Summertime

A giant juicy watermelon and some beefy rich tomatoes from this morning's Farmers Market to welcome in the new season. Our in-house compost collector better get ready for the harvest.

Dulywed: Tough Love

Mack and I were watching a really riveting and cerebral program on VH-1 called Tough Love recently. In this award-worthy reality show, couples are given relationship challenges such as "resist the whorish girl" and "tame the drunk violence," and then receive Dr. Phil-ish critiques of their behavior.

At the end of the 13-episode experience, they must make a serious and life-altering decision.

Break up or get engaged.

Because if you're on the verge of breaking up, that's really when you should be getting engaged.

Watching Tough Love got me pondering my own relationship, so I looked over at Mack and asked him. Whaddya think? Break up or get engaged.

"Let's do both."

So we did. We broke up. Actually I dumped him.

Nothing much changed, but at least we got the breaking up out of the way. Then we got dressed and went to a wedding.

Later on, while we were sitting on a rock and soaking up the sunshine, Mack asked me to marry him, partly as a joke and partly with some insecure sincerity. There was no ring, no kneeing, but something about this time was way better than the first. It was just a perfect moment of relationship stillness, and if it hadn't been for that stupid show, I may have gone the rest of my life without a guy asking to be with me.

It made all those dishes I've done the past 6 years way more worth it.

Trans Bans

Do yourself a favor and never buy these things again. They are lethal, LETHAL, and they are poisoning your babies.

Also, never buy tubes of biscuits. They are way too easy to make to risk your life for the 6 minutes of prep.

I'm pretty sure you all know how I feel about pizza rolls too. (If you wanna buy pizza, the only one we've found sans trans is DiGiorno regular crust cheese pizza.)


Ore Ida Tater Tots used to have 3g of trans fats for 19 tater tots, but now they removed hydrogenated oils from their ingredients and they are "fine" to eat, even though they still aren't really food. Oreos did the same thing.

There's power in your pennies. Stop buying this shit and they'll stop putting it in your kids' food.

Special Deliveries

This one should be here in December.
And this one is due in January.
Hooray for fresh babies!!! Congrats to these amazing mommies!! Woo hoo for Aunt Ammies!!

Love Tours 2010 (part 1 of 3)

A few weeks ago, Mack and I went to LA to visit his family and to celebrate the love of our friends Gio and Whitney. Gio shares my birthday and was my work spouse when I worked in LA. I spent more time with him every day than I did with Mack, and most nights when I'd come home, the conversations between Mack and I would start with, "Oh, guess what Gio told me/did today..."

So what if I kinda worship Gio a little bit. He's badass. And I find his OCD reassuring.

Gio's now-wife, Whitney, is about a perfect a mate as any guy could ask for. She's gorgeous, intelligent, loving, patient, classy and quite likely the most thoughtful person I've ever met.

And the two of them together, with him stealing rubs on her butt and her melting into his eyes, it's just the way it should be... the definition of a love that doesn't make you sick.

Gio and Whitney went to college together, I think at Carlton or some similar liberal arts school that cultivates ridiculously talented people, and all their pals from that era of their life made the trek to the wedding to celebrate the love they watched blossom over four years. And they brought poems and songs and speeches to offer the couple that made the rehearsal dinner feel more like a grown up talent show.

Oooohhh, that rehearsal dinner, mmmmm. Mojitos and homemade gelato and seeing all those people I fell in love with in LA again. I hope Gio and Whitney had as much fun as I did... although I'm pretty sure their night didn't end with them swimming in their underwear and driving home with a towel on their head and wearing Mack's shirt.
The wedding day started with breakfast with Jordan, Jolia, David and Kathy, other work buddies and their fascinating wives, at this awesome place called The Farmer and the Cook. Everyone at our table was vegetarian/vegan except for David and Kathy, and the table next to us, three young people whose prettiness shouldn't be natural, were on a raw diet. The girl had brought her own magic concoction of nuts and health, so she let us have a sample. And then I had one more thing to add to the list of What Makes California So Awesome.

After breakfast, we decided to go for a short hike and ended up looking over the Ojai valley behind an orange grove. The valley runs east-west so it gets sun all day and in the evening, when the sun sets, everything gets bathed in a pink light.
I planned to see that pink light emerge during the wedding.

A shuttle took us up into the mountain to this mansion that had rose gardens that would make the queen in Alice in Wonderland jealous. We watched Gio and Whitney exchange vows that made me cry about 14 times, and the minister, their friend Tessa who was ordained on the internet, told a story of a note Gio had written to Whitney when they were college about the two of them being whales off Baja California making a life journey together.

See, Gio can predict the future.
After the wedding ended, Mack and I wandered around the grounds drinking Negra Modelos and ended up perched on a rock that overlooked a junkyard. The 200 other people carried on with wedding chit chat behind us, but we soaked up the sunshine and took word adventures into our dream life.
Eventually it was time to eat delicious food, play around with the photo booth they had, and take a look at the popsicle cart, which had such flavors as avocado. Then it was cake and dancing and swirling and drinking so many Negro Modelos that every time I walked up to the bartender, he'd automatically hand me two of them.

I wonder if his birthday is also May 16.
We had to get back to LA pretty early in the morning on Sunday so we could see Mack's mom, who had been working all week, so we packed up and headed out. Mack decided he wanted a cup of coffee for the road and zipped our Ford Focus into a corner coffee shop. And by zipped I mean rammed the curb and popped the tire on our rental.

We had a brief pit stop that allowed Mack to show off some of his man skills and let me relish our good fortune at being held up in such a magical place.
Then we were on our way back to real life, knowing that we're not as good at marriage as Gio and Whitney will be but we're getting pretty good at making it through the rough spots without killing each other. And that's probably the most important part of happily ever after.

Dulywed

Last night, while I was engrossed in an episode of Forensic Files, Mack made this little video. Which is a hilarious and troublingly accurate portrayal of our life together. Except he's not nearly that polite in real life. And I look nothing like Sarah Palin.