Oh. My. Goodness.

Still a year away, but two words… Zelda Movie! It looks hella cheesey, but I can’t help but be excited. Check out this trailer!

This American Moment

For one night only (are you hearing the Dreamgirls here??) the best talk-radio show in history is bringing their program to select theaters across the nation. On May 1st you can view This American Life and it’s charasmatic host Ira Glass on the big screen. Tickets go on sale today and my town is on the list! I keep thinking I need to rush to the movie theater right now for tickets, afraid they will sell out. I don’t want to miss my chance. Last year This American Life made their program into a show on Showtime. I almost added Showtime to my cable subsription just to watch it, but that didn’t pan out. Ira Glass at the movie theater will be quite a treat. See if he’ll be visiting a theater near you by following this link. For those of you not familiar with the program, I highly suggest giving it a listen. It plays on public radio stations through PRI. Many fantastic authors contribute and share stories for the show, including the infamous David Sedaris.  

For Colorado folks (specifically Colorado Springs), you get an extra treat. Ira Glass will be speaking at Colorado College on June 14th. The tour site says details are still in the making, but my impatient self found out that tickets are now available through their local radio sponsor KRCC. Better yet, since it is membership-drive time for KRCC, you can get VIP tickets to the show for becoming a member (along with some other snazzy incentives!)  

Finally Keeping up with the Times…

I know feeds have been the hip way to stay in touch with blogs and news for quite some time, but I only recently started using my Goggle Reader to view sites. This was somewhat accidental actually. I stumbled upon a blog called The Art of Manliness. It caught my interest and mentioned a free ebook called Guide to Being a Gentleman in 2008 (of course I found this intriguing!), but a subscription to the blog was required before I could download the file and thus my fascination with Google Reader began. The ebook is certainly worth a read and The Art of Manliness will stay on my Google Reader along with 49 other blogs and sites that I had been increasingly behind in reading before now. Google Reader (and other feed readers) let you subscribe to blogs so that all posts are chronologically updated in one place as they arrive. Of course, you can also view posts by site or by tag, subject or any other way you think up. At first I thought this massive list of sites would be overwhelming, but it turns out to be exactly the opposite. I can easily keep up with my favorite readings without the frustration of going from site to site. I can also easily read new posts only as sites are updated, rather than spending my time revisiting sites that don’t update very often. Another cool feature is that your contacts can easily share stories with you. A couple of my friends set up their Google Readers as well, so now I can check out what is catching their interest. Definitely worth a try! Of course, Google/Gmail users can conveniently set up their readers by clicking the Reader link while logged in. Non-google/gmail users can…oh wait…do those people still exist??

Veggin’ It

A few weeks ago my daughter decided to become a vegetarian. She has made this decision a few times before, but never stuck with it. Usually Julian and I humor her, wanting to be supportive. We alter her meals for a few days and then she decides she wants a cheeseburger. This time she seems to be in it for the long-haul – so much that she has begun talking about becoming Vegan. At that point I had to tell her she would have to wait until she had her own paycheck to cover her grocery bill. Julian and I will continue to support her vegetarianism as long as she is interested, though we’ve had to get pretty creative with her meals. With warm weather approaching, we decided to start up the BBQ last week and prepared some teriyaki chicken kabobs. Sylvia’s kabobs were tofu chunks marinated in teriyaki sauce, then dipped in toasted sesame seeds. I thought they looked pretty gourmet, but Sylvia wasn’t as impressed. If anyone has recipes or vegetarian tips to share, I would appreciate them for sure!

I’m considering hitting my mom up for her 101 Tofu recipes cookbook. My mom was always ahead of her time and had us kids eating tofu and the like long before it was cool. We went on a tofu diet for a stretch of time. Not to lose weight…I’m not really sure why actually. Maybe she’ll comment and enlighten us all. Anyway! We experienced things like Spaghetti with Tofu chunks (instead of meatballs), Tofu fish sticks (where it was more like Tofu-Tofu sticks), Hot Dogs (where the dog was replaced with Tofu) and Tofu fudgsicles for dessert! Mind you, Tofu fudscicles will run you around $6 a box in a specialty food store now. Of course, they are now made with silken tofu that is perfectly blended in with the fudge, so you wouldn’t know the difference between one of those and a jell-o pudding pop. My mom wasn’t going to let her new tofu diet trump her more important value of being frugal, so she must have just bought packages of firm tofu in bulk. Note: this meant tofu fudsicles had a more chewy-chunky quality to them – yummy? (Love ya Mom!)

Survival of the Fittest

I have kept myself amused by watching my daughter revive many of the 80’s fashion trends from my youth. She’s a spunky one and I appreciate her creative flair for the most part, but a scary conversation with a friend last week made me concerned over my daughter’s wardrobe. Friends, stirrup pants are back. Not only back, but the stirrups you are eying to the left are a $168 pair from the lovely 7 for all Mankind (to shame!) Bangle, charm and jelly bracelets have reentered my household and I thought it was cute. Wide belts and obscenely large, neon earrings have graced my daughter’s ears and waist, all paid for out of my pocketbook. I even purchased some banana clips for the girl on Christmas – banana clips! Somehow this possible fashion mishap put me over the edge. Visions of jelly sandals with stirrups on the outside of the shoe would not leave my head. Please wish happy thoughts for me, hoping Sylvia doesn’t start reading my blog, because these pants will surely be on her “need” list if that happens.

On a side note, my friend (we’ll call her Minnie) and I spent some time reminiscing over other hits from our youth. I have a few years on her, so she didn’t remember things like Hypercolor T-shirts and those crazy LA Gear sneakers with the flame cut-outs on the side. Anyone have fashion items from the past that you’re dying to see make a come back??