The Fridge Files (Part One in a Series): Loving Letters

There are few things sweeter than getting a piece of mail, a little moment of connection tucked inside a fragile paper envelope that can capture someone's complete attention and put your love right in their hands. One of those things is getting letters from Laila.

Because she is smarter than all the other kids in the world, Laila, 6, is already able to read and write. She read the entire "Push Button to Cross" sign all by herself when we were at a crosswalk this weekend... she actually said "Push Button to Choose" but that was only because she was mixing in some philosophy since she's already mastered the English language. This kid knows what's up.

Since Mack also knows what's up and his 103.1% A+ calculus tests (the highest in the class) deserve some attention, I had to swap some of Laila's letters for his exams. I love a decorated fridge, but we're running low on the magnets, and I've had to make some cuts. But I'm not about to part with my collection of Laila Love Letters without immortalizing them first.

I mean, when someone as brilliant as Laila lets you know that you are it, you don't let go of that easily...
As you'd expect of a genius, she is very articulate, able to maturely yet subtlely let you know her needs and wants. And if the words don't drive home the message, she considerately adds a visual that expands your perception of yourself.
I've seen a lot of art in my time, and I've never seen someone so profoundly execute a woman with male pattern balding and earlobes for arms. Makes you wonder if Picasso wasn't a mailman in her neighborhood, doesn't it?
Because two-dimensional artwork and messaging is for, well, babies, Laila has already started executing outside the page. The masterpiece below may just blow your mind, so you might want to cover your computer. I know you like it.
This last Laila letter is my favorite. It's simple yet poignant, poetic yet direct, full of whimsy while rooted in reality. And, since if that's all it was she'd be any other six-year-old, she actually designed the paper herself. She calls it, brace yourself, Zebra.
If you need to take some time off because her talent has left you dizzy or your jealousy is starting to consume you, Laila, who is basically a doctor, can write you a doctor's note. Or a prescription for "optibibotics," which are so futuristic today's doctors don't even know about them and which Laila brought to my attention while we were playing "Emergency Room." It's like "TJ Maxx," only with more tantrums and Ma'ams.

It's really too bad I can't just keep her on the fridge.

How Does a Garden Grow?

I've tried gardens a couple of times in the past, and while I love getting my hands in the dirt, I hate weeding and mosquitos and the surplus of a single type of produce that comes with these pesky old seasons.

My first garden attempt was with Amy and Dave in the backyard at Bob-O-Link. They tilled the soil and blistered their hands, and then I spent hours in the dirt putting seeds and seedlings six inches apart and two inches deep (or at least what felt like six inches apart and two inches deep). We planted carrots and strawberries and tomatoes and green peppers and red peppers, and for the first couple of weeks, I weeded and overlooked the dirt patch with nothing but optimism. At about the one month mark, the mosquitos were so bad you couldn't pick a tomato without donating a pint of blood. Weeding became a thing of the past, and the garden was left to its own devices for days at a time.

Even without our TLC, we were still gifted with the fruits of our labor every time we trekked to the garden. Red peppers, which were just as easy to grow as green peppers but which cost three times as much at the grocery store, started showing up, carrot tops started breaking through the earth. The garden was growing.

When life gives you peppers, well, you have to use them. With the same optimism I'd had when we planted the seedling, I started chopping the green peppers for veggie lasagna. Accustomed to store bought produce, I assumed that when I popped the garden pepper in my mouth it would be the same experience I'd had whenever I'd popped a purchased pepper in my mouth.
Not the case.

Garden grown produce actually has taste. It's full of flavor, dense with aroma and completely screws up your cooking. Where I'd normally used three peppers, I could only use one, and that one little pepper was almost overpowering. And then on top of that, I had a basket of peppers. No one likes veggie lasagna that much.

The carrots were a different story. They were tiny, little finger-sized carrots. I assumed they were ready to harvest because it was a beautiful weekend day and I felt like being in the dirt. I pulled up one and saw a rod of orange, and immediately plunked myself in carrot row and started digging up buried treasure.

Then, as it does in Kentucky, the weather turned. The thunder rolled in, the rain bore down, and the lightning did its best to find me hunched over immature carrots, drenched to the bone and relishing in gardening without mosquitos. After one too many brushes with death, David finally came outside to point out how absurd I was being and ordered me to abandon the carrots and come inside.

