11 posts tagged “vox hunt”
Share a book that made you laugh.
I am not kidding: I bought this pre-pre-schoolers' book when I was sixteen because I stood in a bookstore in Los Gatos, CA and got uncontrollable giggles everytime I turned the page. When I realized I had to leave the store with the book, I told myself I'd just buy it for my 2-year-old [babysitting] charge. Then I bought two copies, because I just couldn't imagine not having a copy for myself.
I think the most pathetic thing is: there's no plot. It's literally a book full of horizontally bi-sected pages, with a bunch of adjectives on the top half and a noun on the bottom. So, for instance, the example on the cover might say, "Delicious! A cheese and tomato spider!" Keep the spider on the bottom, flip the top page to reveal another picture, perhaps of a strawberry ice cream cone, and now the pages read "Look! A creamy strawberry spider!" Flip the bottom of the page to reveal an old lady, and all of the sudden you get, "Look! A creamy strawberry granny!"
I'm sorry, but there's no logic to it: this book has me in stitches every time I read it. And I have many, many wonderful memories of me and the boy I bought this book for, sitting on his bedroom floor randomly flipping pages with tears running down our faces, we were laughing so hard.
Show us a baby animal.
I could just as easily show you a picture of Hugo now, because, even though he's only two, he acts like a big honkin' puppy.
I'm sure Hugo was small at some point. Simple Biology tells me this. We just never knew him in a compact form. When the husband and I decided that we wanted to get a dog, orrrrrrrrr when I finally wore the husband down until he caved and let me get a dog, I had only one condition to follow: it must be a puppy. You know, for the bonding that goes on between owner and puppy. :::eyeroll::: Hub was sure that he would only bond with the dog if it was cute. Nevermind the headache and hassle of having a baby animal around the house. I guess we just had to live it.
One thing I did know about labs is the two classes of energy. Didn't know this? Yeah, it was a learning experience for me too, at one point. Look around. Labs are probably the most common dog around still, and you can break them down into two groups: the English style, which is thicker, tankier, and lower energy, and the long-and-lean style, which is a lot more prevalent in the states and can be denoted by well, leaner labs with a lot more energy. Now, don't get me wrong here, labs are working dogs. English or long-and-lean, it doesn't matter, they can still go for 3-mile runs and still be game for a good round of fetch in the backyard. Oh, I really - and I mean really - had wanted to get an adult dog from a rescue. But, given that I wanted a lab, and given that I was barely getting my husband to go along with it, I needed genetics working for me at that point. I was a desperate woman.
So I called around to breeders. It didn't take long until I found a wonderful woman, whose entire life is devoted to her labs, down near Austin. She told me she had a three-month-old chocolate male pup, who had a wonderful middle-of-the-road temperment, but unfortunately also had an overbite. Normally she didn't sell dogs to people not interested in showing, but here she was with a dog she couldn't show and couldn't breed. Hmmmmm. She offered to bring him up for a dog show near us that some of her other dogs were in. The hub and I drove out to the show, and the breeder showed us to her van (or small bus?) where our Hugo was hanging out. We were immediately shocked.
33 lbs Hugo was, when we first saw him. Instead of this cute handful we were expecting, Hugo looked like the puppy that ate the other puppies. We (or, I) fell for him right away, and the rest is history. I suppose it bears mentioning that, while it was definitely a slow-to-warm up situation, Hub is completely head over heels for this dog now. If you've ever met a dog like him, I'm sure you understand.
Show us something that gets you in the holiday spirit.
Decorating the Christmas tree is now the thing that gets me in that holiday spirit. You caught me about three years too late, because this didn't used to be it. The quintessential Christmas kick-off was always the visit to the Christmas tree farm. Just one of the perks of living in a conifer's natural habitat. Every year the family would put on mud-impenetrable boots, pile in the van, trek out to the farm, and scour the nursery for the fullest 6' tree with plenty of room for presents at the bottom. Then we'd wave a tall orange stick in the air, the guy would tag it, and we'd all go back to the gift shop, drink cocoa and eat popcorn while the farm staff cut down our tree and bound it to the top of our car.
We tried to do this in Texas our first year here. In fact, being the "quintessential Christmas kick-off", my husband was furiously trying to make the tree farm thing work. Except, not only is farmland scarce in a metropolitan area, but coniferous trees aren't indiginous to the area. We did eventually find a farm, with Christmas trees, after driving about an hour and a half, but the sham-of-a-farm had a bunch of cut trees, suspended upright by twine tripods, with their stumps sitting in buckets of moist dirt. Oh, and they cost $300.
So, now, we have a fake tree, or faux fir - as I prefer to call it. I decided that, as life changes, traditions have to be flexible, or you're destined to make yourself miserable. As such, the quintessential Christmas kick-off is putting up the Christmas tree while listening to Christmas music. And you know what? It works just as well.
Show us something that always makes you laugh.
This gets me every. single. time.
I made the mistake of printing this and putting it in my cube for a short time. Everyone who came in said something like, "Oh I didn't know you had a kid," or "Why does he hate sandcastles so much?" Nevermind. It was a pain to explain why this unknown child didn't care for the art of sand-sculpting, thus this picture started to become unfunny. I took it down again.
It plays to the tune of the increasingly popular I can has cheezburger? site - although not pulled directly from there. The ICHC brand of humor has me on the floor. It's the kind where I have to immerse myself in it before I start to appreciate it and find it funny. Not just funny - freaking hilarious.
