Not that I'm trying to make up for something...or something.
Anyway, Preston shared some of her favorite blogs with me and I think you'll love this one- since you're into interior design and all. Check it out.
http://decorno.blogspot.com/
As a side note so the rest of you can writhe in jealousy. This week and next LA is celebrating Restaurant Week! 3 course meals at some of LA's dishiest places for low, low prices. Tonight, Little and I are hitting Chaya Venica, which we never would've been able to afford otherwise. Will report back tomorrow. :)
January 31, 2008
January 30, 2008
For Kate...
See?! All in good time. I could not think of a more perfect dedication for my dearest, oldest friend.
Witness Kate's mom in this article. For those of you who do not have the pleasure of knowing Maureen Walsh, may I just say- she is awesome. And now she's outdone herself in terms of her own awesomeness. Which, quite frankly, I figured was impossible.
She's opened a grief counseling center in Weymouth, MA and let me tell you something- short of my own divine parents, I cannot think of another single person on this earth whom I would want to comfort me in hard times. The following article is long but I'm showing it in its entirety anyway because it's my blog and I do what I want.
So there.
Witness Kate's mom in this article. For those of you who do not have the pleasure of knowing Maureen Walsh, may I just say- she is awesome. And now she's outdone herself in terms of her own awesomeness. Which, quite frankly, I figured was impossible.
She's opened a grief counseling center in Weymouth, MA and let me tell you something- short of my own divine parents, I cannot think of another single person on this earth whom I would want to comfort me in hard times. The following article is long but I'm showing it in its entirety anyway because it's my blog and I do what I want.
So there.
‘Grief Weavers’ helps clients integrate death, loss into life
By Maureen Walsh
Wed Jan 30, 2008, 12:10 PM EST
Wadsworth and her fiancé Christian Rubins are now 26 and planning their wedding in two months, but their lives together have been forever shaped and changed by the stillbirth of their daughter, Mackenzie Elizabeth, on December 13, 1999.
“She looked just like Chris. She had a ton of hair. She was a carbon copy of her father, except her fingers were really long and dainty,” said Wadsworth. “Losing a child is indescribable. When I think back to that day, it’s the exact same raw pain, even eight years later.”
To cope with her ongoing feelings of loss, Wadsworth was referred last year to Grief Weavers LLC, a new bereavement support practice founded by two board certified thanatologists: Emily Lazar, MS, a genetics counselor, and Maureen Walsh, RN (no relation to this reporter), a school nurse and health educator.
Grief Weavers helps clients suffering many different kinds of loss to acknowledge and understand their grief and integrate it into their lives.
“We know that you don’t get over it, that there’s no such thing as closure,” said Lazar. “The new theories about loss are about continuing the bond to the person who is not there. The relationship hasn’t ended, just changed.”
Grief is about more than death and dying, she said. Some clients are coping with infertility, with a medical diagnosis, with children’s feelings of loss in a divorce. Others are coping with so-called “disenfranchised grief,” a grief that is not recognized or supported by society.
It’s a myth, she said, that people go through stages of grief and then they’re done. “It’s an evolving process as new events and changes occur in one’s life.”
The first year after her daughter’s death, Wadsworth said she was focused on getting pregnant again. She miscarried soon after Mackenzie’s first anniversary.
“After that, we decided we needed to focus again on us, on our relationship. I hope we do have a healthy baby after we get married and have a ‘normal’ life, but our lives are forever changed because of her.”
Something missing
“Amanda was a young teen mom with no support,” said Lazar. “She knew something was missing in her life. She felt empty. She felt stuck. She felt like people expected her, because she was young and not married, to get over it and move on.”
“Grief Weavers helped her to be able to acknowledge her loss and to share her memories of her daughter. The beauty is that she is still with the same person and they are getting married. She’s done a lot of work, but it took her eight years. It’s been a real struggle.”
Wadsworth and Rubins also had to contend with the discomfort many people feel around those who are bereaved, and the short time the culture allows people to grieve openly.
