Monday, November 29, 2010

Happy Birthday SweetPea!

9 years ago today I woke up at 6:00 am, showered, made sure my hospital bag was ready and then we casually drove to the Labor and Delivery wing of our hospital and checked in. Being induced is a funny thing. It felt like I was checking into a hotel. We were shown our room and we unpacked. Seriously.

But the nice thing was that I was so incredibly present in the birth of my first child. I wasn't distracted by trying to figure out if this was labor or how to keep it going. None of that.

My first words when I saw her were "Oh my God she's beautiful." To which my mother replied, "of course she is."

I can't believe 9 years has gone by. In a blink. That's what all the parents of older children told me would happen, but in those early days of middle-of-the-night feedings and a house full of gates and locks, I didn't quite believe it. But now I watch her long legs as she runs up the stairs or fixing her hair in the reflection she finds in car windows and realize how big she really is.

She is growing into this amazing young lady. Watching her unfold and peel back all the layers that make her who she is is an incredible thing. She loves to read, paint, play music on her recorder and viola, and has a smart ass side too that reassures me she'll never take crap from anyone. She is so determined, independent, and smart. So many qualities that can be troublesome in a 9-year old but that you know you will be thankful for in years to come.

My daughter is beautiful and she hates it when I call her "pretty" so we will stick with "cute" for now. But really we are just splitting hairs.


So, Happy Birthday to my dear SweetPea, the little girl who makes me catch my breath and marvel at how very lucky I am.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Holiday Joy: Tree Tagging

Every year the holidays sneak up and bite me in the ass. This year I decided to sign-up for a holiday photography course to help me not get lost in the mayhem and enjoy all the moments. I am taking the course from Willette Photography and I, along with a huge international group of people, will be snapping my way through the holiday season as I prepare for Christmas Day. It is actually forcing me to get myself organized so hopefully I'll be more on the ball this year and not wake up and find myself 3 days from Christmas with not a single photograph taken or kiss under the mistletoe.

Each year we normally tag a tree in Vermont and cut it down one weekend after skiing sometime in mid-December. This year we decided to stick closer to home and tag locally.


Some of the shots I am required to get this week for the course are getting the tree. For me, November 27th is just a tad early for that. I like to have a living tree by Christmas day and not a pile of needles all over the gifts. Today we brought some decorations to the tree farm so we could tag and decorate but NOT cut down quite yet.


We will cut down the tree in two weeks and bring it home to decorate and enjoy in full!And in other news, in three weeks we will bring home our very first family puppy.

Oh boy, it should be an interesting Christmas season!

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Actions in Photoshop

Slowly....very slowly, I am learning or rather teaching myself photoshop. I have PS CS3 which is pretty old at this point so I figure once I have it down pat it will be obsolete and I'll have to upgrade. Hopefully learning the new version won't be as difficult as learning PS from scratch. We will see. 

I recently had a conversation with my brother about cameras and photo processing now that we are in the digital age. Yeah, I know, we've been in the digital age for at least a decade now but it has taken this long for me to find the value (and desire) in tweeking pictures in photoshop. I am the kind of person who feels that photos are meant to be seen as they are taken but then again, I am finding myself attracted to some of these clearly PS processed pictures I am seeing on blogs these days. So we'll see what camp I ultimately fall in after I play around for a bit.

I discovered "actions" as I scoured Kevin & Amanda's blog for photo, blog, and photoshop advice. I downloaded some free actions from the Pioneer Woman which is a nice entrée into adding flavor to your photographs in PS and figuring out whether you want to be a tweeking sort of photographer. I suspect I will enjoy playing with my pictures to get that extra special shot.

Here is a picture of our sweet boy at the beach this summer in the south of France. I added all sorts of actions to it. I like it. I also like the original. Perhaps I should post both. Okay, I'll do that.

Here is the one I produced in Photoshop...




and here is the original.

The Big Picture!

I am finally figuring out how to make my photos larger on my blog. I am also not happy with the redesign so I am redesigning the redesign. I figured since I haven't felt inclined to blog but am feeling like I want to redecorate, I might as well do that now!

The other things I would like to figure out:
1. how to center my post title
2. how to insert a line or a divider under it
3. how to insert a post divider object
4. I have figured out how to add extra blog pages but I'd like a better font on that tool bar under my banner. HUM. how to do that?







Saturday, September 11, 2010

Playing with Photoshop

I've decided that I want to learn more about how to tweek pictures in Photoshop. I am using PS CS3 and am going to toss pictures up here as I experiment. Feel free to comment. Constructively please.

