My lungs are finally starting to clear from the fire smoke. Today was a picture perfect day in Santa Barbara. We started the morning by taking Patrick to the State Street Halloween Parade. The costumes were great and the kids were adorable. After that we had brunch, and then enjoyed a lazy afternoon until we retired to Tom & Cathy’s for good food, with good friends. All in all a delightful Halloween weekend. Lots of pictures to share…these are my favorites, and the rest are in the slideshow below. Boo!
Patrick & friend
Shrek
Patrick, Cathy & Snoopy
Superman, meet…
Spiderman!
Scooby, Velma & Shaggy
Peter Pan
Alice in Wonderland
Dragonslayer
Eva calling Cathy on a land line
The ocean, from Bassam’s living room
There’s still residual smoke from the fires, so the sunset was awesome.
Chariot of Fire
Is he not the cutest?
Bassam being gangsta
Getting tired
This isn’t what it looks like! I don’t drink!! I actually fell off the balcony though. LOL We were talking politics, and I was getting animated, and it was dark, and… Honestly though…I was stone cold sober!! (And no, that’s not a pun!) I’m just a dork.
I drove up to Santa Barbara tonight for a Halloween party at Bassam’s. I wanted to post a few photos before I went to bed.
In case you can’t tell, I’m dressed as Steve Irwin, the crocodile hunter and that’s a stingray stuck to my heart. Eva is dressed as a pretty messed up mermaid…with shells and seaweed stuck in her hair. Had she not been drunk, she could have saved me from that stingray! Hope everyone’s having a great weekend.
OK, it’s not the best costume, but it was simple and last minute.
Bassam flew in from Jordan on Thursday and spent the night at the Hotel Careyfornia. Friday morning we headed 90 miles north to Santa Barbara to meet up with Eva & eventually Tom & Cathy who were in Portland visiting Marcelo & Emily the first few days. The heat in California this weekend broke all records. We mostly hung out at the water and went to a few movies and had many good meals. (My diet starts….tomorrow, LOL) We spent Labor Day lounging around. Tom & Cathy flew in that afternoon with baby Patrick (how he’s grown) and immediately moved into their new, completely furnished house. We got some sausage and salmon at Trader Joes and had a BBQ topped off with a flourless chocolate birthday cake. The perfect end to a perfect weekend. Here are all the pictures, and below the slide show I’ve included some of my favorites from the weekend.
Since there are very few bad pictures of taken of you in the past 10 years, I put together this slide show to the tune of our group song. There are a few semi embarrassing ones in here, but mostly you’re still the most photogenic of our far flung group of friends. Though if I had to pick two of my favorite pictures of you that show your true personality, they would have to be these:
And since I can’t really embarrass you, I have to embarrass myself! Happy Birthday!! xo
I will be taking a couple of days off blogging, but this is surely the most important entry of the week. All of my friends, and regular readers of this space know about my friend Sabine, Bine for short. You know what a tough time she had this spring at Virginia Tech. You know that her inimitable style and always positive attitude have gotten her, and indeed our entire group of friends, through the best and the worst of times. She is a breath of fresh air in an otherwise polluted world. She approaches everything she does with passion and fervor, and is the glue that bonds us all together. Marcelo put it better than I could in an email to her this morning:
Querida amiga! Happy birthday to you!!! And thank God and Carey, if they are not the same dude, for the Yahoo reminders :) I hope you are well, healthier, with most of your toenails in place, and getting closer to finishing your data collection with the poo tanks! May you keep on blessing all of us with your sweetness, solid character, most excellent sense of humor, and, of course, good stories! Beijos carinhosos, marcelo
What you may not know however, is that she is my wife! Yes, it’s true. We were married in a small civil ceremony in Italy on August 19, 2000. The ceremony was officiated by the great great grandniece of the Red Baron. Her name was Baroness Andrea Von Richthofen. Mick was the maid of honor, Miggl the best man and Eva the flower girl. Now, some background:
I met Sabine at the aforementioned Marcelo’s house in Piracicaba Brazil in 1997. That Christmas many people had converged at the “Casa Diversi”; both friends of Marcelo and friends of his sister Adriana. Many of us did not know each other, but we all soon became great friends, and began our tradition of traveling together for every New Year’s. I was “homeless” at the time, traveling the world with my job, all expenses paid. One day, we were all sitting by the pool in the backyard eating mangoes as they fell off the trees, and I was telling this assembled group of new friends my life story. At the end, Sabine said, “Honey, I should marry you. What a great life!” To which I responded, “Honey, the only way I would ever marry you, is if we were in Florence Italy, at San Miniato at sunset, overlooking the Ponte Vecchio!” We all laughed.
