Apparently the price has dropped.

Not only that, the types of materials that can be used to print has expanded. It’s not just metal (can you imagine melting down your jewelry and printing some new piece you like better?) or plastic (woo-hoo! silly desk toys on demand!) but it has become cellular. Like creating body parts cellular.

Lisa Harouni says it’s a manufacturing revolution. Check it out:

That’s me in the center, dressed as the camel. I was not quite four years old, and it was my pre-school’s Christmas pageant.

I *loved* that camel costume. I mean LOVED it. Of all the costumes my extraordinarily talented mother ever made, this one is my all-time favorite.

Mom put newspaper in the camel body to stiffen it and yardsticks in the back legs, and would you believe that when I walked those back legs would walk with me.

For real. It was awesome. I really feel that I cannot overstate the awesomeness of this camel costume.

Other kids tried to climb on the camel back. I wanted to carry them around. That didn’t work so well. I guess the costume would have been awesomer if I could have done that.

But still, seriously awesome.

Look at the Christmas joy on my little face as I sing a carol. The next year I was the Virgin Mary, and I was bummed out because I wanted to be a camel again.

I didn’t need Christmas as an excuse to break out the camel costume. I wore it at my fourth birthday party.

The little girl in the background is Heather. She was five years old, and she was the daughter of my aunt’s then-boyfriend. Heather didn’t like me. Probably her dislike was not really of me but rather of her dad dragging her to his girlfriend’s niece’s birthday party. That’s probably the reason she was mean to me.

But maybe she was just jealous because she wasn’t a camel.

I had to share this series because it cracked me up so much.

Picture this: Christmas, 1971, Austin, Texas. Newlyweds invite their parents over to open Christmas presents in the small, white, frame house they’ve dubbed “the honeymoon cottage.” The young husband is a technology geek, and this year he has some money to spend. He’s going to get his parents something nice.

“Oooh!” says his mother. “What can this be?!” Dad silently and absent-mindedly tears off the wrapping paper, not pausing to fold it carefully so that it can be re-used for future gifts. Off-camera the young daughter-in-law shakes her head sadly.

They open the box.

“What the hell is this thing?” Dad asks. Mom is bewildered and disappointed. The box had been big enough to contain a porta-crib. So much for the grandchild announcement. Three months of marriage already, and nothing.

“Look, Dad,” their son points, “it’s a stereo.” Dad puts his hands on his hips and harrumphs. The son continues, “You know — like a gramophone, but it has two speakers. See, the sound is split onto two separate tracks and each speaker plays a different track, which gives you a three-dimensional audio experience…” he trails off.

“See, Dad, it explains about the equalizer right here on page 32A of the manual…”

“Hmph,” says Dad, as he hitches up his trousers, “well…thank you, kids.” Mutters…”What the hell am I going to do with this thing?”

And 39 years later the son gets an iPod touch for Christmas from his own kids. Which he doesn’t use.

The struggle continues.

The End

My friend Kathleen informed me that she once belonged to a book group composed of lawyers who made their book choices exclusively from  recommendations in The Economist. They read things like a biography of Potemkin.

Google tells me that this could be a) a Russian nobleman, b) a Russian myth similar to Puss in Boots that has resulted in the phrase “Potemkin village,” a group of facades made to fool visitors into thinking a large town exists, or c) a Russian battleship. Which Potemkin they read seems both irrelevant to the point and boring besides. (Actually, choice B seems kind of cool, but I digress.)

When she suggested, flippantly, to the group that her choice would be to pick a book recommended in People, they were disgusted. Thus, her cue to leave the group. And I applaud her choice. People who don’t like People are insufferable.

I keep The Economist as a bathroom reader, by the way. I have a subscription because I got one free with airline miles and I find it amusing to read what the Brits have to say about us. But it’s dry, dry stuff, to be absorbed one tiny article at a time and tossed out well before I’ve finished it. The only thing it has going for it is clever headlines, and those don’t even apply to all of the articles.

The Euro crisis? *Yawn* I want to know the latest on Brangelina.

People magazine, on the other hand, is absorbing from start to finish. Besides Wired, it’s the only magazine I’ll read cover to cover. Is it the photos? The gossipy nature of celebrity life? The 9th-grade level writing? The heartwarming stories that show up midway through an issue?