“It is uncomfortable for people to sit with those in pain, but it’s what people who are grieving need for the most part,” Lazar said. “When the calls and the cards stop coming is when people are in need the most.”
“For a long time, I didn’t know it was okay to talk about Mackenzie,” said Wadsworth. “It helps just remembering her and knowing other people remember her. Even though we don’t have other children, on Mother’s Day Chris will say ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ to me and I’ll do the same to him on Father’s Day.”
“On her birthday, we’ll say, ‘Oh, she’d be...’ For a couple of years, when she’d be two or three, we went to Edaville Railroad for her birthday.”
Wadsworth and Rubins are learning to weave the loss of their daughter into the pattern of their lives. They hope one day they can provide peer support for other bereaved parents, and Wadsworth has simple advice for those who don’t know how to offer comfort.
“There’s no need to try to say something to make them feel better. Just listen, let them talk about the baby, let them cry, give them a hug. Those things are far more helpful.”
Journey of loss
As a genetic counselor at South Shore Hospital, Lazar has spent 20 years helping individuals and couples cope with high-risk pregnancies and reproductive loss. Several years ago, her own son, born slightly prematurely, died suddenly from an infection.
“His name was Matan Lev, which means ‘a gift of the heart,’ and that’s what he was all about,” Lazar said. “He had two amazing weeks of life. We try to honor the moments that people have had with their loved ones, because every moment counts.”
Her son’s death made her realize the need for more support for people beyond the initial period of loss, Lazar said. She enrolled in a 60-credit-hour program on death, dying and bereavement offered through the National Center on Death Education at Mount Ida College.
There she met Maureen Walsh, school nurse at Saint Francis Xavier School in South Weymouth, and a certified coordinator and facilitator of Rainbows, an international grief support program for children. Both completed the course and passed the board exam for certification by the Association for Death Educators and Counselors.
“As a nurse, I was always interested in caring for people who were terminally ill,” said Walsh. Anyone who is grieving has always been a strong interest of mine.”
The Rainbows program she facilitates at St. Francis Xavier is geared toward children who have suffered loss through death, divorce or abandonment, she said. Small groups meet weekly for about 15 or 16 weeks and follow a curriculum that allows kids to help each other under the guidance of a trained Rainbows facilitator.
“Kids grieve in bits, in small bites,” said Walsh. “It’s not unusual for a child to be told that Grandpa has died and then to say, ‘I’m going to play now.’ Kids learn about the world, about grief, through play. They can only take little bits. They keep coming back to ask questions.”
Up to the age of 8 or 9, many children can’t comprehend “forever,” she said. Even when death has been explained to them, they may continue to ask when Daddy is coming back.
“Kids also re-grieve at every developmental stage in life. If their father died when they were four, they will re-grieve when they go to middle school, when they go to high school, maybe when they make the baseball team and Dad’s not there, when they graduate and Dad’s not in the audience. They never get over the grief.”
Divorce is another loss that children grieve in different ways throughout their lives, she said, and involves other issues, such as going back and forth for the holidays, parents dating and stepfamily relationships.
“Healing art” is a particularly helpful tool in helping children to grieve. Walsh asks children to bring in clothing and other scraps of material that they associate with their loss, and she helps them to make a small quilt or a pillow.
“They have a memory to take home with them. They can wrap the quilt around themselves if they need comforting,” she said. “We can transfer pictures to material and they can write memories around it. They can do all sorts of things.”
While the children are helping to make their memory quilts or pillows, they are also sharing their memories and their feelings with Walsh. “The big thing is, it’s a vehicle for communication with the child, and it’s also a memory maker for the child,” she said.
Grief is normal
Lazar and Walsh began laying the groundwork for Grief Weavers in the summer of 2006 and incorporated in September 2007.
“We’re a support practice. We’re helping people through the journey of loss at all ages,” Lazar said. “We have expertise, but everybody is the expert in their own grief. Everyone experiences loss, but it takes skills that we don’t grow up with. We walk with them and give them suggestions and support and reassurance that they are not alone.”
