orthodoxy

This morning the AYSO soccer sign-ups for fall were held at the local Greek Orthodox church. After I got Elliot all signed up and was leaving, I saw a car in the parking lot with a bumper sticker that read:

"Orthodoxy: Proclaiming the truth since A.D. 33"

wedding crashers review

weddingcrashers_earlyposter
Originally uploaded by kgranju.

I went to see Wedding Crashers last night with a friend. He liked it well enough, although he fell asleep and actually snored during the movie, but I liked it a lot.

Yes, it has Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson in it, but this is a movie more in the tradition of American Pie or early Bill Murray movies than Dodgeball or Zoolander or Anchorman. There's less of the whole GenX ironic humor thing and more plot & character-driven, in-your-face, slapstick, sexual humor.

It's actually one of the bawdier movies I've seen in a while and it's very, very funny.

The story runs a little long, and there are a couple of scenes near the middle-end that I would have just deleted for pacing, but you never get tired of the characters.

I'm off to go riding and then to a partay, so I don't have time to say more , but I'd definitely recommend it as the funniest movie I've seen in a good while.

Unlike most comedies these days, the funniest bits are NOT in the trailer.

And after all, Christopher Walken's in it, so it's a must-see by default.

knoxvegas
Originally uploaded by kgranju.

hasselhoff

The other day my sister was watching my 3 year old nephew, McLean play in the pool and she said to him, "Mac, you're a little monkey," and he said "I"m not a monkey. I'm David Hasselhoff."

who?

When I look at the traffic stats for my blog, I can see that some of the same IP addresses visit pretty regularly. Of course, I have no idea who these addresses belong to, but I'm curious.

So out yourself. If you visit the blog regularly or semi-regularly, and you feel like it, introduce yourself below (click on comments).

I'll start (see below)

-Kate

new music from the new pornographers

ole-621
Originally uploaded by kgranju.

I just found out that one of my very fave bands (thanks QMM) has a new record coming out in August. It's called "Twin Cinema." You can read about it and download the first single RIGHT HERE

shopping

I went to The Tomato Head for lunch and as I generally do, stopped in Reruns on my way back to my car. That is a great used clothing store. You should check it out if you've never gone in. I almost always find something good, and today I ran across a really groovy, black Prada bag for only $40.

punchlist on W.

This is THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE ROUND-UP of the history of the Bush admin I've ever seen. Read it and weep.

googlegrowth

This is AN INTERESTING ANALYSIS of how Google's planned, new news search ranking system is going to have a really negative impact on smaller and alternative purveyors of information, commentary and news.

beautiful baby!

Welcome to the world, Caterina Astrid, and congrats to my friends Stefani and Eric on their 4th beautiful baby, born at home, just like siblings Sarafina, Eleanora and Tor.

Here is Stefani's birth story for baby Cat, born July 3:

I'd like to introduce a very young, very long little girl to you all... She's 20 inches long and weighs 7 pounds, 15 ounces, a full pound heavier than my biggest baby so far.

She was born at 6:56 this morning, and she's nursed like a champ and she and I have been napping all morning. She
has rolls upon rolls and is quite cute.

Here's the long story: Last night (July 2nd, my actual due date) about 9:30, while lying in bed listening to Eric read from Terry Pratchett’s Jingo_ to me, I sort of idly began timing contractions. Roughly every 11-7 minutes, lasting about a minute and a half.

At 11:30, I called the midwife, who told me to take a bath and try to get some sleep. In the bath, I started losing my mucous plug at 11:55 pm. At 12:15, I called her back and said I'd
just feel better with her here, given my history of precipitate labor.

She and my sister arrived about 12:45, and I labored all night long in the tub (after they drained and refilled it, as I'd done it in the afternoon and it wasn't hot yet -- it was definitely the Keystone Kops moments of the birth!).

The contractions felt really productive, but I didn't have to make any noise, just be kind of quiet during them.

Sarafina was the only one up, and she kept announcing the time. When
she said, "It's 5:00," I began to wonder if she was helping much : )
She also did a lot of running around and chatting, which could occasionally be difficult to deal with. But generally she did great and was very helpful.

