Purveyors of the Obvious

Starting the Year

// January 1st, 2010 // 3 Comments » // Uncategorized // Uncategorized

Just reflecting on the start of the year with my guy for 5 years.

NYE 2005 – I went to L. A. (we had just started dating), he stayed in Miami. I missed him.

NYE 2006 – I was working at a field station in Costa Rica over Christmas so my guy came out to meet me for New Year’s. We rang in the year dancing on the sand in Puerto Viejo surrounded by fire dancers with fireworks being set off over our heads. Seriously, we ended up with firework debris in our hair when we kissed.

NYE 2007 – Quietly spent at our home in Miami drinking champagne and listening to sirens, gun shots, and fireworks in the neighborhood. FYI, we didn’t live in a poor part of town either, Miami can just be SHADY.

NYE 2008 – The evening was spent in the screen hut at the edge of a forest on a farm and hostel property in southern, coastal Georgia. It rained hard and my fiance at the time streaked the property obtaining a small bottle of champagne to toast the night. The next day we enjoyed a darling New Year’s brunch at the Jekyll Island hotel.

NYE 2009 – We were drunk off our butts plastered on Jameson Irish Whiskey and Guinness. Flogging Molly was playing a NYE show in Denver and we drank and danced the night away. After the show we went to Steuben’s for the one night of the year they serve Chicken and Waffles. It turned out the kitchen was not open for a while so we drank and danced some more before we had our food and made our way home.

NYE 2010 – Vast contrast to the year before. We had planned a low-key evening at mellow house parties but one friend’s daughter picked up a stomach flu, another friend had to cancel because her husband was sick. Instead we met a friend at Dushanbe Teahouse for an early toast, I had a tea/fruit juice sparkling infusion. We went home and changed to return to the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art for their New Year’s Silver Ball.

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Here is the countdown, the screaming, the bag pipe player doing Auld Lang Syne, crowd doing the universal Ole, Ole, Ole, then the bagpipe man jamming with the DJ. Please be patient, just before I focus on the bagpipe guy I remember my point and shoot only works well with horizontal orientation. My bad… and I was sober.

As the museum emptied we decided to walk up to the last night at bside lounge. You really couldn’t tell the place was closing down when we showed up, we couldn’t get near the door.

Instead we walked further west to The Bitter Bar were James was tending the night and very welcoming. For being a swank Boulder location he brings a good deal of personality to the establishment. He made me a pot of Evening in Missoula tea. kia drink

And an old-fashioned with a bootleg 17 year-old rye for the hubby.

terry drink

It was a fun evening in Boulder. We meant to be low-key but did dress up and get social. Best wishes for your 2010! It is a year we are greeting with much love.

winter by nikki giovanni

// December 24th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized // Uncategorized

winter poem

once a snowflake fell
on my brow and i loved
it so much and i kissed
it and it was happy and called its cousins
and brothers and a web
of snow engulfed me then
i reached to love them all
and i squeezed them and they became
a spring rain and i stood perfectly
still and was a flower

nikki giovanni

happy winter holidays everyone. namaste.

Best “new person” 09

// December 20th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized // Uncategorized

Today’s gwenbell.com prompt for her best of 09 series is

New person. She came into your life and turned it upside down. He went out of his way to provide incredible customer service. Who is your unsung hero of 2009?

I started thinking about this and soon had a swelling list. One of my yoga teacher training cohort has become my best friend locally, she even stepped up to do DONA certified doula training to help when we have our first child next year. Then I started thinking about my prenatal yoga mentor that I certified with who gifted me a boppy the first day I started attending her class as a pregnant lady recently. Then I thought of the spark of unadulterated sunshine I met from online who fills me with so much positivity whenever I get to be around her. Then I thought of the PR person for a womens’ race that gave me and some friends a fat discount simply to encourage more women to get healthy and get out to do a 5K. There was the awesome guy from up north who I met at a social from a conference and now I look up to for advice on natural family rearing.

I can go on and on. One of the big commonalities is that I keep coming back to the connections I have made with the Front Range community. I can’t pick one new person, I have to go with my community. My husband and I have only lived in Colorado for 20 months, but the support and connections we have made are deep. We thought made friends but the outpouring of support that has come our way since we announced our pregnancy has been down right overwhelming. For two adults that do not have the most supportive blood families we do not take for granted the “tribe” we have found with our neighbors and friends.

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Thank you Front Range… from Fort Collins to south of Denver we appreciate you. You have shown us much kindness and we only hope we have been a friend to you as well. Namaste.