Grief Weavers offers individual, couples and group support based on the “companioning” model of Dr. Alan Wolfert, PhD, director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition, which trains facilitators to assist people who are grieving.
The name “Grief Weavers” comes from a folk-tale-style story written by Walsh while she and Lazar were facilitating a group for bereaved parents who had experienced pregnancy, newborn and infant deaths.
“It’s a beautiful story about a couple’s journey on the loss of a child and how they learned the only way to deal with the pain is to weave the loss into your life,” said Lazar. “You have to take on the components of that person’s life that you can carry with you.”
“Grief is a normal process of life,” said Walsh. “While people who are grieving may need help, that doesn’t mean they are sick or broken. We are not treating them. We’re along for the journey.”
Grief Weavers LLC is based in Weymouth, but serves clients throughout the region. Many groups meet on Saturdays and Sundays. Services are provided on a flexible, sliding fee scale, and no one is turned away because of inability to pay.
Goals for the new bereavement practice include outreach to those who are grieving through hospitals, physicians, funeral homes, etc.; increased support for men who are grieving; development and training of a peer-to-peer support network; and ultimately a grief center to provide 24-hour drop-in support and resources for all who are dealing with loss.
For Pam...
I'm sorry, but does Pam's fiance Joe have something he'd like to tell us? Because he looks a LOT like designer Chris Benz. Anyone? Bueller?
January 29, 2008
For Lee
Finally, the perfect tribute to the beauty and majesty of Power Rangers (and I'm talking good, old-fashioned Power Rangers of my youth.)
Enjoy little brother.
Enjoy little brother.
January 28, 2008
For Preston and Toman
While preparing for Singapore...
I found this blog when I was looking up info for the book Trail of Crumbs featured below. While it's useless to me, where I sit in Southern California, I thought you might find it fun. Maybe you'll get some restaurant ideas for your trip this spring.
http://www.trailofcrumbs.blogspot.com/
I found this blog when I was looking up info for the book Trail of Crumbs featured below. While it's useless to me, where I sit in Southern California, I thought you might find it fun. Maybe you'll get some restaurant ideas for your trip this spring.
http://www.trailofcrumbs.blogspot.com/
For Little...
Long time coming. I can't believe there are still people with no dedications to their name! Rest assured, it has nothing to do with my love for you, all of you who are still nameless on my little archive to the right over there. I think of you all often- it's just that I haven't found anything worthy of your notice yet!
So, in the spirit of Better Late Than Never, I grant an excerpt from a book that sounds awesome that immediately made me think of Little. First the description from Amazon and then the excerpt. Enjoy. (Courtesy of USA Today online. Love ya!)
Summary
On making Sunee's acquaintance in the introduction to this charming memoir, it's hard not to envy the young woman swimming laps in the pool overlooking the orchard of her petit ami's vast compound in the High Alps of Provence, but below the surface of this portrait is a turbulent quest for identity. Abandoned at age three in a Korean marketplace, Sunee is adopted by an American couple who raise her in New Orleans. In the 1990s she settles, after a fashion, in France with Olivier Baussan, a multimillionaire of epicurean tastes and—at least in her depiction—controlling disposition. She struggles to create a home for herself in the kitchen, cooking gargantuan meals for their large circle of friends, until her restive nature and Baussan's impatience with her literary ambitions compel her to move on.
Excerpt from 'Trail of Crumbs"
Where I Am
So, in the spirit of Better Late Than Never, I grant an excerpt from a book that sounds awesome that immediately made me think of Little. First the description from Amazon and then the excerpt. Enjoy. (Courtesy of USA Today online. Love ya!)
Summary
On making Sunee's acquaintance in the introduction to this charming memoir, it's hard not to envy the young woman swimming laps in the pool overlooking the orchard of her petit ami's vast compound in the High Alps of Provence, but below the surface of this portrait is a turbulent quest for identity. Abandoned at age three in a Korean marketplace, Sunee is adopted by an American couple who raise her in New Orleans. In the 1990s she settles, after a fashion, in France with Olivier Baussan, a multimillionaire of epicurean tastes and—at least in her depiction—controlling disposition. She struggles to create a home for herself in the kitchen, cooking gargantuan meals for their large circle of friends, until her restive nature and Baussan's impatience with her literary ambitions compel her to move on.
