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Henry has no school this week, so we went down to Balboa Park this afternoon for a treat. I love Balboa Park. My parents used to take us there sometimes, and we’d spend the whole day wandering around, looking at the gardens and visiting a museum or two. It’s a very happy, special place for me.

Today the Aerospace and Automotive museums were open for free! I love looking at the beautiful old cars. Here I am with an International Harvester Model A Auto-Wagon, which has bolt-in back seats so it can be used for hauling things around the farm or to take the family to church:

And here’s Henry with the DeLorean:

When we were finished drooling over the cars, we went through the Aerospace Museum. I like the WWI gallery best, and the spacecraft of course! Here’s Henry with the Apollo 9 Command Module:

So much fun!

I’ve been having a ton of fun with Hipstamatic, an app for iPhone that “brings back the look, feel, unpredictable beauty, and fun of plastic toy cameras from the past.” http://hipstamaticapp.com/

I bought it a while back when it was on sale and had fun with it then, but a recent update has made it way more useable, since it will now allow you to take up to nine photos in quick succession and eliminate your unloved films and lenses from shuffle mode. I kinda went nuts the last couple of days.

When you upload photos to flickr from within the app, it tags them with the film, lens, and flash you used so you can easily recreate your favorite combinations. Handy!

Every time I want to make a custom alarm for my iPhone, I need to google the process all over again. So, just thought I’d note it down here to make it easier next time. Of course, the same process makes alarms and ringtones.

Here’s the link I always use:
http://www.ehow.com/how_2160460_custom-iphone-ringtones-free.html

Here’s a quick version to remind myself:

iTunes preferences -> CD import settings -> AAC
Convert mp3 snippet to AAC
drag AAC version to desktop (or somewhere), throw away mp3 version, throw away AAC copy still in iTunes (if there is one)
rename from .m4a to .m4r
double-click

The alarm I just made is the “Somebody loves the MONARCH! Monarch speaking… WHAT?!??!” soundbite from The Venture Brothers. Cracks me up every time I hear it. Grab it if you want it. It’s only 7 seconds long. http://ge.tt/3yvpkMq

I had a really fun dream early this morning, just before my alarm went off. I was singing with a friend… a man with a baby daughter. I’m not sure which friend it was. Could have been Hugh, pthree, or even my cousin Jon — all three have baby girls. We were singing “I Ride an Old Paint” (I like the Almanac Singers version with Woody Guthrie on lead vocals):

The guy (whoever it was) was singing lead, and I was harmonizing. In my dream the notes were crystal-clear. The verses were easy to harmonize with, but I had a little trouble finding harmony to fit the chorus; however, by the end of the dream I found notes that fit beautifully. And although sometimes I wake up with really awful songs in my head, that’s a lovely one so it made a good start to the day.

In unrelated news, I weighed myself last night: 112.8 pounds! That’s up from my usual 109, and even if the home scale isn’t as accurate as a doctor’s office scale, I must still have gained a pound or two. Yay me!

(I’m almost 5’8″, so 109 is wayyyyyyy too thin. 112 is, too, but it’s better, anyway.)

Last Monday I had to spend a few hours at the hospital having a scheduled heart catheterization done, so my doctor could check on my primary pulmonary hypertension (caused by heart defect). It had been seven years since the last time I had this procedure done. I’ve been feeling considerably worse over the last couple of months, so I was quite worried, but my doctor says that the pressures have worsened but not drastically so, and he’s just going to double one of my prescriptions and see if that helps me feel a bit better.

Also, he thinks that my constant cough, which is not caused by allergies, asthma, or freaky diseases, must be a rare symptom of my PPH, and that it might get better on this new dose of medication. That’d be nice. I’m really tired of coughing all the time.

I have a problem with never being hungry, so not eating enough. I decided in January to try to eat some kind of lunch every day, and I’ve stuck to that. I keep a few small leftover dinner portions in the freezer, as well as some of Trader Joe’s frozen cheese tamales, and I have something nutritious, if only something small, every afternoon whether I’m hungry or not.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve also been eating breakfast. I have a fried egg on whole wheat toast every morning (where morning is sometime before noon), and I find that, paradoxically, I am much more likely to be hungry for lunch when I’ve had my egg in the morning. It’s quick to make, tastes nice, and isn’t too much food. I’m not a big egg fan — don’t like them scrambled or omeletted — but a fried egg is pleasant.