I don't really like carrots, so I don't remember eating them or how they tasted. For me, the thrill came from cultivating them.

The second garden came courtesy of Shannon, who read somewhere that success was growing a garden, and since she is a brilliant overachiever, it only followed suit that she would grow a garden. She started her seeds under grow lamps in the kitchen. For weeks we watched as dirt pods gave way to unfolding seeds. For weeks I wondered if the police would be raiding us anytime soon.

When it came time to break the earth, what better spot that right in the middle of the backyard? After she'd shoveled a path to having a garden, she stacked the old land in a heap next to her project and was content to let that mound be the start to the Picadome Hills. Having done the garden thing, I made it clear that this was her project. I watched, I laughed, I shook my head, knowing that if the weeds didn't kill her the mosquitos would. I also assumed my usual position as her shadow and cleaned up her destruction so that the beauty she was making would be amplified.

I don't know how often we pulled goodies out of that garden. She planted peppers, tomatoes, zucchinis, cucumbers, chives and zinnias, and I distinctly remember the thrill of adding some of its offerings to breakfast one day. Shannon married Charles that summer, so the garden didn't get its due respect from anyone. I mowed around it every week, noting how many tomatoes were abandoned to rot on the ground, how many zinnias were begging to have a place on the island in the kitchen. Life just got in the way of the romance of having a garden. Life and the mosquitos.

My association with two gardens has left me with a brutal honesty about what I will do for a vegetable. I will not hoe, I will not till, I will not weed, I will not fertilize, I will not harvest regularly, I will not modify my cooking.

I also will not miss the chance to bite into a juicy, warm, homegrown tomato in the middle of summer, and since I'm not sure I can count on Californians to share their produce the way Kentuckians do, I'm back on the garden wagon. I love how tomatoes are hot inside when you pull them from the vine. I love slicing them and putting salt on them and calling it a meal. I love making salsa from their mass production. They're the the flavor of my childhood, of summers at Grandma's and cookouts by the sandbox. They trump watermelon and ice cream, the swimming pool and playing Chase at dusk. They're the heart of the garden, and even when the gardener doesn't have heart, the tomatoes still deliver.

Just 60 more days...

What a Day, What a Day

After what felt like the longest week ever -- the kind where you go from loving your job to hating your job to being indifferent about your job and where you hate to admit that the highlight of your Valentine's Day came from being completely selfish -- I got to have a Saturday -- the kind where you have nothing planned and no one telling you what to do. These were completely foreign to me until I moved to LA.

We've been having the most gorgeous weather I've ever experienced in February, so instead of holing up and riding it out like we're conditioned to do at this time of year, we've been riding our bikes to Venice Beach to watch people and smell the sea in the air. We never plan to ride our bikes to the beach, but somehow we end up there, laying in the sand and listening to drummers and wondering why we don't go there more often. It's amazing how that salty moist air manages to blow away the residue of life while that crystal clear sunshine reinvigorates your whole attitude.

After a day in the sun, the night in the house is actually a pleasure. The windows and doors are wide open, the air is wandering through the house and cleaning the stale life out of the corners, the alley noises are creeping in and teasing our imaginations.

Today I love living here.

44 Questions

Dear Elijah sent me one of those questionnaires, and I couldn't resist. I love these things.

