Ombailamos

watch ALL the shows!

I realized last night, looking at the long list of shows on our DVR, that Mr. P and I have become serious consumers of filmed media. And we hardly even go to the movies anymore. Between web video and the TeeVee, all I can say is it's a good thing I can read at the same time most shows are on because otherwise I would have to sequester myself in a room without a screen. I shock myself.

Speaking of Mr. P, he recently found this: http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/cdf25c08c7/the-rece-pt The Rece!pt is a short film inspired by a German thriller called Run Lola Run (which is excellent by the way). It concerns a young man who has to get across town with a receipt so that his girlfriend can return a very expensive handbag before the store closes, and the obstacles he faces along the way.

If you live in L.A., it's quite funny because our hero is on foot and the locations he crosses range from the San Fernando Valley to Hollywood to Long Beach to Beverly Hills. And the obstacles themselves are pretty funny. One of them is a gang of ... ballroom dancers. (Why?!) And Mr. P and I were in the project. If you are on the lookout, you will see us, trying not to laugh (because we are not actors) while the hero dashes through the group.

In other news, we are now keeping up with SIX scripted shows as well as Iron Chef America, DWTS, SYTYCD, etc. Maybe we should send them all a demo reel. Then all this couch-surfing could be justified as "research."

random notes

I am in one of those list-checking-off, tidying-up, housekeeping & organizing phases. Precipitated by a chapter Board meeting and a dinner party. Now if this mood will just persist till the tax prep is done, I'm golden.

Ms. Hummer 2012 has been on her nest for a week now. If all goes well, chicks should be hatching toward the end of this week, beginning of next. I will be spying regularly. ... Either she is getting used to me, or she was just too comfy to leave the nest when I went out this morning to refill the feeders.

Mr. P and I will meet with our coach again this week, and this time with much lower pressure - working on just one dance instead of four, and for a (donated) performance instead of a competition. And we have music to work with, which always helps. I am fairly proud of the edit I did on this one, two splices and a trim from the front to get it down to length and get the boring instrumental bridge out of the way. :-)

A fairly ambitious weekend menu worked out well. I will cover in more detail in the next few days.

And finally, I am on the homestretch of a small addition to my Etsy inventory and hope to get that all posted next weekend. Motivation there: a wildly self-indulgent trip to the Gem Faire in Santa Monica on Saturday. Kahn-Fagan, my nemesis!

the dream house, v2012

I am a house nerd. I am interested in architecture, building design, and building technology. I am interested in simple living, self-sufficiency, and space management. I have done to-scale drawings of house plans for nearly thirty years, ranging from very ornate and/or avant-garde to extremely simple and minimalist. In the past few years, I've been actively educating myself about what kind of house I want to live in, in my later years.

Obviously I am hoping that I won't be living there alone. But one thing ten years of marriage has taught me is that I have a deeper interest in the details of this future home selection than Mr. P does.

It's not that he's not interested in design: he definitely is. He's got spatial-relations skills for days, he's a great lighting designer, and he has strong opinions about what looks good and what works. More, this is a case of me learning about stuff and then talking it through with him. I'm the researcher.

We watch "Holmes Inspection" together and we have mutually decided that one thing we DON'T want is a fully-renovated older house. We just have no faith that the renovation will have been correctly done, or that the original structure will be sound. So the retirement properties we'll be looking at in a few years will ideally be unrenovated. Because we're just going to take all the interior non-load-bearing walls down anyway, and probably the interior sheathing of the exterior walls as well.

We want to retire in a house that is inexpensive to operate, which means it needs to be well-insulated, with low-maintenance exterior surfaces, high-efficiency water use, and minimal HVAC requirements. Obviously, the location we choose will be an essential part of this equation. We're going to be looking on California's central coast, but inland - where temperature ranges are, well, temperate; and "weather" is not really a consideration.

One thing I feel pretty strongly about is not buying too much house. This is about retirement. I want to have time to have a garden, time to work on crafts, time to teach a little if I want or need to. So if it would take more than thirty minutes a day to keep the house tidy and clean, the house is too big. In effect, this means I want no more than 1200 square feet of inside space - and if I can design the layout myself, we could be quite comfortable in quite a bit less.

Far more important to me than the size of the house is the size of the lot, and freedom to make use of it as we please. So we won't even look in any 'association' areas. We'll almost certainly be looking outside city limits.

But at the same time, we need to be close enough to amenities that cabin fever isn't a risk, and close enough to emergency services that a gardening accident doesn't mean dying alone in a ditch. So we're not going to be looking in remote or difficult-to-access areas, like somewhere on a twisty road in the Coast Range. We're going to be in one of the valleys, near a good-sized town.