Lately I notice myself getting hungry by 11 if I haven’t had my egg yet. Yay! So, it’s time to go make my egg and eat it on the lawn in the sunshine. We’ve had some beautifully sunny days lately, which is a nice change from the unusual amounts of rain and gloom we’ve had this winter.

So, almost a month late and I’m finally writing about our lovely family Christmas!

My dear Aunt Susan and Uncle Jack flew into town from New York a few days before Christmas, and my sister Kirsten and her husband Marcos drove down from San Francisco, visited with his family in LA for Christmas eve, and then came to us on Christmas day.

(Here is Kirsten trying out Angry Birds on Dan’s iPad on Christmas night)

We had, of course, several sessions of wonderful Christmas Carol playing/singing! Mom borrowed a couple of cellos for Kirsten and Susan to play, Chloe and Sal and I all played the piano in various combinations, Bob played the guitar, and Marcos borrowed Henry’s electric bass.

Just before Christmas Dan helped me to rearrange the furniture so we could get the piano out of the dark, crowded corner of the dining room and into the living room. We just pulled the sliding doors shut between dining and living rooms, put the piano against them, and now we pretend it’s a real wall. Though it is a bit crowded, especially with 12 people in the room, it’s much more cheerful.

We had gray rainy weather most of the week, but one day right after Christmas it was beautifully sunny, so we all took a walk at Mission Bay. I need to walk rather slowly, but Bob stuck with me the whole time so I didn’t get lonely. Very sweet :) (Dan was asleep at home that morning, or he would have walked slowly with me too!)

We had dinner one night at En Fuego, and lunch another day at the Studio Diner — that meal was Grandma’s Christmas present to us all. She sent some money so we could all do something special together.

I have the BEST family.

Next time I’ll tell you about Christmas knitting and presents!

More Grammar-Land! Sorry, I forgot to update this since November, but this post will catch you up with the podcast feed and we’ll all be in the same place again.

01 Mr. Noun – 00:10:47
02 Little Article – 00:06:56
03 Mr. Pronoun – 00:11:18
04 Serjeant Parsing’s Visit to Schoolroom-shire
05 Mr. Adjective – 00:10:03
06 Mr. Adjective Tried for Stealing – 00:11:24

Oops :) Forgot! Here’s all the rest of The Apple Stone. Hope you like it!

58 The Apple Stone, Ch. 8: The Muddled Image
59 The Apple Stone, Ch. 9: Stupid as Stone?
60 The Apple Stone, Ch. 10: Big Game
61 The Apple Stone, Ch. 11: Sheep May Safely Graze
62 The Apple Stone, Ch. 12: The Monster

Next up is “The Four-Story Mistake” by Elizabeth Enright.

Happy New Year, everyone! It sure would have been nice if I’d gotten around to telling you all about our wonderful Christmastime, so I’ll try to remember to do that over the next few days, but for now, I’ll tell you about my very nice New Year’s Eve and Day.

First of all, yesterday Dan and Henry cleaned the whole hideously messy back room which serves as hobby-room/office/Kara-closet. I’ve been wishing that room was clean for, oh, years, so that was a wonderful thing!

And then last night my mom and Bob and Chloe came over, and Dan and Henry were here too so it was a very jolly New year’s Eve. We talked and laughed and ate a nice dinner of my carrot-potato-cheese soup and garlic toast, and a beautiful salad that Mom made using lettuce and the few remaining tomatoes from her garden, YUM. Sal gave piano lessons to Henry and Chloe while I was cooking dinner. Mom went home after dinner (8pm is pretty late for her already) and, until midnight, the rest of us just talked and laughed and listened to a collection of Beatles tracks that someone somewhere ripped from the Beatles Rock Band disks, so we could hear JUST vocals, or JUST bass, etc. That was really quite thrilling.

