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You’ve probably noticed majestic birds flying around Loudoun County. Their six-foot wingspans powerfully soar through the air, circling you and your family as you drive, bike, and stroll. As they come closer, however, you realize that what you assumed were eagles or hawks are actually turkey vultures.
Besides being ugly, smelly, and territorial, one of these federally protected birds’ least attractive traits is their practice of vomiting up semi-digested dead animals.
My sister, Kay, and her boyfriend, Calvin, can attest to how unpleasant this can be, since a vulture threw up a bloody mess on Calvin’s truck yesterday as they drove down Route 7.
In case you didn’t see them yet, you should check out Sarah Silverman’s video confession to her boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel and then Jimmy’s response, which premiered last night after the Oscars.
Watch Sarah’s first.
Here’s Jimmy’s. You’ll find a better quality version on abc.com, but it takes longer to load.
They bleep out the curse word, but don’t play it loud at work!
Here’s an obvious but overlooked idea: reducing your printer margins will reduce the amount of paper that you use. Actress and writer Tamara Krinsky has started the “Change the Margins” campaign in an effort to reduce waste, improve the environment, and save money.
Reducing your margins from the Microsoft standard 1.25″ to .75″ decreases your paper use by 4.75%. Based on 2003 paper consumption rates, Americans could conserve 6,156,000 trees a year by switching to the .75″ “efficient margins.”
Not using 6 million trees also saves the following:
– enough energy savings to power 100,000 homes
– C02 emissions equivalent to 132,000 cars
– enough wastewater to fill 7,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
The Change the Margins campaign is aiming to raise individual awareness, convince Microsoft to change its default margins settings, and get major companies and universities to adopt efficient margins.
The Washington Post featured the campaign in last week’s Sunday paper.
A quiet week on the blog is a sure indicator that lots is happening in life!
A quick recap:
– Last Friday night my BFF went into labor a month and two days early. She labored like a champ and Saturday morning her beautiful baby girl arrived! She is gorgeous and perfectly healthy. She’s a good size — 6 lbs., 4 oz. — but she seems so tiny to me. I can’t believe that my kids were ever so small. At 17 months, Bennett is literally four times bigger than the baby!
– Colin turned five! Colin, SJ, and I went skiing at Whitetail on his birthday. We had a blast. It was so much fun to spend time alone with him, and to see him attack the slopes. He did kids’ camp for a couple of hours in the afternoon and then we skied together. He’s going to be a better skier than we are by the time he’s seven!
– We hosted Colin’s birthday party at our house on Saturday. Getting ready for that was an ordeal, with the requisite cleaning, prep, and baking.
We kept it to kids in his class this year, but there were still twenty-two kids there, counting siblings. It was a great time – for me, anyway! I love the noise and chaos of young kids having fun. We played a couple of games that worked well; I’ll share those soon in another post. I’ll be cleaning up from the party for the next month or so…
– The lake house basement construction work is finished. I’ve been scouring Craig’s List and driving around NoVa looking for furnishings and decorations to prepare for the rental season.
Anyway, I’m optimistic that this week will be a bit calmer, and I already have a post all queued up…
Anne Bancroft was 35 when she filmed The Graduate.
That’s right; I am now officially older than Mrs. Robinson, the American archetype for the “older woman.”
At least I’m still younger than Stiffler’s mom…
It’s been a year of weddings in our family. My sister, my sister-in-law, and my sister-in-law’s sister are all getting married within a fourteen months of each other, while another sister teeters on the brink of engagement. Love, marriage and caterers are in the air.
I attended one of these nuptials last September. My husband, SJ, and I were enjoying our first adults-only weekend since 2005, with the kids safely stowed away with friends.
I examined the wedding program after settling into our pew. On the first page was a beautiful poem* that I assume was meant to capture the couple’s love for each other. It spoke of romance, passion, mutual adoration, and lovers bathed in the light of pole stars through eternity.
“I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.”
In short, it was a love poem obvously written before the sleepless nights, leaky diapers, and stretch marks of parenthood.
But wait before you scoff. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ll do my best to write about something more interesting than paint brands next time. 
I haven’t posted for a few days because I was painting our newly-finished basement at Lake Anna. My beautiful and generous sister, her buff and handsome boyfriend, and I painted four rooms on Tuesday and Wednesday. It was hard work, but the rooms look great now.
Here’s a story with a lesson: we initially used Behr paint from Home Depot, which is very highly rated. When I decided I didn’t like one of the colors, I headed to the local True Value hardware store for more paint.
The True Value Paint looks just as good as the Behr paint and covered a lot more wall space per gallon. The Behr paint was much thicker and seemed to sink into our walls. As a result, the Behr brand required more paint to cover a given space. Since Behr paint was also $3 more per gallon it was almost twice as expensive overall.
There’s a line in the movie Steel Magnolias where Dolly Parton says that her favorite emotion is laughter through tears. I realized today that my least favorite emotion (besides grief) is when somebody screwed up royally – and it’s me.
I don’t like to be wrong and I absolutely cannot abide standing in a shitstorm of my own creation. Today I am in a major cluster of fun and there’s really no one to blame but myself.
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