Things I like

Honestly, it's been a bit of a poopy summer so far. Serious sadness with Ash, litigation with the farmer's market and crazy head with me. It's a good time to take stock of the things that are going well, of which this is only a small sampling: great friends, no, the world's best friends; my boys really love each other; Atti has mad style AND loves to read; early morning sunshine and great animals and lastly, a great typewriter and a porch on which to write. And Jason, always Jason.

I am a git.

Ted Kooser is in Casper, Wyoming leading a workshop as we speak. I blanked on the date and failed to plan for it. I think I am going to hop in the car tomorrow morning and try to catch day two. Ted Kooser! I adore him. I particularly love the book of poems he did with Jim Harrison,Braided Creek .
I wrote a poem yesterday and jotted some ideas for a short story. I may be making too much of that- very brief notes. Eh. It could be something.

the young Truman Capote

Our friend Charlotte found the bowtie for a quarter when we were thrifting with RJ the other day. Atticus is in love with his new clip on bowtie. He asks for it every morning and wants to be taken immediately to the big mirror to see himself. He leaves it on all day. Yesterday he helped his dad garden all day long.

a dime

Vintage Montgomery Ward jumper. Ten pennies at the Salvation Army. Corduroy? Check. Sure, the zipper broke but I think I can put a new one in. Sweet, right?

Help me

I have made almost no progress. It is too overwhelming. Please come help me. Or call me on the phone and chat with me while I shelve.

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so. Japanese Trifele Tomato plants. Totally badass. Can't wait to eat them. Already in the ground- if you're from California you'll scoff at that- if you're from Wyoming you'll genuflect or do some other properly awe-filled gesture.

I heart poladroid. This is Ash playing airdrums and Atti in a rictus of ecstasy because his brother is playing with him and he just got a new scarf with his initial on it. You can stop the picture mid development for a grainier more 70's look. Awesome!

trip to slc

We went to Liberty Park with Artemis and family, ate mole at Red Iguana with Mel, met Derek and explore the SLC library as well as meeting our new friend Krista from the SLC bike collective,we spent hours at Ikea where Noodle and Mel washed dishes in the kid's section, Noodle chose a snickerdoodle at the awesome bakery near the Temple and even though we had a great time at Temple Square with all the flowers in bloom, I, like a lazy slattern, forgot the camera. I also have great pictures of Chandelle's kids but have to ask her before I post them. Great trip, superb weather, it was blizzarding (again!) back home. The boys cleaned the house and worked on the upstairs bathroom remodel. I am a lucky girl.

Political Whore?

Ash with Howard Dean in Iowa - 2004
Atti with Obama in Laramie - 2008

I have to have another kid because there may be another great candidate...

floral or animal?

I am stuck on cousin KT's baby blanket -it's felted purple and green- but what to back it with?

Handsome Princess

It's only the very masculine and secure males who can rock a princess outfit; that or baby's with mamas who callously use them for social experimentation; I prefer the former explanantion.

We went to the Wild Animal Park in San Diego with my brother, Efram. Brilliant.

Rainbow Brite?

My mom made this for me when I was...9? 84, abouts. Now she's in Atti's room. I am going to be making some dollie clothes in the next weeks, I'll try to post pictures, but nothing as cool as Rainbow.

The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. How do you do?

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE. *note* I can't figure out how to do this so I'm going to try changing the font or color...



1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen Read once a year
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien never really liked- read because my brother told me I had too
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte Once a year
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee Named my kid Atticus
6 The Bible I love parts of it but on the whole? Nah.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte I read it over and just to get to the "Heathcliff is more myself than I am" speech.
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman It seems unfair they don't list these seperately like they do for C.S. Lewis
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens love
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott love - I don't care what Q says- I love Beth March
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller haven't read in ages but still think of Yossarian often
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare I'm lying- but since they list Hamlet seperately I think they know that
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks I'm surprised this is on here because I've never spoken to anyone else who's read it. Cool.
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot Love like crazy. This was my favorite book to read when Atti was a newborn and we could just sit and nurse and rock forever.
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell My ten year old self loved this. Me? Uh-uh.
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh Love to pieces- own it on the excellent BBC book on tape and listen to it in my car all the time - but, oddly, have never watched the movie.
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy One of the only Russian novels I actually plan on reading
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens Love.
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen Just reread this last year and I hate that girl more every time I read it.
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden I kept flipping to the front to check it was really written by a man.
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne "Oh, Eeyore, you are wet!" "Could somebody please explain to Piglet what happens when you've been in the water for a very long time?" The best!
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez Love.
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins Only book that Wolf and I have really disagreed on.
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery Why doesn't Montgomery get the whole series included?
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood should reread- haven't read since I was a teenager
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons Never satisfied with the answer they gave.
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen Love.
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez Sets my head on fire.
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov Just can't read it anymore- loved and appreciated it as a teenager.
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt So Ridgecrest.
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold For some dumb reason I read this in a bookstore, sobbing, naturally.
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac Big impact on me in high school.
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie I think this is the only Rushdie I liked.
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens love.
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett I want to have a girl and read her this.
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce Someday.
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray That Becky was too much for me.Yuck.
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker Like a swift kick to the gut while a heavenly choir sings.
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White love.
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom Seriously? Blech.
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince- Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams I am crazy about this book.
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole ditto. Although I always wish I could have read it without the intro the first time.
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare Love and made my son memorize when he was 10. Not all of it, obviously. He uses it to impress girls now.
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

