Aunt Shelli turned her collection of "Mexicana" into this super cute display at Grandma Tootie's house.
Many of the items are from the Vasquez family, including the sombreros and antique dolls....
Friday, December 23, 2011
Feliz Navidad
Monday, December 19, 2011
Elvish?
If you ever wondered about what an Elvish Elvis would look like, here ya go.
Art by Annabelle, 2011.
Senior pics on display
The photographer who took Annabelle's senior picture put her photo on display in her studio... Proud mom was happy to see her hanging on the wall!
Thanks Kathy!
(And if you're looking for a senior portrait photographer, check her out!)
Cranberries, the column
What can I bring for Thanksgiving dinner?, I asked my mom.
Hmmmm, how about the cranberries, she said.
Cranberries? Ugh, I thought.
I’m not a big cranberry fan, let alone cranberry eater. Cranberries are bitter. I think they taste like pink-colored acid.
Even the name sounds awful when you say it: “craaaaaanberries.”
Double ugh.
Now did I stop to consider for a minute that Grandma was doing all of the cooking for our annual feast? That she was hosting our family get-together?
Family and friends were coming. All I had to do was bring one little dish of cranberries. Was that really such a big deal?
Yeah.
I decided I better refocus.
How hard would it be to make a simple cranberry dish? I mean, you just buy a bag of cranberries and put them in the blender, right?
I can do this, I thought.
I got some cran-attitude. I’ll take those cranberries and show them who’s boss, I said.
I would become a cranberry connoisseur. This would become my own version of a Project Runway challenge. I’ll call it “The Cranberry Episode.”
I started doing cranberry research online. At one website, I found the mother of all cranberry recipes. It called for something like 14 ingredients. Yikes. I wanted to cook cranberries, not do a dissertation.
I thought of visiting MarthaStewart.com for a cranberry recipe, but I was afraid of what I would find there. Martha would probably have me head to the nearest cranberry bog to personally pick my own berries.
My mom called. She may have sensed my cranxiety.
Another guest had asked if she should make cranberries, my mom said. Are you still bringing them?
Hey, no poaching my cranberries, I said. I got the berries. I got the recipe. I am on it.
OK, she said.
While my as-yet-fruitless search for a recipe continued, I had a moment of weakness where I considered chickening out by buying a can of cranberries. You know, the kind that comes out like a gel with the ridges from the can. A colleague at work told me that’s the kind she prefers. Maybe there are others like her out there. Maybe I would be doing everyone a favor by bringing cranberries-in-a-can.
Rallying, I Googled “easy cranberry sauce.”
Aha, here was something. A cranberry sauce calling for just four ingredients, one of them being sugar. Plus I could add other items for “additional flavoring.”
To combat the bitter cranberry taste I opted for blueberries, strawberries and plenty of sugar. My cranberry sauce would be sweet. So sweet that our dinner guests would think of it as a prelude to dessert. I envisioned it tasting something like a fruit compote, although what a compote was, I wasn’t exactly sure.
On Thanksgiving morning, I started cooking my cranberries. Adding the sugar and other fruit, I also tossed in some chopped pecans for the heck of it. A taste test of my sauce confirmed the sweetness factor. Ahhhhh…. now this was a cranberry sauce I could be proud of. Sweet. Not too tart. A little nutty. Perfect.
Normally I’d pass on the cranberries at Thanksgiving, but not this year. Sitting down at our dinner, I pushed those cranberries like I was the president of PR for Ocean Spray.
“Have some cranberries,” I said to one of guests. He paused as if to say no, but from the tone of my voice I think he could tell it wasn’t an option.
Sure, he said weakly.
Pass the cranberries around, I said loudly.
Girls, give me your plates for some cranberries, I announced. They knew better than to refuse.
Digging in, I tasted a piece of turkey, then mashed potatoes, and then the cranberry sauce. Not bad, I said to myself. Not bad at all. Could this be the beginning of a new cranberry-based relationship? What’s next, cranberry juice? Some cranberry cookies?