Excerpt from 'Trail of Crumbs"
By Kim Sunée
Where I Am
Let me start by saying where I am. I've always thought that knowing this much may help me understand where I was and, if I'm lucky, to better know where it is I'm going. Luck. I know something about it—it got me out of an orphanage in Asia and across the waters, through various port cities, to right here, in France, where I am.
Looking out onto the foothills of the High Alps, in a damp Missoni bathing suit, I'm sitting on a cane-seat chair that once belonged to the father of the man I love. The father is long dead, of cancer, too much alcohol, and not enough tenderness. He's buried in a monastery high in the hills of Ganagobie, just a few kilometers from here. Olivier, my companion of nearly three years, is somewhere on the property. I hear his voice every now and then as he goes from room to room discussing colors with Ariane, the artisan from Carcassonne he has hired to repaint the walls of the entire house before the end of summer.
"Ici, un bleu chaud, pas clair. .. là, du vert foncé. .. à la main. .. Tout." He wants warm, chalky blues, strong greens, and everything rubbed in with bare hands—the reason Ariane charges so much money. Ariane lights a cigarette and, after taking a long, dramatic puff, stops to nod at the appropriate moments.
Tout, I repeat to myself, trying to say it like Olivier, but the o and u together is a sound I still have trouble pronouncing. Tout, not tu. Everything, not you.
After he has finished instructing Ariane, Olivier will busy himself with various tasks: opening bottles of red Bordeaux, negotiating tickets for a performance of La Bohème at La Scala, and tasting the mint sauce for a fresh fava bean salad I have chilling in the refrigerator. He'll do this and more while waiting for me.
I have just finished swimming forty laps and am trying to catch my breath before the long evening ahead. It is midsummer, the longest day of the year, perhaps one of the longest years of my life, and I'm barely twenty-five years old. It's almost dusk, the first starlight splinters through the slender leaves of the linden trees. If I open the upstairs window wide enough, I can catch glimpses of Olivier's daughter, Laure, and her best friend, Lulu, the caretakers' daughter, as they chase each other barefoot through the orchards. They have eaten so many wild berries and plums that their small round mouths will be stained for days.
Maybe because they are French children, or because I want them to be like me, I think they enjoy being at the table. But today the girls have so thoroughly stuffed themselves they will not be hungry for dinner. It seems we are always finishing one meal and preparing for the next. This is the way it's been every day, every season, for the last three years together with Olivier. But tonight's meal seems different somehow. I have taken extra care to tend to all the details.
Sophie, the caretaker's wife, and I were first at the market this morning, choosing small, ripe melons only from Cavaillon, the fattest white asparagus, and long, fragrant branches of fresh lemon verbena. The best salt-cured ham from Bayonne, fresh pork livers, and juniper berries for a terrine still warm from the oven. Our friend Flora gathered poppy leaves and wild mushrooms to bake with yard eggs and flowering thyme to accompany the lamb. Olivier always roasts the meat and chooses the wines. Laure and Lulu helped shell garden peas, the bright green juice spreading across the prints of their tiny fingers. And they played with pastry, smearing rich butter into the dough and cutting out hearts and stars before helping me to wrap it gently around wild peaches. Zorah, the Moroccan housekeeper, has been baking large golden moons of semolina bread all day.
All this for Olivier's family and our friends who have come from both small surrounding towns and as far away as Marseille and Paris. Some will stay through August and maybe into September. They watch as I begin to cook and then ask me questions about where I'm from. Olivier's friends from deep Provence still think it exotic—an Asian face telling stories in French about la Nouvelle-Orléans, le jazz, la cuisine Créole. Olivier, who loves to be in the kitchen, feels that I am better suited for it—he thinks it is here that I am happiest. And because I'm young, or haven't yet mastered the language of opposition, because I don't quite know what it is that makes me happy, I oblige as they gather for the spectacle: Midas and his Golden Girl.