I want to be able to install photovoltaics, a greywater irrigation system, a composting toilet, and a rain garden. I want to be able to hang a clothesline and put the vegetable garden in the front yard if the site works best that way. There will be no grass lawn, no lawnmower, no leaf blower; there will be fruit trees, and I definitely want some chickens, or ducks, or both. So my yard is going to be messy. I don't want neighbors so close that they are going to bitch about my meadow or my bees.

We are still five or more years off serious house-hunting time. By the time we're ready, we're going to have a very precise set of requirements to set before a local agent. Having never worked with an agent before, I can only guess how they will react to having a set of requirements that treats common considerations as unimportant!

But really: we don't care about the school district. We don't care if the property has the potential to appreciate in value. We're hoping to die there, and our heirs are likely to be the Nature Conservancy and a nephew we barely know. This is about what we want. It's about how we want to live as our lives wind down.

It may be weird to think so closely about all this at midlife. We may not be moving into this dream property for twenty years. But this is a decision that, if made incautiously, could be very difficult to reverse or correct. We want to get it right the first time.

the optimist, keeping an eye on the paparazzi

See that pale rim of soft-looking nest around the top?  That's the new stuff.  The darker gray nest cup was all recycled.  I am sure that the entire interior is carefully lined with fresh new spiderwebs and other fluffy goodness for the average pair of teeny tiny eggs.

enforced beadery

So last week, Mr. P and I were supposed to be gearing up for competition. And then we both caught flu. Murphy, meet Law.

As flu goes, this one was trivial: a day of chills and fever, and a couple of days of fatigue and general acheyness. Compared to my last dose of flu, it hardly even qualified. But it did mean a couple of days off work for me and three days off for Mr. P. What do to with all that unscheduled "free" time?

Obviously, in my case, a lot of reading. I polished off a mystery series I was re-reading prior to donating to our library. Caught up on a couple of issues of Fast Company, and a National Geographic. Got some computer chores done.

But over the weekend, Mr. P sort of commandeered the laptop to stream Season 4 of "The Tudors" onto the big screen, and while that was playing out I engaged in some overdue and very entertaining (to me, because I'm a nerd) beadery.

There was a necklace I made a long time ago that needed to be renovated. So I did that. Then there were two other, more recent things that needed to be enhanced. So I did those. And then there were four drawers from the bead pagoda out on the floor and I engaged in a binge of organization.

You would simply not believe how many shades of red there are. Apparently I own some kind of bead representing each of them. The yellows and metallics were a breeze in comparison.

I really love all my beads and the collection itself is a joy to behold, but I hope to seriously draw down the collection this year. I meant to make a lot more last year than I actually did make; and the things I made just didn't use enough product! I need to find me a project I can work on a little bit at a time that will use a whole lot of beads.

At least I can go into it considerably more organized than I was a week ago.

hummingbirds! [facepalm]

She's doing it again.

Last week I was sitting on the couch having my breakfast before work and saw the telltale jiggle of the ficus tree. Sure enough, there is Ms. Hummer stitching away at a nest.

It looked as though she is recycling one of last year's nests, rather than starting from scratch; after a year of exposure, the structure had been pretty well cleaned by rain, wind, etc. so maybe she thought "good, a fixer-upper" and decided to save some time.

Of course, she really ought to have waited. Just because Nest Building Day 1 was sunny and mild, doesn't mean February isn't going to bring its usual 10 to 14 days of cold, wet weather. But nature is optimistic.

link of the week: white hot truth

http://whitehottruth.com/white-hot/in-honour-of-the-fact-that-life-is-short/

Anybody out there, besides me, who has a big long list of gwishes (goals/wishes) for 2012? Anybody out there, beside me, who had a big long list for 2011 and didn't get to the bottom of it?

I am going to try to take Danielle's advice here to heart. I have a tendency to overschedule. There is a lot I want to do, and I often feel that time is fleeting so I have to do things now now now. But this doesn't just affect me, or me-in-this-moment.

So I want to try to place every gwish that pops into my head in a box with Quality of Life, Creativity, and Loving Relationships and let them all duke it out. If I open up that box and everyone is happily cohabitating, that's a gwish I'll keep.

If a gwish gets pummeled to death by the three dragon guardians of my mental and physical health, well, that's my dragons telling me you don't have to do Everything Right Now.

Enjoying the beauty of life is just as important as Project X. I'm getting better at it every year, but it never hurts to unleash the dragons. Happy Year of the Dragon, y'all.

*here's a little bonus link if you want to keep surfing this wave. http://www.bemorewithless.com/2011/how-to-make-a-love-list/

wild kingdom

So this weekend we had a good day of rain, and on Monday we had a downpour. The results are: clean streets, clean trees, clean air (temporarily), and a gorgeous accumulation of snow on the mountains to the east.

I like rain, and I wish we got some every month - I miss thunderstorms! - but the six-week winter period when Los Angeles gets most of its precipitation has come to be a slightly anxious time for me. Not because I have to drive in it (thank heaven) but because of those silly hummingbirds.

