The Countdown

Posted on June 3, 2010 by elizabeth

When I was a kid, I used to have what might be called annual birthday freakouts. If you were being nice. I think that somehow my streak of sentimentality combined with my love of order and numbers and things being just so and my incredible talent for thinking entirely too much created this monster. This little girl monster who would get a little thrill each month on the 21st and count months on her fingers, and who would turn the weeks leading up to her birthday into a veritable countdown of extremely significant events.

“This is the last time I’ll ever ride my bike to town while I’m 11!”
“I won’t ever eat ice cream as a non-teenager again!”

While I have largely grown out of this annual birthday freaking out, milestone birthdays give me a little shiver all the same. I avoided it entirely on my 25th birthday, because two of my great friends got married the day after, so my birthday was spent running errands and eating meals and celebrating at a rehearsal dinner at which they actually sang to me which was so crazy sweet. I don’t really remember 20, but 21 was a big one, a big one that contained the distractions of everyone other than me being drunk and thus needing care.

But my birthday is coming around again, in a little more than a month and a half, and it has me thinking about the remaining items on my 28 To Do List. (Still achievable: baking cupcakes, spending time outside (and lying in the grass), working toward a rainbow of shoes, and finishing the list of 365 things that make me happy.) So I’m feeling pretty awesome about that, and starting to gather materials to work on the book to document the list.

I’m not sure, though, what to do about a list of things to do while I’m 29. Will that bring on a “holy crap I’m turning 30 and what have I done with my life” birthday freakout? Will it give me 29 reasons to FIGHT the birthday freakout that is so damn cliched that it annoys me to even think about it? Am I totally jumping the gun seeing as how I’m not even 29 yet? Does the fact that my boyfriend’s birthday is a few days before mine, and he’s enough years older than me to be hitting his own milestone age mean that my birthday freakouts are even more totally ridiculous?

I don’t know. But I have a few ideas for next year’s list brewing, so maybe I’ll keep at it. Not having a list after two years of having one might give me hives anyway.

Blue Green

Posted on June 2, 2010 by elizabeth

Blue green is a pretty fantastic color, and I found it where I least expected to this week. The third shot is a gratuitous shot from the cruise we went on in 2007, because it goes without saying that the Caribbean is every color blue you can imagine – blue green, robin’s egg blue, pacific blue, cerulean, blue, sky blue – and I love an excuse to look at those photos as often as possible.

Orchid

Posted on May 24, 2010 by elizabeth

Orchid was last week’s color, and I was kind of surprised to find it on the first day, right in my apartment. The yarn and granny squares shot is one of my favorites in a while. Plus, the granny squares are a current obsession anyway. Orchids always make me think of the prom, because I had a black and white dress and was totally set on having red flowers for my corsage… until my date informed me he’d gotten a dark green vest. Hopes of matching and contrasty goodness dashed! Until I saw the corsage he got me… gorgeous, unique, stunning orchids from Chinatown. Sure showed me. I don’t know if I have a photo, but those were the prettiest orchids ever.

Burnt Sienna

Posted on May 17, 2010 by elizabeth

Burnt Sienna, one of the enigmatic brown crayons, was last week’s color for the sixty-four colors project. I had a few back up options in mind, but then I saw that my fellow group members were bringing their A games… and resolved to look a little harder. And lo and behold, I found some burnt sienna in the parking lot at Lowe’s, where the white parking lot lines had turned rusty thanks to the nearby rusty shopping cart corral. I did not find nearly as much burnt sienna in the archives, but I found some close ones all the same. I love how this project makes me look at things with new eyes.

Baseball Movie Classics: A Pseudo Marathon, The End!

Posted on May 13, 2010 by elizabeth

(Part One) (Part Two) (Part Three) (Part Four)

For Love of the Game rounds out the Kevin Costner trilogy of baseball movies, and was another one I had very high hopes for (even after not totally loving Field of Dreams). The movie came out much more recently than I realized (1999) and is actually based on a novel by Michael Shaara (who also wrote The Killer Angels, which is a Pulitzer Prize winning Civil War novel). Costner plays Billy Chapel, 40 year old veteran pitcher (who’s been pitching for the Tigers for 19 years), who learns before the last game of the season that the team has been sold, and he can either be traded or retire. The same morning, his girlfriend informs him that she’s leaving for London. Forever. So it’s not a good day. The movie chronicles Chapel’s journey through this single game, and flashbacks to his relationship and love of baseball are mixed in between the innings. I love stories that are told backwards in this way, and although some would probably argue that the story is too much about his love of Jane, rather than his love of baseball, but I thought it was just right. It was a great story, and Costner is really compelling, and I am definitely adding this one to my list. If you love baseball, you really should see this.