The next day, as I congratulated myself on my newly evolved relationship with cranberries, I made up a plate of Thanksgiving leftovers, including a big drop of my sauce.
I popped in a mouthful. My mouth puckered on something tart. My tongue wanted to retreat. Ewwww, what was that sour taste?
Oh jeez, it was my cranberries. Yuck.
Hmmmm, how about the cranberries, she said.
Cranberries? Ugh, I thought.
I’m not a big cranberry fan, let alone cranberry eater. Cranberries are bitter. I think they taste like pink-colored acid.
Even the name sounds awful when you say it: “craaaaaanberries.”
Double ugh.
Now did I stop to consider for a minute that Grandma was doing all of the cooking for our annual feast? That she was hosting our family get-together?
Family and friends were coming. All I had to do was bring one little dish of cranberries. Was that really such a big deal?
Yeah.
I decided I better refocus.
How hard would it be to make a simple cranberry dish? I mean, you just buy a bag of cranberries and put them in the blender, right?
I can do this, I thought.
I got some cran-attitude. I’ll take those cranberries and show them who’s boss, I said.
I would become a cranberry connoisseur. This would become my own version of a Project Runway challenge. I’ll call it “The Cranberry Episode.”
I started doing cranberry research online. At one website, I found the mother of all cranberry recipes. It called for something like 14 ingredients. Yikes. I wanted to cook cranberries, not do a dissertation.
I thought of visiting MarthaStewart.com for a cranberry recipe, but I was afraid of what I would find there. Martha would probably have me head to the nearest cranberry bog to personally pick my own berries.
My mom called. She may have sensed my cranxiety.
Another guest had asked if she should make cranberries, my mom said. Are you still bringing them?
Hey, no poaching my cranberries, I said. I got the berries. I got the recipe. I am on it.
OK, she said.
While my as-yet-fruitless search for a recipe continued, I had a moment of weakness where I considered chickening out by buying a can of cranberries. You know, the kind that comes out like a gel with the ridges from the can. A colleague at work told me that’s the kind she prefers. Maybe there are others like her out there. Maybe I would be doing everyone a favor by bringing cranberries-in-a-can.
Rallying, I Googled “easy cranberry sauce.”
Aha, here was something. A cranberry sauce calling for just four ingredients, one of them being sugar. Plus I could add other items for “additional flavoring.”
To combat the bitter cranberry taste I opted for blueberries, strawberries and plenty of sugar. My cranberry sauce would be sweet. So sweet that our dinner guests would think of it as a prelude to dessert. I envisioned it tasting something like a fruit compote, although what a compote was, I wasn’t exactly sure.
On Thanksgiving morning, I started cooking my cranberries. Adding the sugar and other fruit, I also tossed in some chopped pecans for the heck of it. A taste test of my sauce confirmed the sweetness factor. Ahhhhh…. now this was a cranberry sauce I could be proud of. Sweet. Not too tart. A little nutty. Perfect.
Normally I’d pass on the cranberries at Thanksgiving, but not this year. Sitting down at our dinner, I pushed those cranberries like I was the president of PR for Ocean Spray.
“Have some cranberries,” I said to one of guests. He paused as if to say no, but from the tone of my voice I think he could tell it wasn’t an option.
Sure, he said weakly.
Pass the cranberries around, I said loudly.
Girls, give me your plates for some cranberries, I announced. They knew better than to refuse.
Digging in, I tasted a piece of turkey, then mashed potatoes, and then the cranberry sauce. Not bad, I said to myself. Not bad at all. Could this be the beginning of a new cranberry-based relationship? What’s next, cranberry juice? Some cranberry cookies?
The next day, as I congratulated myself on my newly evolved relationship with cranberries, I made up a plate of Thanksgiving leftovers, including a big drop of my sauce.
