Etsy

/

I stumbled on this amazing site tonight called Etsy for all things handmade.

I will open an Etsy site one day, I swear. If only for the fun of it and without a half a mind to make money, although that would be cool.

The coolest part of this site is how you can shop by color. Feeling blue? black? orange? apple green? hot pink?



You don't have to spend a penny to take a psychedelic color trip. Just don't complain to me if you never finish your to-do list.

Me, Myself and I like these green bug coasters by Multiple Personality.



And Jamie? I see a store in your future too!

Speaking of Italian

/

Speaking of Italian, if we -- I mean, when -- we move to Redwood City, it is not too far-fetched to imagine that the three of us might drive or train it to SF for a little more Italy in our lives.

Continuing on this Italian note, here is the first Italian I ever learned, courtesy of Paolo on Friends:

Guarda la luna
Guarda le stelle
Guarda tutte le cose belle.

My friend Stefano, an Italian exchange student at the time this episode aired, seriously choked with laughter over this "totally lame" poem.

As I looked up this episode tonight, I found the most hilarious bit of trivia about Paolo. When Friends was dubbed in Italian, Paolo was translated as Pablo and all his lines (in Italian for us) were translated into Spanish! Ha-larious to me!

Someday I will blog about Stefano. He is from Bologna, or as he signs emails: TMBCOTMBCOTW. This did not have to be explained to me after hanging around with him and his Italian friends at UCSD for a year, I knew it was the ultimate acronym for "The Most Beautiful City Of The Most Beautiful Country of The World."

And that pretty much sums up Stefano, Italian men, northern Italians and northern Italians from Bologna.

I can't resist ending this post with a visit to one of my favorite sites of all time, In Italy. I used it to plan my second trip to Italy in 1999 with my grandma before she died. Someday, (i.e. when I have a house again), I will digitize all my Italy photos and go post-happy with them.

Do Not Play Small

/
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves,
Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine, as children do.
We were born to make manifest
the glory that is within us.
It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.

-- Marianne Wililamson --

Thank you to On Her Way for a great blog and seemingly endless inspiring quotes.

Why I Will Enjoy the Flat Soccer Field

/

By ANDREW DALTON, Associated Press Writer
August 5, 2007

CARSON, Calif. (AP) -- Jake Brown didn't feel his shoes pop off.

"I was already knocked out," he said. "The last thing I remember was thinking, how do I fall?"

He didn't recall anything else until he walked off the mega ramp about 10 minutes later.

"Walking off the ramp, that was rough," he said.

At the X Games Skateboard Big Air competition Thursday night, Brown was in the lead heading into his fifth and final run when he lost control during his second trick, sailed out away from the ramp's platform and plunged about 40 feet onto his heels and then tailbone. He bruised his lung and liver, broke a wrist and a vertebra, and had his sneakers knocked off.

He finished with a silver medal for the second straight year. Bob Burnquist made the winning run right on Brown's heels.

The TV and internet video of the drop, which makes even hardened viewers flinch, has made Brown an instant celebrity.

He talked by phone from his Southern California hotel room Sunday morning, sore and a little bit groggy.

He said it started with a surge of joy.

After rolling down the 80-foot drop in, he made two full turns over the mega ramp's 70-foot gap and landed in the adjacent halfpipe, but had trouble maintaining control as he sped across its bottom and up the other wall.

"Yeah, the 720, it was the first one I've ever done over that big gap, or even the small one, so I was happy," he said. "But I was a little too far to the left for the trick I needed to do, so I started carving across the flat over the right, and I tried to carve back left, and my timing was a little too late, I got a little bit wobbly going up."

His instincts, which would help him seconds later, did him wrong at first when he shot up and away from the lip of the halfpipe and over the flat area in its middle.

"The G-forces made me squat down onto my board, my natural instinct was to stand up, and that just shot me out to the flat. So I was 40 feet up, and 30 feet out."

Brown said that as other skaters have speculated, much of the flailing fall that followed was intentional.

"I definitely was trying to think of the best way to get out of the fall," he said. "I think I did pretty good."