At one point, everyone but Sarafina was asleep, and I was falling asleep in between contractions.That's never happened to me before. I woke from a silly dream about someone saying that the new gun ban had to be called the BerlinGunBan. Apparently I was in Germany, but I woke into a contraction, which was disorienting.

I finally asked Kristen, my midwife, if I was actually making progress, or if I should be doing anything more active. She said that if I felt like I wasn't, we could talk about things to move things along.

Apparently talking was what I needed to do. Contractions picked up and I stopped having a long break in between. I actually felt my water
break, with a distinct “pop.”

Kristen said that the intensity might
pick up now – I knew, I knew. . .

Around 5:00, I asked Sarafina to get
Eric. He got the cold washcloth that is his main labor responsibility.
Sarafina brought a bowl of cold water for him to use. Right about then,
I began to cry, then threw up a few times.

One part of me was rationally observing: Hmmmm, crying, vomiting, sounds like transition to me! The other part was, well, crying and vomiting. During the last part of birth, I really hang onto Eric, tugging and pulling on his arms
as I try to deal with it. He doesn't seem to mind. I also assume announcing that it hurts is somehow helpful, so I do it frequently.

Danue and Kristen were especially nice in telling me I was doing well,
that the baby was coming soon, and yes, it stunk and hurt a lot.

At about 5:50, Sarafina got Ellie because I was making pushing sounds.
At 6:15, she got Tor, and I was in full cry, really roaring through the
pushes.

I dislike pushing intensely, but I realized this time that I dislike the moments immediately after even worse, when the baby's head pulls back over the ground gained. Apparently our Labrador, Mack, was upset by the noises I was making and kept coming over to investigate.

I was totally focused on what I was doing, although I did check the kids
occasionally to see if they were okay. Denise said that at one point,
the children were all in different positions, covering their ears when
I yelled, then popping up to see what was going on when I quieted.

The midwives had asked me if I wanted to catch my baby myself. After
this birth, I realized that the answer is clearly, "No." I want reassurance that I'm not tearing, and lots of support. She crowned after a few pushes, and the midwives gave me perfect encouragement/coaching on going ahead and having her head. I was only certain that I didn’t want it to pull back for another push.

After her head was out, I had to wait for another contraction to get her body
out. It hurt too, more than I remembered it doing with anyone except
Tor.

There was some complicated cord unwrapping going on behind me, as
I was on all fours. It turned out that her cord was pretty tight twice around her neck, so they were unwinding her by spinning her. Kristen later said that she though the slow head descent might have been because of the cord, since she had thought it was slow for a fourth child.

I turned around and sat down against the side of the tub, and there she
was, handed to me. Fat cheeks, fat arms, really a lovely little chunk.

no commentary needed

hell
Originally uploaded by kgranju.

The Short Life, Painful Death, and Unexpected Resurrection of the Kings of Power Pop

I can't wait to read this book (thanks to John Sewell for the tip).

Did you know that Big Star has a new record coming out?

36 candles?

I love the movie "Sixteen Candles."  Molly Ringwald's character, Samatha Baker,  and Molly herself, are exactly my age, and when I was 16, that movie perfectly captured the cultural zeitgeist of my teenage years.

Now I hear that Molly is in talks to star in a sequel to the movie. It would update us on what Sam's been doing for the past 20 years.

Boy oh boy do I hope they don't make this movie. Nothing good can come of it. I mean, I don't want to know that Jake Ryan eventually dumped two-years-younger Sam after she lost her virginity to him and he then went off to college, breaking her heart and leaving her ever-so-slightly bitter.

I don't want to know about Sam's two children and insurance salesman husband and the house they now have in the 'burbs of Chicago.

I don't want to know about her wistful, melancholy longing for her magical 16th birthday, when she fell in love and the world was spread out before her and anything seemed possible.

I certainly do not want to find out that Sam, unhappy in aforementioned boring marriage, tracks down Jake via Friendster or Classmates.com and finds out he's middle aged and balding, and also unhappily married, or worse, divorced and having a mid-life crisis.

The beauty of Sixteen Candles is the ending, beautifully ambiguous as Sam and Jake lean in for their very first kiss over her belated birthday cake.

