Behold, the only thing greater than yourself!

Remember that line from Roots? Hope so.

The only midwestern city that's better than Minneapolis is Chicago, so it was a natural long-weekend destination. We left right after work on Thursday and drove for awhile. Dan let me listen to my newest obsession, Game of Thrones, and I decided to download the physical book, too. Cliff-hanger! I'm already on to the second one. Anyway, we drove and drove and ended up in Rockford visiting Cheryl and her new boyfriend, Dave. They're cute together and have a nice house. We chatted until midnight or later and then crashed, grabbed breakfast, and drove to Chicago. We made it in pretty good time until we hit 94/90. I think I spent about 2 hours going less than 20 mph. Chicago, we hate your traffic!!

My cousin Sarah lives in Chicago now, with her new hubby, and they rent a Mac properties apartment in Hyde Park Chicago. Of course, this was perfect for us, with our love of MAC's help on Armour Boulevard in Hyde Park, KC.  They helped us buy bus passes and we took off on the number 6 to downtown. Navy Pier was cold and foggy, but we decided to ride on the architectural boat ride tour anyway. We had a pretty good tour and it was awesome to learn a few facts about the Chicago rebuilding and the skyscraper construction, with lots of quirky facts about each building's construction  Sadly, I have no photos of this because our camera died on the drive to Chicago.


We were all freezing by then, and sushi seemed like the only way to warm us up, so we went for sushi and dinner and back to Cheryl and Dave's hotel for a drink. After that, we went back to the apartment, talked for awhile and then crashed.

Day 2 Sarah had to work, but we went to the Frank Lloyd Wright walking tour in Oak Park. These were the giant houses I'd been waiting for.  I fell in love with the first suburb, even though I hate suburbs and all....

After the lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely walking tour, we went to Indian food. They do know how to make it spicy in Chicago, thank god. Then we went to the show "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind." Check out their website here: http://www.neofuturists.org/
I also love that we can see a show and the ticket price is based on the roll of a dice. We met up with Justin and his new GF (everyone seems to have a new boyfriend, girlfriend or husband in this episode of our lives)  and they saved a spot for us.

At this show, you get a special name based on what you look like or how you act when they ask you your name. I saw a JFK, JR on a preppy kid and some punk ass names on some punky looking kids. Dan was Rodeo and I told them my name was Reindeer. They gave me a nametag that says Pee Pee Pants.


The show was inspiring, poignant, beautiful, sad and hilariously funny. They try to do 30 plays in 60 minutes. We got to 28.5 plays in 60 minutes and then got one small piece of pizza after the show.

Went back to the apartment, crashed, and then woke up for brunch with sarah and brian and brian's brother and stuff.Since the brother and fiance needed a place to stay on Sunday night, we decided to just leave and drive back rather than force one of us to get a hotel. So on to MN we went, where I napped and drove and realized that I really want a house that Frank Lloyd Wright designed so that I won't be in this infernal apartment any longer! :)

Remember your graduation?

I don't remember mine too clearly. I remember it a little bit, some parts, but nothing stands out other than clapping for all of our teachers and throwing the caps in the air at the end.

It seems like yesterday when I found Jade sleeping on the stairs, when she was 6 and 3/4 years old. She had a little book in her hand and she was waiting to read it to me. Or for me to read it to her. It was the most touching moment that I've had with her, scooping her off of the stairs and carrying her to bed, feeling terribly remorseful that I didn't get home from work in time to read the story. She wasn't quite as long as the stair was, and so tiny that her entire body could fit across the width. Clad in a pink nightgown, her hand stretched out and wrapped around a book. She was waiting for me to come home.

Now she has graduated, and I still have to remember that we're not going to Miss Winter's first grade reading session, that we won't have any more time at elementary school or Parkview Middle School or anymore first kisses to talk about or homecoming dances to share.

I rented a limo for this graduation, something to celebrate my mom's 50th and distract us all from the fact that my Dad hasn't called or asked about graduation at all and probably isn't going and doesn't care,  and to remind us that we are not going to have this house much longer, either.
 The limo was perfect.

My sister hopped in, embarassed that it was parked right out front for her and my mom crawled in, shocked that this was actually happening. She said she had never been in a limo before. My brother crept in and acted like this was something he'd done a million times, and then Dan, Lisa R and I slid in as well. Radio? Check. DVD player? Check. Minibar? Nope. Forgot the booze, since it was a Highschool graduation + 50th birthday party.

We did what every limo passenger does: Called our friends, asked what they were doing and decided to drive around to get them while dancing out of the sunroof. We stopped back in Ankeny for soda and wine for the adults, we drove around the lake, and then stopped at Cheesecake Factory for desert.

I have had a few happy and amazing days in 2011, but I will sincerely say that this one was the best of them all.