Wouldn’t you know it, that three years later, we all found ourselves in Florence, Italy at San Miniato at sunset, overlooking the Ponte Vecchio. Our friends had bought some truly rinky dink rings on that same famous bridge earlier that day, and as the sun sank into the horizon, we said our vows.
LOL, so there you have it. The story of my phony wedding in Italy. This year Sabine, the two timing tramp, got engaged to Alan. In all honesty though, I can’t say that I’ve been entirely faithful in this marriage. So here’s to you Bine, on your birthday. I wish I could be there with you to celebrate. I know that you will have a wonderful day. You always do. GLY!!!
And now for the obligatory embarrassing pictures I’ve taken of you over these past 10 wonderful years darling! (And some not so embarrassing this time…just to show how wonderful you are!)
The early years
The Bavarian Princess and Cesar
After 2 years in Virginia you’ve become a true redneck!
What’s up Doc?
That’s certainly not me doing the writing!
Partying with the Vikings
Another drink please!
Peace brother!
Caught again
Muahhhhhh
LOST again!!!!!!!!!!!
Treating your husband they way a wife should treat her man
Just one of the guys
I will love you, until my dying day….come what may
Feeling a bit sad
GLY!!
Just happy to be in LA
Pajamas & beer
Too much beer!
Dream car
One of my favorites of us
Your true character, and a smile that could light Christmas
Here’s a more up-tempo version of “our” song, for your party today
OK, I’m sometimes accused of being prejudiced toward “stupid” people, but this is unbelievable.
Are ugly children less loved?
Report: Parents more attentive to attractive kids
Most parents would deny it, but Canadian researchers have found that physical attractiveness affects how children are treated, according to a report Tuesday in The New York Times. Read more…
If it’s true (gasp), it speaks to what what Desmond Morris theorizes in “The Naked Ape. We’re all “naked apes” (check out the book, and excerpt below). Survival of the fittest. You just need to define “fit” in every generation. Truly shocking “research”, if that’s what it is. But as a friend of mine who’s a professor at UCSB pointed out, “If the article really represents the study they did, then there’s a potentially big flaw in it. In the statistics, they should at least account for (or correct for) the attractiveness of the parents. That’s clearly correlated to the attractiveness of the children. The attractiveness of the parent may effect their behavior (e.g. they could have married into richer spouses historically, thus come from more moneyed families which may tend to care more for children in public spaces out of a variety of fears). The trouble with these statistical studies is that they only show correlations, not cause and effect relations. In humans there’s even an expression: “my mother drowned the stupid ones”. have you heard that? Yes, animals don’t appear to treat all their children equally similarly for humans. however, attractiveness may not be the important factor there. my guess is that it would be next to impossible to device a statistical study to test this. It would be extremely difficult to isolate (or correct for) all the other possible factors that people could think of (not to mention the ones we can’t think of yet).”
From amazon’s review of The Naked Ape, a book I read 15 years ago that still resonates in so many of my life experiences:
“A startling view of man, stripped of the facade we try so hard to hide behind.” In view of man’s awesome creativity and resourcefulness, we may be inclined to regard him as descended from the angels, yet, in his brilliant study, Desmond Morris reminds us that man is relative to the apes–is in fact, the greatest primate of all. With knowledge gleaned from primate ethnology, zoologist Morris examines sex, child-rearing, exploratory habits, fighting, feeding, and much more to establish our surprising bonds to the animal kingdom and add substance to the discussion that has provoked controversy and debate the world over. Natural History Magazine praised The Naked Ape as “stimulating . . . thought-provoking . . . [Morris] has introduced some novel and challenging ideas and speculations.” “He minces no words,” said Harper’s. ”He lets off nothing in our basic relation to the animal kingdom to which we belong. . . He is always specific, startling, but logical.”