I got to bed around 12:30, listened to The Archers, fell asleep immediately after that, and slept until 9am, so that must have been close to 8 hours of sleep. A good way to start 2011. After I woke up and read email, checked twitter, etc., I did my first LibriVox recording of the year, Charles Perrault’s version of Puss in Boots for the Charles Perrault Fairy Tale collection. When I saw that project go up I begged for Puss in Boots. I just love that tale. Why does he need the boots? Who cares. He just does.

Then I had a lovely chat with Aravis until it was time to wake Henry up. I fixed him a little cup of coffee for a treat (decaf!) and we had a great time listening to The Rite of Spring and following along in the Dover edition of the full orchestral score that Santa brought him. Henry’s dad picked him up around 1:30, and a minute or two later Mom showed up to help me get my garden ready for Spring! She brought me six lovely sacks of composted steer manure (from Home Depot, she doesn’t have any livestock, heh), and she dug those into my little garden bed, and pulled weeds and everything, while I tried to stay warm in the sunshine and we talked and talked. And then we planted peas, lettuce, spring onions, and cilantro.

In the early evening Dan and I went to see “The King’s Speech” which was really superb! I loved every minute of it, as did Dan I think, and the minute we got home I made plans with Mom and Chloe to take them to see it tomorrow. It’s got a quiet but extraordinarily moving story, a great cast (Mister Darcy, Lucy Honeychurch, Lizzie Bennett, Squire Hamley, Mister Collins, and many other familiar faces), and a lovely score with lots of Mozart and an excellent use of Beethoven’s 7th at a critical moment in the story. Read some reviews to see if it looks like your kind of thing, and if it does, please go see it before it leaves the theater. Let’s support those rare movie makers who know how to tell a decent story.

Then this evening I knitted and watched several episodes of a BBC Music History series by Howard Goodall, which was great, and then we watched a few episodes of Venture Brothers and now it is bedtime.

I hope your 2011 started out as pleasantly as mine did!

At least, I hope it’s a treat :)

Here is my recording of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”:
A Child’s Christmas in Wales

This little story is a Christmas tradition in my family. I remember my big sister reading it aloud to me when I was very small, and I remember my parents reading it to us little ones, and then I remember reading it to them when I was bigger. A bit of info from wikipedia:

A Child’s Christmas in Wales is a prose work by the Welsh writer Dylan Thomas. Originally emerging from a piece written for radio, the poem was recorded by Thomas in 1952. The story is an anecdotal retelling of a Christmas from the view of a young child and is a romanticised version of Christmas’ past, portraying a nostalgic and simpler time.

If you like it, may I suggest that you buy a recording of Dylan Thomas reading it himself? It’s on iTunes (though iTunes won’t sell you the single track; you must buy a whole album of Thomas’s poetry for $6) and here is the single track on Amazon for only $.89!
http://www.amazon.com/A-Childs-Christmas-In-Wales/dp/B00491RONM/ It’s a wonderful recording. It’s a permanent part of my “Best Christmas” playlist.

Merry Christmas, everyone! I hope you get plenty of Useless Presents. Go ahead and lace your tea with rum; it’s only once a year.

P.S. I worry that the joke of “Snakes and Families” and “Happy Ladders” is lost on Today’s Youth… The real games were called “Snakes and Ladders” (you might know it as “Chutes and Ladders”) and “Happy Families“. Now you know.

Dan and I went to the art museum yesterday to see the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit again. (Henry was recovering from a sore throat, so he stayed home).

Hm, I thought for sure I wrote a blog post about this exhibit (I’ve seen it three times now) but I can’t find one, so I guess I only imagined writing it.

Our museum owns a complete collection of Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters (as well as other works) but they are so fragile that they are stored safely off-exhibit most of the time. The last time they were displayed here was back in the 80s, I believe. So this is a really rare chance to see them all. The exhibit was supposed to end on December 12th, but it was extended to December 31, thank goodness!

