My parents are awesome

My parents sent out a group email to all the people on their winery mailing list about the harvest this weekend.  One line caught my attention, first because of the awesome deadpan punctuation (not "we will party!!!" but "we will party.") and then because I thought, how many people get emails like this from their parents????

"After we crush and settle the wine in the tanks we will party. "

Yeah.

Currently Watching An Inconvenient Truth By Al Gore, Billy West (II) see related

Remember the movie Reality Bites?  Well, there's this cereal that Dan and I used to laugh about whenever I would buy it in Chicago, a "healthy" cereal made with various types of grains including some older varieties like kamut that aren't used much nowadays...so the cereal is called, in honor of our "heritage" of people in the ancient world who grew kamut and other lesser-known grains, "Heritage Bites."  I saw a box of this (actually pretty tasty) cereal in the health food section at the grocery store the other day and just had to buy it.  It was so awesome to tell Dan, "Hey, I bought some cereal.  Heritage bites!!"  Yup, we still laugh every time I pour myself a bowl.  Brightens up our mornings. 

I guess the people who came up with the name were thinking that each bite of the cereal is like a piece of our shared human agricultural heritage, or something like that.  But they're obviously not very familiar with the slang verb "bites," (incidentally only really used in the present tense...I've never heard anybody say something like "That movie totally bit.") meaning "to be of very low quality, to be crappy and bad".  So basically they're saying, unintentionally, that heritage is a terrible thing, or that heritage sucks.   Well, Cereal Naming People, whoever you are, I think you're full of it!!! I don't know about you, but my Swedish heritage ROCKS!!!  But thank you for giving us one more thing to laugh about.  

I have kind of a love-hate relationship with the rain lately.  It's been raining a lot more this summer than last summer, and I get tired of having to lug an umbrella with me almost every time I go somewhere because the sky has gray, heavy-looking clouds or because the newspaper has a rain symbol yet again in the weather forecast.   I do love the cool breezes that usually come with the rain; it's so awesome to lie in bed or on the couch with the window open, watching the drops fall and feeling the breeze.  You can almost forget that it's summer in Houston.  (Until a little while after the rain, when it starts to get hot again.)   I don't like the way the rain disrupts my plans to go running.  I don't like how every time I open the trunk of my car after it has rained, lots of water drips down onto whatever was in the trunk. 

But sometimes walking to the rail stop with an umbrella, feeling just little splashes of rain on my feet and kind of a mist blowing in my face, but hearing and seeing the rain fall all around me, can be strangely peaceful and beautiful.  Yesterday was like that; it rained in the morning as I was on my way to church.  Then it proceeded to change into a torrential downpour and I had to sit through the whole service soaking wet in a way-too-air-conditioned church.  Yeah.  That's when I don't like the rain so much.

Today, though, the cool breeze from the afternoon shower just made my day.   And I'm thankful.  The little things make such a difference.

A lot of y'all will probably never get a chance to see me dance flamenco, but it's something I spend a lot of time doing...I take classes twice a week and practice at home several times a week too.  We even recently bought a big, really wide mirror so I can see my whole arm span when I practice, and a rollup bamboo rug so my shoes won't ruin the floor.  Flamenco is challenging for me...unlike some of the people in my classes, I'm not a natural dancer; I have to work at it.  But I don't mind, because I enjoy dancing so much.  

Back in April my dance studio had our  big annual show, and I was in a dance called the tanguillo.  It basically means "little tango," but tango in flamenco is nothing at all like the dramatic Argentinian dance you're probably thinking of when you think of tango.  It's just the name of a four-count rhythm in flamenco.  The fun thing about tanguillo is we get to use fans and wear hats.   (The dance I'm learning now, caracoles, uses a fan too, but I don't know any other dances besides tanguillo where you wear a hat.)

Here's a picture of me in my tanguillo getup.  Yes, we are supposed to wear crazy huge earrings like that!!

So at this show, my parents had videotaped (secretly, with a digital camera, hence the sort of fuzzy picture quality) the second half of the tanguillo dance, and I've finally figured out how to make it into a file that photobucket (the photo/video hosting site that I use) will upload.  The dance looks more interesting from the front because you can see all the stuff I'm doing with the skirt and the fan, but I think by the time my dad realized my number was starting, he didn't have time to go find a different place to film.  But I'm just happy to have it on video at all! 

I'm not sure if this is going to work...I've uploaded the video to my photobucket site and linking it.  Let me know if it doesn't play when you click on the Play arrow (I think you have to click on the one in the bottom left corner, not the big one in the middle).  There should be audio too.

