re: A Birthday StorySlam

We're big fans of The Moth and the Porchlight story telling series in our house, so to celebrate my birthday last week we decided to host our own StorySlam with our friends. A StorySlam is a live storytelling event where participants from the audience are chosen at random to come up to the mic and tell their true personal tales.

I rented out a little coffee shop around the corner from our apartment, set up a mic, and all night we drank delicious hot chocolate the barista whipped up for us and listened to our friends tell 5 minute true stories on the topic of "getting older."

Willing participants put their name in a box, and we drew 10 names over the course of the evening to tell a story in front of the group. We borrowed our rules from the Moth StorySlam, which were as follows: 

It must be TRUE
Stories are strictly non-fiction.   

It must be ON TOPIC
The story you've prepared should be intrinsically related to the theme of "Getting Older".   

It must be YOUR STORY TO TELL
Were you there? Are you one of the main characters? Your involvement in the events as they unfold is essential. No journalism. Eyewitness accounts only.   

It must be ON TIME
You've got to squeeze all of that into 5 minutes. 

And, if you'd like a taste of what we heard that evening, here's Collin, telling a story about a blind raccoon and his golden birthday. Enjoy:

Birthday Story Slam | November 30, 2012 from Rebecca Wright.

(pretty photos taken by Kristian + Kimmi, video by Julio)

re: A Morning in SLC

We were in Salt Lake for the weekend for a wedding, and on Saturday morning decided to visit the SLC Farmer's Market to get our picture taken by my dear friend Alisha Stamper. She specializes in portraits, and she brings her large format camera to the market to take lovely black and white photos on instant film:

We had a lot of fun posing for our photos, and celebrated by going to Bruges immediately afterwords and gorging ourselves on hot waffles and sausages. It was a perfect morning activity.

If you're in SLC, the market lasts another few weeks. $15 will get you your own 4x5 print (and if you love your pic, you can have larger prints made from the negative).

re: Family Portraits in Hawaii

We just got back from a trip to Hawaii over the weekend with the Ferneys. Turns out, September is the best time to go to Hawaii - because everyone has gone back to school and it is technically "off" season, plane tickets are cheap and the beaches are empty but everything is still awesome.

We hiked to Waimea Falls one afternoon, and were amused to find some very muscular life guards hanging out there, renting life jackets and pool noodles to the visitors. It looked like the kind of job that left you with plenty of time to hang out doing push ups and working on your tan.

All I know is that I tried to take a classy family photo of the Ferneys by the natural beauty of the Falls - real Christmas card material, you know? - when one of the life guards decided to jump into the quiet lake and take a swim by the Falls, just as we were getting posed.

Do you see him? Here. Let me give you a closer look:

I dunno. I think they can still use it for their Christmas card.

Resolved: Eat More Salad

I meant to post this back in June, but I got too busy to have goals, apparently. So, I'll just count this goal for my entire summer, since I pretty much practiced it on a weekly basis.

My goal for the summer was to eat more salad. Not just the expected green salad (though I do love a classic green salad) but the kind full of grains/legumes and fresh things so delicious that they trick your mouth into thinking it is munching on something less healthy than it is.

The recipe that turned into my go-to salad (aka I craved it fortnightly) and that I probably made if I was invited to a potluck was this Massaged Kale Salad with Mango & Avocado from Healthy Food for Living:

Ingredients (4 servings)

1 bunch lacinato (dinosaur) kale, leaves torn from the stalks and thinly sliced
1/4 cup Lime Olive Oil, such as Boston Olive Oil Company Whole Fruit Persian Lime (alternately, you can use 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil + 1 Tbsp freshly squeezed lime juice)
Kosher salt & freshly ground black pepper, to taste
2 tsp agave nectar or honey
2 ripe champagne mangos, peeled, pitted, and diced
1 ripe but firm avocado, peeled, pitted, and diced
1/4 cup toasted sliced almonds
1/4 cup toasted unsweetened flaked coconut

Instructions

In a large bowl, toss the sliced kale leaves with a small drizzle of the olive oil and a bit of Kosher salt; massage with your hands until the kale softens and wilts, about 2-3 minutes.

In a small bowl or jar combine the remaining olive oil, honey, and salt & pepper to taste. Whisk or shake until well-combined.

Toss the massaged kale with the dressing and add in the diced mango and avocado.

Serve at room temperature topped with the toasted sliced almonds and flaked coconut.

Can be made a few hours in advance.

Kale all freshened up with limes and mango? So simple, and so so good.

Any favorite salad recipes of your own to share?

***

Instead of taking on a whole list of resolutions at once, I'm focusing on one life improvement a month in 2012.

See January's resolution - Do My Hair
See February's resolution - Taking Care of Business
See March's resolution - Clear the Clutter
See April's resolution - Tackle the Craft Suitcase
See May's resolution - Take a Class

The Longest Yard Sale 2012

August was pretty busy, ya'll. I went to the Longest Yard Sale in the World. (You know - the garage sale that takes place on the first weekend in August and stretches from Michigan to Alabama? I've actually been twice before. I'm pretty much an expert at junk.) Spending four days straight looking at treasures is pretty much the stuff that genie lamp wishes are made of, in my opinion.