The picture on the left, in color is the original. My daughter in a cute cotton nighty on our balcony waiting for her dad to get home from work during our stay in Paris.  In the middle is a simple photoshop conversion to b/w. On the right is a combo of the two. I extracted the nighty and placed it over for a hint of color.

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

duh.

Don’t you hate it when you catch yourself being insanely dense? As you know I love to chronicle our lives and especially our travels on this blog. You may have noticed a lack of material appearing here over this summer which might have surprised you since we are in France for a couple of months. Lots to write about and photographs to share. The problem was that with the slow French DSL uploading pictures turned into a small nightmare. Each time I sat down to write a post, it would take hours to upload the photos. I am using the new blogger editor and in the old editor you could select pictures in batches of 5 , hit upload, and walk away. It was very easy to be doing a few other things like getting the kids ready for the day or make dinner while uploading pictures. With this new editor it seemed that I could only upload one picture at a time which in essence tethered me to the computer. I found that I was spending too much time in the apartment on the computer to chronicle the previous day’s adventure and we were starting to spend less and less time adventuring. So I abandoned it altogether.

Here is where me being the moron comes in. Now on vacation I decided that I was really annoyed that I could not upload batches of photos. So in one swift search in the help box here on blogger I discovered that I could just keep adding photos and not have to wait for the first picture to completely upload. AHHH. So as I write this I am uploading 14 pictures to share from our day in Barcelona yesterday!!!

If all goes well, I will get this post done and scheduled to post before the coffee maker finishes brewing that much needed pot of joe.

If I had been blogging regularly, you’d know that I am in the south of France on a family vacation. We arrived on Friday the 30th and we are renting a crazy house in the old section of a very old hilltown. I’ll do another post about that. Monday of this week it was scheduled to rain so we decided to hop in the car and head down to Barcelona – just a short 3 hour drive away. We had a nice big lunch of tapas, paella, and sangria and walked around the town for about 6 hours. The kids got to get a jist of this beautiful city and can now say they’ve been to Spain!

Here is the border crossing coming from France into Spain: 













 La Rambla
 Smoothies from the St. Josep market were very popular on this hot day...





One of Gaudi's Houses. Casa Batllo.





 Refreshment found in a water fountain.

 Sagrada Familia proved to be inspiration for the following day's sandcastle building on the beach....














Friday, July 16, 2010

July Dates in France: The highs of the 14th and the lows of the 16th

Mid-July is a time for celebration here in France. Like our 4th of July festivities in the U.S., all across France families gather to celebrate their independence day on the 14th. However, there is another event that occurred in mid-July here in France that is not the cause for celebration. It is called Le Vel d’Hiv.

On July 16, 1942, French Police under orders from Pierre Laval and the Vichy Government who were at the time, cooperating with the occupying Nazi regime, began a series of roundups in Paris’ Jewish neighborhoods. There are differing accounts on who gave what orders for these “arrests”. Some claim that there was a certain number of men that the French police were ordered to detain while others say that entire families should be arrested in an attempt to quell public outrage that families were being broken up. None of that really matters because in the end, the reasons were simple. One group wanted to eradicate another and the reasons behind this objective can never be truly understood.  It is unfortunate that at this time France’s leaders were cooperating as though they were on board with Hitler’s mission.

Over the course of two days in July of 1942, Parisian police rounded up 13,000 Jewish residents and corralled them until July 19th at a sporting arena called the Vélodrome d’Hiver. Just to put this in perspective, 42,000 French Jews were deported to Polish death camps that year so nearly a third of those people were taken from Paris on these two days in July.

Planning for this event started the previous month and considering there had been other series of arrests during the spring of that year, rumors did begin to surface. There were undoubtedly people working in government offices who, upon learning of this secret mission, helped to quietly warn Jewish families. Some accounts of this event indicate that many people thought that the police would come to arrest just the men. Other accounts indicate that the Nazi forces asked for only people over the age of 16. Regardless of what was supposed to happen, 3,118 men, 5,919 women, and 4,115 children were forcibly removed from their homes and most were sent to their deaths. If you look at those figures and note that the women outnumber the men by nearly double, it seems reasonable to conclude that many of the men were in hiding. Perhaps some of them had already been arrested but it could be an indication that people may had heard rumors of a round-up and thought they were coming for just the men.

