love and cynicism are in the air

I hate Valentine’s Day but I really love making valentines. The result is that I make really horrible valentines which I am absurdly pleased with.

Here is a sampling of last year’s efforts!

Some were cute:

And some were nerdy:

And THIS year’s are… well… lower tech. Prehistoric, even. But 300% more horrible! Click on the image to see it full-size.

In case they’re hard to read, they say:

You’re pterrific! (Wasn’t that pterrible?!)

I would like to hug you (but my arms are very, very short.)

I’m falling for you (I hope extinction is nice.)

Be my valentine? (All my other friends are dead.)

I RAWR you! (There’s room for some interpretation.)

If you were a flower (I would eat you.)

I got you something for Valentine’s Day (it is an internal organ)

Cheers!

-Maisha

P.S. – I just remembered, the lolcats ones were mostly dragged from googleimages, not actually created by me. I did, however, print up about 20 of them and give one to each of my residents from their RA.

snowpocalypsemaggedon!

This is what things look like out our window right now:

 

And because this is Portland and people flip out at even a suggestion of snow, this buildup of a whopping two inches of snow means that EVERYTHING. SHUTS. DOWN.

I can hear sirens (well, more than usual) zipping up and down Barbur.  All TriMet buses have been chained up and relegated to a maximum speed of 25 mph. TriMetTracker is powerless to predict bus arrivals. Many schools are opening two hours late in the hopes of snowmelt, and some of the ones on hills are closed entirely. (This is the most relevant “inclement weather” news to me, since I usually get to my four public schools via public transit.)

I’m off to brave the blizzard! Wish me luck! If I don’t make it, tell my family I loved them!

-Maisha

fungus among us

Yeah, that’s right. We had nearly given up on the oyster mushroom spawn we ordered from Fungi Perfecti three months ago and lovingly mixed into steam-pasteurized coffee grounds filling the repurposed purple coffee table-turned-garden-box residing in the garage, but at long last! Look what’s growing!

We’re going to harvest them and put them in our favourite Hungarian Mushroom Soup recipe (from Moosewood) in a couple days. Then we’ll simulate another ice cube-based frost, lay down some black plastic for insulation and air flow restriction, and see if we can get another bloom out of this mycelia order. Maybe this time the mushrooms will even grow inside the box, and not just in the crack between the coffee table and the wooden slats nailed to the top of it.

In related news, the guy who did the TED Talk on mushrooms will be speaking about how fungi will save the earth at Lewis & Clark on Thursday this week. You bet I’ll be there.

Appropriate Fall Activities

Because it’s fall, we’ve been very responsible about working our way through the required to-do list for the season. Last weekend, we roasted chestnuts on an open fire. (This didn’t work out so well, since most of them escaped their protective aluminum and rolled into the fire.) Maisha has also been adding pumpkin to anything and everything she can think of. We’ve had pumpkin cinnamon rolls, pumpkin muffins, and several varieties of pumpkin cookies. There’s also pumpkin spice mix in the cupboard in case she hasn’t met her pumpkiny quota for the day. And pumpkin spice coffee as well, just in case.

So the weekend before last, we went to Sauvie Island in order to get actual pumpkins. Before we did that though, we had to check a few other things off of our fall to-do lists. We bought lots of kettle corn.

We got lost in a corn maze.

THEN we could go explore the pumpkin patch and pick out our perfect pumpkins. Maisha helped again by posing artfully in the pumpkin patch.

Mel elected to be the packhorse, hauling the wagon full of pumpkins plus Maisha all the way back to the place where you had to actually pay for your pumpkins.

Hopefully more pictures later after we’ve carved all these monstrosities!

hipster photos from my hipster life

I’ve been taking lots of photos with my cell phone lately, and I thought those of you who haven’t already seen these on the facebooks might be interested. So, without ado or explanation, here’s my life in high-contrast, overwrought “retro” cell phone photos. (As always, I couldn’t resist including alt-text. So if you hover your cursor over the photos, extra commentary will appear!)

