Here is a skirt I made this week for Trinity with one yard of fabric & no pattern. I really like how it turned out. I would only change a small thing that doesn’t show but would conceal the elastic a little better on the inside. We added two similar buttons in two different sizes for decoration. I also had enough scraps to make a head band for her.Tghe colors of this skirt are a lot like the colors you can find in her eyes!
We journeyed to the Missouri Botanical Gardens again last night for a free picnic style concert put on by The Whitaker Foundation featuring Anita Rosamond. It was packed. We had a GREAT time. The kids were awesome. It’s so fun seeing them experience something for the first time. There was a good deal of wine, cheese and people who really know how to relax and have a good time. They had wine bottle/glass caddies, plenty of food… salads, chicken, strawberries & chocolate fondant. They were skilled in bringing the ultimate pack away conveniences. Josh and I were particularly impressed by this table, and the amount of people who had one. Many children took the opportunity to exhibit their kooky dance moves.
The leaves were already starting to fall. Probably due in part to the cooler weather we have been having lately. A shorter summer reminds me of living in the North West.
It was a little humid, but we brought plenty of snacks and water. The Childrens Garden was a stones throw away and we walked over to let the kids soak themselves in the little sprinkler yard.
After the sprinklers, they got dressed and we waited to see the concert.
This is Anita Rosamond, taken by Josh.
I have been learning how to color correct my images this morning, after coffee. No big adventures planned today, but are they ever planned? We wanted to go camping, but we need to do a little more research on the place. It’s not like in the Northwest where you just go up to the mountains and pick a spot and camp. Well, there are campgrounds there as well, but sometimes it is nice(aside from the lack of toilets) to not camp next to John and Jane Doe in their RV with their yelping chihuahua and their electricity generator.
Last night we doused ourselves in bugspray and went to a carnival. For the first time we all rode rides together. We gave the kids a good dose of scary rides, because before they just stayed on the ones that went in circles. Jonas and I rode the scrambler and the ferris wheel together. The scrambler goes much faster than I remember. My brain felt like it was being pushed to the back of my scull. He screamed the whole time, but wasn’t scared, and came out with an ear to ear smile. Josh rode with Trinity and took her on the umbrella things that go really fast at a tilt. The kids rode the swings together and it scared me more than anything. Trinity was way too brave. It was a really fun night.
You thought the “beer summit” was sending the wrong message!
Josh took this photo.
I was beside myself when Jonas looked over at me and said “mommy, I gonna shoot you!” This is one of those teachable moments, isn’t it? Isn’t it?! Speaking of beer, since when do people walk around with buckets full of it? I have never seen that while living in the Northwest-but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I did see people with wine glass necklaces at the Newport, OR wine festival.
Here is one I took. I love it cause it is more interesting than the average flower.
Continue reading ‘Missouri Botanical Garden’
Do you want to see what I have been up to in school this summer? Here is an essay I wrote for Film Appreciation class taught by Stacy Barton.
“A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.” —Jean Genet.
To describe City Of Lost Children as dark, sinister or “sick-and-twisted” (Hicks, Deseret News 1996) in the most rudimentary convention is to fly instead of taking a ship, camp in a trailer instead of under the stars or watch a movie when (in some cases) the book proves more insightful. In every visual way possible, this movie is indeed dark. The darkness is not that of formulaic bogeymen and monsters. It is an apocalyptic darkness. Pervading time and underscoring the injustices of violence that average people are quick to utilize with out repercussion, the darkness is barely recognizable as what follows day, which is something that is so easily taken for granted in the here and now. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro created the depth needed to explain, like a book, the story in it’s entirety. Very few movies are capable of rivaling their printed counterparts. Fewer movies can boast that they epitomize reading between the lines, but as some state “[City of Lost Children] …too rarely engages deeper emotions to score much of a bonus”, the “collection of weirdos” and “in-your-face imagery”(Variety Staff, 1995) is too much for some to go looking for them. Perhaps it is what it is and we should have all peed our pants over it and gone home by now. Or perhaps the message, drenched in the romanticism of newfound friends and a happy ending is so much darker than ghoulish antagonists and rusted metal shrouded in fog.
At the fault of my own ‘judging a book by it’s cover’ method of choosing movies, my first viewing of this film, about five years after its release came at the insistence of many artistic friends. I also can thank my husbands love of sci-fi, as I essentially watched it by proxy. At first glance I was impressed by the quality of it’s aesthetic. The engaging look of an apocalyptic city soaked in an almost silent trickle of water was like looking through goggles in the night to an encrusted coral reef, soaking in each color like a massive sponge. Each orange-red and blue-green, a mesmerizing trademark of the Jeunet-Caro partnership, was blinding me to some of the takes that eventually became poignant in the second and third viewings. Maturity may have also shown me the ability to see what I was blind to before. As a child fast food was like a candy dish. Maybe the sun-bleached drive through menus are as now as old as I am, but I only see brown, orange and yellow. Even the salads are an inedible shade of chartreuse. I’ve opened my eyes. Hamburgers are great every now and again, but sometimes I like my movies to be like a copper fillet of baked salmon with a huckleberry sauce deeper than merlot contrasted with an emerald spinach salad topped with julienned carrots and cabbage that makes a plum blush with envy. The recipe of French cinema is more complex, more natural and consequentially more honest. It’s cause and effect montage sequences, unexpected camera jumps and emphasis on normalcy in lieu of ideology play on the conventions of Hollywood and gives City of Lost Children a classic yet complicated visceral patina that is felt through out the film and echoed in the costume and sets.