Later, with full stomachs and slipping, slightly tipsy, between crisp, heavy linen sheets, the visitors will ask one another: What more could she possibly want? If they looked a bit closer, would they notice that despite Olivier's insistence on making me the mistress of the house, I still don't have a clue as to what is expected of me? And that Laure is both fascinated by how different I am and envious of the love her father bestows on me? Her mother, Dominique, a French woman whose beauty has been pinched with bitterness, sends letters filled with threats due to the pending divorce and malicious remarks in reference to the chinoise Olivier has taken up with.
But they do not see any of this, because in the face of gastronomic pursuits, I appear fearless and without age. I am filled with courage as I take on two ovens, three refrigerators, one neglected caretaker's wife, a few sleepy housekeepers who turn about like broken clockwork, and a soon-to-be-official stepdaughter who loves me instinctively but hasn't quite figured out why I am sometimes distant, melancholy.
As always, at some point toward the end of the meal, Olivier will propose a toast, pleased that I can make a daube or soupe d'épeautre like the best of the locals. Laure will lean into me, her small ear pressed just at the level of my stomach, and she'll whisper to me that it's grumbling, that I must still be hungry. Then her giggle will turn into a deep, rich laughter, like a drunken sailor's. This always makes me smile. Olivier, who's always searching for a sign, will see this and think that I am almost happy. And sometimes I think so, too, believe that I have buried my constant need for departure. I always remind him, though, that this is really not my home, that I am just a small part that completes his world and not the whole of it. Nonsense, he declares.
After years spent expanding his company while ignoring the yearnings of the heart, Olivier tells his friends and family that meeting me has proven that love—despite its elusive market value—is also an enterprise worth investing in. And sometimes I believe him, because being loved by him makes me feel whole, makes me forget sometimes that life was not always like this.
With Olivier, I am the least lonely, and I love the family he has tried to give me, love this country that will never be mine but whose language and markets and produce, flavors and secret recipes, I have come to know and desire as well as any native.
Later, when I tuck the children into bed, Laure, cranky and still smelling of suntan lotion, complains of a bellyache. She holds up her tiny hand to mine, marveling at how close they are in size. Tu t'es coupée. You cut yourself, she remarks. And then she shows me her green fingertips, stained from shelling the spring peas, before she and Lulu giggle themselves into a half sleep.
Sometimes, late at night, Laure asks to hear the story about how I met her father, in a cold country, how he rescued me from winter and brought me to be her American belle-mère. Then she hugs me with all the love of a ten-year-old stepchild, as she has been doing ever since we met.
Before I turn out the lights, she makes me promise to take her and Lulu along wherever it is I may be going tomorrow. Mais il faut revenir avant qu'il fasse nuit. She wants to be back before nightfall. She has been having nightmares lately that she is lost in a forest, and just before dark her father comes to save her. Mais parfois, j'ai peur. Je ne sais pas quand il reviendra. Sometimes she's afraid; she never knows when he'll return. Et toi? And you? she asks. I hug her one last time, amazed and surprised at how a little human being can already sense so much.
I wait a few minutes more until I hear Laure's breathing slow down, until she finally lets go of my fingers. If I move too quickly, though, she grasps my hand again. Tu te rappelles la premiére fois où l'on s'est rencontrés? Do you remember when we first met? she mumbles. Yes, I nod.
IT WAS SUMMER 1993; she would soon turn eight. Olivier and I picked her up at her mother's in Forcalquier, the nearby village, just about a kilometer from the house here in Pierrerue. I was still expecting boxes to arrive from Stockholm, where I had been living when Olivier and I first met. While waiting for Dominique to move the rest of her stuff from the house, Olivier had rented a huge apartment in Aix-en-Provence for us, but we spent most of the time in the Pierrerue house anyway. He and Dominique had been separated almost a year when we met. She lived part-time with Laure in Forcalquier and the rest of the time in an apartment in Paris. Olivier was paying for both and more, all because this was what Dominique demanded, knowing he would do nothing to jeopardize custody of his daughter.