This year I roamed the outer fields of Ohio and Kentucky with four other ladies with impeccable taste:

There may have been a little worry at first that we'd all be competing for the same treasures, but I think it speaks well for us as civil human beings and for the immensity of the Yard Sale that we managed to come home without any missing limbs or bloody scratch marks from trying to claw finds out of eachother's hands, AND we still ended up with a luggage rack that looked like this:

Maybe you want to know what is inside all of those suitcases? You and the airport security both want to know. I'll tell you as long as you don't unpack my suitcase and hold everything up while laughing and showing it to your buddy who is working the x-ray machine.

There were old forgotten treasures like viewmaster projectors.

Pretty collars and pins and other things I like to wear.

And, maybe I picked up some decorative baby toys that I got a preemptive kick out of as I imagined future children using their iPhone to look up photos of what a telephone switchboard would have ever been used for.

(I posted a few more pics on the AHV blog if you'd like to keep looking at old things.)

One new addition to this year's adventure was a quick stop at Dollywood, aka the most patriotic and tacky of all theme parks, hidden right outside of Knoxville, TN.

There are a lot of all-American bald eagles around. While waiting in line for roller coasters, you felt a little like you were in a motivational calendar.

The sign posts in the park actually didn't give you any direction, but you did feel good about yourself as you wandered aimlessly in search of a bathroom.

There was also plenty of Dolly paraphernalia to peruse. Her hair reached epic proportions in many of the photos, and there was evidence of her being BFF with a lot of other famous people (like Rod Stewart, who incidentally in the 70s was dressed like every blogger in 2012).

Indeed, the whole experience left me motivated (to pursue bigger hair and more sequins in my life).

re: Two Years

August 28 marks two whole years of marriage already. I kinda don't know how it went by so quickly ... which perhaps is evidenced by the fact that we still have a bag of bike horns sitting in our storage room that we step over any time we go in there. Apparently we've been stepping over them for two years.

For those of you that might remember, Derek and I sent out bike horns as part of our wedding invitations. It was a fun little teaser to the bicycle brigade surprise that we had planned for the day.

(It also meant coming up with 100 bicycle horns as cheaply as possible. Luckily Derek took care of that during a business trip to China, and managed to track down two duffle bags full of black bike horns one afternoon. I imagine him in some back alley full of huge stacks of weird plastic things in mass quantity, heroically wheeling and dealing to get the best price so that our wedding invites could be awesome, but I think he was mostly just embarrassed to have to haul them home in front of his co-workers.)

Anyway. We decided it might finally be time to get rid of those leftovers, so to celebrate our 2 years, in the late of the evening Derek and I found a few unsuspecting bikes in the neighborhood and gifted them some new noisemakers.

(That last one wasn't a bike, but we figured that anyone who drives an old parking meter cart around must have a sense of humor.)

Honk honk! Happy 2 years.

A Pahnke Wedding

Two of the greatest people I know, Mark and Emily, got married this month. And, because Emily is a genius, she figured out a way to incorporate all of her favorite things into the wedding:

First - look at their wedding invites/announcements. Everyone got their own viewmaster with a reel of cute photos telling Emily and Mark's story in a perfectly patterned box (design by Karisa, letterpress by Jordan):

Horse Ribbons (customized and in her favorite colors, of course):

Scratch offs in the guest book:

A Hanky Pahnke Party

I'm a little behind in updating over here, but I had to share the details of a bridal shower that I helped throw for my dear friend Emily last month. She happens to be marrying a dude with the last name Pahnke (pronounced "panky") which means that OBVIOUSLY I was going to take full advantage of the giggle inducing surname and throw her a "Hanky Pahnke" party. I decided to take the "hanky" part of the party theme and run with a vintage hankie angle, because although I wanted there to be people throwing underwear all around during this party, I still wanted them to be doing it in a classy setting.

First, THE INVITES! I pulled out my trusty gocco and screened the pertinent information onto a bunch of frilly vintage hankies. Then I packaged them into velum envelopes so that the recipients could get a sneak peek of their individual cuteness and the post office workers could feel a little jealous:

Next, THE DECOR. We pretty much hung a hankie onto anything that was hangable. Vintage handkerchief buntings! Vintage handkerchief chair backs! Vintage handkerchiefs underneath all the milkglass serving dishes! I started worrying a little about overkill, but I think the fact that every hanky was a little different made it just feel nicely themed with just a hint of feeling like you were living in your grandmother's dresser drawer.

And it didn't hurt that the food was really pretty too:

For the entertainment portion of the evening, we threw a white elephant underwear exchange. Perhaps my favorite gift that was opened was the Buty Panty (aka the generic version of the Booty Pop) which calls itself a "natural looking padded panty preshaped with contour foam to resemble a curvaceous bottom." Needless to say, this was a hot ticket item.

You couldn't expect us to keep the whole thing classy, right?