breakingsod.com

As opposed to the plethora of dubiously edible food-like substances promoted in most supermarkets?

Awesome article by food superhero, Michael Pollan.

Yay food!

Had a lovely dinner with my friends Rita and Ben, my mom and teh Samster. Mmmm…. Porkchops simmered in plum-nectarine-blueberry sauce with shitake baked rice(recipe courtesy of my awesome friend Sharon who is about to come out with her very own cookbook!), garden collards and garden salad. And a veritable plethora of desserts! I made a blackberry cobbler with some very fine and ginormous berries my mom brought, Rita brought two kinds of lemon birthday cake from her Bday celebration and Sam and I made chocolate chocolate mint chip monster cookies! Yum. Stuffed ourselves and then Ben and Sam made origami while I painted Rita’s lovely, pregnant belly.

Yay! Happy birthday Rita! And hurray for summer goodness…

More pictures of the dinner and the belly, here.

I may have had a rather unfortunate summer, but I certainly have an amazing fortune in my friends!

Cody, kickass organatrix and grand friend that she is, decided to throw a benefit party for me and proceeded to do so, in truly glorious Badbad Faerie style! Jeff generously donated the use of the Little Red Day Spa and my fabulous posse(Yay Cody! Rita! Ben! Anna! Blackbird! Drew! Juliet! Cheri! Sam! David! Julia!) rallied their considerably delicious forces and talents and thus, the Infinite Feast was born!

It was an absolutely sumptuous, sexy soiree, with delicious munchies, hot tubbin’, dancing(thanks Michael Holden for the awesome tunes!),

yum

massage(yay Candace!), tarot(the mysterious Madam Blackbird), poetry(call and response between David Jones and I), luscious desserts, awesome art and of course the Bad bad Faeries and their wicked, fruity shenanigans!

Badbad Faeries!

More pics on Facebook.

It was so much fun! Thanks so so much Coders and all of you who helped organize it, baked for it, made gorgeous signage, worked it, donated awesome art(yay David, Juliet and Liz!) and services(props to Cody, Danni, Sharon, Jason and BB!) to the auction and came and danced and soaked and cuddled and bought art and things…

My Buddha holds a fat envelope full of lovely green bills that will help me pay off a chunk of my debt, buy my ever-growing kiddo clothes for the fall and get my unhappy tooth to the dentist.. Though one of the very first things I’m going to do is GO BUY A NICE BIG CANVAS!!! Just to prove to myself that I don’t have to give up, even if I no longer have those lovely big walls I was so looking forward to painting pictures for.

But regardless of the money, the gift of my friends and community is a rich one. It is a boon and a bounty I’ll not soon forget.

Love.

I love threes and nines, so 39 is simply the most exquisite number EVER. Obviously, my 39th birthday had to be something special.

Therefore, I combined it with my annual Naked Human party. Everyone brought tons of gawdjis clothes, we made a humongous pile and dove in. The party was so much fun, it just sort of ran itself! None of the performances I’d planned happened-but there was plenty of spontaneous performing ‘midst all the talking, snuggling, playing, trying oning and giggling.

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Brenda Belcher serenaded us with her lovely songs(when Zola wasn’t licking her face).

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Sean made magic with his mesmerizing balls.

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Yonatan stole our hearts with his shy debutante act… And then stole my hat. Again.

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Danni and Cody had us bustin’ a gut with their hilarious body-part-mash-up(Cody is the legs, Danni the top). There were really too many lovely performances to snap pictures of… Mai Li sang to us and told us ridiculous jokes, Juliet and Drew gave an awesome poem/montage of quotes, sweaters were cut into leg-warmers———-

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———-and we feasted on delicious foodstuffs. Rita made me an awesome grapefruit cake-yum! My lentil stew turned out divinely although it was a new recipe and I de-baconated it in favor of my veggitastic friends. Everyone scored loverly new clothes and we all had fun rummaging through the pile…

Such a glorious birthday! Thanks so much all y’alls, you’re amazing. Such a rich, lucky woman am I, to have such fantastic friends and community!

More pictures here.

Feed your digestive system.

Atiron got her’s flickr’d.

Go, see the great pillow massacre, Me eating Delayne’s arm, Ben french-kissing a dragon and tons of other cool madness!

Mwahahahah!!

I’m bustin’ with culinary pride tonight.. I made a turkey pie for dinner! TURKEY PIE!!!

No recipe, from scratch, woot! It’s super yummy too-even Sam likes it!

Plus, cranberry bars for ’ssert, spur of the moment, invented on the fly. Mmmmm… A very creative evening in the Circle kitchen.

Flickr’d pics.

It was an awesome Turkey day! Sam, BB, Delayne and I farmsat on Whidbey Island and Rita and Ben came out friday evening for to cookandNOM!

