holiday spirits

As you probably know, I'm very much in favor of drinking responsibly or not at all, so when Mel was asking for tips for getting through the holiday season, I was a little reluctant to share this particular one.

But it's a DBJ family Thanksgiving tradition and comes complete with a pretty blue flame and yesterday, I conjured up a punchbowl full. Because, really, what's more fun that an enormous vat of alcohol that you SET ON FIRE!!!

So, next time you're having a family celebration of something or other, follow this simple recipe. Strike a match. Listen to everyone ooh and ahh. Douse the blaze. Take a sip or two. And watch all those unpleasant relatives fade to a vague, yet charming blur.


If you celebrate Thanksgiving, what's one of your family's traditions?

first things first

Somehow this wasn't exactly the result I was expecting. First, that everything looks fine. And second, that it really looks like it's a, y'know, XX. I mean, it's all good. Very, very good, even. But, as they say, still.

I'm not going to think about that right now, though, and, instead, I'm going to concentrate on something simple and concrete. Namely (I so crack myself up), it occurs to me that she'll probably need a pseudonym.

Since I have kind of a color theme going with Gray and Cole, I decided that I should follow the path of least resistance and continue along that route. Which turns out to be far easier than one might have thought, since just a few moments reflection generated the following list of possible blog names for the little one:

• Scarlett


• Pearl


• Rose


• Willow


• Ivy


• Sienna


• Jade


• +Ruby (added at the suggestion of several clever commenters)

So, tell me, which, if any, sounds best to you?

And feel more than welcome to offer any other suggestions you might have for at least somewhat color-related names.

Thank you so, so much for all your thoughts and congratulations on the last post. I don't want to get all sentimental or anything, but they really mean the world to me. Also.

and for my next trick...

I'm sitting in the airport, waiting for my flight to board. Tomorrow is the level II ultrasound and I'm almost too exhausted to be stressed. Please vote in the poll below and I'll do the big reveal when we find out.

eta: I'm too lazy to fix it, but by tomorrow, I mean Tuesday, since today is actually Monday. Sorry!

when I look into Niobe's future I see....

• blue
• pink

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already gone

Feeling oh-so-much better, mostly because I'm about to head out on a ROAD TRIP!! For the weekend!!! With the brilliant and beautiful Julia!!!

Laterz!

beware of blog

Do you ever have one of those days, when, like, everything just irks you? When the spitting rain and stubborn darkness seem like conclusive evidence of a vast conspiracy and your umbrella collapses when you try to open it? When you're sick and tired of your own blog and your own voice and you sit there watching the words you're typing appear on the screen and the letters start to look for all the world like the secret silken cords wielded by murderous Thuggees?

I realize you're probably thinking, Okay, Niobe, whatevs. No one is actually forcing you to blog. And if you don't feel like it you can always, y'know, not.

Which is a perfectly legitimate point, so let me stop whining for a moment and ask you this: For you, what's the most difficult part of blogging? And do you ever read your own writing and wonder what you're really trying to say?

Bonus fun activity! (because I'm thoughtful like that): if you want to design your own warning label (and, perhaps, post it prominently on your blog) check out this site or perhaps this one.

transparency

Someone once told me that glass, though it seems solid, is actually a very slow flowing liquid. If you examine the stained glass panels in medieval cathedrals, you'll find that they're slightly thicker on the bottom, supposedly showing how, over the centuries, the glass imperceptibly dripped from top to bottom.

However, while it turns out that the nature of glass is an improbably controversial (and, at least to me, all but impenetrable) topic, if it is a liquid, you certainly can't prove it by looking at old windows.

In fact, using the technologies of the time, medieval glass makers were simply unable to produce sheets of glass of a uniform thickness. And so they installed the glass thicker side downward because it balanced better that way.

And the moral of which is that, while, as Yogi Berra said, you can see a lot just by looking, sometimes what's most misleading is what's right in front of your eyes. It's like the marksman who amazed visitors by showing them a series of bullet holes in the side of his barn, each shot exactly in center of a bull's eye. When asked how he did it, he said, It's easy. You just fire a shot at the barn. And then you paint a target around it.


Have you ever been absolutely sure about something, but, you later learned, were totally, completely, entirely wrong?

hard choices

So, here's a game that I stole from somewhere that requires only minimal thought and limited soul-searching. Which is about all I'm up for at the moment.

How to Play:

--The poster (in this case, me) asks an either/or question.