As promised, since I was "tagged"...

OK, so I was tagged by j_flo_in_tx like a week ago, but it's been a bad week...I've had ear infections in both ears, one starting up right as the other was winding down.  I won't say much more about that except that the past week and a half have involved a lot of saying "owww!!" and a lot of lying on one side putting medicine drops in my ear, 8 times a day.  Yes, literally 8 times a day, 4 times for each ear.  At least I'm getting a lot of opportunities to read! 

So this is one of those things where someone answers certain questions about themselves and then "tags" other people to do the same thing.  In this case, 8 weird things about yourself.  I don't always do these, but what the heck, it's summer and I actually have time to sit at the computer for a purpose other than work.  So here goes:

8 weird things about me

1.   I still don’t really know how to ride a bike.  I've gone about ten feet, then fallen, a couple of times, but that's it.

2.  I like to watch Bollywood musicals.  They're like those cotton-candy romantic comedies that so many of us love to watch even though we know the two supposedly star-crossed lovers are going to get together in the end.  What's interesting is to watch how it happens, right?  But add in lots of bright, dazzlingly colorful and beautiful sets and costumes, random digressions into passionate singing and dancing (cheesy but totally aware of it...you can tell the actors are just having fun with the ridiculousness of it all and that's how you're expected to take it too), and dramatic scenery (during the songs only...it's a kind of dream-sequence technique) usually involving edges of cliffs, endless fields of flowers, pouring rain, or a combination thereof, and stretch it out to about three hours of anticipation before the lovers finally reunite, and you've got a Bollywood musical.  I can't help it, I love them.  It's probably a language thing too--I love listening to the Hindi while reading the English subtitles and trying to distinguish words here and there that I recognize or can figure out from the context what they mean.  Yeah, I guess that's another weird thing, I'm a language geek.  Got that from my mom!  I guess I'll make that number 3 and move on to four. 

4.  I have crooked pinkies.   They bend inwards and look like they’re broken, but I was just born that way.  It’s a trait passed down on my dad’s side of the family. 

5.  I can raise each of my eyebrows by itself.  That one doesn't need much explaining.

6.  I'm a big soccer fan.  Football's okay, baseball is pretty fun to watch too (yes, I still love the Cubs), but soccer is what I'll actually pick up the sports page intending to read about.  (There usually isn't much to read, but still, I check.)   I watch a lot of the Houston Dynamo games, but I also like to watch some of the European club teams, especially Manchester United, and also the Swedish national team.  I go craaaaazy over the World Cup and even over the European championship (which is coming up next summer!).  Guess I got it from my grandfather; when I was in Sweden last summer and the World Cup was going on, we watched two games a day together and read all the articles we could find about it in the newspapers!!

7.  There are some "normal" things that most people eat but I don't.  This doesn't seem that weird to me but Dan tells me it is very weird.  So here goes: I don't like peanut butter, ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, or pickles.  (One sure way to make me really mad is to order a sandwich or hamburger from somewhere and assume that I just want all kinds of condiments on it.  Yeah, sure, technically I can take that stuff off, but the taste is still there, and the sandwich/hamburger is completely ruined.  This happens to me at work all the freaking time.)  I also don’t like nuts (though I am not allergic to them), and I will almost always ask if a dessert contains them (as a precaution, so as not to have to waste food or offend the baker by taking one bite and then throwing the rest away because there are nuts in it.)

8.  When I’m having a bad day, I often go for a run around the Rice outer loop to make myself feel better.  (This is not that weird, I know.  Keep reading.)  But when I get really really mad and I feel like punching something or jumping up and down and screaming, I have been known to do something Dan and I call “The Mad Run.”  (Well, to be honest, it's not really either-or.  First I jump up and down and scream and punch something, then I do the Mad Run).  This outburst of anger-running, complete with facial expressions, is so intense that it normally doesn’t last more than a block.  As far as I know, no one I know (even Dan, although he knows about it and thinks it’s hilarious) has ever witnessed this phenomenon, and I hope to keep it that way.

Now for my tagging...you're supposed to tag 8 people. 

I tag  j_ana, poshdeluxe (I know, you have your other blog, so write it on there!), ambre , fraudoktorsweigart, pigballs, heyzeus, aguafresca, and dweebfactor5.  (There are other people too who I would tag but I know they don't write on their xanga blog anymore and probably stopped reading their xanga subscriptions too, so that's the reason...nothing personal!) 

(Dan refused to let me tag him, so I guess you'll never find out 8 weird things about him...maybe you know some already!)