My cousin, Vinny

I've a friend who is a freakin' good attorney.  I thought I'd be the kind of person that dislikes attorneys and all things big legal, but as time passes, I just appreciate them more. Practicing law is like art, it's beautiful and when it's done well, it damn well kicks ass.  My friend is amazing at getting an audience to side with her, to get people to be sympathetic to a cause while agreeing to move against it, she's wonderful at consensus building and majority rule and I'm damn lucky that she considers us her friends in the first place, for there's certainly nothing that I've done for her that equals the good she's done for me. I called her for a particular potential legal situation that has nothing to do with my family and she instantly found some great recommendations for lawyers that specialize in that type of law. Relief. I love professionals.

I went into a small bookstore today after work, rummaged through a jewelry store that had a large husky standing sentry, and bought a book with several short stories from the UIowa Writers Workshop,  and they were playing Christmas Music and random historical recordings. At one moment,  Teddy's eulogy for Robert Kennedy, JR popped on. I nearly cried for a moment, listening to it, the Kennedy family representing Citizenship. I asked myself if I was representing the suffering or the sufferer, and the answer was that perhaps when acting in my own self interest, I can be a bit biased. Am I not suffering, isn't everyone suffering in some capacity or another?

"Some people see things that are and say why? I dream things that never were, and say why not?"--Ted Kennedy
I wish I could say that I was that optimistic or idealistic, but I can't. Nor can I say otherwise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9JTYnMpRyg

The most unfair thing

I hate using qualifiers, like "the most unfair thing in the world", for surely anyone can come up with something more unfair.  Yet this blog entry from Lois Lowry does make one's heart turn. Isn't this completely unfair, to die when your little baby is only 2 years old?
 Of course it happens every day, but what a tragedy.

I hope that if Lois Lowry is out there, she forgives me for directly copy/pasting this into my own blog. 

Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht

I am writing this from Germany, where I am visiting my granddaughter and her mom and stepdad, and where it has been snowing now for several days. We were delayed getting here from Zurich because of a snowstorm...and it hasn't stopped. Airports all over Europe are now closed though it appears that the snow will have ended by the time we leave here, flying out of Luxembourg, day after tomorrow.
Last night, despite the weather, we went to the town of Gorelstein, about 38 kilometers from here, for a chamber music concert in which Nadine's violin teacher was the lead violinist. There was something quite magical about being in a goregous old German church, listening to Bach, with snow falling outside. Driving home...with difficulty (twice we failed to make it up a snowy hill and had to take a different route)...on twisty narrow roads through woods and occasional villages, in the swirling snow, you could almost picture the brothers Grimm creating their tales. Wolves lurking in the snowy darkness didn't seem beyond the realm of possibility.
My granddaughter is a typical teenager who plays violin, and dances, and rides horseback and goes to parties and is working on getting a driver's license (much more difficult in this country!) and who is at this moment working on her calculus homework.  But she is also an imaginative and gifted photographer who recently got a fine camera for her 17th birthday and has been creating some dramatic photos of herself:

This morning I had her do some photos of me for book-promotion purposes but they are the standard author-trying-to-look-scholarly photos, no fishnet or eye makeup!
Grandbeagle Luke has just been out for a run in the snow, and soon we will go through the snow to the next village to have dinner with Nadine's German grandparents, Katerina and Johann, who have lived there all their lives. My son Grey, Nadine's father, is buried in the beautiful little village cemetery there; she was only two when he died.

He would be so proud of her today.
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh
Sleep in heavenly peace

Imagine

I was just taking the doggie out to the bathroom and thought "I wonder how much different the world would be if people would just accept for a few minutes every day that there might not be a God that's watching over them and dictating their life's events."

Then I realized that John Lennon had already done this thought exercise.
Let's give it up for him at this live performance.

Death to Jinnah

Or perhaps, death to me. I am going to die in about 30 seconds from running too much.  It's ok though, because my run was nice, on the lake, and faster than I've been going. However, I am now exhausted and would kill for a hot shower. Sadly, the water in the complex right now is only lukewarm. Househousehousehousehousehousehousehouse. Apartments suck. That is all.

Today I watched the cutest little girl comfort her crying little brother in the elevator. Very touching and adorable.

Lois Lowry

Having loved Lois Lowry growing up, I went searching for a Judy Blume book today and realized that I had confused the two authors a bit in my mind.  Whoops.
Now that I have the two separated, I'm debating on a few things.
1) Should I bother to read "Wifey" for book club? It's a little too passe for me now, 2nd wave feminism stuff is interesting when you're talking to people in real life, but not so interesting to devote my free-time to it. Maybe I should read this to gain appreciation for women that suffered in country club duties before me, but I think most of America has moved on.
2) Should I read the Giver trilogy? For one, I didn't even know it was a trilogy and now I see that there are more books to the series and I'm curious about what happens.
3) Should I bother to read the last few Dark Tower books? I'm not in love and the synopsis didn't do it. Answer to this question is probably no.

Which leads me to my 4th question: WHAT SHOULD I READ?
Right now, it's a book about what motivates terrorists.