These people were held at the Vélodrome d’Hiver for 3 or 4 days with no food, water or sanitary conditions. Disease spread, babies were born, and people died. It immediately conjures up thoughts of the Superdome in New Orleans during the recent Hurricane Katrina. Inhumane conditions. The kind that if you really wrap your head around, your stomach will turn.

Between July 19th and 22nd the Jewish people were transported by train to either Drancy, which was a French internment camp, or Auschwitz. From some accounts I have read, men and childless couples were sent directly to Auschwitz and mothers and their children were sent to Drancy. What is seemingly in agreement amongst all sources is that at some point, children were forcibly and fearfully removed from their parents and left to their own devices at Drancy. Eventually, all these Jews were sent to a death camp.

What I find stunning is that a single event like this, that accounts for a third of the number of Jews deported from France in 1942, got so buried in history. Did you know about it? I certainly didn’t, and my husband who grew up in England didn’t learn about it either. I’d even bet that French school children don’t hear much of it as well.

I first heard of the Vel d’Hiv in February of this year when on a Sunday afternoon I picked up the book, Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay and the rest of my life stopped. I could not put it down. Tatiana de Rosnay tells two stories in alternating chapters. Both set in Paris. One, of Sarah who lives in the Marais in 1942 and the other, of Julia, a woman in present-day in a troubled marriage who is about to inherit an apartment. In the Marais. If I could recommend one book right now, this would be it. It grabs you from the first chapter and doesn’t let you go. You will find not only sorrow and grief in this book but also hope and tenderness.

Knowing I would be here in Paris on July 16th I have been rereading sections of the book to gain a better understanding of where all the events took place in the city. When you read the book, because you must, you will then understand why I will be thinking of all the Sarahs from 1942 today.

(The photos in today's post were take at the Bir-Hakeim metro station which is one you might use to go to the Eiffel Tower)

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Opposite of Windchill Factor

So I am trying to figure out why 33° c is killing me. It is only 91° f when you convert it so why does it feel like 104° f ? Because I have forgotten the pavement factor. City heat is so much worse than suburb heat especially when you are used to suburbs by the sea like I am. The pavement and stone buildings create an oven-like environment and frankly the heat this summer has become more than I can bear. There is no breeze. There is no shade. And our apartment faces west so we are screwed in the afternoons. Added to that, we have much longer days here in this northern latitude so by noon it is hot. By 3 pm it is oh-my-god-I-need-to-find-a-tree-to-sit-under hot. And by 6 pm it is so mutherfing hot you think you might actually die. We don't really sleep at night. Opening the windows isn't an option with the street noise factor. With it only getting truly dark around 11:00 pm, it doesn't cool off until about 3:00 am. By then the street noise seems to dissipate so we struggle until the middle of the morning hours when we can open the windows and get to sleep.

F.U.N

Today is probably our 10th day here with temps over 33° and we have now taken to closing our window shutters around noon to try to curb the heat in the apartment. The weather forecast is calling for things to cool down on Monday but they keep saying we're going to break the heat and it doesn't seem to happen.

In the winters they tell us it will be cold but the windchill factor will make it feel colder. I wish they'd acknowledge that in the summer it may be hot, but in the cities, it will feel hotter due to the pavement factor.

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Summer Soldes!!

France generally has sales 2 times a year. Unlike the US when every retailer seems to just put on a sale whenever they want, here the timeframe for Les Soldes is set. There is one in the winter and one usually lasting the month of July. Today, June 30th, marks the beginning of Les Soldes for most retailers and causes quite a stir. Today many things at Monoprix were marked down 50% and those of us with a carte de fidelité, i.e. a Monoprix card, got an additional 10% off. I ran in at 8 am to buy a blender/grinder appliance I've been eying and walked out with much much more. I could barely squeeze myself into the kids clothing aisle where most things were also  50% off, but I am a seasoned discount shopper. As I left the store at 8:20 am, every store on Rue de Levis was putting out tables of stuff massively on clearance to inaugurate the 2010 summer soldes season. YAY! What a good time to be in Paris! Tomorrow I am off to Les Halles where all the culinary stores are! Let's see what kind of damage I can do down there!!!

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Le Terrace

It has been hot here in Paris. My guess is that 30 degrees C is unseasonably hot for Paris as this city is on the same latitude as Vancouver, BC. I think all the pavement turns the city into an oven. But then again, according to my iPhone weather app, everyone is in the thick of a heatwave. I'll never complain about spending any amount of time in this city regardless of what time of year it is. However this beach town girl is a bit at a loss of what to do with two kids when it is so HOT in the CITY. Last year we had literally 3 months of 78 degree weather with a slight breeze. One day it rained. One day it was 96 degrees and we all thought we were going to die. Perhaps that was because it was the day that we had to collect Nana from Charles de Gaulle airport by way of the RER which has NO a/c. That was a delight. Other than those two days we had more perfect weather than we could have ever imagined. This year, we're getting heat that I did not expect.