The hub doesn't get it. Perhaps he's never taken the time. I think he'd really dig it. So okay fine, here are a few of my favorite ICHC's.
Share a song from your favorite band.
It's Pearl Jam. It has to be from Pearl Jam. Always.
Because you haven't experienced poetry until you've heard it spoken. Or sung. Played?
Because the music and words combined tap into a sense that doesn't quite belong to the other five - where your heart aches, your blood tingles, and your breath catches right at the diaphragm.
Not to mention that it is meant to be played loudly. This appeals to the teenager on a very basic level, I think, because amplitude has that beautiful side effect of drowning out all thought. Like when your Dad jokes that you should hit your thumb with a hammer if you want to get rid of a headache. The brain only has so many processing paths.
And this is weird. But I feel called to share this song. It's far from one of my favorites and not one I'd normally share to get people psyched about my favorite band. The music isn't spectacular, but the words...
It means nothing for a person to tell you what poetry means to them - so here it is. Interpret for yourself. It meant a lot to Andy and I in those tumultuous coming-of-age years. But we're all kind of always coming-of-age, aren't we?
Do you see the way that tree bends?
Does it inspire?
Leanin' out to catch the sun's ray,
A lesson to reapply.
Are you getting something out of this all encompassing trip?You can spend your time alone
Redigesting past regrets,
Or you can come to terms and realize
You're the only one
Who can forgive yourself.
Makes much more sense to live in the present tense.Have you ideas on how this life ends?
Checked your hands and studied the lines?
Have you the belief that the road ahead
Ascends off into the light?Seems that, needlessly, it's getting harder
To find an approach.
Ain't no way to live.
Are we gettin' something out of this all encompassing trip?
Show us a smile.
People see Jesus or the Virgin Mary in very random and often obscure places. Me? I see smiley faces.
I saw this while my husband was doing the dinner dishes one night a couple months ago. We'd presoaked a sauté pan and set it to one side. When Andy finally lifted it off the counter to wash it, the water and soap bubbles underneath the pan formed this. Almost a little too perfect, isn't it??
"The sky broke like an egg into full sunset and the water caught fire." -- Pamela Hansford Johnson
Show us a self-taken picture of the sunset.
Submitted by Connie.
The only picture I have of a sunset. Not even your traditional sunset. This was taken while my husband and I were sailing just off the coast of St. Lucia on our honeymoon. The sun in St. Lucia never really set. It just got about a foot above the horizon and seemed to disappear behind some clouds. You can see it doing that here. Still breathtaking. It was to us, anyway.
Show us something wacky.
You want wacky? Look for the scattered slices of Americana dotting our interstate system. No kidding. Even more lies in wait if you travel our smaller highways through all the small towns.
I took this picture at a rest stop on I-35 in Oklahoma just north of Oklahoma City during our cross country move from Illinois to Texas. I can just imagine the conversation between the founding fathers of this particular rest stop:
"I want to put picnic tables here, so our patrons can have a leisurely bite to eat."
"Well, I'd like to put some iron tepee structures around the facility to pay tribute to our vast Native American culture."
"What if the picnic tables WERE tepees?!?!"
... stunned silence as they marveled at the genius of this idea...
And iron tepee-covered picnic tables is what travelers in the great state of Oklahoma got.
Share a song you recently realized you can't get enough of... no matter how many times you listen to it.
Show us something handmade that you love.
This really begs the question: What is it about handmade things? Really? For me, there are an infinite number of handmade things that I love. I have a hard time thinking of a handmade anything that I don't love. Either someone I know makes something for me, while thinking of me, or I hand-make it, in which case I usually take two steps back and admire my own ingenuity and talent. Most of the time. :)
The above is a portrait that our mutual friend, E.J., drew of my husband and I as a wedding gift. It's a charcoal sketch that he did off one of our engagement photos. It is now hanging in our bedroom. I am still in awe of it. No he's not an artist - by profession - and he's never been really trained in it. He has always just had this amazing talent. Ever since we've known him.
That's not where the list ends, though, folks. Another handmade item that I especially love is a turquoise afghan that was crocheted by my grandmother. It's made of acrylic yarn, nothing fancy, but - as it was constructed 18 years ago - it is now well worn in and very very soft. I remember distinctly my grandmother taking me to a craft store to pick out yarn. It was one of the weeks during the summer that I got to spend with grandpa and grandma all by myself. My grandparents lived about 2 hours away from us. Every summer, my two brothers and I each got to spend a week by ourselves with grandpa and grandma. This gave my grandparents uninhibited time with their grandkids without being overwhelmed by all three of us. It gave my parents three weeks during the summer where they had to deal with one less kid. And it gave me and my brothers a week of abundant attention away from our skeevy siblings. Win-win-win.
Back to the yarn, Grandma told me to pick a color that I liked. This was during my turquoise phase - hey, it was the 80s, it could've been worse - so turquoise it was. Grandma spent the entire week making that afghan and was finished before I returned home. I love that gosh-darned blanket. I still use it all the time. It has the perfect loose stitches and light weight when you need just a couple more degrees of warmth.
What else? There's the scrapbook my sister-in-law made for us for Christmas last year, with twelve pages: each pages dedicated to each month in my nephew's first year of life. Breathtaking. There's the former keyring turned ring by my friend's creative use of needlenose pliers. Hilarious. There's the 12 months-of-the-year kitchen towels that my mother and I made together in high school, which she gave me for a wedding shower gift. Priceless. The list goes on. Kind of makes you want to make something and give it to someone doesn't it?
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