1. What is your occupation?   not really sure. i wish i was a writer, i'm basically an editor, but i also play with video stories.
2. What color are your socks?  black with a snowflake
3. What are you listening to right now?  two boys playing Guitar Hero, very badly
4. What was the last thing that you ate?  pepperoni pizza or a tater tot
5. Can you drive a stick shift?  i prefer them
6. If you were a crayon, what color would you be? cornflower blue
7. Last person you spoke to on the phone? mack, but i've left a couple messages this morning
8. Do you like the person who sent this to you? i adore her.
9. How old are you today?  28
10. Favorite drink? lemon lime sparkling water or Ruble's martinis
11. What is your favorite sport to watch? boxing on tv, baseball in real life
12. Have you ever dyed your hair? twice... once reddish, once maroon, now just highlights, which i desperately need.
13. Pets? miss kitty and V
14. Favorite food? too hard to answer, since I love to eat... maybe mashed potatoes
15. What was the last movie you watched?  part of match point, otherwise Last King of Scotland
16. Favorite day of the year?  my birthday
17. What do you do to vent anger?  bitch
18. What was your favorite toy as a child?  homer or my silky
19. What is your favorite - fall or spring?  fall
20. Hugs or kisses? kisses. not the sloppy tonguey ones, but the tender full affirmative savory lip ones. delicious.
21. Cherries or Blueberry? bing cherries raw, blueberries in my dad's pancakes
22. Do you want your friends to email you back? usually
23. What happened to this question?
24. What happened to this one?
25. Living arrangements? cramped and overpriced
26. When was the last time you cried? not sure. i almost cry every day but only really cry about once a month. probably the last horrible cry was leaving leiah, ben, betsy and my mom and dad in october. that one still hurts.
27. What is on the floor of your closet? the dog
28. Who is the friend/family you have had the  longest that you are sending this to?  my mom
29. What did you do last night? hung out at a pub with Kristin, Will, Melissa, NUC Dave, Gio & Raul, drinking beer and playing Guitar Hero
30. Favorite smells? thanksgiving dinner and mack when he changes deodorants
31. What inspires you? ladies
32. What are you afraid of?  corruption and lies
33. Plain, cheese or spicy hamburgers? sometimes a plain cheeseburger is a taste of heaven
34. Favorite dog breed?  devoted mutt
35. How many years at your current job? <1
36. Favorite day of the week? Saturday
37. How many states have you lived in?  three
38. Favorite holiday? halloween
39. Ever driven a Motorcycle or heavy machinery?  yes, a motorcycle, once with success and once it tumped on me and that was the end of that.
40. Who's your favorite NFL team?  UK is the only team I like
41. Do you have a house phone that is NOT cordless?   i don't even have a house phone
42. 10 inches of snow or 100-degree weather?  depends on if I want to swim or snuggle
43. What kind of car do you drive? no lo tengo un coche... I scoot
44. Do you have any tattoos?  uh huh

I also love reading other people's answers, so you should answer in the comments part. Pllleeeeeaaaassseee?!!

Happy Days

I spent the last couple of days rediscovering why I'm too old for things like "spring break" and why I really can't rely on potato chips and brownies as my sole sources of sustenance. That's right, it was the annual ski trip weekend with 30 of my oldest and newest friends, which means we were holed up in a cabin in a construction area in the mountains in Gatlinburg with nothing but board games, junk food and liquor. Good times.

Since most of my weekend has an alcoholic or hangover haze all over it, I can only really remember laughing. At Porkchop whenever he gave clues for Catch Phrase. At Thumper. At Amber 2 and Phil whenever they were wearing those ridiculous glasses and had to get a better look. At Will whenever I passed by him playing Guitar Hero. At Brady whenever I skunked him in my second-ever game of cornhole. At Jana moments before she passed out. At Vic wrestling a Jagered-out-of-his-mind Matt to the ground. At the artwork throughout the cabin.

And since it's been barely 24 hours since my last drink, I'm still in an exhausted stupor, so I'll let the pictures be worth the thousand words.

Will rethinks the whole marriage thing...

Lisa embodies a side effect of too much ski tripping.

Security.

Jon and his standbys... cafe lattes and Woodford!

You should have seen when Amber had them hooked on her shirt collar. Pee my pants funny.

This is what you call "double fisting with a beer bong backup."

Guitar Hero plays his favorite song ever -- "Surrender."

The Shot Train stop, starring Amber 2 in her shot sequence debut!

Team Drunk & Hello, My Name Is Drunk doing math.

JD, Manlissa and Megan 2 Getting Steamy

I'm pretty sure we killed on points. Girls tore it up.

Thanks to all who made it a weekend worth remembering -- to all the game planners, to Griffin for letting me steal his room, to all the girls on Team Amber, to the members of the Shot Train, to all the cooks/shoppers/keg transporters/money figurer outers/event organizers/video makers, and to Lisa for not killing me when I got 4. See you next year!