Amos and I went on a wild goose chase tonight determined to find a suitable area rug for their living room. After striking out at Cost Plus World Market, Crate & Barrel and Bed Bath & Beyond, we went for a yummy sushi dinner and headed over to a TJ Maxx which was somewhere in LA I’d never been. Alas we found the perfect rug. It looks really nice and the place is coming along well!
I’ve been asked to repost this, so here it is:
I read an amazing story today. A friend of mine wrote eloquently about the importance of family and respecting the past, and though he was too young to remember it at the time, how it shaped him. He posted an emotional email from his father that described a truly incredible, dangerous and life changing journey, fleeing from tyranny and hoping against hope for a better life for his children in America. Though I knew of my friend’s past, I had never heard it from his father’s perspective, but after reading this account I gained a deep respect for where he came from and the experiences that shaped the man he is today. It made me think about a couple of strange things that happened last week.
I had to drive to Laguna Thursday, and I was listening to the Dreamgirls soundtrack the whole way down. It put me in a great mood, and when I met with my some of my business associates I asked if they had seen the movie. One woman in particular expressed interest. She’s in her late 40′s or early 50′s I think, and wanted to know more about the film. I related the whole tale to her about Jennifer Hudson, The Supremes, Florence Ballard and the tragedy behind the real story. She listened intently, and after I was done she responded “So it’s a black thing?”
I was taken aback by the question, and didn’t know how to respond. I asked her what she meant and she told me that while growing up in the 60′s her father never let her listen to “nigger music”, but that she and her sister secretly liked and listened to Diana Ross and the Supremes. I could tell by the way she was relating the story that she had no idea that it sounded racist. (I don’t know about her father’s past, but I would venture to guess, he was also a product of his circumstances…and so the cycle continued).
We are all a reflection of our parents and our upbringing. Some who struggled early in life (like my friend) might feel guilty about the sacrifices their parents made to ensure that their children had a better life. After all, as children, don’t we all want to live up to our parent’s expectations? When we act in ways that we think will disappoint them, it makes us sad. That’s what part of growing up is all about. Eventually you come to the realization that despite their flaws, your parents only want a better life for you.
Later the same day I drove to my aunt and uncle’s house for my regular Thursday spaghetti dinner with them. They’re 2nd generation Italian Americans who grew up during the Depression. They’re both in their late 70′s and early 80′s now, and since my Grandma (Nonna) died, they are one of my links to our family’s past. My uncle served in WWII overseas fighting the Japanese and raised his family in the turbulent 50′s and 60′s. There wasn’t one African American or Asian person within 100 miles from where he lived. He doesn’t have a mean bone in his body, but sometimes he makes off the cuff remarks about people of other races which in the modern “PC” world may not be received that well. He is a product of his past; his upbringing, the war, the race riots of the 60′s. He raised 3 kids (my cousins) to be decent hard working people like him, and they’re now raising their children and their children’s children the same way. He is a good man, honest and hard working and has lived a good life.
I recently had a heated discussion with my friend Eva who’s getting her PhD in education at UCSB. She has a utopian view that everyone has or should have the potential to be whatever their definition of success entails. For some that might be a doctor or a lawyer. For others it might be a ditch digger. But because of the inequities in education, and class and race, she believes our society and our system is incapable of affording everyone the same opportunities.