When Laure and I met, she greeted me with the customary kiss on both cheeks. I remember thinking how much more radiant she was than in the photos Olivier had shown me. A Venetian blonde with violet blue eyes, resembling, she claimed rather proudly, neither her mother nor her father. She ran her tiny hand along my smooth skin before turning to her father to say that she wished her limbs were brown and freckleless like mine.
"My name ees Laure, what ees your name?"
I told her slowly in English, but then she responded in French that she was learning my language in her school this year. Muscular and animated, breathless with questions, she seemed to understand I was the new woman in her father's life. She had never met anyone named Keem. She wanted to know how old I was, where I was from, but twenty-three and New Orleans meant nothing to her.
"Je te montre le jardin?" When we got to the house, she took my hand and showed me through the gardens and the fruit orchard. "Voilà mes arbres." These are my trees. She stood firmly on the ground. Like her father, she knows and loves where she is from. "Cerises. Figues. Mirabelles." She waited, like a patient schoolteacher, for me to repeat after her as she pointed to the cherries, figs, and tiny yellow plums. "Et des pêches de vigne."
Together we stooped to pick up fallen wild peaches. Blood peaches. It was the first time I had ever seen a wild peach. I held one up to the light, broke it in two to study the scarlet veins running through the flesh.
"Do you sleep with Papa?" Laure asked, picking distractedly at a scab above her knee. Her question seemed so natural, so French, but I was still torn between nervous laughter and scolding.
"Yes," I answered firmly, biting into my first pêche sauvage ever. I had never tasted anything so delicious and forbidden. I almost wanted to cry, not from joy, but from some distant awareness that we would pay dearly one day for such sweetness.
I kiss Laure's ear good night and wish her sweet dreams, and she whispers it back to me. Sweet dreams. It is one of her favorite phrases she has learned in English.
As I walk back downstairs to the remnants of the dinner party, I think of what I will teach her tomorrow and the next day, because soon, in a month, two, a year from now, I may be on a high-speed train back to Paris. On the TGV, men will look at me and see a foreign woman in an expensive dress and sandals, carrying a soft leather bag, and one of them may ask me to spend a moment telling him something it looks as though I should know.
Staring out the train window, though, I'll think of all the things I have yet to learn, and I might catch a fractured glimpse of this same woman and see her for who she really is: a lonesome voyager, with uneven tan lines, knife cuts on her hands, and a heart speeding fast toward the season of fall.
Wild Peaches Poached
in Lillet Blanc
and Lemon Verbena
We picked pêches de vigne* direct from our trees in Provence. If you don't have access to wild peaches, use ripe yet slightly firm and blemishfree white or yellow peaches. Substitute aromatic Pineau des Charentes Blanc, Monbazillac, or your favorite white wine for the Lillet Blanc. I've experimented cooking these in red wine, and the peaches, although delicious, are not as pretty.
6 medium-size ripe wild peaches*
1 (750-ml) bottle Lillet Blanc
1/3 cup sugar
2 to 3 tablespoons honey
1 (3-inch) piece orange rind
Squeeze of fresh orange juice (from 1 quarter)
4 to 5 fresh lemon verbena sprigs, plus leaves for garnish
Cut an X in blossom end of each peach. Plunge in boiling water, about 30 seconds. Remove and peel peaches. Place peeled peaches in a large, wide, heavy-bottomed pot. Pour Lillet Blanc over. Add sugar, honey, orange rind, and juice. Gently crush lemon verbena leaves with hands to release fragrance and add sprigs to pot. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to medium, and poach, occasionally turning peaches gently for even cooking, 20 to 30 minutes (depending on ripeness) or until peaches are tender when pierced gently with tip of knife. Carefully remove peaches and place in a large serving bowl. Turn heat to high and cook poaching liquid 6 to 8 minutes or until thick and syrupy. Pour over peaches. Let cool and chill in refrigerator at least 4 hours or overnight. Garnish with more lemon verbena leaves. This is also delicious with a swirl of crème fraîche or soft vanilla ice cream and grated Amaretti di Saronno cookies. Serves 6.
