Emma's Fantabulous Blog

This year for Thanksgiving, our friends Russell and Jenny kindly invited us to have Thanksgiving dinner with them. They provided an amazing spread of traditional turkey day goodies and we brought over a homemade pumpkin pie and supplies to try out my henna skills on Jenny. (She’s incredibly brave!)

The next day I still had a bunch of goo left and decided to try out some new ideas and doodle on my hands again. This was the result. Not super amazing, but it was fun to try some new patterns.

And then Devon decided to be brave and let me doodle on him!!! I tried my best at making an Apple computer power button on the back of his neck. I drew one almost perfectly, but unfortunately the back of your neck is a location that’s really hard to keep from smudging. So it didn’t end up staining well… But the initially it looked really rad.

Duran Duran has a new album out! It’s called Red Carpet Massacre. From what I previewed on iTunes, the album is kinda “meh” but I really love one of the songs. Falling down. Plus they made an awesome video to go along with it. It features a Britney Spears look-alike going to rehab. (As a random connection: the rehab building in the video looks strangely familiar to an abandoned hospital featured in on of my favorite shows: Showtime’s Dexter.)

But yeah. Check out the vid.

I recently finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I know. An Oprah Book Club book. Shoot me now. I have no good excuse.

It’s the story of the love between a man and his son and set in post-apocalyptic times. They are on a journey with no safe place to call home and no way to find food other than scavenging. All the while they’re trying to avoid cannibalistic bandits which roam the roads and abandoned buildings.

I’m really glad that I did finally read The Road, as it’s earned a spot as one of my favorite books of all time.  It had touching and emotional moments. It also had gruesome and raws moments.  The entire time I was reading it, I was wishing that I was closer to the end (even though I was totally engrossed in reading their journey) so I could find out what happened to the main characters.

The book had some raw moments, so I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for someone with an extremely delicate composition. However I loved it and found it very powerful and I highly recommend it in general.

Now I know, I usually see the word “carob” and i generally think “a weak excuse for chocolate”.  Normally I would agree with that, but after coming across this “snack bar” I can’t disagree more.

I was rummaging around Central Market‘s organic/herbal/medicine section looking for flax seed or something hippy-ish and random like that, and I noticed that they had a refrigerated organic section. And that’s where I found this snack bar.

Brand: Perfect Foods Bar. Flavor: Carob Chip.

First ingredient: Natural peanut butter. Second ingredient: raw honey.

Ok. stop right there. I’m sold.

It tastes absolutely amazing. Seriously. It tastes like the filling of a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup except it doesn’t have any junk in it. I had it for breakfast this morning and I was totally filled up (although I would’nt have denied a glass of milk if I had one to go with it.) Calories: 282. And I think it cost $2.50-ish.

But yeah. Totally amazing. Unfortunately I think that they still have a somewhat limited distribution, but check to see if they have a distributor in your area/state.

D and I went to a Halloween costume party on Saturday. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a real costume party, let alone one with a date, so I knew that I had to take advantage of that and do a duet type costume… And something where the guy would have to wear something pretty non-costumey, because Devon isn’t really a costume kind of guy.

I had an certain image in my mind and the results ended up being frighteningly on point. The looks:

Mine (“It’s britney, b@tch):

Devon’s:

Check out all my pics from that night, as well as our friend James’ costume. He was working security for the party and came dressed as a Blackwater Operative. It was awesome. And you can read Devon’s blog post on the party here.

Last week we had house guests. A friend of Devon’s, Jillian Ann & her dreadlocked husband Grant. They were in town for a couple of days touring with their band Heavyweight Dub Champion. They’re nice people. Passionate and definitely artists.

I really enjoy welcoming people & showing my love through cooking. They were mostly vegan & organic focused. So it was interesting trying to cook for them…. I’ve cooked for vegetarian friends before. I’ve also tried eating a macrobiotic diet before. But vegan is hard. I didn’t realize how often I cook and bake with butter. Anyways. I tried my hand at making a vegan veggie & bean soup which turned out pretty good… Although, gawd. I really love my carbs, cheese and pork products. But I always enjoy learning how to cook within new constraints. Even if I’m not interested in permanently adapting my diet.