I popped in a mouthful. My mouth puckered on something tart. My tongue wanted to retreat. Ewwww, what was that sour taste?
Oh jeez, it was my cranberries. Yuck.
Monday, December 12, 2011
A Christmas pumpkin
I'm wondering if it will still be around by Valentine's Day?
Sunday, December 11, 2011
A Long Way Gone
Annabelle's "Survival Literature" class is reading "A Long Way Gone" by Ishmael Beah.
It's the story of a boy soldier in the Sierra Leone Army.
For a final project, she created this three-dimensional viewer/mask.
The eyes are cut out so you can look inside at a scene from the book...
Here's a top view of the inside of the viewer.
This is what you see when you look through the eye...
Here's a side view.
I'm hoping she get's an A on this one!
Sunday, December 04, 2011
Do not open
As any parent of a teenager can tell you, they’re not exactly
known for being neat and clean. OK, let’s be honest. Teens are
downright messy.
Take their bedrooms, for instance. A teen’s room often resembles the aftermath of a dirty bomb attack — a dirty clothes bomb attack, that is.
There may be a conveniently located clothes hamper in the teen’s room, but it remains nearly empty. It’s as if some kind of anti-clothing repellent force field has been activated around it. Even when clothes are flung in its general direction, they never quite make it into the hamper. They automatically shoot to the other side of the room, ending up under beds, in closets or behind dressers.
Teens are messy with food too. It seems like I’m always catching our teens eating in their rooms. They’re like squirrels, nibbling away at a nest full of food, burrowed under their covers. It’s as if they think they’ll never get a chance to eat again. Either that or they don’t want their sister to get her hands on their secret stash of candy from Halloween 2010.
Teens also don’t seem to have any idea about what to keep and what to throw away. I suppose they consider their rooms one big, albeit messy, filing cabinet. In their mind, they know exactly where that missing paper or letter is.
“It’s in my room,” the teen thinks. “If I dig around long enough, I’ll find it. There may be a half-eaten Blow-Pop attached to it, but it’s here somewhere.”
Unlike this mom, teenagers don’t sort their paperwork every day into neat piles of “keep, toss, recycle.” For teens, it’s all “keep.”
Whatever a teen brings into his or her room stays in the room. Crumpled paper towels, piles of old homework assignments, random notes, notebooks containing last year’s history tests, half-empty sack lunches, empty bags from that candy store at the mall, permission slips and college catalogs. It can all be found in your teen’s room, and usually on the floor.
And don’t try to ask a teen about throwing away some of those wayward papers. A mom knows a piece of trash when she sees it. But to a teen that same item is a Smithsonian Institute–worthy memento that MUST be preserved. “No!” the teen will say. “I’m keeping that.”
Left long enough without some kind of cleanup effort, a teen’s room can turn into Hazmat conditions requiring yellow “caution” tape and all kinds of protective gear. Ancient sodas slowly evaporate. Bags of chips go stale. Boxes of crackers get ground into dust. Local ant colonies start reconnaissance missions, plotting their attacks.
The only thing that stays clean in a teen’s room is the carpet itself. That’s because it’s usually not visible underneath a layer of clothing, backpacks and bags covering it.
The mess migrates with the teen. If you could look inside a teen’s locker at school, I’d bet you’d find a layer of detritus dating from the beginning of the school year to yesterday, like layers of rock and sediment that archaeologists use to measure geological events.
“Aha,” an archaeologist would say. “Here we find evidence of the Crustaceous period, and by that we mean the crusty leftovers of September’s lunch.”
Last week, one of our teens was gone at a school event for four days. She was barely out the door when I hit her room with garbage bags and a vacuum. A few hours later, the job was done. There is nothing that gives a mom more satisfaction than a newly cleaned teenager’s room.
For the next three days, every time I walked by her room I’d stick my head inside to admire my work. I knew I had to enjoy it while it lasted.