Mmmm…

Quite an eventful holiday.. The three goats(Merriment, Snow Princess and Chardonnay-or as the kids call them: Butt Goat, Nice Goat and Starved Goat) turned out to be quite skillful escape artists and so we spent quite a bit of time rounding them up and juryrigging the gate shut so that Merriment(Butt Goat) couldn’t eat ALL the hay.

Not to mention calming the hyper young german shepherd, Savannah(and cleaning up poop-not my favorite part). She spends much of her time locked in the laundry room, so she’s VERY ENTHUSIASTIC when let out. Luckily, our group included some avid dog fans, so she was well taken care of, even if she did still spend much of her time watching(~pantwhinepant~) the ladder for the poor cat which hardly ever comes downstairs, except to make a mad dash for the kitchen loft where her food is.

The kids had a great time feeding the chickens(Rowan practically adopted them) and ducks and we all enjoyed wrangling the goats and petting Velvet, the donkey, who seemed a bit depressed this time around.

It was lovely to get ‘lost’ in the forest, which is honeycombed with paths to yurts and cabins and farmsteads. We also took a day trip out the Double Bluff Beach and there was much sliding down bluffs,

log walking, admiring clay bastions, stacking rocks(on Delayne’s part) and I made a very odd cliff creature in the sand/clay/sandstone bluff. Most of the oddness due to the act that the head I was carving kept shifting and falling off. Oh well, it was fun.

Our feast was splendid and abundant. We had turkey, stuffing, mashed ‘taters, Rita’s amazing juiced orange sweet potatoes, cider…

(possibly a little too much cider?)

garden pumpkin and Ben’s delicious gravy(made at the risk of his life and to the detriment of his pants).

Dessert was a most delicious triple berry pie that Delayne and I found at a sweet bakery in Langley. He and I had a lovely little browse in an amazing import store there. They have gorgeous rugs, bizarrely cool hats, exquisite gemstone jewelry and these ginormous chairs carved from whole old growth tree trunks-all smooth oiled wood loveliness. I absolutely lOVE them. If I had a few extra thousand smackers, I’da brought one home for sure. As it was, I rang every bell in the place and brought three of the sweet little ones home. Amazing, hand beaten metal bells from India-they all have different tones and I chose the sweetest three of all the little ones.

Aaaaaaaaaah, such a marvelous time. More pics of farmy goodness and all our adventures here.

I’m so lucky to have such brizilliant friends and family.

The new Mountaineers climbing wall at Magnusson is extremely cool.

So extremely cool, in fact that it utterly defeated Sam and I.

Oh wells, we had fun goggling at it and chasing the resident crow away from our leftovers until he wickedly spilled both of our sodas in vengeance.. Then I took him(Sam, not the mettlesome corvid) to the Brig(where I teach clay class) and showed him the cool whale sculpture and the pea patch and we ate lots of raspberries and then went on a gelato procuring mission, starting with the kidnapping of BB so that she could come eat gelato and go walkies at Greenlake.

More wall, whale and walkies pics here.

My new friend Maya lured me off to ‘A Night of Transformation’, a Toltec wisdom performance event saturday evening.

The ginormous beehive of the Nexus Hotel near the Northgate mall seemed quite an incongruous location for such an earthy, spiritual event, but it mattered not-it gave us enough space for transformation, enough space for the band to play, for the stories to blossom, for our spirits to rise!

So invigorating to see men of wisdom speak! Tell story, sing, share music and art. Don Jose Ruiz sitting there(smiling this huge smile like the sun shining on every single wildflower in a brilliant mountain meadow) and giving us his blessing through stories. I loved watching Eric painting, his firey artwork taking shape under the spell of the music and magic. The singers and musicians fueling our yearning and encouraging our spirits with their poignant, funny and tender songs.

I love Don Jose’s Abraham Lincoln quote: ‘When you do bad, you feel bad, when you do good, you feel good’. What a simple, easily graspable, explanation of karma! And his recounting of the joyous memory of hundreds of metalheads OMing at an Ozzy Ozborne concert, and the vision of humans, us, ordinary human beings, as angels, fully capable for change, of taking back our world.

Right here, right now, every day, we are the angels, we can take our world back. That makes my heart so happy, so happy.

And Maya, oh miss Maya, marvelous, dancin’, skippin’, tiny, soft, strong, dynamite papaya woman. So glad to welcome you to my tribe! Many thanks to Yoni for bringing you to my nest and to you for lifting my heart, hearing my poems, reveling in snuggles and chocolate, giant leaves and foggy worlds, for purple cauliflower, for giggles and rubbing my feet…

More pics here.

I love it when my family grows.