Alice's Adventures Underground

He's an item that was in our silent auction last week. Once we dressed him up and set him on the table, he just kept staring at me, begging me to take his picture.

This guitar, signed by thirty some-odd Country artists, was donated to my organization and we have spent at least three years trying to figure out how best to use it. In the meantime, it's been in my office and we have been cohabiting. I've developed quite a kinship with it, even referring to it as "my guitar" much of the time. So when we finally sold it at a charity event this month and the very excited person who won it walked away hugging it, I cried a silent tear of remorse. Goodbye my love. Enjoy your new home. She'll never treat you as well as I did.

I am in love with red leaves. Betcha couldn't tell.

"No, I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way."

- Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

Since I read this photoshop tutorial on using textures several months ago. I've tried it on a couple dozen photos. I think I've got the "how" part down pat. I'm just not so sure about the end result. Every time I do it to one of my photos, it comes out looking like "What's that weird stuff doing there marring an otherwise okay photo?" I guess part of the skill in applying textures to a photograph lies in the judgment to choose what photograph and what texture.

So instead, I'm using the exact same subject from the tutorial: a dandelion about to go to seed from our front yard.

When I first read the tutorial, I noticed she called them "wishing flowers." I'd never heard that term before and thought it was lovely. As kids we did blow on them and wish - the number of seeds left after blowing was supposed to represent how many years it would take before your wish came true. But we just opted for the less poetic name: "dandelions." Being fairly unimaginative, I still call them that, but interestingly, I started to notice that The Dormouse also calls these "wishing flowers." Must be something she picked up at school because I'm pretty sure The KoH calls them "those blasted things that spread weeds around."


Anyway, here's my straight out of the camera photo:


Here's the same photo with some sharpening and a color boost.


Now here it is with the texture applied. I think I left out a step and bumped up the hue/saturation levels at the same time. Hence the bluer blue.


And here's that photo with a color applied over top. I went with an odd kind of color choice... one that a friend would refer to as "stool yellow."


So what do you think? The photo with the textures and colors? Or just the straight out of the camera shot? I'm still on the fence. Maybe it's just not my style.

This one is much cuter.

Needing a bokeh intervention.

As opposed to "naughty tree," which is an entirely different thing.

Each year for work, my office plans and hosts an annual convention. It's gigantic, not when you consider the size of the attendee list, but when you take into account that we use very few paid workers, there are only seven full time people working in the office, and we each have committee chairs, presentations, and politicking business as part of our everyday jobs to accomplish while we are there - which is a very full workload until itself, not to mention the stuff we have to do to keep the conference running.

To deal with the pressure, we use humor - because apparently someone decided it was not appropriate to lie on the floor kicking and screaming in front of the registration desk. Each year there is a list of phrases and events that will go down in infamy and be told and retold. This year, we started the list even before we traveled to the conference location. Not all of these are my direct experiences; some of my colleagues contributed to this list. I will, however, withhold the names to protect the innocent.

You know it's conference time when...

• You've awakened at 3:00 am every day for a week, but you still haven't seen a sunrise.
• You pack your two year old's baby toothbrush instead of an adult one and have been using it for four days. But you only realize this after the fourth day.
• You look through the program to see if they have mislabled your credentials because so many barely-more-than-strangers have come to you for marital and psychological advice.
• You are so brain dead that the most witty and cerebral thing you can add to a conversation is "That's da bomb.com" ...yet your colleagues are so similarly affected that they think it's hilarious.
• You walk around with a $20,000.00 check in your pocket all day because you're afraid if you put it "somewhere safe," you'll forget where that "somewhere safe" is.
• You subsist on free granola bars and hotel mints because you spent all your per diem on clothes before you got here.
• You come into your hotel room to find your freshly made bed with a letter bearing your name on the front. It turns out to be from the transportation manager explaining your departure plans and ride to the airport, but before you open it, all you can think of is "CRAP. WHAT AM I IN TROUBLE FOR NOW?"
• You drop two Alka-Seltzer in a glass, promptly forget that fact and then think you're hearing things because you can't figure out where that bubbling noise is coming from.
• You travel a bit too much & never put away your quart ziplock bag of airplane/travel compliant liquids or your roller bag suitcase from the trip you made last month.
• You never put away your ziploc thingies from last year's conference travel bag.
• You not only put your undies on wrong but you put on two different colored socks.
• You would rather drink the margarita fixins prepared for the silent auction basket rather than actually deliver the basket to the donation location.
• When you hear the accompanist for the soloist at the opening night concert has to cancel, you suggest kitchen band accompaniment instead.
• You miss your husband and children, sure, but what you're really longing to see again is a televsion channel that doesn't have constant Roseann reruns on it.
• You consider writing a book of conference tips and tip #1 is: to avoid embarrassment at a professional conference, when you register yourself on-line, don't put "studmuffin" in the nickname or first name as you would like it to appear on your name badge field.
• Tip #2: when trying to motivate volunteers, avoid phrases like, "If you're just standing around, you can leave." Try instead what you really mean, which is, "If you've completed all the tasks I assigned you, I don't have anything more for you to do. So you can go and enjoy some of the conference now. Thank you for your willingness to help." (at least I hope that was the intended message)
• In a discussion about technology and the profession, when your colleage asks, "Does anyone have a Wii?" you think she said, "Does anyone have any weed?" and you aren't the least bit surprised or concerned.