Last year a lady hummer built her nest in the middle of winter. It was absolutely the wrong time to build a nest and try to hatch chicks. She managed to fledge at least one, but there were days when I turned on our patio heat lamp for her, because it was so cold out there. You have never seen anything quite so pathetic as a two-inch bird huddled down in a golf-ball nest with big drops of 50-degree rain thumping her on her head.

I am hoping the little nitwit does not repeat this performance. Saturday, during the morning showers, I saw one of the female hummers perched in the ficus tree and just thought "don't do it."

The Anna's hummingbirds, which are the most frequent visitors to my patio garden and drive-through, do not ordinarily migrate from our latitude. They are, ostensibly, adapted to the weather. We have year-round natural food sources, and a patio like mine is kind of an ideal sheltering spot because not only do I have the feeders, I have cover; it's situated in such a way as to discourage incursions by predators like rats or crows; and there are old mangey trees nearby that are loaded with spiders and other little bugs, providing good food and nest material. And I know that wild birds are a lot tougher than they, in their tiny feathery cuteness, appear. But still. Wait at least till March, okay?

what DVRs were made for!

For the true addict, or student, or just dance lover: you can now see repeats of So You Think You Can Dance in primetime, Fri-Sun, on Ovation. And you can also now see repeats of Dancing with the Stars in primetime Fri-Sat and Sunday afternoons, on GSN (Game Show Network).

I stumbled across this latter phenomenon this weekend. Judging from the promos they were running during commercial breaks, GSN has acquired at least half of the seasons to date, and I see no reason to suppose they haven't bagged them all.

It just so happens that due to some technological connectivity engineered by Mr. P, I am the proud bootlegger of all except Season 1 of DWTS. Back in the mists of time, Season 1 was probably considered a throwaway. They had a tiny cast (compared to recent seasons) and it was over in a flash.

But lo and behold, a cultural phenomenon was born and now we have at least three dance-oriented TV series in any given year. I think this is awesome. When I was a kid, the only dancing I could see on TV was on the series "Fame" or on PBS broadcasts of the Lawrence Welk Show or of Hollywood musicals.

Also, of course, with cable and satellite TV and other media, the average person now has near-instant access to the hundreds of dance-oriented movies made over the years.

There is still stuff, of course, that is very difficult to find. Like a French near-silent movie called "le Bal" that I saw (in France) and finally found on a very expensive imported VHS. Or Sally Potter's excellent "The Tango Lesson," still unavailable on DVD.

But that's what it means to be a fan, I guess. Those oddities and rarities stick in your mind and in between "fixes" there is the mass market. Which has, happily, gotten a lot broader.

Now if ESPN would just schedule DanceSport competitions ... we would have to upgrade the DVR.

Quick note on dance movies: not long ago I picked up the DVD of "Love 'n Dancing," which is mostly about West Coast Swing and is kind of a romance and kind of an after-school special about the hearing-impaired, has a few very good dance performances at the end and those are the only reason I've kept the thing.

More recently I got something called "Leading Ladies," which I never heard of before it showed up in my Amazon recommendations. It stars Melanie LaPatin and Benji Schwimmer and it is, I am happy to report, a Good Movie. It is funny and dramatic and sweet, and while the characters are slightly over-the-top a la Strictly Ballroom, the movie loves them. Plus, not only does it contain one really excellent number with Benji, it is about dancing as much as it is about anything else. And there is a lot else going on.

Full disclosure: there are gay characters in this movie and the central romantic relationship is between two women. If that's an issue, don't search this one out. But if you like a classic coming-of-age story combined with a classic show-business story, I recommend it.

spring cleaning

So, a little early.  "Tax prep" is one of those phrases that covers a lot, isn't it?  Had to first update my filing, then pull out (and do a half-a**ed job of organizing) my 2011 statements and stash them out of the way till I'm actually ready to assemble my 2012 tax box.  Along with that, a little junk went to the shredder and a lot into the trash.

Why is paperwork so easy to put off?  What drives me crazy (about myself) each year is that I have inevitably procrastinated with regard to tasks that simply do not take that much time.  Why don't I just do them along the way?  Why let them pile up?

Well, of course, the answer is that there is always something else to do, and often the other task can't really wait.  Many projects are time-sensitive, and paperwork really isn't.  At least until tax time.  And then, here I am, kicking myself for not just doing the fifteen minutes or half-hour of data entry every month.

Part of my paperwork-related to-do list this weekend was to clear out a large stash of articles I had assembled, mostly having to do with yoga and other fitness disciplines.  I had to really consciously walk myself through the mental steps of letting go of this stuff, because it's all great stuff - but these particular articles were not the first, and will not be the last, such articles.  It's decluttering 101.  Can I get the information again?  Yes.  Easily.  For free.  At will.  Thus ... no need to keep all these pages torn out of magazines.

Oh well.  It could be, and has been, worse.  And this too shall pass!