So! That finishes the movies that I’m going to watch for this project, largely because baseball season is in full swing and I want to watch BASEBALL, not movies about baseball. The two movies I had tentatively put on the list that we didn’t get to were A League of Their Own (which I’ve seen a bunch of times, and can acknowledge as probably worthy of being included in the better of the baseball movies, but which I can’t seem to get the motivation to watch) and Bad News Bears (which I included just because I’ve never seen it). So I’m considering this project a resounding success because it was a lot of fun, and I finally did watch a bunch of those movies everyone thinks I should have seen, but I haven’t (if you recall, that’s #11 on my 28 To Do List).

All told, we watched 9 movies. Two I really didn’t care for (Field of Dreams and Mr. Baseball). The rest were really good movies. Here’s my final ranking:

Bull Durham
The Natural
Major League
For Love of the Game
Mr. 3000
Little Big League
Major League 2
Field of Dreams
Mr. Baseball

And I’d happily add Bull Durham, The Natural, Major League, For Love of the Game, and maybe Mr. 3000 to my annual Baseball Season Is Almost Here Let’s Watch Some Baseball Movies To Get Even More Psyched About It movie viewing list. The first four are solid, amazing movies with great stories about likable characters, and more importantly, about loving the game of baseball.

Indigo

Posted on May 11, 2010 by elizabeth

Indigo is a gorgeous color, but a very tricky one, both to find and to photograph. For one, it’s remarkably close to Blue Violet. It turned out that all I found last week was the one indigo sweater I’d been saving all week to wear on the coldest day. But it’s almost perfectly matched, so it’s okay in the end.

I Hope the Next Thing I Cook Is Prettier

Posted on May 4, 2010 by elizabeth

As I mentioned last week, I realized recently that time is running out when it comes to my 28 Things. So I’m trying to hurry up and learn how to cook some new things. I think that my original intent when I wrote the list was to learn how to cook new things that become staples, which is kind of unfortunate, as after yesterday I’ve learned how to cook two new things (or maybe a better description is that I tried two new recipes) and neither are the kind of things I am really going to need to cook again with any urgency. (And actually, it’s just occurring to me now that maybe what I really meant was to learn new cooking techniques? Who knows.)

Anyway, this is all the lead up to say that last night I made this Three-Bean Super Stew from the Vegetarian Times. It’s a stew with black beans, chickpeas, lentils, a tomato, a bell pepper, and some spices. And it was good! The coriander and cumin combined with the beans made for a really wonderful flavor. My main issue with this was that apparently I can’t read, and I was surprised when this turned out to be soupish/stew-y in texture, and very, very mushy. (But the mushiness, I think, was due to the fact that I overcooked the lentils, which seems to happen every time I cook something with lentils. I am beginning to think that I only like lentils in canned lentil soup.) Also, it’s brownish, mushy texture and color made it completely unphotogenic.

But still! I cooked something new! And I have food for the week!

Any thoughts on what I should try next? People keep telling me to learn how to make tomato sauce from scratch, which I am not feeling a burning need to do, or pizza. Maybe I’ll make homemade pizza. Do you think pizza dough is above my current cooking-knowledge scale? I’m kind of afraid the answer to that will be yes.

Scarlet

Posted on May 3, 2010 by elizabeth

Scarlet is yet another tricky color for the sixty-four colors project, because it’s a really nice reddish orange, but my mental image of scarlet is a much more vivid, deep red. I thought I wasn’t going to find any good shots to match the ones from the archives that I really love, but an impromptu photo walk around my apartment building turned up scarlet right outside my door!

Learning to Cook Is Probably Mostly Mental

Posted on April 28, 2010 by elizabeth

#21 on my 28 Things to Do While I’m 28 list is to learn to cook three new things. I am still pretty damn psyched about feeling confident with making chili and sausage risotto, and I wanted to force myself to expand my repertoire a bit. Of course, now my birthday is three months away and I haven’t learned to cook anything new at all, so I’m starting to panic a bit. Because this list is clearly supposed to make me worry about stuff, rather than gently inspiring me to do more and be happier.

So today I decided to try what I think is a Mark Bittman recipe from the New York Times for Roasted Sweet Potato Salad with Black Beans and Chili Dressing because if there are two things I love, they are sweet potatoes and black beans. The end result was not very photogenic at all, and I suppose it would have been a little less jarring if I’d expected it to be more like a potato salad. Don’t get me wrong, it was very, very tasty (black beans, sweet potatoes, onion, red peppers, with a sauce made of jalapenos, lime juice, and garlic) and maybe it’ll be better as leftovers when the flavors have had time to meld. But it was a lot of flavor. Still, I’m glad I’m back to tentatively trying new things. Sort of.

Carnation Pink

Posted on April 26, 2010 by elizabeth

Carnation pink came around in sixty-four colors just in time for cherry blossoms, and even though I still can’t stop taking pictures of cherry blossoms, I didn’t want to make a cherry blossom shot my official posted-to-the-group shot this week. But I found a lot of carnation pink in the archives, and seeing it all together is exactly why this project is so damn much fun.