Farmer's Market harvest

Fall bounty at Dupont Farmer's Market. Hopefully next year, we'll have our own backyard bounty again!

cheddar cauliflower and pumpkins



pretty colors in fruit and flower





uptight grocer!

Seeing Double

Dan's sister Anne had twins two weeks ago. Everyone is happy healthy and very cute. Jackson and Sarah for all to admire.

still martha after all these years

went to lowe's this morning to pick out paint for our new house. We couldn't go totally upscale this time, since it's not on our dime, but we were nevertheless determined to find some nice colors for the house. Oh, and most importantly, the contractors are painting, not us! Hurray. The colors we found at Home Depot last week were too bright and reminiscent of our old house in Seattle, and I just wasn't feeling it. I remembered when we were living in Minneapolis 10 years ago the Martha paints at KMart rocked, and were super cheap prices for good quality paint. Well Martha and KMart are no more, and I had long since upgraded to Benjamin Moore. But I discovered Martha's new paints at Lowe's, so off we went. We will now have a house covered in silly named colors like "Flying Jib," "Tin Pail" "Andiron" and "Birds Nest." Can't wait

Hopefully they look awesome, and the silly names will fade away into the night!

on the move

We're moving to Mt. Rainier next month. No, not that Mt. Rainier, this one. We love our current neighborhood, but it's really hard to find what we want in Mt. Pleasant, so we're moving on.

We found a great, big, old east coast Victorian house, with a sunny yard for the dogs and the garden. Since we only got 2 or 3 tomatoes all summer long, it's definitely tine for a sunnier yard. Mt Rainier is a few blocks over the city line in MD, so we get to vote again and have federal representation, which makes us ecstatic. And we get to live in a town that was founded by Washingtonians, so that makes us feel a little bit closer to Seattle. Plus, you don't get to live in a town famous for the Exorcist every day!

We're packing up and moving next month, but now we're helping our new landlord decide where to put walls and what colors to paint the house. He's totally remodeling the place, so we get to move into a brand, spanking newly renovated place. We'll have lots more room, and a good yard for the mutts and garden. I get to grow seeds in the basement all winter, and can't wait!

pictures soon.

sacrilege

it's october 18 and we have the air conditioner on! I'm outraged!

islands in the stream

I've decided that fake celebrity sitings are just as much fun as seeing the real thing. It's especially fun after a few pints of beer in the middle of a Saturday in NYC. We saw fake Kenny Rogers in NY recently. Now it was hard to tell him from the real thing because Kenny Rogers has had so much fucking plastic surgery, I could barely recognize him on American Idol last season. That's right, he made the rounds of shameful Idol self promotion. I guess he's gotta pay the bills. Anyway, this guy really looked like the new and shiny Kenny Rogers, not the old sexy one from the 70's singing duets with Dolly and everyone else.

Chelsea flea market finds

Danly and I went to NYC a few weekends ago to get out of town and see friends. Sunday morning we went to the Chelsea Flea Market, where the people watching was amazing, and the stuff for sale was pretty good too. Since I couldn't get sneaky pics of all the characters at the market, here's some shots of the cool stuff for sale.

pretty pretty signs

cool signs I took shots of in San Pedro. As I was taking these photos, I realized that I have been taking pics of signs everywhere I go for years. Have to find them all and do a comparison. San Pedro still has an abundance of groovy 50's signs, which makes for lots of fun. Here's a sampling.






pretty garden in long beach. i love how this gardener combined bright plastic flowers throughout the real garden plants. so bright and cheery!


nice neon bar signs

Oh My God...I Think I Just Blogged!

Now that Naomi's put a picture of gnomes on the blog...I guess it's time for me to chime in. Danno here, btw, coming to you straight from Chocolate City. I have to say that I have mixed emotions about blogging. Part of me thinks they're great, part of me thinks they can get self-indulgent...which is at odds with my protestant family history. So, if I ever start reading like an Andy Rooney piece on 60 minutes, please...you have my permission to whack me.

Ok...that's out of the way. I'm sitting here in DC, in graduate school, I'm pushing 40, my dogs are just as neurotic as me, my sister's about to drop twins...wow...how did that happen? Sometimes I look around and realize a lot has happened in the last year.

I'm in grad school. Me... When I graduated from college way back when, that was it, baby. I was done! Things change, I guess, cuz not only am I in grad school...I'm getting a Masters in Special Ed. Yes, you read correctly, Special Ed. Basically I thought general ed. would be to EASY...yeah...that's it. too EASY. I went to a grad school fair about a year ago, met a woman from the University Maryland Special Education department...talked with her, set up an appointment, met a couple professors...started applying and what do you know--they accepted me! I gotta give some props to my buddy Bruce at this point. He was the person who kept telling me to stop THINKING about all this and just do it. His help was invaluable to me, and I owe him big time. More on that later. So, now I'm in school, careening towards a teaching career...go figure. It's great and I love it, stress and all.

I know Naomi's already mentioned our feelings about DC, but let me just add a couple of things. First of all, it's a beautiful city. The neighborhoods, the architecture, all the monuments, parks...it's a pretty place. Having said that, there is something weird about it. I know we'll probably go on and on about this as we post more, adding our latest theories as to the weirdness of DC. Here's tonight's installment. As I was walking the dogs tonight, it suddenly occurred to me that this city is full of people who's lives are somewhere else. They are here for their stint in DC, doing whatever work they're doing, but they don't bring their lives here. It's like they've put huge parts of lives on hold, or they're keeping them going in the city they came from, and probably will return to. It makes for an interesting community dynamic to say the least. You've got this huge part of the city that doesn't invest in the city they live in, and another huge part of the population here, who have built community and lives here, who don't have the resources or municipal infrastructure, or representation to invest in the city the ways they'd probably like to. We've all heard about the schools, the crime, the poverty, the racism, the plantation mentality of our capital city. The amazing thing to me is that all that's going on while money is simultaneously floating all around this town. Someone told me the other day that something like 3 of the 10 richest counties in the US are in the DC metro area. But in the actual city, there's more people living poverty than I've ever seen before. By far. It's interesting that I'm learning all the nuts and bolts of No Child Left Behind. It seems to me that the first child left behind was, and continues to be, Washington DC.

How's that for a first posting! Sheesh--I guess that Andy Rooney reference didn't take long to materialize! Didn't mean to get so damn serious there...quick---LOOK AT THE GNOMES!! happy happy gnomes.

I'll sign off on a lighter note, really. We going up to NYC this weekend to hang out with buddies and go to the San Gennaro Festival!! Woo hoo! Man I'm going to eat my way through Little Italy! I'll be sure to eat a cannoli for y'all! Maybe I'll get a tattoo! What?

Stay tuned!

Dan(OhMy!)

Gnomes run wild in Long Beach

in Long Beach for work this week and was doing a little investigating on the internets, in case I have a free moment to explore. Holy cupcakes, Batman, look what's going on down here in SoCal!