Hanukkah

// December 19th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized // Uncategorized

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Tonight the last candle was lit. It always seemed like a token holiday to me, something to be there and over-hyped by Christians to counteract the over-hype of Christmas. Passover is the high holiday. However, I love living in a community with such a large Jewish community. There were simple dinners and gatherings to celebrate the eight nights all over town. I even had latkes with sour cream and applesauce in the last week with some nice families.

It was a lovely eight days and nights. Thank you. Shalom.

The Potluck Dish

// December 16th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized // Uncategorized

We all have that go-to dish, or at least we should for potlucks. It should be tasty, feed a good number of people, be fairly economical, and go with many different foods.

In undergrad I did a Caribbean legume and veggie rice dish. It worked very well for the hippie school and hippie folks I hung around with.

It was in grad school when I lived in a less kind area that I stepped up my potluck game for less adventurous palates and I have found this choice has worked very well in almost every situation where adults are eating.

Pear-Walnut Salad

1 pear, thinly sliced

1/4 c. – 1/3 c. toasted chopped walnuts

fresh parmesan cheese grated or shaved

white balsamic vinegar

good quality olive oil

fresh black pepper

sea salt or kosher salt

organic spring mix

Toss spring mix with vinegar, olive oil, pepper and salt to taste. Add thin pear slices and parmesan on top. Ask guests if there are any walnut allergies, if not then add them on top and lightly toss so most stay near the top. One more drizzle of oil and spices.

I prep the ingredients and pack them separately to the event and assemble there. I don’t know, I guess the presentation adds to the dish. It is simple but will impress your friends. They will be amazed actually.

This salad is easy, tasty, and easy on the palate so goes with a lot of dishes. I have made this for casual gatherings, Thanksgiving dinner, Hannukah dinner, baby showers, etc.

Please post your go-to potluck contribution if you care to share.

bodhi day co(ck)ntest

// December 8th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Uncategorized // Uncategorized

Happy Bodhi Day everyone! This is a good day for contemplation or rather an arbitrary day in the ebb and flow of winter holidays to be kind to one another. The eighth day of the 12 month is about when Shakyamuni or Siddhartha Guatauma attained enlightenment. Which calendar do you ask, well… for consistency sake let’s just say 8 December. Anyway it is a great day to exhibit reverence, just like everyday.

We here at Ossumniss HQ have something amazing to share with you though. A contest actually. Your very own metal cock. He weighs in at 1.5 pounds and is 20″ tall, exactly and approximately. His meaning, whatever you want! Let him hang out on your mantle, be protector of your Wii high score, torment your parents, scare the squirrels in your garden. Your choice.

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head

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tail

whole

He is a beautiful little guy so we are not just giving him away. You need to work for it. Tell us your best quick story of personal enlightenment in the comment section. We will harbor judgments which doesn’t seem very enlightened but that is how we will select the best story.

We will mail in the continental United States, but for local folks… we will bring him to Ignite Boulder on Thursday for you if you are going. Just think, he can also be your drinking and heckling buddy. Win-win.

Contest closes 9 December at 6 PM MST. Winner will be announced 10 December.

Happy Bodhi Day. Now go eat a tangerine. Mindfully eat a tangerine. And BE NICE TO EACH OTHER!

simple comforts for the infirmed

// December 7th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized // Uncategorized

let me see… December… close to ZERO degrees in Colorado for a few days now… cooties are spreading among us… holiday partying is wearing us down… are you feeling 100%? If you are sliding or just want to boost your immunity here are a few of the simple comforts us here at Ossumniss HQ rely on when we are not feeling our best.

#1 good old fashioned rest

sleep

#2 good nutrient-dense food, vitamins if you need to supplement

#3 probiotics, we have a cow share that supplies us with raw milk, consider yogurt or supplements

#4 honey, naturally antiseptic

#4.33 honey with lemon for a bad throat

#4.66 hot toddy if you are just feeling like sh*t (squeeze two lemons, add honey to taste, heat til really hot, pour in mug, add whiskey til it slightly burns your eyeballs when you go in for a sip… vary with spices and liquors… go wild!)

hot_toddy

#5 saline wash (add sea salt and water to gargle for your throat, use this mix in a neti pot if you need it for your sinuses)

#6 elderberry… this is a new one for us and we have been doing elderberry and zinc herbalozenges because we have not hit the cool threshold to make elderberry syrup ourselves with dried elderberries