No matter how messy teens are, it never ceases to amaze me how they manage to pull themselves together each morning. They always find something to wear. It may not match, but they usually have pants, a shirt and two shoes on. I guess they figure it doesn’t matter what their room looks like when they leave, just as long as they get out the door.
Over the years, instead of threatening, begging and downright pleading for our teen to clean up her room, I’ve developed a coping technique instead.
It’s simple, effective and quick.
Shut her door. And do not open it unless it’s an emergency.
Take their bedrooms, for instance. A teen’s room often resembles the aftermath of a dirty bomb attack — a dirty clothes bomb attack, that is.
There may be a conveniently located clothes hamper in the teen’s room, but it remains nearly empty. It’s as if some kind of anti-clothing repellent force field has been activated around it. Even when clothes are flung in its general direction, they never quite make it into the hamper. They automatically shoot to the other side of the room, ending up under beds, in closets or behind dressers.
Teens are messy with food too. It seems like I’m always catching our teens eating in their rooms. They’re like squirrels, nibbling away at a nest full of food, burrowed under their covers. It’s as if they think they’ll never get a chance to eat again. Either that or they don’t want their sister to get her hands on their secret stash of candy from Halloween 2010.
Teens also don’t seem to have any idea about what to keep and what to throw away. I suppose they consider their rooms one big, albeit messy, filing cabinet. In their mind, they know exactly where that missing paper or letter is.
“It’s in my room,” the teen thinks. “If I dig around long enough, I’ll find it. There may be a half-eaten Blow-Pop attached to it, but it’s here somewhere.”
Unlike this mom, teenagers don’t sort their paperwork every day into neat piles of “keep, toss, recycle.” For teens, it’s all “keep.”
Whatever a teen brings into his or her room stays in the room. Crumpled paper towels, piles of old homework assignments, random notes, notebooks containing last year’s history tests, half-empty sack lunches, empty bags from that candy store at the mall, permission slips and college catalogs. It can all be found in your teen’s room, and usually on the floor.
And don’t try to ask a teen about throwing away some of those wayward papers. A mom knows a piece of trash when she sees it. But to a teen that same item is a Smithsonian Institute–worthy memento that MUST be preserved. “No!” the teen will say. “I’m keeping that.”
Left long enough without some kind of cleanup effort, a teen’s room can turn into Hazmat conditions requiring yellow “caution” tape and all kinds of protective gear. Ancient sodas slowly evaporate. Bags of chips go stale. Boxes of crackers get ground into dust. Local ant colonies start reconnaissance missions, plotting their attacks.
The only thing that stays clean in a teen’s room is the carpet itself. That’s because it’s usually not visible underneath a layer of clothing, backpacks and bags covering it.
The mess migrates with the teen. If you could look inside a teen’s locker at school, I’d bet you’d find a layer of detritus dating from the beginning of the school year to yesterday, like layers of rock and sediment that archaeologists use to measure geological events.
“Aha,” an archaeologist would say. “Here we find evidence of the Crustaceous period, and by that we mean the crusty leftovers of September’s lunch.”
Last week, one of our teens was gone at a school event for four days. She was barely out the door when I hit her room with garbage bags and a vacuum. A few hours later, the job was done. There is nothing that gives a mom more satisfaction than a newly cleaned teenager’s room.
For the next three days, every time I walked by her room I’d stick my head inside to admire my work. I knew I had to enjoy it while it lasted.
No matter how messy teens are, it never ceases to amaze me how they manage to pull themselves together each morning. They always find something to wear. It may not match, but they usually have pants, a shirt and two shoes on. I guess they figure it doesn’t matter what their room looks like when they leave, just as long as they get out the door.
Over the years, instead of threatening, begging and downright pleading for our teen to clean up her room, I’ve developed a coping technique instead.
It’s simple, effective and quick.
Shut her door. And do not open it unless it’s an emergency.
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