I really like Toulouse-Lautrec’s work. It’s so hard to say why, though. I guess I find his art to be exhilarating! I like his colors, I like his shapes, I like his perspective, I like the energy and freedom in his lines, which seem to me to portray movement but not agitation. There are a couple of pen-and-ink sketches in the exhibit which just knock me out every time I look at them — a group of racehorses jumping a hurdle, and a view of some street performers. They’re just brilliant. So few lines, so much meaning. I’m also extremely fond of the six or eight different posters and portraits old Aristide Bruant. What a guy! Here he is:

After much experimentation, I think I’ve created the world’s simplest, least-fussy recipe for Eggplant Parmesan. (Eggplant = Aubergine, my non-USA friends.) I have found that you don’t need to bother with the salting-waiting-pressing step, nor the breading and frying, nor any pre-cooking at all. You don’t even have to grate the cheese if you don’t want to.

To feed 3-4 very hungry people, buy:
Two medium eggplants
One brick of mozzarella cheese (Full-fat, please, let’s not skimp. I think they typically weigh one pound)
One jar of your favorite tomato sauce
A lump of parmesan cheese, or some of the pre-grated stuff if that’s how you fly. I won’t touch the pre-grated stuff, but that means I have to do a bit of grating. Up to you.

Pre-heat oven to 350F

Ok. Slice up those eggplants, peel and all, into rather thin slices, maybe 3/8 of an inch thick. Less than half an inch, anyway. Let’s call it a centimeter. That’s less than half an inch, right?

Slice up the mozzarella similarly. Grate up some parmesan cheese if you’re snobby like me.

Dump a little bit of sauce into a fine large casserole dish with a lid. Layer about a third of the eggplant slices on top of the sauce, overlapping as necessary. Layer about a third of the cheese slices (this will not even remotely cover the eggplant. That’s fine. It will spread out as it cooks), then about a third of the remaining tomato sauce. Repeat eggplant/cheese/sauce layers, then sprinkle a generous handful of grated parmesan cheese on the very top.

Cover and bake for a LONG LONG TIME. I think I ended up baking mine for about 2 hours. Test after about 1.5 hours and see if the eggplant in the center is tender yet. Pull some out and taste it. Raw eggplant is revolting. Bake a while longer if you’re not sure. Take the lid off for the last half-hour or so. Let it cool just a few minutes before serving.

This is so freaking tasty, and easy too! And it doesn’t make a big greasy mess in the kitchen. And it smells so good while it’s baking. Yum!

Oh, you can throw in some slices of fresh tomato between the layers, if it happens to be summer and you happen to have a lovely ripe flavorful tomato handy.

The next book in the “Kara’s Free Audiobooks” podcast is a wonderful little thing called “Grammar-Land”:

In this charming 1877 book of grammar instruction for children, we are introduced to the nine parts of speech and learn about the rules that govern them in Grammar-Land.

Judge Grammar is far mightier than any Fairy Queen, for he rules over real kings and queens down here in Matter-of-fact-land. Our kings and queens have all to obey Judge Grammar’s laws, or else they would talk what is called bad grammar; and then, even their own subjects would laugh at them, and would say: “Poor things!

They are funny fellows, these nine Parts-of-Speech. You will find out by-and-by which you like best amongst them all. There is rich Mr. Noun, and his useful friend Pronoun; little ragged Article, and talkative Adjective; busy Dr. Verb, and Adverb; perky Preposition, convenient Conjunction, and that tiresome Interjection, the oddest of them all.

Here is the Preface and Introduction:
00 Preface and Introduction

And here is the rest of This Country of Ours, part 3:

31 The Hunt for the Regicides
32 King Philip’s War
33 How the Charter of Connecticut was Saved
34 The Witches of Salem

One of my tweets was featured on the BBC’s “The Archers” website:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thearchers/2010/12/a_shed_for_tony_-_listener_dis.html

So I’m all proud and honored and stuff :)

This is completely unrelated except for being another thing I’m proud of, but 300 people have downloaded our little German book!
http://www.archive.org/details/first_little_german_book_1011_librivox

On June 1, 2008, (thanks, gmail archive) our dear Chris Hughes sent me an email recommending “Peep Show“. Dan and I tried it and absolutely fell in love. We’ve watched all six series over and over and over, to the point where we can recite along with the characters. Or all we have to do is say, “Mark, are you ACTUALLY Sherlock Holmes?”, or mention “tricking the boiler” or “invisible rays of bullshit” or “endlessly pooing” or “red next to black, jump the fuck back”, or scream “JOHNSON!” to make each other crack up.