Anyways. Last thursday we went to see their band play at the Nectar Lounge in Fremont (North Seattle area) I think they said their “genre” was sort of Industrial Rastafarian. I was intrigued. I enjoy reggae and industrial music, but had never heard of the two totally different types of music being combined. And I was skeptical.

The venue was pretty cool. It looked like an old converted firehouse. I got a club soda and it only cost 75 cents. There was lots of room around the stage, as well as a balcony overlooking the performance area that had lots of tables and chairs. D & I had brought along our friend Russell, and we all felt a bit out of place as we didn’t have dreadlocks or droopy hemp hats. (In addition to wearing button up shirts, not smelling like pot and having bathed that day…) Hehe. But really, It was a pretty cool crowd; we just felt like stiffs. There was a girl waving a Jamaican flag, and there was a collaborative painting taking place. (We couldn’t tell if it was supposed to look like a sofa, a lotus flower with a pig or a mandala.)

Anyways. The band, Heavyweight Dub Champion, was pretty cool. They had great thumping industrial techno-ish beats with a reggae twist. It hard to describe… There was a reggae vocalist, as well as Jillian who is a more melodic singer….. Then there was a guy who would play saxophone occasionally.. and a whole lot of other stuff going on. It was pretty interesting.

You can check out Heavyweight Dub Champion’s myspace page here. Unfortunately I think the industrial beats is something that they’ve started doing more recently, so they don’t have many examples of that on their page, but hopefully they’ll record some of that soon. I’ll totally buy one of their cd’s that features that.

So yeah. That’s what I was up to last week.

Some day, when D and I own our own home and we’re fabulously independently wealthy, I want to decorate our home with some cool modern stuff from Eurway. Especially this snoogley step framed bed or something similar and this stainless steel curved bar. Me like.

Of course we’d need disco balls to hang from the ceiling above the bar… In addition to a padlock to protect against lemur raids.

For now I’ll just keep drooling.

So for the un-tech-savy Facebook.com is a social networking site similar to myspace.com. You get a profile and can add your friends who are also on the site to your network. You also have the option to join a plethora of groups depending on your interests.

Examples of some of the ones that I belong to: “I went to a public high school… b****”, “Audi drivers do it best”, “Voss water tastes better cause it’s from Norway”, ” Stewart and Colbert 2008“.

Anyways. I came across one today that had me trying really hard to keep from spitting my cappuccino onto the computer screen.

“Wilst my friends have babies and mortgages, I have hangovers and 100 shoes.”

And the group has over 5000 members. I love it.

So Halo 3 was released last night. I won’t have a husband for a week or so. This is what he has looked like since I hunted, foraged and gathered the game for him earlier this afternoon:

Curled up underneath a blanket, on the couch, in his lounging clothes, playing Halo 3, with a HUGE smile on his face. It’s really quite cute actually. He’s like a little kid on Christmas morning.

BTW, I just want to say how bizarre it was to be at the video game store at the mall today (a Tuesday), in the middle of the day. A rotating group of 20 or so men filed in and out of the store while I was there… Most of them were in their 30s or 40s. They all had big grins like Devon. Halo junkies/addicts. Grown men ditching work to get their hands on their video game fix. It was really strange.

Anyways. Have fun Devon! I’ll see you when you defeat the Covenant, or as soon as you start to look dehydrated/malnourished and I bring you sustenance.

Justin Timberlake had a free concert at 9am yesterday at Gas Works Park. SOMEHOW I never found out about it until I was enroute for my 8am shift to hang out with the baby raccamundis at P.A.W.S. My question is: Why did noone tell me that my boyfriend was in town? I would have totally called in sick…

I did find it interesting that my P.A.W.S. shift, which normally has 7-10 people, only had 3 yesterday… including me. Everyone else had called in sick or unable to make it at the last minute. Yeah.. sick… I’m sure… (sarcasm abounds)

I know they were all just playing hooky to watch my (other) man perform!