I don’t know, and I don’t care. I don’t have to deconstruct People. I just like it, and I’m not embarrassed to admit it.

Fifteen years ago today, I married this man. Not only is he the love of my life, he is my life.

I am so grateful as I think back to our wedding day. I’m grateful for my parents, who didn’t freak out when their 22-year-old daughter decided to get married, and who supported my decision emotionally and financially during a time in their lives when making that financial commitment was difficult. I’m grateful to them for demonstrating, daily, what a good marriage is and can be.

I’m grateful for my parents-in-law, who have been unfailingly kind to me since the beginning of our relationship. I am grateful that they raised a son who himself is kind and who learned growing up what it is to love and be loved.

I am grateful for the sisters and brothers in blood, law, and soul who participated in our wedding. I give a special thanks to our friends Bill and Sylvia, who not only introduced us but have continued to be our friends through these years. You are deep and real in a world that often feels shallow and false. We are glad to call you friends.

Most of all I am grateful to God not just for giving me a partner but for giving me the maturity at an immature time in my life to know I had something good I needed to hold onto. How I received such grace remains a mystery to me.

To my best friend: I cannot count the ways in which I love thee. You are not only my soulmate, you are my soul. Every day I think I’ve loved you to my limit, and every new day I realize that I did not know my limit.

Happy Anniversary, Marty.

That’s when we happened upon this beauty:

It’s perfectly suited for a future refinishing project, preferably something with red Krylon that will end up looking like this:

Or turquoise Krylon. I’m more excited about turquoise:

No gold handles, though. With turquoise one should stick to nickel.

But Lynn, you’re asking, why on earth did you buy this mid-century monstrosity when it is not at all in your style?

This is why:

It’s a stereo, a completely mint, working stereo. Not only does it have a turntable (up to 10 discs automatically!), but it has a radio receiver. And the speakers put out a rich, deep sound, sound that is better than the stereos we had been casually shopping in stores and certainly better than the little stereo we already had.

But wait. It gets better. Check this out:

Do you see the input selections? AM. FM. FM AFC. TAPE. ST PH.

Wait, back up. Tape?

We checked out the back of the console, and sure enough, there are inputs for a tape player. Not only that, but there are outputs to a tape player so as to record the playing record.

Who cares about tapes? you ask. I don’t. What I care about are tape inputs. Because guess what else I can plug into those inputs?

That, friends, is my iPhone. I am playing it through a stereo manufactured right around 1970. How freaking cool is that?

Not only can I input any iPod, I can output records to my laptop from the tape outputs. This means I can rip records to .mp3 in style.

We’ve placed the “new” stereo where we had the table/shoe rack that served as a constant attraction to this family member:

Here’s hoping it does not attract sharp puppy teeth as much as our shoes have.

Hope y’all are having a happy Saturday!

free babysitting!

We chose to celebrate with wine and steak. Our 15th wedding anniversary is coming up next month, and we picked today to break out the bottle of wine that we purchased on our trip to Italy for our 10th.

If you’re a fan of the show Modern Family, you may have caught the scene last week where Claire and Mitchell find themselves trapped in a tree house and decide to kill the time waiting for help to arrive by drinking a bottle of wine. Claire does not have a corkscrew, so she opens the bottle with a shoe.

Of course we had to try this. The crazy part is that it worked! Here’s a YouTube of how it goes:

The downside to this method is that it stirs up all the sediment. When you’ve had a bottle of red wine sitting on a wine rack for five years, this is not the best plan for opening it. But it was so hilarious we didn’t care.

Next I cooked the steaks. We decided that the next time I make steak I need to take photos of every step and post them because I have finally learned how to make the perfect steak. The key is a cast-iron pan on the grill and a lot of prep time. The actual cooking took about 10 minutes.

Here’s how mine looked:

It was melt-in-your-mouth goodness. It’s been a delicious day.

We saw this sign yesterday morning and had to stop to take a photo with my phone. It’s a little hard to see — it says, “God wants spiritual fruit, not religious nuts.” I was going to post it as just plain funny, but now, in light of last night’s news, it seems oddly prescient.

Osama bin Laden is dead. Praise be to God.

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” — Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire

On Sunday, I was one of the 23,000 dots pictured below. I “ran” the 2011 Capitol 10,000, a race I first tackled in 1989 and last took on somewhere around 2000. That would be pre-kids. Or as The Big M and I call it, “BC.”

