Vignettes Gone Wild

new discovery! the effects menu on iphoto. i'm partial to the vignette effect.
Jason is one of our house guests. this is a two month old pic. his beard is a lot longer now. kinda like "beards gone wild"...this sometimes happens after graduating from BYU. He's been staying with us since he finished his internship at Aprovecho in Oregon. Ashley Sanders has written about him on her fabulous "project deseret" blog. He's the catalyst for two of her posts. Jason is really smart. and funny. and tells it like it is. which usually results in a good laugh.
O'lover wicked up some fritatas for our house guests. yum to the 10th!

Natalee doing contact improv at the tea party on tuesday.

Annalisa is teaching me how to dye wool. Who knew it could be so dangerous? She also taught me how to cross country ski this past week. Who knew it could be so addictive?
Colby took this pic during gallery stroll. Amy and I are standing in front of one of Connie's paintings.

Well, that's the week in review. Someday I'm going to document a week and tell you every gory detail. Like how Saturday night past 1:00 a.m. I thought i would die if i couldn't go cross country skiing right that very second. O'lover held me until the shaking stopped. I really need to find my own gear.

R.I.P. Pyracantha

Last night, while trekking back to the coop to tuck our hens in, we discovered that our twelve foot tall Pyracantha had fallen during the snow storm.

It was a good bush...sigh...but its nickname was "fire thorn" for a reason...kept us watching our step...

After garnishing our wreath, I wondered what else we can do with the berries... Pyracantha jelly? Wiki says they're not poisonous...

so long old friend. our backyard will look a little naked without you.

Sitting in the kitchen, waiting for a peach cobbler to come out of the oven...Is it just me or are our computers kissing? How very indecent! They're not even the same species! Not to play into the apple vs. pc debate but James sometimes swears at his laptop while my sweet laptop gets nothing but love from me.

So tonight O'lover and I braved the rain and went on the gallery stroll. We met up with James at Coleman Studios. And...huh...it's only occurring to me right now that we forgot our car downtown. James gave us a ride home after three hours of meeting up with people and looking at art. And we did a lot of shopping too.

Here's a pic of the Gallery One.Ten where we emptied our wallets at their Art Market.

James and Alfred strike a pose at the new Muse Cafe.

Rebecca and Ryan Neely celebrated their one year anniversary for MODE boutique today. Congrats! i just offered them some work as gallery stroll coordinators. they said "yes!" They will take the gallery stroll to a new level.
Maht and Liz Paulos at their shop, Coal Umbrella. Today was the grand opening. The place looks amazing!
Ok, the following couple/partners in Coal Umbrella... They are so cute it stings. I never remember their names because I'm so distracted by their hair. There must be a way to splice my hair genes with theirs so my kids have an improved chance of getting some curls.
Fun people. Great art. And this wasn't even the half of it.

Tonight is going to be the BEST night 'cause the downtown provo gallery stroll has expanded to include 5 new venues! i'm starting at gallery one.ten and then working my way north.

hope to see YOU there!

If a post just magically appeared EVERYDAY, without any effort from me, then you'd probably already know about the Doggie Crime Wave of December '07.

We woke up to find my wooden hair brush gnawed to bits. luckily there was plenty of DNA, or actually slobber, to identify the wrongdoer. Soon after we found that said culprit also chewed the side of my built-in wardrobe and munched the clasps off of some innocent and very pretty bras --forcing them into early retirement.

And then, the second worst offense to date, was captured on surveillance cameras. And this crime was PREMEDITATED. Look at the doggie scoping out the luscious snowpeople. You know what he's thinking... yes, he really did run over and PEE on her snowwoman.

happily, posts don't tell everything about every day's events, or else you'd also know about the Duck Assault of November (Pewter is doing fine now). and you would not want to see what remains of the famous Yoga Mat Massacre of last October.

No sentence has been pronounced but let me tell you. sometimes when Farmer barks to be let back in the house i make him wait a millisecond longer than i ought to. which i guess makes us both guilty as charged.

and yes, the dog has loads of chew toys. there's no excuse for that waving mouth of snapping teeth.

When it comes to attending a lecture by someone fantastic (Michael Pollan). who wrote a few books i really like (The Botany of Desire, The Omnivores Dilemma). about a topic that the O'lover is obsessed with (FOOD)...i make it my duty to scooch my chair up..and lean forward...and stick my leg out. So there's no mistaking that I am indeed the CLOSEST audience member.
me and Michael...ahhhh...Many thanks to my grandma-in-law Lillian. Besides being a constant inspiration (she is a very strong woman and environmental activist) she is the matriarch of the family I so luckily married into. Oh! And she also provides the hot item tickets to the author series up at Sundance.

signed,
star struck and clutching my autographed copy

We're going to have a simple holiday. We haven't even put up a tree. Our new tradition is to slow down. almost to a metabolic halt.

image from the New York Times Thanks to RH who recently sent me a link to this article.

In the old days, when humans were in sync with the seasons, before the madness of alarm clocks and every hour of every day needing to be accounted for, people would pile up with each other and their live stock and snooze away the winter months. Fast forward a bunch of years later and i for one am still feeling the lure of hibernation. My strong impulse is to squirrel a medley of nuts in my cheeks and bury myself in the hay with anything that gives off some heat.

It's time for a big SLEEP!

And big dreams. And losing oneself in the flow of music, art, anything, without regard for schedules and lists.

Last night, O'lover and I went to the Messiah Sing-In. I got caught up in the truths of all those exquisitely expressed notes of music. The heroic journey of both Christ and Handel (the composer) renews my faith in suffering, in emotion, in hallelujahs, and riding the waves of it all. And by the last "amen" I felt like i had been granted a bonus life time.
Walking home from the concert...pretty, ey?

xoxo,
quel