organized, bagged and boxed. I posted three different ads on the local Freecycle, grouping the available toys by age group. I found five pairs of excellent jeans, size 7, that I had been saving for when he grew into them. He’s already outgrown them 
DH is going to repair (again) the little bookcase. We still need to sort through books, change the bedding, dust the corners and vacuum. I’d like to get some new closet doors, but that won’t happen tonight.
We had a very nice dinner and blew off the church party. Fireworks aplenty are going off outside.
Here’s to a productive and successful and prosperous 2008 for all of us! Happy New Year!
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