Last year some time we heard rumors that there would be a seventh series. Eventually the rumors were confirmed, and then the writers and actors (we follow some of them on twitter) even began talking about filming… and finally, months ago, they announced that Series Seven would premier on November 26th. So we marked the calendar and began counting the days. And today was the day! Finally, finally, finally, some brand-new PEEP SHOW!

We tried not to expect too much… not every episode is great even though they all add up to something remarkable, but tonight’s episode was everything we could have hoped for. Ahhhhhhh Peep Show. Thank you, cast and crew and writers! Can’t wait for next week!

If you haven’t seen Peep Show yet, I should give you a word of warning as to content. I’ll paraphrase the warning that Chris gave us originally:

It is very innovative, and very funny – BUT dark, dark, dark, to the point of cringe making in places. Adult themes. Bad language. Do not watch with children or the elderly and infirm.

If you can handle it, you’re in for a real treat. Check youtube (carefully). You can probably watch every episode there in bits and pieces. Look for Mark and Jez:

And of course Super Hans!

This is OUTRAGEOUS! This is CONTAGIOUS!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I hope your day was as cozy and peaceful as mine.

Henry went to Rhode Island on Tuesday with his dad and grandpa to spend Thanksgiving with his Rhode Island relatives (he says they all talk like Peter Griffin), so Dan and I had a quiet Thanksgiving with just the two of us. I hadn’t really planned on making a big feast… but then Trader Joe’s tempted me with their pre-cooked half-turkey, and I do love mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. And stuffing. And gravy. So I went ahead and made everything as usual, heh.

Dan requested a cranberry cheesecake so I bought a springform pan and we made a cheesecake together on Wednesday so it could chill overnight. It turned out fabulous! Here’s the recipe: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Cranberry-Cheesecake/Detail.aspx But you should double the amount of cranberry topping, and also follow the alternate baking directions: bake at 350 for 15 minutes, then at 200 for 75 minutes, then turn off the oven (NO PEEKING) and let it sit in there for two or three hours. Perfect creamy texture and no cracks! We served the extra topping on the side so the pretty marble pattern didn’t get covered up.

I also invented a saute of cauliflower and asparagus with a lemon/butter sauce. Turned out nice! Oh, and we shared a bottle of sparkling cranberry juice. Here’s dinner:

Yum!

Elli and I just recorded an adorable little picture book together: My Very First Little German Book. The text is here: http://www.read.gov/books/german.html and the free librivox audiobook is here: http://librivox.org/my-very-first-little-german-book-by-anonymous/. I read the English parts and Elli read the German parts. I edited the whole thing together, and she did the cataloging. So much fun! Here’s a sample page:

Poor little boy!

I’m quite proud of myself because I have just read an entire novel in German: “Klassensprecherin Dolly” by Enid Blyton. I’ve read a lot of other stuff in German over the years — chapters of this and that, short stories, and even half of Alice in Wonderland for LibriVox (Elli read the other half), but never a whole novel from beginning to end. And Enid Blyton is unknown here, so I wasn’t even familiar with the story or characters. Our library has NONE of her books in English, though she is a British author! They only have a few German translations in storage. Hilarious.

Yes, it’s “just” a kids’ book… but still it was quite an accomplishment for me! And very fun, as well. I’ve always loved boarding-school stories. And I was just delighted when Dolly gave horrible Irmgard a good shaking!

Now I’m in the middle of “Balletschuhe” by Noel Streatfeild, which I’ve read before in English, of course, so that helps quite a lot. But I think Streatfeild’s writing style is a bit more complex than Blyton’s.