When we hit the pumpkin patch a few days ago, we called up some friends who lived close and asked if they wanted to join us. And because they choose to humor the people who can never make plans ahead of time or give anyone notice, they met up with us en route. (Personally, I think it was because they thought that we just might show up on their doorstep and wanted us to stay the heck away from their house.) We stopped by the side of the road so they could catch up with us and follow us to the not-so-easy-to-find farm. I looked out of the car window and felt like I could have walked across the street and into a movie scene set in the early 1900s.


And then was jarred out of nostalgia when I looked to my left and found the Free Clinic:

This guy was practically begging me to take his picture and reminded me of Foghorn Leghorn.

It might be stretching a bit, but these leaves always remind me of spiders.

One of the best things about Grandma is she always knows where to find the Roadrunner cartoons.

The Dormouse picked this flower up and carried it around for hours one day. By the time she finally went to bed, it was lying on the table, looking slightly worse for wear and a quite embattled. I was about to throw it out but happened to be sitting down next to it and got up close to see all the petals it was really still quite beautiful. Sometimes it's all about perspective.

As a follow-up to this post, the answer is no, I never did find plastic vampire teeth - mainly because the universe hates me. But I did finally come across this set of wax vampire teeth (further lending credence to my theory that all Halloween stores stock their shelves directly from Oriental Trading Company). And so I give you most haphazard Halloween costume you've seen this year - Vampire Pirate Girl:

It was just pointed out to me that I never posted photos of the Halloween costume extravaganza. So here they are - for posterity. I consider these costumes a great coup because:

a) I managed to convince them to wear costumes that go together. (Although, as The Dormouse will tell you, SHE is a Pirate Girl. The Caterpillar is NOT a Pirate Girl. The Caterpillar is a High Seas Buccaneer... and that's completely different.)

b) I managed to convince The Dormouse to wear something non-pink and non-princess-related (I was gonna say non-Disney-related, but I guess that doesn't apply anymore.)

c) I managed to find pirate costumes that don't make them look like tiny strippers in a theme bachelor party. (No easy feat with little girls' costumes these days.)

It'll make him crazy.

I grew up mostly in the Southwest, where there are spectacular, jaw-dropping sunsets almost every night.

Here: not so much.

I'm told that it's because the Southwest is *echoes* distant... dry... dusty (and if you get that reference, then I know you grew up there too). Basically, when there's dust in the air, the light refracts off the particulates and creates the brilliant colors you see in pictures like this.

As we were leaving the House of mental illness Halloween the other day, I looked up to catch these pretty colors. It's no desert sunset, but every once in awhile the Mid-Atlantic area gets it right.

I just can't figure out how they were able to sing while having a scope run down their throats.

Usually, this little mosquito hatchery pond in the woods near my house looks like a big garbage dump. Isn't it interesting how fall colors make everything more Victorian?

Spiderman = mine
Surprised Frankenstein = The Dormouse's creation
Tiny angry pumpkin = The Caterpillar's (with a little help from The KoH)

First - here is today's picture:


And now, a story.

I gave The KingofHearts his birthday present almost a month ago: tickets to Mike Birbiglia so close that you ran the risk of being spat upon during the show. (Not that you tend to spit, Mike, I don't want to end up in your next show like the pants pressing guy, I'm just sayin' we were close. So close that if you were the type to spit - though I'm sure you're not - you could take a page from Gallagher and hand out raincoats to the first several rows. And we would have been given raincoats. That's how close we were. Great for the bulk of the show; kinda made that reenactment of throwing up on the amusement park ride a little discomforting though.)

But I digress.

I couldn't let the occasion of Daddy's actual birthday go by without a Tribute to Daddy Cake. And what more fitting tribute to Daddy than something that says who Daddy is? Call me Captain Obvious, but we went the nerdy, geek route:


For the record, I would like it noted that this was an original idea I came up with using all my own brain power. Since I normally steal all my ideas from some random, faceless person in the Interweb, you can imagine how much more disturbing it was then, that while I was Googling for images of the Periodic Table of the Elements so I could get the colors right, I found at least a dozen pictures posted by people who have made, received or eaten a Periodic Table made entirely from cupcakes. Don't you hate it when people steal your ideas before you have them? Me too.