 

the fruits and vegetables of our labor

alternatively titled: The Garden of Eatin’

….annnnnyway…

So, we planted a garden. And we even occasionally remembered to water it. And then… well, it was just like magic! Delicious, delicious magic!

Things got big and turned various shades of autumn!

These are Armenian Heirloom tomatoes, grown from a teeny little start of a plant that was one of my graduation/housewarming gifts.

These are Roma tomatoes. I regularly walk through our 4′ x 5′ garden barefoot and pick three or four of these off the vine and just eat them right then and there. Like, that happens several times a day.

Here’s today’s harvest of four different types of tomatoes, all from our garden!

And, because I like to take pictures of produce, here’s today’s tomato harvest arranged in a different bowl!

And it turns out that the trees in our backyard are plum trees! Since we’re us, we couldn’t just let those plums go to waste to the squirrels.

But what to do with so many plums? First we tried eating them and giving them away to friends and family… but we still were hauling in a big mixing bowl of plums a day!

So we made jam. (Aside: We accidentally put one batch of the jam in the jar previously containing garlic and olive oil; we had to throw that batch out, because plum and garlic is really friggin’ weird.)

And a plum tart.

Thursday volunteered to help me take photos.

And mini tartlets in cookie tins!

And now we’re out of spelt flour, but not plums. So um, holler if you want some plums.

As if we weren’t getting enough veggies from our garden (and I didn’t even take pictures of the cucumbers, jalapenos, basil, chives, or orange bell peppers), we’re getting a weekly CSA box from the fantastic program that our very own Diane spent all summer putting together. This is Rachel opening our very first box.

And, since it’s officially fall, and we spend most of our home hours wrapped around mugs of tea,

that means it’s PUT PUMPKIN IN EVERYTHING season! And in my case, it means it’s put pumpkin and chili powder in everything season. So I made fluffy pumpkin spelt cookies with an orange glaze and, you guessed it — chili powder. We ate all 36 of them in approximately 3 hours.  [Click for recipe]

I keep meaning to make more, but Safeway is perpetually sold out of pumpkin. It’s a big problem. So if you bring me ready-to-go pumpkin, I will make you three dozen of these.

And just as a teaser: we just inoculated our oyster mushroom spawn, which is an intimidating way of saying we put mushroom babies into a load of coffee grounds in the garage, covered the whole thing with ice and a repurposed cardboard box, and are patiently waiting for the mushrooms to grow into something we can convert into several years of Hungarian mushrooms soup. The garage smells delightfully like coffee, which I’m pretty pleased about.

bottom’s up, grown-up

We are a house full of grown-ups, now that Mel has had her 21st birthday. And we celebrated the hell out of it, grown-up style, which here means with homemade pinatas.

Thursday, of course, helped us tear the newspaper for the pinatas. We have photographic and videographic evidence.

The pinatas turned very quickly into a whole-house craft project. Since our local Safeway is approximately the dimensions of a vending machine, I had difficulty obtaining the decoration supplies I required for a normal-looking pinata. I improvised. With duct tape.

What should have been a one-hit wonder pinata turned into a level 47 beast. It might as well have been reinforced with steel and diamond and mithril.

Don’t let its cute winking eyes (googely eye found at a bus stop) or charming fuzziness deceive you. This bee pinata is not messing about.

And Andrew made a fish pinata, so we actually had two pinatas at the party. So very, very grown up of us.

The people who have been grown-ups for longer took a bit of time to warm up to this whole pinata ordeal, but eventually even Mel’s mom played. Of course, she also cheated  (she took off the blindfold halfway through and whacked at our masterpiece with the aid of sight), but maybe that makes her the least grown up of all?

After everyone had the chance to smack the pinatas around a bit, we busted them open.