Continue reading ‘Dreaming is Nursed in Darkness.’
Josh asked me last night if I wanted to go camping. Between the bugs and the poison oak, no… not really. Actually, I think I would love to. We might this weekend. He also wants to drive somewhere. I said the beach, but The Great Lakes are closer and cooooooooooooler. I don’t know if we’ll really go, but it would be nice to do something like this before summer is over.
Last night was my last film appreciation class for the summer semester. It was my only class. I got an A on my 5 page paper & the teacher asked to put it on her website. I realized how it is weird how there are some people who like what I write and then the polar opposite(Josh). He doesn’t hate it, but I am way too long winded and flowery for him. He prefers reading thick manuals to anything remotely entertaining. I am influenced slightly by Bronte & Abbey & Zola when I write-among other poets. I was nervous about the paper because I didn’t want to get some of the technicalities wrong. I have never done a formal bibliography or have ever cited sources with in the text.
Chloe has been doing SO well. She is a little more layed back, but just like before only nail-less(which is really fantastic when it comes to pain). She is so funny when she gets REALLY excited she runs through the house like a maniac. We’ve let her sleep outside of her crate the last two nights and aside from waking me up a little earlier, she’s done pretty well. We still keep the kids door closed, mainly because they leave their toys everywhere and I don’t want her to chew on stuff. They clean their room daily, but I don’t hover over them and stuff gets on the floor. Pretty sure the floor is magnetic. I have also been tucking the garbage can into the little downstairs bathroom(which is near where the can is anyway) so that in case Chloe smells anything she might like to dig for I don’t wake up to the floor covered in trash. So anyway, it looks like she likes sleeping in her little bed(that she has outgrown, but loves dearly) near me(she would rather sleep ON our bed, but yeah-I ♥ you, but no thanks). I want to get her a new bed, but I want to make sure it has a waterproof inside and a washable cover(s). Washing her little bed is a pain in the bum!
We got our shopping “bags” tonight!!
We ended up getting them at Target anyway because we checked out the ones at Dollar Tree and they are TINY!! These where like six dollars each, but we figure with all the grocery shopping we do they will get major major usage. Not to mention most of the vendors at the farmer market automatically bag in plastic t-shirt bags for each individual vegetable. Luckily today we were able to cut down on bags by bringing along our little cooler. I had SO much fun there… we weren’t there for too long, but we got a ton of good veggies and the kids got to play a banjo and the banjo guy sun while they played. 
Trinity got another matryoshka doll at one of the trinket vendors(it’s like Saturday market, only the nonfood goods are pretty much made in China dimestore hippie crap) and the lady GAVE jonas a little wooden doggie that is a puzzle that opens.
_
Coraline was a little too much for the kids. Trinity stayed up half the night & Jonas said he had bad dreams and he never does. After the movie he was all zombie and wierded out. They never seem to get that bugged out about scary stuff… but I don’t think they watch too much of it. The last movies I think were a little scary for them was neverending story(the wolf was scary) and Trinity watched Return To Oz with Marina when she was like 3, but I don’t think she remembered it. It scared the ship out of me!! We kept reminding them that Coraline was a. fake & b. had a good ending. I think it would have been different if they watched it in the middle of the day.
On Friday, because the weather has been too good to not enjoy, we took a drive out to Carlyle Reservoir to check it out. The state park itself was pretty boring. We tried to go all around the lake and check out the wildlife reserve at the top, but as we took some access roads from Centralia, it became more and more country. When we finally reached the Kaskaskia River, we ran into a road block of flooding. The river was big and brown and going fast. There was a cool old bridge that had a sign to not cross. The garbage man who had given us directions from his stinky truck said he had been through the flooded part of the road, but it look like it was over 4 feet! It was crazy. There was an old guy camped near the river with his dog "twokay", an old hunting German Shorthair. It was brown and white. He said he had a girlfriend in Mascoutah. Chloe liked his dog. We talked to him for a while and then Chloe decided she would try to get to the river through the brush. I think she got a little trapped or something for a minute. we were really worried. she wasn’t barking or yelping. Then she just came out. maybe she just was grabbing a drink or something. We couldn’t get in there because there was poison oak all around. There was also a lot of dragonflies and caterpillars. some where hairy! trinity made friends with this one.
I got a singer sewing machine. The cheap walmart one. At first I was really bummed out about it because that is the way I am.. haha. I didn’t open the box for like three days. idk, I just know that we can’t really afford it(ie; i can think of more fruitful ways to spend 100$)-but now I am trying to enjoy and utilize it. Jonas has been begging me to let him sew himself a brown sweater. lol. I made him a scarf out of an old t-shirt. 
Trinity is learning a lot with it & of course Jonas wants to learn, but isn’t giving me the attention I need to fully explain/remember things. Trinity is retaining things, so yay. We just gotta get thinner thread now.
I really hope it survives. Their names are Me-me & You-you.