Thankfully for us, our apartment is á la deuxieme étage. Why is that important? Well in many of the buildings here there are little terraces on the 2nd and 5th floors and the others simply have floor to ceiling windows. I know, such a shame, floor to ceiling windows, but a terrace is even more delightful. Last year we were on the 1st floor for our first apartment and the 4th floor for our second apartment so no terraces were to be had then. This is our third, and perhaps our best apartment here in Paris. It is smaller than the others but more well appointed and much more comfortable. It is in a perfect neighborhood, close to multiple metros, and is a building full of families with children. The latter point could be considered a plus or a minus depending on the time of day and whether the little terror upstairs is awake. Last week the kids and I came home at 4 pm to find a parade of 4 year old girls in Disney Princess costumes, including massive make-up, parading up to the 4th floor for a party.  It feels in NYC terms, very Upper West Side and we love it.

Yesterday was so hot that I had the curtains drawn all day and by the time we got home in the evening it was still so hot I didn't bother to open the windows. You see considering our latitude, it stays light here until nearly 11:00 pm. I don't know the official sunset time but consider this, on 14 July we will celebrate the national holiday here in France and the fireworks are not scheduled until 10:45 pm when it is dark. That is 3 weeks from now.

With my deuxieme étage apartment terrace, I have taken to sitting on le balcon during the evenings and watching life pass by. My husband is busy at work until very late these days considering it is the end of Q2 and most of the people he's managing (i.e. coaxing to get all their shit in on time) are in the U.S. Tonight he's had late meetings which have turned into a dinner at a local bistro. I know. How terrible.

Me? I've set up camp with a couple of chairs on my terrace to enjoy the evening breeze and to quietly listen to the people next door enjoy their dinner on their balcony. I've sent my children to bed to giggle and read and hopefully fall asleep at at a reasonable hour. It is 10:00 pm here and all I hear around me are the clanging of dishes as people sit down for their evening meal. There is quiet conversation from apartment windows, jovial laughter from bistros around the corner, and happy people strolling along the Rue, and I wonder to myself why I feel the need to have sleeping children. After all, the people next door have a 3-year old and he's still up. I watch families walk by seemingly full from a nice dinner somewhere, with kids in tow young enough, that by American standards, should be well enough in bed. Most are groups of families. Some are kids with just mom or dad. Many of them are ice cream in hand. Like the dad with his three daughters who just looked up and smiled at me. Bon Soirs were exchanged.

Parisian life makes me happy. The sound of vespas and cars with diesel engines roaring down the street, the smell of warm pavement and bakeries, and the knowledge that even though people here don't outwardly show it, they are enjoying life to its fullest. Á demain.

Friday, June 25, 2010

Staying fit in France

Like any other country outside the US, many American trends have filtered in here and taken root. Strong root. Like McDonalds which the French affectionately call McDo and Starbucks which I am sorry to say is starting to spring up on every block like they do in the US. We do both fast food and coffee brilliantly so it is understandable that this country would import those two chains with such fervor. However, one of the things that the French have decided to keep uniquely theirs, is exercise. There really are no gyms to speak of here in Paris. Okay. Maybe a few. And while you might think that bringing the gym concept to a city full of people would be an easy sell, getting your exercise in an air-conditioned room full of machines upon which other people are also getting their exercise is simply not popular here. For me, this has been difficult. I have had to abruptly break my 6-day a week gym habit in the hopes that marching around the city with two children in tow all day might suffice. 


When you are here for  week's vacation that might be just good enough but when you are here for several months it is a different story. Like I mentioned earlier, there are gyms sprinkled throughout the city. Most of them are near the universities on the left bank and there are few exercise rooms attached to city pools. Membership and/or usage costs are exorbitant and then there is the issue of what to do with those two children I mentioned. My husband recently caved and joined a gym which is actually just an exercise room attached to a pool up near his office in Levellois. The membership to the gym is 200 euros/month for us foreigners but if you can prove you are here working for a company and get a letter from your doctor saying you are healthy enough to exercise, they will drop that rate to 125 euros/month. The big selling point, according to the Frenchman who took my husband on a tour of the gym, is that membership also grants you access to the spa which includes steam-rooms, saunas, and the solarium. For those of you unfamiliar with that last term, solariums are large areas of decking where people lay about on lounge chair recliners getting sun and are quite popular here.  The French love to tan. The more tan you get during the summer the better. Getting a seat in a solarium is like trying to elbow your way through a ski lodge a noon looking for a place to collapse and have your lunch. During this tour, my husband noticed that the the steam rooms and solarium were full of people relaxing but the gym was vacant. The upside is that he'll never have to wait for a machine.