The fish was full of candy. The bee was full of tea bags, a little worse for the wear after being tossed around inside the paper mache equivalent of a tumble dryer being used for baseball practice.

We had two cakes. Mel’s mom made the pretty one, and I made the one that looks like a flattened version of the HoneyBeest pinata. (Same recipe, except mine was spelt flour and drenched in over-dyed coconut flakes.)

Since we hadn’t had enough sugar between the pinata innards and two chocolate-drenched cakes, we also did a build-your-own gross sundae game! We handed out menus to everyone, and let people make their selections before we brought out the jars and bottles of toppings.

All in all, a successful birthday party.

Heralded into the 21+ club by excessive amounts of sugar and home-made pinatas sets a pretty obvious precedent for Mel’s 21+ life: home-made booze. The day after her party, she and I found ourselves in a teeny little home brewing store in North Portland, buying plastic tubs and mad scientist doodads from a hipster lady who was wearing a ferocious sweater despite it being mid-July. We cleared out enough space in our garage to get set up, and then researched everything we could find about apples and their ambrosia. We sanitized the daylight out of all our equipment, dumped in some high-quality Costco apple juice and a packet of wine yeast, sealed everything, and started playing the waiting game. After three weeks of sniffing apprehensively at the airlock — which smelled kinda sulfer-y if you were curious — we siphoned and bottled the cider, adding honey for sparkles. Now we’re just waiting for the carbonation process to finish, then we’ll drink it and hopefully not poison ourselves.

While waiting for our latest diy experiment to come to fermentation, we decided we ought to check out some of Portland’s 21+ venues. First stop: Darcelle’s.

Darcelle’s is the longest-running drag show in the US and probably the universe. Darcelle herself, who still performs, is 80. The whole show was a sort of sassy, glittery cabaret.

The weirdest part of the experience wasn’t the dudes in elaborate light-up dresses lip synching and dancing to Lady Gaga covers, or even Darcelle’s sequined, assless cowboy chaps, or even the part where all of the performers flashed us with their hand-sewn costume manparts… no, the weirdest part of the experience was the audience. Almost everyone in attendance was a sloppy loud drunk girl who was just so excited that her best friend from like the best sorority ever was getting married! Seriously, apparently it’s a thing to take your bachelorette party to Darcelle’s. Your very drunk, very loud, very squealy bachelorette party. One of the brides-to-be was wearing a lurid crown that proclaimed “this twat got caught” and several others had little bridal veil hair clips. One even had a light-up shotglass on a necklace. Classy.

At the end of the night Darcelle called all the brides-to-be up onto the stage. She asked each one her name, the name of her intended, and the wedding date. The second to last woman in line, when asked who she was marrying, pointed to the woman next to her. “We’re marrying each other! Next summer!” they said. They got the loudest cheer of the lot, and Darcelle said, “Well, hopefully the world will have woken up by then.” It was great.

A little closer to home is the Crab Bowl. Actually, it’s right across the street.

The Crab Bowl is a perfect swan dive of a bar. It’s the kind of place that has half-lit neon signs in every window advertizing PBR and Budweiser. On the inside, it is decorated like a party store liquidation sale — and it has Christmas lights up all year round. When we first walked in, there was no bartender at the bar. We awkwardly gathered around a table and watched the girl who was performing karaoke. She looked like she’d been forcefully extracted from a Tim Burton film: long and thin and vaguely goth, with a cherry red bob cut. Turns out she was the bartender.

I can only assume she’s new to the job. When some older bro ordered a whiskey cocktail, she couldn’t find the bitters and he had to point them out to her. When I ordered a water, she knocked over several bottles trying to fill a glass from the tap. And when Mel ordered a cranberry vodka, she mistook tomato juice for cranberry and ended up concocting something that included a splash of beer and a dollop of Tabasco sauce, which she slid across the bar saying “I know it looks weird, but it’s actually really good.”