I argued that with intelligence and hard work, in combination with our upbringing (the morals we learn from our parents and those experiences from our past that shape us), that anyone can be successful. I used the example of Chris Gardner (the real life man portrayed by Will Smith in the movie “The Pursuit of Happyness”). Tyson, who with his brother actually taught Will Smith how to solve the Rubik’s Cube for the movie, writes in his blog about how annoying it is when people ask him about “the trick” to solving the cube. While on the movie’s set he observed people asking the same thing of Chris Gardner: “What’s the trick of going from rags to riches?” Chris responds by handing them a copy of his book! Tyson’s point is well taken. He worked hard and learned how to solve the Rubik’s cube himself. It’s not a trick. He’s smart (he can do it blindfolded), and he figured it out, just like Chris Gardner, who simply wanted a better life for his son. The pursuit of happiness.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that we all want what’s best for our children. My business friend’s father who didn’t want her listening to “nigger music” honestly thought that was what was best for her. My uncle, who doesn’t trust other ethnicities as much, has deep seated notions that were formed during a world war. My friend, who got the heartfelt email had a father who overcame unbelievable obstacles to provide a better life for his children.
I’ll end with a movie recommendation I’ve made before. If you haven’t seen Babel, you should. It’s out on DVD now and it’s really what the essence of this posting is about. My favorite three movies last year were: Babel (to appreciate how truly the same we all are, and simply want what’s best for our children by trying to do the right thing); Dreamgirls (to realize how dreams can come true, and also be fleeting) and The Pursuit of Happyness (to recognize the potential in all of us, and that it’s never to late to pursue a good life and ultimately be happy).
Good day. Good week. The post holidays blahs don’t seem that bad this year. The fact that is was 80° the day after Christmas probably helped, LOL. We’re actually in a “cold” snap now though. On the way over to Atwater Village tonight I heard that our “esteemed” governor has declared a “Cold Weather Emergency“. I almost had to pull over I was laughing so hard!
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today declared a state of emergency throughout California because of the cold snap gripping the state. “I have directed state agencies to activate the extreme temperature protocols established last year to assist the most vulnerable populations in the state and asked local governments and the people of California to take common sense precautions in the unseasonably cold weather,” Schwarzenegger said in his declaration.
“Extreme temperature protocols”??? That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all week. It was about 60° F (16° C) today! Granted it was colder up north and in the mountains, but geez louise, they’re used to it. This state does crack me up sometime. Arnold’s from Austria. I’m from Chicago. Newsflash: This ain’t cold!
“It was so cold in LA today the people were huddled around the remains of Suzanne Somers smoldering house just to stay warm” Jimmy Kimmell
Skyped and webcam’d with Daniel in Germany for a while tonight. He’s really doing well in his internship, and I’m so proud of him. It’s like my little brother’s growing up. He was mixing a new song tonight. It’s all in German, but it’s quite catchy. Check it out:
Me and Daniel in Hamburg
After that I went to Seth & Jessica’s house for dinner. We had a really nice time. Hannah’s walking all over the place now (and has the vocabulary of a 10 year old!), and the dogs get so jealous when I pay her any attention! Take a look:
After the baby went to bed we had a great dinner: Rosemary chicken, wild rice and zucchini. After dinner the conversation turned to the whole nature/nurture, doctor vs. ditchdigger discussion. Seth seemed to side with Eva’s position, while Jessica and I were more in synch (as usual). We also watched some of Tyson’s and Macky’s videos, because Seth got a Rubik’s cube for Christmas. They couldn’t believe their eyes! I told Seth about Tyson’s tutorial, but he had the right idea already, and wanted to see if he could do it on his own.
I discovered that website today after writing a response on Tyson’s blog. To be such an amazing photographer at such a young age is quite impressive. Lots of props to him! He’s got a great eye (like Matthias and Perry). I’m curious to know what kind of SLR he uses. His twin brother is a photographer too. Speaking of Perry (my college roommate), check out the new Hasselblad. WOW.
It’s as cool looking as the iPhone…and it’s digital!
Eva came this weekend and helped me put up my tree….it’s become somewhat of a tradition, when I’m not out of the country for Christmas. I’m also dog sitting this week…which is good, as we had to put Beast down last week. Terribly sad. Anyway, the house is finally ready for the holidays!
Had she not been drunk, she could have saved me from that stingray! Hope everyone’s having a great weekend. 
Happy Birthday!! xo
All of my friends, and regular readers of this space know about my friend Sabine, Bine for short. You know what a tough time she had this spring at 
So here’s to you Bine, on your birthday. I wish I could be there with you to celebrate. I know that you will have a wonderful day. You always do. GLY!!!
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