PS. Lois Lowry has a blog and I get to see what her house is like and what her life is like. I almost wish I could see this growing up.
http://loislowry.typepad.com/lowry_updates/

The Big 5-0

Though it may be tradition in our family to go to Hawaii for your 50th birthday, I don't think my Mom is going to make it there by tomorrow.  It's the big one for her tomorrow, and I'll just have to hope that her group of bffs take her out for a big party since we won't be there for it.  My big surprise to her will just be in 10 short days & I will cross my fingers that it will be worth it.

Happy 50th Birthday, Mom. I promise you don't look your age.

Islamic investment

My coworker and I read an abstract today about Islamic investment funds. Oooh, they are impossible. Koranic law prohibits the charging of interest. All business arrangements have to be mutually beneficial to all parties and entered into them voluntarily. Then there are the underlying investments, which must follow 10,000 different rules. So complex, it seems impossible. Which is why there's only one very thinly traded Islamic ETF that we could find today, I guess.

WTF

"In accord with our religious beliefs, we do not publish photos of women, which in no way relegates them to a lower status... Because of laws of modesty, we are not allowed to publish pictures of women, and we regret if this gives an impression of disparaging to women, which is certainly never our intention. We apologize if this was seen as offensive."

WHen the light's right

The cheapest camera Target sells can produce passable Greece photos. I am pretty sure these are on Mykonos.

Greece, 5 years later

Whoo, can you believe it's been 5 years?  What has the rest of the world been doing since they graduated from college?

Impervious to bullets, Mommy!

The best Mother's Day movie of all time is Kill Bill 2.
What? you ask, horrified.

But it's true.  You forget that Beebee is alive and all you can do is get excited about Bill's imminent demise. Then, when you least expect it, Bee pops out of nowhere with the cutest lines. "Bam!"

Then she chimes in with the cutest words ever, "Impervious to bullets, Mommy."

CBOE!

Guess who's spending her whole weekend on CBOE.com? Went to the complex option trading class today. I thought I'd be OK, but I left feeling like the dumbest person in the universe. The strategies I can figure out. The approval levels I can figure out. The reason behind the strategies? I hope I can remember them.  My coworkers that understand it intrinsically just spent tons of times on OptionsXpress.  This goes way beyond covered calls and married puts.

It took me a few minutes to figure out that you were covered when you short a stock and write a put. It took me even longer to remember that you should look for people who are naked the long contract for a month on some calendar spreads. I hope I can remember this when it comes down to the wire.  And then I got caught wondering if someone long a put has to sell or buy shares. Duh.

In reality, I won't be spending all weekend on this. I'll be raking leaves for old people and getting ready for  a rad party. The surround sound is ready! The record player works! Congratulations on graduation,  Dan.

Rent song to review my birthday!

How do you measure a year? Oh, Rent, you were so good at the philosophical questions. I copy/pasted the song here, but it doesn't let you really measure you year, it just talks all about love.

Well, I'll tell you about love. Some other time.  Maybe after my party!

Five hundred twenty-five thousand Six hundred minutes,

In daylights, (365) in sunsets,(365) in midnights (365)
In cups of coffee (zero, but one machiatto at Glace before we moved)
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife. ( I guess the 600 miles we moved should count) (laughter at tons of parties this year, I've laughed so hard my sides hurt) (no real strife this year, thank God)

In truths that she learned, (you gotta keep the pickle in your shirt)
Or in times that she cried. (So far, I've only cried 3-4 times this year!)
In bridges he burned,  (my dad telling me 3x that I was dead to him)
Or the way that he died. (only one family member died last year)


I had to change the gender descriptions on that last paragraph again. Go watch the Youtube video with the kid that keeps his pickle in his shirt.


I just ate Jimmi Johns, my stomach is so full it's going to rupture!

Osama bin Laden

Osama is dead. I found out while riding in my car. My friend called to laugh because she thought it was Dan's birthday, not mine, and she had just figured out that it was MY birthday, not Dan's. Then she mentioned, excitedly, that Osama bin Laden was dead. I snapped on the radio and stayed glued until we got home and could watch TV. I was pretty excited. I'm a liberal but I'm with the conservative hawks on this one. In the past 18 months, I read the 9/11 commission report, details of people on both of the planes before they crashed, 9/11 survivor stories and stories of people who were trapped inside the buildings above the impact zone and their calls to their family members. I've watched the videos of Americans kidnapped in Iraq and beheaded, (which has nothing to do with Osama, I realize), and I've read 2 books that spotlight real Afghanis living in Afghanistan before and after 2001. 

bin Laden is a terrible person.  I feel zero remorse for celebrating his death. He felt no remorse when he plotted attacks on the US, US embassies and USS Cole, Yemen hotel bombings, US military training facilities in Saudi Arabia. He openly encouraged people to attack Americans in the streets. Then his followers tried to bomb Times Square, several airplanes, the NY subway. 

I just have to say that whomever feels any remorse or misgivings about celebrating Osama's murder must be better people than me. I just feel joy.  Rot in hell, fucker.