The highlight of this bar is that it’s a karaoke bar. The first song someone in our group chose was Enya. We worked our way through Mr. Roboto, Ke$ha, t.A.T.u., Cee Lo Green, and No Doubt before finally heading home.

All in all, this being an adult thing is going quite well.

Um, and we made Sangria.

doing it (wrong) ourselves

Mel and I — okay, mostly Mel — are really into diy. For those of you not born in the 90s Heyday of DIY, that’s Do It Yourself. It’s a philosophy founded on a haphazard and delightful hybrid of hubris, creativity, and a fierce commitment to doing things as cheaply as possible.

Perhaps attending a liberal² arts college is partially to blame. After all, we’ve been surrounded for three or four years by a bunch of mostly well-off teenagers who prefer to wash their pits with orange peels and PBR over deodorizing soap. I think this habit is born out of some combination of consumerist disillusionment, leftover teenage rebellion, laziness, and a desire to understand those achromatic rasta-haired folks downtown I think of as “grungesters.” You know the ones I’m talking about. They all seem to have grimy and remarkably well-behaved pit bull-german shephard crossbreeds strapped into doggy saddlebags, and cardboard signs requesting “money or weed,” no “god bless” apparent. I’ve actually seen classmates panhandling with the grungesters on street corners, black fingernail polish and army surplus sleeping bags included. After all, the first thing you learn in sociology 101 is that really good sociologists become part of the community they’re studying. So yeah, there are lots of kids on campus who smell like roadrash because they really, really just want to know what it’s like, man.

Perhaps our diy interest is because, at our liberal² arts college, everyone is much more concerned with being green than being black and orange. Environmental Studies is such a popular major that it has its own academic symposium and its own themed housing, cutely titled PEAS: Pioneers for Environmental Action and Service. Green PEAS. Yep, they went there. Last year, in addition to the usual pursuits of giving dorm-wide composting another go and harassing everyone about lightswitch negligence, the PEAS community also built a box out of scrap wood, stashed it in their basement, filled it with coffee grounds from the dining hall, and grew their own culinary mushrooms over winter break. The official title of this project, I kid you not, was The Filth Experiment. Safety Bob had a fit.

So you can kind of see what fertilizer we’ve been percolating in.

Mel and I have tackled a number of diy projects in the last few months.

After seeing the price tags at PetSmart and realizing we had access to scrap carpet, scrap wood, and power tools, we stuck it to the Pet Supply Industry Man and built our own scratching post for Thursday.

We’ve also made our own cat toys, and in some cases Thursday has made things into cat toys.

Now Thursday has his own dinosaur (made out of abandoned pajama pants and leftover cotton balls) so he doesn’t have to play with Mommy’s.

He also has the endlessly entertaining, exercise-inducing stick-with-dangly-bits, which Diane constructed out of a stick from the backyard, a cast-off t-shirt, and liberal amounts of masking tape.

Mel and I built a temporary closet in a reasonable desire to not live out of suitcases indefinitely.

I embellished a bit, because as Portlandia will tell you, it ain’t art unless you put a bird on it.

We transformed an old coffee table into a standing garden box. It’s growing lettuce and spinach so we can stop buying salad materials from corrupt industries or expensive local farms, and instead nom on the stuff that grows practically and literally on our front porch.

These are all well and good diy projects. Things get a little sketchier when you start trying to make your own cleaning supplies and personal hygiene products, guided and misguided by a handy and adorable little zine-book called Make Your Place. With tips from this book, contradictory advice from the internet, and an ill-fated tendency to trust our own instincts, we made:

1. non-chlorine bleach
2. laundry detergent
3. mint essential oil
4. toothpaste

The bleach and the detergent seem to be working out okay. The laundry detergent is especially great because it smells like lavender and orange. A welcome change to the storebought stuff we had been using that the previous tenants had left behind in the laundry room, which made our clothes smell like the partially-melted inside of a piñata.

Mint can be used for a lot of wonderful things, especially in its oil form. Making mint essential oil was a great idea, and things started out looking bright and hopeful.