So what does all this mean for me? Ride up to his office and drop the kids with him at work while I hit the gym for an hour? Possible, yes. Realistic, no. Do I already feel myself getting soft? Yes. Does that make me panic? A little. Plus the city of light is not the city of lite when it comes to food so I have gone to a store called Decathlon to purchase some weights, a ball and a mat. And I will have to get my exercise where ever I can. Like yesterday, we went to the Eiffel Tower. And we took the stairs.

Monday, June 21, 2010

The old and the new

At the moment I am listening to a very frustrated maman negotiating with her 2 year old in the stairwell of our new apartment building. Well the building is not new, but it is new to me. It is kind of interesting to hear the mother-child back-and-forth going on in French. I am sure after a week or two it will get old. Simon mentioned we have small ones upstairs that like to cause a raucus in the public areas of the building and conduct chariot races in the apartment above ours. He has been here for a few weeks now and is not only not suffering from jetlag like the rest of us but he knows all the ins and outs of the apartment and this building.

We are located not exactly in the 17th as I had thought but instead in the 8th right on the line. Lucky for me it is is virtually the same neighborhood we lived in for part of our Paris excursion last year. We are equidistant from Parc Monceau but closer to Rue de Levis with all its shops & the Bio (organic) market on Saturdays.

There has been quite a different feeling landing here in Paris this time compared to last. There is so much less to figure out. I know where the kids can play, where they can scooter around, how to get to the grocery store and where everything is. Last year it took me a while to figure out shopping cart & razor scooter protocol. This year not only did I know where to park my roller cart when I was doing my shopping but I also didn't have to spend 30 minutes reading all the yogurt labels to figure out which kind the kids would like. The comfortable feeling I have with this city is nice but I have to say I miss a bit of the excitement of having to figure things out. Thankfully we have had to get creative with coffee making and the washer in our apartment was not like anything I'd ever seen.  As you can see from the first picture above it looks completely friendly from the outside. But when you open the lid, the photo on the left is what greets you. A bit of a surprise, no?

Sunday, June 20, 2010

It's not just jetlag

It is Sunday morning and I am exhausted. I slept for about 14 hours last night. My body crashed and crashed hard around 8:00 pm which is good considering I didn't take a nap after arriving here in Paris yesterday morning. The kids slept for 5 of the 6 hours on the plane while I tossed and turned as our jet made a rollercoaster ride out of our cross-Atlantic journey trying to avoid pretty bad turbulence. Of course the only thing on my mind were pitot tubes. If you don't know what I am talking about, go google pitot tubes and Air France you'll find an event from last year (almost the day) that was on my mind as I tried to relax in my AF Airbus 330 seat.

But we arrived not having to find out how cold North Atlantic waters are and I was thankful to put our 6 feet on the ground as we tried to navigate as fast as we could through Charles de Gaulle Airport to get to Dad. SJ left a few weeks ago and before that he was not home for about 2 weeks with a combination of business and vacation trips. The kids haven't spent any time with him in something like 4-5 weeks. The non-EU passport control line was, well, out of control. I'd never seen such a long line. I was so tempted to break out the kids' UK passports and follow them through the EU line and try to talk my way through with my Blue passport. But I wasn't that brave.

By the time we got to baggage, I felt broken. Preparing for this trip while single parenting for weeks on end and also trying to get through the end-of-school-year-gauntlet was mind and body bending. Ben was complaining of a blister and I was now carrying all of his bags in addition to my own. The long passport control line meant that by the time we got to baggage claim all the bags had been unloaded.

While I had originally packed 3 bags to check per the limits of Air France, we ended up checking 4 because I do not have the airport karma that my husband seems to have. When we dropped him off at the airport he had one bag that we knew was probably going to be over the limit (so I brought an overflow bag to take stuff home) and a second bag for which he'd have to pay $55 which contained things like razor scooters and household items I was sending over with him. We walked up to the desk and the AF person notified him that with two bags he would have to pay the extra baggage fee and then asked if she could weigh the bags. 1st bag was over the limit. She tagged it and sent it. The second bag over the limit she tagged it and sent it. Then told us she saw he hadn't done seating and would try to get him a good seat. She handed him his tickets and said have a nice flight. If you are thinking I forgot to mention the part when she asked him for his credit card, I didn't. She never asked for payment on the second bag and gave him that coveted window seat in an emergency row that has NO other seat in front of it at all. Leg room galore!