#7 tea – we darn near live down the street from Celestial Seasoning and they are going to do well this cold & flu season for a reason… tea is comforting and in the right blend it has healing properties. just stay away from the caffeine because that will not help if you are trying to tell the mucus to go bye-bye. you can also bath with some mint and/or eucalyptus blends or just put them in a bowl to breathe the vapors.

teabath

#8 emergen-c… why is this stuff da bomb?!? stay with a flavor you like though. we have too many friends that decided to be adventurous and buy a box of acai berry, that stuff tastes like a$$.

do you have any remedies to add? the more old-timey and accessible the better.

crafty, crafty

// December 6th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized // Uncategorized

I have been looking for the fun craftster scene since we moved to Colorado. There are a lot of cool crafty people here who upcycle and create, but I have not found the craftster scene yet. That is until today. I followed the trail from Friday’s re-nest post on 23 handmade craft shows to Hello Crafts post on the shows from last week. Low and behold, Holiday Handmade in Denver, CO. Yeah it was this past weekend, yesterday and Friday to be exact. No problem though, the link took me to Fancy Tiger Crafts and Denver Handmade Alliance. I will be heading into this craft store the next time I am in Denver on a weekend afternoon, I will also be following both online.

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However I do not live in Denver, a little further north. In my hood I love the lab space at Common Threads in Boulder as well as their consignment clothing store.

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Also this past weekend in Longmont was the holiday market the local farmers market puts on at the Boulder County Fairgrounds if you wanted to buy local in person.

If you want to craft and/or upcyle yourself my fave stores are the Salvo on 33rd just north of Arapahoe, the Humane Society Thrift Store on Arapahoe and the Resource Yard on 63rd to find bits and pieces of projects to work on.

the mythos of the holiday hobo sack

// December 6th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized // Uncategorized

In early December ‘06 I was in a car accident that left my back and right hand a little worse for wear. I had planned on sewing a holiday stocking for my fiance but physically could not do it. We had already gone to the fabric store, he picked what we wanted, and it sat folded up, unused. On Christmas Eve I had the brilliant idea to take a chunky stick from the yard and put his presents on the fabric and tie in on the stick. It was all I could do with my body post accident. My fiance, now husband, is an odd duck and absolutely loved it. He grabbed his hobo sack and took a march with it that night. At the time we lived in Miami and had a huge garden and yard so would sleep outside under a crab apple tree on Christmas Eve, he had a lot of room to march hobo style.

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Thus the mythos of the hobo sack was born. We began joking that night that our kids would have hobo sacks for the holidays. We would use it as a teaching tool with them. We would allow them to pick their stick. The ideal hobo sack stick. If you pick a big, sturdy stick it would support a good amount of weight in the sack, but could get too heavy if their march was going to be a long one. They would lose gifts out of the sack along the journey if it was too heavy until it was ideal weight for a good march. If they did too small of a stick their hobo sack would have to be tiny and they would not get as many presents. The feat of selecting the hobo sack stick would be a question of greed vs. comfort vs. sensibility. We would let our kids pick their stick, put an appropriate collection of presents on the fabric and tie it to the stick, then go for our Christmas Eve or Christmas Day march into nature to open the presents. The fabricated complexities of the tradition grew with the amount of champagne and orange juice we drank. WanderingStick

In ‘07 I made a small stocking for my fiance to hang under the crab apple tree and he acted like he appreciated it. In ‘08 he had become my husband and prior to Christmas admitted he wanted the hobo sack back. On Christmas day there was a big box for him, with a hobo sack on top of it attached to a stick leaning on the side.

The stick is already selected for this year… but as impeding parents we are facing more of a quandry with if we are going to celebrate a sham of Christmas for a non-Christian and a non-practicing Christian and what to do for our kids in the future. If we do any Christmas stuff there will be hobo sacks involved and we will have kids growing up thinking this is typical holiday tradition.

No Shave Movember

// December 4th, 2009 // 7 Comments » // Uncategorized // Uncategorized

Movember was started by some wacky Aussies a few years ago after some guys in a pub got to talking about men’s health and moustaches over a few pints. The movement has spread and tonight in Denver Matt Bernier (@mbernier) spearheaded a movement to get the Metal Mustache team to have a great party where it all started… at a pub. The team had raised about $700 before the night started and kept it going through the night with raffles, a silent auction, generous sponsorship from Mike’s Hard Lemonade (who sampled their Hard Cider tonight), and a generous sponsorship from The Rackhouse Pub. The guys on the team were invited to have a barber manscape their scruff and after a contest for best style ensued… for men and women. Kudos to Matt, he put together a great team for the month of Movember and closed our their efforts with a fun celebration to raise money and awareness for men’s health.