For Adam...
I stumbled upon this recipe on the Food Network website. It is, of course, courtesy of the our First Lady of Butter and Sweet Cream, Ms Paula Deen. Enjoy.
| |||||||
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| Cake: 1 (18 1/4-ounce) package yellow cake mix 1 egg 8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, melted Mint leaves, for garnish Whipped cream, for garnish Filling: Combine the cake mix, egg, and butter together and mix well. Pat into a lightly greased glass 13 by 9-inch baking pan. Prepare the filling. Beat the cream cheese until smooth. Add the eggs and vanilla. Add the peanut butter; beat. Add the banana and butter and mix well. Add the powdered sugar and mix well. Spread over the cake mixture. Bake for 45 to 50 minutes. You want the center to be a little gooey, so do not over bake. Top each cake slice with a mint leaf and dollop of whipped cream | |||||||
Quickie update...
My first week without gossip smut is going surprisingly well! Thanks to the support of my understanding roommate, whose hesitant questions of "Is E! True Hollywood Story still ok?" made me smile. Honestly, I have no idea. I'm worried about E! altogether. If the purpose is to eschewing the paparazzi, then I'm not sure ANY E! programming is ok. This will be toughest given my love of The Girls Next Door. Does it count if the show stars D list celebrities willing to whore themselves out for reality television?
These are questions I was not prepared to answer. But I will say that I did not touch US Weekly and though I did glance over the headlines at the supermarket checkout, I did not flip through any of them.
Minor hiccup coming soon: Amanda and I were "hair models" at the International Salon and Spa Show in Long Beach this weekend (So much to say. We modeled extensions. Possibly one of the most hilarious situations I've ever found myself in. Although I'm not the one who ended up looking like Jessica Simpson- cough) and among the incredible deals usually only afforded salon and spa owners and cosmotology students (like Bed Head for $4! And new fun stuff like a pair of tweezers with a light attached! We were like kids in a...well, a beauty supply store.) was the publisher deal for magazines. Know how your local hair stylist can afford so many subscriptions? I do. And they were sweet enough to grant me the same deal. As a magazine junkie, let me just say that I blacked out, but when I came to I had six new subscriptions to my name- at such a low price, I almost needed a drink after the paper was signed.
The special bonus to all who signed up? A free subscription to OK! The gossip devil clearly devised this situation to ensnare me. Doesn't mean I have to read it. And I'm not paying for it so I haven't violated my agreement to myself. But still... To quote Michael Corleone from the Godfather marathon over the weekend, "Just when I thought I was out...they pull me back in."
These are questions I was not prepared to answer. But I will say that I did not touch US Weekly and though I did glance over the headlines at the supermarket checkout, I did not flip through any of them.
Minor hiccup coming soon: Amanda and I were "hair models" at the International Salon and Spa Show in Long Beach this weekend (So much to say. We modeled extensions. Possibly one of the most hilarious situations I've ever found myself in. Although I'm not the one who ended up looking like Jessica Simpson- cough) and among the incredible deals usually only afforded salon and spa owners and cosmotology students (like Bed Head for $4! And new fun stuff like a pair of tweezers with a light attached! We were like kids in a...well, a beauty supply store.) was the publisher deal for magazines. Know how your local hair stylist can afford so many subscriptions? I do. And they were sweet enough to grant me the same deal. As a magazine junkie, let me just say that I blacked out, but when I came to I had six new subscriptions to my name- at such a low price, I almost needed a drink after the paper was signed.
The special bonus to all who signed up? A free subscription to OK! The gossip devil clearly devised this situation to ensnare me. Doesn't mean I have to read it. And I'm not paying for it so I haven't violated my agreement to myself. But still... To quote Michael Corleone from the Godfather marathon over the weekend, "Just when I thought I was out...they pull me back in."
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