Let's just say that with my 3 bags becoming 4 bags upon check in, that I do not have the same kind of airport karma he has. And this was confirmed when 3 bags arrived and not 4. I grabbed my phone and texted SJ that we were missing a bag and didn't really feel I had the capacity to handle all this. It was the bag with all the good stuff in it. Expensive knives, all my kitchen equipment, father's day presents. Yeah. All the good stuff. So I make my way to the baggage claim desk to report the missing bag and find myself in yet another long line. When I get to the top of the line in true Parisian form I was promptly cut in line. Not by a Frenchman but by a German. Line cutting is part of the norm here and you really have to watch your back if you care. By the end of our stay here last year not only did I learn not to care but I also learned to cut. So alas it is my turn and I sit down and in my very rusty French I explain the missing bag. She is very sympathetic and kind. We are about to start collecting my information when my phone abruptly rings with SJ asking me where I am. He had talked his way back through customs into the baggage claim area to try to rescue me. Of course when he walked into the office the kids leapt into his arms and I started crying. I explained to the woman that the kids hadn't seen him in 5 weeks and she did the big eye-puffed up cheek blow that I love about the French. In any case, we completed the paperwork, Simon explained where we lived in Paris, and I continued to cry. She explained how they will look for the bag and then looks me dead in the eye and tells me that no matter when they find the bag that I get a 100 euro inconvenience allowance which I can have reimbursed when I get back to the States so I should go buy myself a pretty dress. And then she smiles.

So as we are leaving I say to the one with the good karma, can YOU just go take one last look. And not surprisingly, he comes waltzing back with the bag which he found in some remote corner of baggage claim.

I will still be buying that pretty dress which will be made of copper and will be purchased at E. Dehillerin.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Oh, wait, today is Saturday?

Every day since Tuesday I keep thinking the bullshit will end. The nonsense that has been tripping me up all week is nothing short of a scene out of an Inspector Clouseau movie. The kind of stuff where you just throw your hands in the air and say to yourself, "really? Come On!" I am trying to pack. I am trying to organize. I am trying to parent and keep on top of all my other responsibilities so if the nonsense could just STOP, that'd be great!

To paint a picture for you, here's today's drama...

Rolling in at 11:30 after a morning of soccer, tomato plant buying, PTO volunteer protecting, and whining children, I was relieved to be home before Noon so I could talk to the milk delivery person to let him know this would be our last delivery until we get back from Paris in August. He rolls up right at Noon. On Fridays. And then it hit me, today is Saturday.






Wednesday, June 09, 2010

There is never enough Paris

It has been a busy year. Busy kids. Busy mom. Lots of stuff going on and hardly the time to blog. But we're heading back to Paris this summer for more fun and games. Besides getting to live in one of the world's most beautiful cities, I love that life gets simple again and I have time to think and write and blog. T minus 9 days and we're back! Yay!

Oh and if I have time (insert laugh track here) I'll try to give the blog a new look.












Thursday, January 14, 2010

She's going to be very aware of you....

Those were the words just spoken to us by a Martha Producer as we sit here in the Front Row! Yes the FRONT ROW people!!! Martha will begin the show right smack in front of us! Like two feet away! Ha!





Unobstructed View!

Waiting

The vibe in the waiting room is fun fun fun. It is so nice to be
surrounded by bloggers who understand your need to post. Much more fun
to come. Stay tuned

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

A blogging Business Trip!

Blogging from the Audience @ The Martha Stewart Show
Thursday, January 14, 2010

Wooo Hooo! Follow along peeps!



The Blog Show with Brian Williams

Explore the blogosphere with Martha and blogger guests! NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams gives you a peek at how "The Daily Nightly" blog is written, "Martha Moments" creator Andrew Ritchie shows you how to use leftover yarn to embellish cards for any occasion, and "Cooking School" chronicler Jeff Blumenkrantz ("Jeff and Martha") is in the kitchen with Martha.

Thursday, January 07, 2010

Comedy on the road

Every so often my life if running errands as a SAHM rewards me with a
belly-aching giggle. Today is one if those days. I am so happy to be
neither a politican nor this man's neighbor.