The bad old days

Winnemucca burned
Not down to the ground
which would have made me clean

Winnemucca burned
in fits and starts
never a column of smoke
-too Greek

Winnemucca burned
but it never once
though it intended
(every sooty step of the way)
burned me

Whiskey on a Friday Night In Cheyenne

I got schnockered on Black Label Whiskey last Friday night. Difficult to tell how much of an ass I was. My dad said liquor doesn't make you say anything you weren't already thinking. This is true. I haven't been schnockered in...a decade? That sounds right. I think my favorite bit of conversation was with a girl I had just met, M. who grew up in Cheyenne. I was telling her about yoga class at the Unitarian church and how to get there when she said that it was the old Mormon church that she had attended as a child. We talked about how funny it was to see this very proper and conservative church transformed into this gay friendly, Wicca- bedazzled new kind of church, at least that was my friend S.'s experience of it. S. had attended the Mormon church as a kid, also. Oh yeah, I remember her, M. said, didn't she get pregnant at like, 16? Yeah, I said, by her LDS Sunday school teacher. As a sidenote both M and I were pretty well drunk by this time. At least I was. I hope she was because the next thing she said was, Ohmygod, I totally remember him! (clutches heart) He was so hot!
That's the funniest thing anyone has said to me in a long time.
It's a funny thing about hanging out with new good folks, whose company you enjoy. It makes me miss all of my old friends almost painfully. Hough would have had a good time there. Jyn and I would have spoken fake German. Michael J would have had that pretty lawyer rethinking moving to Vegas. And so on.
This galvanizes my South Side Cheyenne Renewal Project. Houses are selling over here for 60, 70, thousand dollars. We have acces to a coffeeshop for readings, trains for dreaming and eventually, each other for company. C'mon people.

Sunday In Cheyenne

I wrote this some months ago. Maybe February? I am reposting it now as a siren call to Toast. Yes, I could pick up the phone and call him in New Orleans. I find this much more interesting though; picking up the phone would be giving up. And then the terrorists will have won.

This is what Sunday looks like in Cheyenne. Olivia (dog) and Artemis (cat) jump into bed with Jason (husband) and me right around the time the alarm goes off and a woman named Portia does very well on the NPR morning quiz show. The dog and cat do what my friend Chris Sullivan calls a" Singapore back room honky tonk miscegenation freak show." Here, we just call it love. They lick one another and invariably Ollie fits her mouth over Arti's whole head and gives it a gentle shake. Arti kisses Ollie back as soon as he works his head free. Ashton pads in and makes a place for himself on the floor because at 13, he no longer fits in the double size bed we sleep in. Why not get a bigger bed? I love to have Jason so close to me, that's why. Art jumps down and tries to convince Ashton to get up and provide him with salmon, which he does. The salmon is not my idea. Jas and Ash insist. We have mice in the basement and I'm always trying to cut back on Arti's food so he will go after the mice. I have given up on that scheme because Artemis shows his displeasure in a particularly aggresive way: he kills squirrels, brings them into the guest room and disembowels them on the rug. It is subtle but effective. Even with a tinkly bell on, he has killed 4 squirrels in the last month and a half. I get up and slip some shoes on, take Ollie with me over the viaduct to work, say hello to the trains and feed my barm. When we get home Ollie patrols the yard, which she believes is her job, and a very serious one. I make a fool of myself in the front yard, trying to show Ollie how to pick up the paper by crouching on all fours and picking the paper up with my teeth. Olivia ignores me and I think that perhaps the Sunday NY Times is a bad place to begin. Maybe I could start with a small section and then work our way up? It's worth a try. I put the water on for coffee, Jas is in the shower, Ash is on the couch reading The Adventures of Marlys. The big treat of the morning is admiring again, the settee. I worked all day yesterday at my girlfriends home decor shop, Salt. Directly after work I took my friends John and Jane out to see Brokeback Mountain. They ranch outside Cheyenne on one of Wyomings oldest ranches. John is a good old boy and a lovely man. Last week I disguised my voice and called his house telling him he'd won the take-a-rancher-to-Brokeback-sweepstakes, was he interested in taking "the great leap forward?" "no, ma'am, I'm sure not." Jane convinced him otherwise and I snuck us in some beer. After the show we came back to our house for dark chocolate and tea. And darn it if Jason Thomas hadn't, in one afternoon, built me a brand new settee in the bay window, the way I'd always wanted. So as soon as I finish writing this I'll eat my toast Jas made on my Sourdough Wheat Walnut with cranberries bread, read my paper and write out recipes for the class I'm teaching over in Laramie this afternoon on Sourdough. Sunday mornings are just fine in Cheyenne. If I ever say different remind me that I'm just being greedy.

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Toast I have lost you in cyberspace as if the mean streets of New Orleans were not bad enough I now have to graplle with ways of not seeing you in this mysterious forum. This is sad.

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Where are you Toast?/