As 10K’s go, it’s a pretty easy course. There aren’t a lot of hills, and the ones that are there go mostly down. Sunday was perfect, weather-wise. It was overcast, temps hovering around 60, and very low humidity.

I lost my running partner somewhere between miles 4 and 5. I needed to walk, and she needed to keep running. One of us is considerably flabbier than the other.

I’ll give you a hint: she is not the flabbier one.

Somehow I missed this sign as I passed my old high school. Maybe I was distracted by memories of the days when I wanted to fly free and live somewhere other than Austin.

More likely, it was Mario and Luigi’s fault. They were so funny — so perfectly made up to be the characters of MarioKart for Wii. Even Yoshi and Princess Peach were there.

Luigi had bananas hanging from the back of his car. Mario had the electronic game music playing. They kept hurling stuffed turtles at each other as they ran.

I promise, it was hilarious if you know the game.

Regardless, I missed the sign. Shortly afterward, I caught my toe on a reflector and did a faceplant on Lamar Boulevard.

You know that collective “oooooh” that a group of people make when they see something painful and instinctively feel it themselves? I made that noise a few weeks ago when I saw a guy smack his cranium right into the point of an aluminum canoe.

“How does someone bump their head on a canoe?” you ask. That’s a good question. The answer is: some dumbass tied a canoe to the roof of his SUV, let it dangle off the back four feet, and parked it in a dimly lit parking garage where the canoe stuck out in the aisle just above eye level and just below crown-of-the-head level.

“Oooooh!” I yelled sympathetically, and asked the poor guy if he was all right. I couldn’t tell if it was just embarrassment or a concussion or both, but he didn’t want to make eye contact. He stumbled away towards the elevator, muttering to himself and refusing assistance.

When I faceplanted on Lamar, I got to hear that ooooooh from a large crowd. About four strangers lifted me out of the gravelly asphalt and landed me back on my feet. One commented that it was a good thing I was wearing long pants.

And it was. The vanity that made me cover my flabby thighs protected my knees from more than minor scrapes.

Unfortunately I was wearing short sleeves. For the rest of the week I will be wearing three-quarter length sleeves to cover this:

I took that picture this morning. It’s much better looking than it was yesterday, now that all the blood and gravel are scrubbed out.

I stumbled on towards the finish line, and completed the race in what I felt was a respectable 1:16, all things considered.

Best of all, I did not break any bones or teeth, or tear any tendons, or otherwise irreparably injure myself. I live to fight another day!

Hope you had a good weekend.

It was a Weltschmerz — which we used to call “Welshrats” — the world sadness that rises into the soul like a gas and spreads despair so that you probe for the offending event and can find none.  –John Steinbeck, East of Eden

I’ve got the Welsh rats nipping at my heels today, and I can’t pinpoint why. The sun is shining, the house is clean, the kids are behaving, and I don’t have to go grocery shopping. At least not urgently. We can do without milk for a day.

But something is gnawing. I think the trigger may have been a conversation I had today in which I learned that a second young dad at our school has died in the last three weeks. The first had a pulmonary edema and died with no warning, and the second, lymphoma that was so advanced he made it only six weeks beyond his initial diagnosis. Between them, they left behind five children, the oldest in fourth grade and the youngest an infant.

I’ve been praying like crazy for the brother of my friend Julie. He’s a young dad, too, and he was just diagnosed with melanoma that has metastasized.

Lord, please bless Paul and his wife and their little son. Please help him as he goes through chemo. Please heal him. Please bless his family and ease their worry.

It is heartbreaking. The young dad for my own little family is out in west Texas today, and I worry for him, too. Lord, that he may be safe on the road. That he may be healthy. That we will grow old together and know the joy of our grandchildren.

I’ve wrapped myself in threads of illusion, a woven blindfold that blocks out the terrifying reality that almost nothing is within my control. When a thread slips, that’s when the world sadness rises into my soul like a gas. I think keeping out the despair is perhaps under my control.

To that end, I’m going to go watch Home Alone 2 with my kids. They think it’s hilarious, and I’m grateful to be able to cuddle up with them on the couch.

…..

P. S. Ten minutes in, and I feel better. I love my goofy goobers.