--The first commenter (which could, quite possibly, be you) answers the either/or question, then poses a question of her own in the same format (ex: Coke or Pepsi? Mac or PC? Beatles or Rolling Stones?)

--The second commenter answers the previous commenter's question, then poses one of her own.

--And so on and so on.

Easy, right? Why not give it a try?

And here's the first question: red or white?


eta: And, if like me, you had no idea what Katie meant when she said "daddy or chips," here's a link to the iconic ad

trompe l'oeil

I was pushing the stroller across the big street down by the reservoir when one of the cars stopped at the red light rolled down a window and someone began to yell "Niobe! Niobe! N-i-oooobe!" I looked into the car and saw a guy about my age, big, balding, wearing scrubs, the steering wheel in one hand, a blackberry in the other.

"You don't know who I am," he said.

"Of course I do," I lied. "It's, um, been a long time."

"Twenty years," he said. "No, more than that. But I'd know you anywhere. You're just as beautiful as ever. You haven't changed a bit."

He asked for my email address and I gave it to him and kept walking. It was cold and it was going to rain and there was poison ivy twined around the reservoir's chain link fence. I stopped trying to remember who he was and considered what he'd said. And, true or not, it was what I most wanted to believe. Everything was different now, everything was gone or altered past all recognition, but I was exactly the same.

negative images

The other day, I found a reference somewhere to a study purporting to demonstrate that being unhappy has a number of positive features -- making you less gullible and improving your judgment and memory. The experimenter induced happy or sad moods in his subjects through movies or by prompting recollections of past events and found that those in a negative mood were more critical of, and paid more attention to, their surroundings than happier people, who were more likely to believe anything they were told.

Interestingly enough, the study also found that sad people were better at crafting persuasive written arguments, concluding that a "mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style." Which, I suppose, may fit in with the frequently-made observation that negative posts often seem, not only more interesting to read, but easier to write. Or, to put it another way, (as Tolstoy almost said) happy blogs are all alike; every unhappy blog is unhappy in its own way.

Anyway, what's your mood today: :) or :( or some other emoticon altogether?

tell-tale heart

At long last: the place where you can ease your conscience by telling us all your guilty secrets. You know you want to.*

As always, the rules are simple and few.

(1) Choose the anonymous comment option. (there are always a few people who fail to do this, so please double check before you hit publish)

(2) Leave your confession in the comments.

(3) If there are enough comments, I'll add a couple of confessions of my own. See if you can guess which ones they are.


And this isn't exactly a confession, but, while I've posted the above photo before, it's become one of my personal faves ever since Charmy pointed out the hidden valentine.


*Well, actually, I know there are some of you who, for reasons that I certainly understand, absolutely hate these confession posts. If you're one of them, just sit this one out and we'll see you on the flip side.

bottlefed

The other day, I was checking the stats for my Flickr photo account and was ridiculously pleased to see that the above photo of Cole (taken back in June when he was just beginning to hold his own bottle) is featured on some obscure Portuguese language* parenting site.

And, kind of speaking of which, it occurs to me that tomorrow is the first Friday of the month and we haven't done one of those tell-all confession posts for a while. Therefore, I'm soliciting any and all ideas about what this month's confession theme (if any) should be.

Please, help me out. Leave a comment letting me know what genre of confession you'd most like to read and/or share and start thinking about what as-of-yet-unrevealed secrets you're going to reveal.


*Courtesy of Babel Fish, here's a translation into (more or less) English, which at least gives you the general idea of what they're talking about (hint: milk for suckles and of transistion)

there is such a thing as a tesseract

I was a bookish and peevish and generally ill-natured child and one of the many, many things that annoyed me so much that it made me want to jump out of my skin was the part of Madeleine L'Engle's classic children's book, A Wrinkle in Time where our heroine, Meg, travels to a dimension far, far away and ends up on a planet controlled by an evil telepathatic force known as IT, with a capital I and a capital T.

IT captures Meg's little brother, Charles Wallace, and it's up to Meg to save him. She's trying everything she can think of, when, suddenly, she realizes that the way to rescue Charles Wallace is through the power of love. Love. That was what she had that IT did not have.

I read those words and wanted to rip the page into tiny little pieces. Even then I could see that anyone depending on my ability to love would be pretty much out of luck. It wasn't exactly that I didn't have a heart. It was just that it was two sizes too small. Minus the evil and telepathic elements, I had a lot more in common with IT than with Meg. And, while I knew that that wasn't supposed to be the point of the story, that was what it was whispering to me.

What book from your childhood had an unusually strong effect on you? And, if you know, why?