That didn’t last long.

After days of work, the mint essential oil… smells like pesto. It’s not actually an essential oil, as we don’t have the equipment to actually extract the oil latent in peppermint plants. It’s actually more of an infusion, with the base oil being the most passive variety of olive oil we could find at WinCo. Unfortunately, not passive enough. The viscous liquid we ended up with, which visually resembles a particularly algae-ridden fishtank, smells like a combination of Italian food and candycanes. It’s kinda weird. We’re not really sure what to do with it.

The toothpaste is a whole new kind of horror. The kind of horror that got thrown out too quickly for photos to happen.

It started well enough, or at least well-intentioned enough. The recipe called for calcium carbonate (aka chalk), baking soda, stevia, vegetable glycerin, and peppermint oil. We figured the chalk and glycerin were mainly for paste-like texture, and therefore could be skipped. (Also, we didn’t have any on hand.) That was mistake number one. We also figured we didn’t need stevia, since neither of us like our toothpaste as sweet as Colgate and even Tom’s makes it. And it just seems stupid to brush your teeth with something that contains a sweetner. That was mistake number two. We also didn’t have peppermint oil (other than the murky pond dredgings described above), but we did have loads of dried mint leaves we rescued from my parents’ herb garden’s impending demolition. So we figured, why not just crush up the mint leaves into fine crumbles, and stir that in instead? Mistake number three.

The resulting goop tasted like a baking experiment gone horribly wrong. Kind of like when you mistake the proportions for sugar or flour with the proportions for baking soda. The first time we tried it, Mel bravely said, “Well, it’s not so bad, just don’t get it on your tongue.” I pointed out that you’re supposed to brush your tongue, but she wouldn’t be deterred. I had already thrown in the towel and declared the homemade toothpaste a failure not worth a second try. Mel is made of tougher stuff. Mel has more perseverance — or faith — or poor judgment.

When we pulled the jar out the following day, it was turning colours. You know how bugs and frogs and eels and things advertise themselves to the drabber animal world as poisonous by looking like they had a bad run-in with a pack of highlighters wielded by an enthusiastic four-year-old? We might have taken a hint from nature.

The paste was turning a frightening orange. The shade and consistency reminded me of the neon paste I had used during my hot pink fishingpole days to hook an impressive number of trout. PowerBait orange.

Also, Warning Sign orange.

Valiantly, Mel unscrewed the lid, spooned a miniscule amount onto the bristles of her toothbrush, and jammed it in her mouth.

She gagged three times and made a carnival of faces I have never seen before or since, before sticking her whole head into the sink to rinse.

Perhaps we should stick with Tom’s, even if it is owned by Coca-Cola, and restrict our diy projects to things that involve nails and scrap fabric.

parades on parade

In Portland, summer is not heralded by endless blue skies and radiant, sunburny sunshine. No, usually when the clouds part, Portlanders react one of two ways:

1. cower in fearful confusion
2. frolic in delighted confusion

What really signals the arrival of summer is far less celestial in origin, although arguably just as confusing as a big glowy ball that waddles across the sky: parades.

This summer, as a faithful Portland denizen, I hauled myself (and assortments of my housemates) to pretty much every parade and parade-like occurrence that marched through the city.

Portland’s parade of parades starts with the Starlight Parade. As the name cleverly suggests, the Starlight Parade occurs at night. That means all the floats are lit up, and it also means I didn’t even bother trying to take decent photographs. I nabbed this one from the internet.

Since the Starlight Parade is more about glow bracelets than it is about high school marching bands, we wanted to take along Mel’s nephews. We had grand, starry-eyed plans to take them on the #12 for, you know, The Public Transportation Experience. It would be a Learning Opportunity, and y’all know I can’t pass up a good learning opportunity. First, Andrew helped me do the math to figure out how much bus fare we would need for all of us.