Either way, our Periodic Table of Cupcakes was a big hit. He saw it and then for forty-five minutes, sat there pointing from cupcake to cupcake and naming all the elements on the table one by one... in fact, he sounded like this guy:




And then The Caterpillar got into the act and it eerily sounded like a moment from my past for a bit. But all that ended with the hilarity that is The Caterpillar trying to pronounce "aluminum."

We had another one of those Superflocks of birds come through the neighborhood the other day.

I knew they were there even before I looked outside.

How did I know, you ask?

The KingofHearts has been into drinking herbal teas lately and he likes honey instead of sugar or sweetener. Unfortunately, he grossly overestimated how long to put the honey in the microwave to simply soften it enough to make it pourable and now this is what our honey dispenser looks like:


I can't help but think that Winnie the Pooh looks over my shoulder from some omniscient Hundred Acre Wood Heaven and cries a big stuffed tear every time I use this.

There are two musicals that I know like the back of my hand - mostly because I've played in the pit orchestra for both of them multiple times and when you sit through all the rehearsals of a show, you tend to learn a line or two. One of them is West Side Story. I've played two different performances of this and it's one of my favorites. When I was in college, we participated in a state competition of stage shows and we won best orchestra - which was no easy feat with that music. Bernstein's score, while brilliant, is not very straightforward and certainly not simple to play. I learned to love the score and the fact that just about every musical device that could be employed was... because that's Bernstein. But I won't lie, we worked our little fingers to the bone for every inch of that trophy and complained about it the whole time. I don't remember very much of the play in either production I played in because I was so busy counting and living in fear that I'd miss one of those oh-so-important cues, without which, the dancers wouldn't know whether to kick up or kick out. Last year we went to see the fiftieth anniversary revival of the production at the National Theater in D.C., where it all started in 1957 and it was pretty darn cool especially when I realized halfway through that I was holding my breath for the strings during the fight scene and I wouldn't have to worry about being the only person playing in that grand pause that was coming up.

The other musical I know like a lover is Fiddler on the Roof. When I was probably still in elementary school, I saw it in a theater for the fist time and loved it. Then in high school, I played in the pit orchestra for our school's production of Fiddler. I've often thought that it'd be good training for actors who want to learn their lines to attend high school play rehearsals. Just from the sheer repetition, I know almost every line from every character. I was "the fiddler" in my high school's production - or rather, I played the fiddle solos from the pit while someone else pranced around on stage in a fake beard and pretended to be playing. I've never really understood why they can't use a real violinist in that part, but even in the many professionally-produced performances I've attended, I've not seen it yet. Which is weird, because in the production we saw Friday night, they had the fiddler pantomime playing the violin, but had a real clarinetist and a real accordion player on stage during the wedding scene. I'm still shaking my head over that one.

I could be wrong, but I think that our high school version of Fiddler was also the show where the stage crew decided to be real tools about the auditorium and refused to let us have food or drinks during rehearsals in the pit. Rehearsals that sometimes lasted four hours and started immediately after school and "drinks" that included the water the wind players used for their reeds, so they had to sneak in tiny vials of water to soak their reeds in if they wanted to... you know... play. It got so ridiculous that at the final performance, as an adolescent act of protest, we brought in a toaster oven, cheese, pepperoni, pizza sauce and during the rests in the music and dialogue, while Tevye and Lazar Wolf were toasting La'chaim on stage, we were making mini-pizzas down below and reasoning, "What are they gonna do? Kick us out?" During intermission, I went out to see a few people in the audience and had to play dumb when people said, "I smell pizza. Do you smell pizza?"

We also went around school communicating with each other in only lines from Fiddler, said in the same melodramatic way our peers uttered them on stage:

"After a lifetime, a piece of paper and 'get thee out.'"

"Oh, I'm losing my head. One day it will fall off altogether, and a horse will kick it into the mud, and. goodbye, Yente."

We may or may not have been some of the nerdier kids in the school.

A couple of weeks ago, The KingofHearts came home saying, "I just bought your birthday present... but I'm not gonna tell you what it is... or nevermind, I'll tell you." He reasoned that since the event was nowhere near my birthday and so it made no difference, but I know the truth: no one in this family can keep a secret. His surprise was that he got us tickets to see Fiddler on the Roof with the original actor, Topol, in the role of Tevye.