Fade to black.

I don't want or need to know what comes after. I'd rather continue to imagine, just as I have since I first saw the movie when I was 16, twenty long years ago.

me and my mother - july 3

katemama
Originally uploaded by kgranju.

I have decided my mother is shrinking. I swear we usedto be the same height and I'm only 5'3"...

jane over fences

From Tryon - July 10

jumpin' jane

Here is one of Jane on Cinco from the Tryon show this past weekend.

Jane is 9 and Cinco is 6.

jane and cinco

P7080605
Originally uploaded by kgranju.

This is a photo of Jane and Cinco at the Tryon "A" show in Tryon, NC this weekend.

She had her best show ever -- coming in 3rd overall in a very large, very competitive children's pony division with only 1 other small pony and one other medium. The other ten were all larges.

All the other kids were a lot older too; she was apparently the only child in the division too little to yet be wearing tall boots.

This is only their sixth show together and was her first really big A-circuit show. We went to Brownland in May but Conco colicked so she couldn't really show him...


More photos from this weekend's show are RIGHT HERE

i love the south

Recently, a "major cockfighting ring" was busted in Del Rio, in Cocke County, a few Tennessee counties east of where I live.

The FBI really came down hard on these folks in this tiny community, who have apparently been engaged in the activity for generations. It's been big news here.

Today, the Knoxville News Sentinel ran pro and con cockfighting editorials on the Sunday op-ed page.

I am not making this up.

You can read them RIGHT HERE

As I said over at SKB's blog, I'm not going to "defend" cockfighting, but I do think anyone who eats the chicken, beef or pork they buy at the local grocery or Ruby Tuesday doesn't have much moral leverage in arguing against the activity, given that the animals we eat every day are raised and slaughtered on unbelievably inhumane, cruel factory farming operations.

And of course, at least half of the detergents and moisturizers and shampoos we use every day are tested on poor little bunnies.

So for folks to get all worked up over cockfighting on a Saturday night in Del Rio, Tennessee seems a bit absurd to me.

I can't imagine how many tens of thousands of dollars were spent by local, state and federal law enforcement on busting up and prosecuting these folks. I'll bet that money could have been used quite profitably to buy shoes or food or housing or medical insurance for the families in that really, really poor area of Appalachia instead of hauling them down to Knoxville to face cockfighting charges.

Back to the Sunday paper...

money

I am very bad with handling my money. Always have been. My parents avoided discussing the topic, considering it somewhat tacky. This left me at a distinct disadvantage when I became an adult and had to figure money things out. Their approach hasn't served me well...at all.

But I'm trying to do better. I still don't have a budget, per se, but I am trying not to buy expensive shoes, just because, these days. And it pains me, but I'm doing better with gritting my teeth and walking away from the (super fabulous boy oh boy could i use those really adorable lime green stiletto heels with really cute ankle straps) shoes instead of whipping out the debit card.

But I still DO feel pain when I have to spend a bunch of money on something ostensibly practical that I KNOW shouldn't cost so much. Like today, I had to spend THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS to have my fence shored up so my dogs don't keep getting out.

You must understand that I hate this ugly chainlink fence. I do not want to spend one penny on it. It came with my house, which I love, when I bought it. My intention is to either replace the ugly chainlink fence or at the very least, get flowering vines grwoing all over it so you can no longer see the fence. I haven't gotten around to doing either yet (have only had the house 11 months), but my three dogs have figured out how to wiggle under the bottom of the fence.

So after trying makeshift solutions (I'm not very handy with repairs), I called around to get estimates on fixing the bottom of the fence. Different people offered different solutions, but this one guy's idea -- to add tension wire along the bottom all the way around the yard -- seemed most sensible. So then I called and got estimates on having that done, and his estimate was the best, believe it or not.

So today this nice man and his son came and spent a grand total of maybe 90 minutes wiring up the bottom of my ugly fence, making it dogproof, and I forked over the cash.

I think I should go into the handyman biz. I would definitely make far more than I do working in television production and/or freelance writing.

And I am still not convinced that what he did will actually work. We shall see...

gmail?

Can anyone tell me how to get signed up for gmail?

Thanks--

Katie