Big Air skaters, taking a tip from skydivers, have learned to spread themselves out and roll into an impact, and Brown did his best to do that.

"I wanted to turn around so I didn't go face first into the flat," he said. "I didn't want to just hit with one part of my body.

"Instead of landing on one part of my body I wanted to spread out the injury," he said.

Brown lay still for five minutes, then began to stir. He somehow walked away about five minutes after that.

The small, 32-year-old Australian's plunge and his incredible toughness was the talk of the X Games all weekend. He made an appearance to a huge ovation at the Home Depot Center on Saturday night between motorcycle races, and showed up to watch Sunday's Skateboard Vert competition.

"He's the greatest athlete of all time in the world," fellow Australian pro skater and friend Jason Ellis joked to ESPN's cameras Sunday. "Michael Jordan is nothing compared to Jake Brown."

But Brown was a bit dubious about his sudden celebrity.

"I'd rather be known for the stuff that I can actually do," he said. "But if that's going to help skateboarding, that's fine."

And how long would it be before he has the guts to get back on a skateboard? Months? Years?

"I was thinking just a couple of weeks," he said. "I was pretty sure if I just get some massage, some chiropractic, stretch and eat healthy, I can get back out there pretty quickly."


Lolcats

/

My friend Adam told me about Lolcats awhile ago and admittedly, I didn't get it at first. But in Maui, I remembered them and showed Jeff's dad and Marsh and around page 5, the humor started to grow on me.

Now a couple few weeks later, I am here to say I officially think they're funny. Some of them truly crack me up. There is one in particular I am searching for but until I find it again, this one will join my blog.


Ironic, in a way, that the first one I am posting is not of a cat at all.
Hmm.

Have fun!

Airline "Delays"

/

The upcoming trip to Maui has got travel on my mind. I am hanging around Budget Travel and there's always lots of interesting things there to read.

This caught my eye this morning and steamed me up!

"A check of two dozen flights from June airline schedules found that "block times" --the time airlines allot in their schedules for the trip -- are about 10% higher than they were in June 1997....Many delays are now simply being incorporated into schedules, at high cost to consumers and airlines. Congestion at airports and in the sky have forced airlines to pad their schedules more than ever so flights have a better chance of arriving "on-time," which the Department of Transportation defines as within 15 minutes of the airline's scheduled arrival time. Flights now arrive technically "on-time," but with 30 minutes or more of delay written into the flight plan." (reported originally here by the WSJ).

Well gosh now! Who makes these decisions and how do they sleep at night? I just think this is wrong and I know stuff like this happens all the time around me. It makes me feel angry. Here I spend all day teaching my son to be a good person and have his words mean something and there someone, unaccountable, pads flight times to land "on time"! It's totally meaningless! GRR!

I mean there is obviously some larger problems here, if congestion has gotten so bad that it comes to this. Then how is that issue to be resolved? I don't know. It's like vehicle traffic I guess. Sure, point A to point B is only 10 miles, but at 5 p.m. it will take you 1.5 hours to travel that far. So you have to factor that in when you say you can meet someone for dinner. I guess that's what the airlines are doing?

Geez now I am thinking about Silicon Valley traffic, workaholics and world overpopulation and NOT Maui sunsets and relaxation. The world is too much with us!

Heaven on Earth

/

Tonight I met Jamie at Santana Row to go to a card store (Jax) that could special order envelopes in the size we need for her reception invites. Luckily for me, she was running late and I remembered that a new paper store had opened up recently so now I finally had time and space to check it out.

Well pardon me for having a heart attack but I finally found it: Heaven on Earth.

Oh my gosh I mean I have needed a reliable source for stock papers and envelopes for years, but this store goes way beyond my expectations. First of all their card stock is dreamy, hello scalloped edges and rickrack borders in multiple sizes, but rounds! Oh the rounds. They even have BLANK ROUND STICKERS!

No one else but a fellow paper freak can probably understand why 1:47 after the store closed tonight, my pulse is still racing.


I will fall asleep tonight dreaming about paper flowers.

And I will fall asleep happy.