the weekend begins to take on a structure, and i will not complain. the past three weekends were spent shooting/editing gra & r's wedding video with her family and friends. we will be seeing its completion soon and i must say that i am thankful for the opportunity to be reacquainted with the camera, lights, edits and selecting good songs for the back tracks.

there also has been some nice saturday nights out. yesterday was spent at night & day to watch jon and natalie. jon has gotten so good. he was good before, and now he is gooooood. it's such a delight to watch friends shine and excel at what they do so well, i find myself smiling so hard my mouth hurt after. the night was doubly lovely because of the company of jas. the bar with its mismatched furniture and unpretentious vibes, i liked, i like.


then, the sunday comes, and the day is even more structured, i do not complain. today, i tried to engage the kids in an impromptu conversation about God and church. i was, frankly, pretty surprised by the response, but the session left me wanting more with them. the noons have been spent with the grandfolks (on both side, we try) and i begged amachi to teach me malayalam today. begged. why wouldn't anyone teach me!! don't they see the willingness and desire in my eyes?

then, what used to be spent taking the only afternoon nap i could take in a week, i now force the running outfit on to go for a half-hour run, while the sun is still out. i wouldn't say the weekly weakly exercise has done any good for the body, in terms of burning calories, except make me hurt. But, endorphins, are always a good thing. i end of each exercise session, cleaning my room, as if to proclaim, to whoever who want to be proclaimed at, "bring on the new week, my room is clean and i am organized!!!"


so here's the deal. If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.

M I O A E Y J B H T

this will soon become our lunch place • where we order the usual • enjoy the slower pace of lunch and the small lunch crowd • not resist when Mauro throws in a free panna cotta • end off with an illy coffee • bid goodbye • only to return again

browsing through olaf szczepaniak's photos and listening to katie herzig belt out her tunes

“I’m not even close to where I want to be”

the week is done.

i thought i had been seeing her name around, but channel five did a music review when she was in town (so odd for them to do indie, but great!) i checked her out. you do too. emmy the great (thanks to Tashed)

cover of the week

we celebrated the july babies @ shashlik - the cutest old-sch psuedo-russian restaurant circa 1980's. we sang the birzzday song, had really good shashlik and odd russian salad, distributed presents and watched fire.

my biggest pet peeve is not incompetence; it is dealing with incompetent people who are being paid for an expected level of competence.

i wish i didn't have this pet peeve because the encounters are just too many and each time they occur, a part of my soul is sucked dry.

phrase of the month is defined as the phrase used the most number of times in any given month.

phrase of the month for Jun 09:

this is riiiiiidicuuuuloussssssssss.

Look what i found!
http://gallery.ntu.edu.sg/videos/v/convocation/2008/c15/C15_part6FLV.flv.html

When I say stuff like that, I do mean it.

Yet the truth is that, for most of us, home is a compromise.

The majority of people inhabit a particular region because of an accident of birth (our parents’ dream house is, for an average of at least sixteen years, our own home-base), a necessity of relocation (the pursuit of work or love) or the simple logistics of the housing market and mortgage system. We would ideally like to live in A (if we can afford to), B (if there was a company branch there), or C (if our partner’s family ties were not five hundred miles away) or, increasingly in Britain, in A, B, or C if we could sell our bloody house in D. But, alas, for any of these reasons, D is where we are stuck. Yet call D dull in public and you will discover that each of the D-siders resides there apparently from choice. They live there because they love there

- Mark Lawson's The Battle for Room Service: Journeys to all the Safe Places