It ended up being $5.05, so Andrew graciously offered to supervise the fiver while his little brother got the shiny nickel.

But a mostly unforeseen and definitely hoped-against problem arose: the Rose Festival (of which the Starlight Parade is a part) makes the city live up to its name. A combination of the rivers being swollen from the constant post-August drip of the Pacific Northwest and every dignitary, sailor, and Important Person popping in for a visit means the bridges kept going up and down to let the ships through — and it also meant buses and Max trains were frequently delayed while they waited for the bridge to descend again. This all translated to us waiting for the bus (which normally comes every 15 minutes) for almost an hour, before breaking down and calling Mel’s mom to come rescue us from the bus shelter. She has a minivan disguised as an SUV, and she packed us all in — Rachey, Diane, Ella, Mel, the boys, and me. Matthew paid her the nickel he would’ve given to the bus driver as a thank-you.

Parade Season, unfortunately, brings out the worst in some people. We walked along the parade route looking for a place to squeeze ourselves, and eventually settled on standing behind the earlycomers who had staked out front-row seats on the sidewalks. We asked if our polite, eager 5- and 7-year-olds could sit in the street on the ground in front of people in their fold-out cup-holder-included soccer mom chairs, and people either ignored us or cussed us out. I would just like to remind you, paradegoers, that the street is not actually your property, and the basic tenets of respectful social interaction still apply, even if you’ve been marinating in your own grump for the past seven hours marooned in the tepid Portland summer sun.

While waiting for the parade to get underway, Matthew fine-tuned his fine motor skills.

He also is a champ at adorning himself properly for the occasion at hand. Belly shirt and rainboots included.

By the time the Starlight Parade ended at 11pm or so, the boys were tired (Matthew was mostly asleep) but had had a good time, despite other paradegoers being asshats.

The next weekend was the Big One — the Grand Floral Parade!

The cool thing about the Grand Floral Parade is that all the floats are decorated with natural materials — rose petals, almond slivers, grass clippings, egg shells. Like well-organized compost, but on wheels.

Much like the Starlight, the waiting period before the parade actually gets started is sometimes the most fun. We all had different ways of entertaining ourselves.

Mel worked on her hand-sewn cloth napkins. (This little project and accompanying travel-size sewing kit comes with her most places.)

Ella did crosswords like a boss.

And I, of course, did elaborate chalk drawings.

The firefighters also ambled by yelling at everyone to “fill the boot.” Presumably with money. For charity?

Before the parade, everyone who wants to signs up to play Horse Poop Bingo. We draw a giant grid on the street, and for a dollar buy-in you get your name in a square. If one of the horses in the parade poops in your square, you win the lot; if no poop lands in the Bingo grid then everything is donated to the firefighters. This year, the firefighters won. And they didn’t even have to poop for it!

This was Ella’s favourite float.

This was my favourite float, because it was the closest thing to a dinosaur the parade offered this year. It was also Mel’s favourite, because it was bicycle-powered.

There were also lots of cultural entries, some more terrifying than others. (Yes, there’s a person in there.)

Some entries combined music and culture, like this culture of bagpipes.

But the real reason I go to the parades is this:

The One More Time Around Again Marching Band!

The best moment of every parade is getting to see my parents tootling away on their instruments and having a heck of a lot more fun with it than their high school marching band counterparts.

We also went to the Portland World Naked Bike Ride — as skeezy voyeurs, not as eco-friendly exhibitionists — but we weren’t so skeezy as to bring cameras. (Also, since the ride took place at about 11pm, the darkness would have been a major photography deterrent.) Believe me when I say we saw lots of equipment.

Speaking of nudity: not only is June christened Rose Festival Month — it also doubles as Gay Pride Month!

In past years, the Gay Pride Parade has been like the very colorful, kind of spastic little brother of the more dignified Rose Festival parades. It’s usually about 45 minutes long, with paradegoers frequently abandoning their sidewalk seats to join in when they see friends or acquaintances marching in the parade lineup, till the whole thing turns into a cheerful and confusing sort of rainbowy flashmob.