In 1971, Chaim Topol played Tevye in the film version after making the role his own in the stage production. If you want to see one of the best performances on film or on stage any where, any time, rent this and watch Topol. He is truly entertaining in every sense of the word and if ever there was a person born to play a role, it's Topol born to play Tevye. If you want to see the magic of Topol on stage in person, you still have time - like we did Friday night. Topol, we learned from a quick internet phone search during intermission, was born in 1935. That makes him seventy-four years old as of the performance we just sat through and all I can say is, I wish I could be that spry at seventy-four. From the moment he walked out on stage (and the ovation that ensued when the audience saw him) he was brilliant. Since I've seen the movie multiple times, it was evident that since 1971 he might have slowed down a bit here and there, but also: not much. That big gorgeous voice was still there, he danced around stage with the best of them and in person (and probably after thirty-eight years of playing the same role over twenty five hundred times) he had a lot more fun with the actors and the audience. I kept saying to The KoH how amazing it was that he did such small things on stage, facial expressions, little throaty noises, picking at his actor-children like a father would, etc. and they all translated to that giant room full of people. I don't know many stage actors capable of that.

So instead of going on about him, take a look for yourself. I hope you'll enjoy him as much as we did because it was sure a treat.

This is one of the few pumpkins that we did not pick up at the pumpkin patch.

It's National Blog Posting Month... or my favorite acronym to mess with: NaBloPoMo.

The rules of NaBloPoMo are simple: post at least once every day for the entire month of November or feel like a sad, pathetic failure who should only aspire to a career holding the Slow sign by the side of the road and crawl into a hole, never to show your face on the interweb again. Or maybe I misinterpreted the intent. Anyway, I've participated in this for the last three years running and I feel I can't break stride now.

If you can't tell by the veritable plethora of posts the last few months, it's not been all that difficult for me to post something every day. When I started this blog I never intended to be one of those "post every day" kind of people. In fact, I'm not. What I am is a "get a whole bunch of ideas in one day" kind of people and a "better put them in the drafts folder before I forget them because I didn't write them down" kind of people, then later a "post-schedule them all because I feel weird publishing nine posts in one day" kind of people. Posting something well thought out, meaningful, insightful or useful to anyone else reading it, might be a little more of a challenge, but that just seems HARD. So instead, my twist on NaBloPoMo this year is that I will post one photograph for each day of November - if I write something, bonus, but the photos are a must. Oh, and no snapshots; this has to be a photograph I might be willing to submit to a show or use in a graphic design project. I really want to move my photography skillz to the next level and short of buying a really good camera which costs a couple grand, this seems like a reasonable (and cheaper) alternative to make me at least try to become a better photographer.

By way of excuse, for whatever reason, the resolution of photographs on this blog is a bit funky. Sometimes I take what I think is a beautiful, crisp photo which looks like a treasure on my laptop screen, then I upload it to the blog all proud of myself and I look at my web page only to find that it looks pretty darn ho hum. I have never been able to find a way around this and lack the motivation to inquire, but if you click on most of the photographs, they have been uploaded in a higher resolution and will open in a screen by themselves. When I do this, I generally feel a little less bad about how they look. If you care, you can try too.

So here's my first photo of the month - let's call it A Tribute to Autumn.

In the language department, The Caterpillar is coming along nicely. I can't help but think that that's thanks to all that worrying I did before. Almost as soon as she started talking, she began using more complex concepts in speech. While The Dormouse spent quite a long time talking about herself in the third person and saying the names of things but not incorporating them in a sentence, The Caterpillar - once she did start talking - almost immediately began using pronouns correctly and was able to communicate abstract concepts like, "I'm cold." Which only further confirms my opinion that it wasn't that she wasn't taking in and/or understanding language, but that it took awhile for the nine muscles of the mouth to develop enough to where she could form the words. Even now, she's still really hard to understand sometimes and if I close my eyes, I'm almost sure I'm having a conversation with Charlie Brown's parents. But it's clear she's working on it.

Last week she got a flu shot and proudly wore the band-aid badge of honor for at least three days before The KingofHearts tore the band-aids off in the bath one night.

"Why did you do that?" I asked.

"Because, she doesn't need them anymore."

"You have to know that it was never about the needing them, right? She didn't need them three seconds after she got the shots. She WANTS them."

"Yeah, but eventually they have to come off right?"

"OK, but you live with it."

"Live with what?"

"I think I'll go to the store for some new band-aids now."

And then: oh, the injustice to strip her of her dignity like that! And we heard about it. Because for the next five days, she repeated, "DaDee. Don'T TaKe ofF my BanD-AiD." Just like that. Hitting all the consonants with the emphasis of an elephant stomping his feet.

Over.

And.

Over.

And.

Over.

If I had a nickel for every time I've heard that in the past week, I could buy a year's supply of BanD-AiDs.

It's not that I don't want my kids to speak. I just wonder if once they learned, they could try an communicate when necessary and be quiet the rest of the time. Because Momma has a headache.