Not this year.

This year the parade was Serious Business. Even the firefighters showed up to supervise.

This year the parade was three glorious, exhausting hours long. And there were more churches marching than shirtless men. (Although I did see one of my professors wearing nothing but sneakers and tighty whiteys. It is a sight I can never unsee.)

We arrived early, as usual, and grabbed a patch of sidewalk at the corner of Davis and something. Ella and I clearly interpreted the unofficial dress code differently, although we both agreed on the guiding principle of putting together an outfit that you wouldn’t be able to get away with in everyday life. My version: how many different patterns and colors can I wear at once. Ella’s: thrift store purple bowtie for the win.

The  parade begins with Dykes on (motor) Bikes, which has more in common with the Naked Bike Ride than the benign name implies. (Photo warning: lady nipples and chains. Click the thumbnail to see the full version.)

Pride actually has a lot in common with the other Portland parades (nudity notwithstanding). It has music.

It has people selling poorly-manufactured shiny choking hazards and blocking your view every few minutes.

It has floats representing important local nonprofits.

It has corporate branding.

And elaborate cultural displays I wish I understood.

And cultural entries I do know something about! (This is the Portland Two Spirit Society.)

The Pride Parade also has royalty.

Including royalty with cow bells. Where are your cowbells, eh, Grand Floral?

Oh, and it has clowns people in bizarre makeup.

And flags!

You can also tick “dog wearing a tutu” off of your Pride bingo scorecard. Because Portland Pride’s got that, too.

The Pride Parade is also family-friendly. It contains scads of children I want to babysit.

There are grown-up bikers, too.

The Pride Parade also has a few things that other parades don’t have. Like giant koosh balls made out of balloons which are then strapped to scantily-clad people’s backs. Yeah. Grand Floral ain’t got that.

Also, you probably will not see people happily hanging by chains from their wrists and ankles in the other Portland parades. That is because the BDSM community is not invited to the other parades.

It’s a well-established fact that everything is instantly converted to being gay or at least gay-friendly when wrapped in a rainbow.

Not that Roller Derby needs help being any more queer.

This is probably the single most literal interpretation of “float” I have ever seen in all of my two paradegoing decades.

And, just to get you excited for future parades, I leave you with the trailer (ha) to Portland’s very own SlutWalk, coming to streets near us on July 31st, which is an easy date to remember because it’s also Harry Potter’s birthday. (Um. My nerd is showing. Sorry about that.)

I do hope you have enjoyed this Portland Parades Retrospective 2011. The next blog entry from me will probably contain raunchy exultation about our gardening efforts. There might be some naked vegetables. You have been warned.

Hugs,
-Maisha

Thursday is helpful

I’ve always known myself as a “not-a-cat-person”. Well, since we snatched up Thursday the Cat, I’ve been warming up, to say the least. I was the one in the get-to-know-you room at the Humane Society who stuck myself in the corner and easily abstained from squealing at all the “adorable kiiiiiitties!!!” Anywho, this post is to highlight Thursday’s daily helpfulnesses from a born again cat lover (or at least when it comes to this little bugger).

Thursday helps Maisha to heal from headaches.

Thursday helps to make the bed.

Thursday helps with construction projects – I’d say it’s his favorite helpful activity.

Thursday helps me to Skype and to study Russian.

Thursday helps Maisha with organizational crafts (this one is for separating our mail, since we are so numerous and mossy). I understand he made his way up there on his own.

Thursday helps me play the piano. He also pounces the keys every so often, inspiring new pieces.

Thursday helps decorate for a party! (Actually, he fell asleep whilst playing.)

Thursday helps us wake up in the morning.

Thursday helps us brush our teeth by modeling the proper rinse method.

Thursday is helpful, probably because he has thumbs.

❤ Mel