I couldn’t have asked for a better Saturday. It started when The Big M took the Boy garage sale-ing. For $6 they picked up a really cool record collection from the 1940’s put in the World War II-era version of a CD storage case.

How cool is this thing? Oh, and hello, Joanie.

Then our college friends Bill and Sylvia came to spend the day with us. We got to catch up, our kids got to play together, we got to eat steak (that’s a later post), our kids played some more, the grown-ups played some dominoes, and we watched some NCAA basketball.

I’ve had an unbelievable run in my NCAA bracket and went 8-0 in the Sweet Sixteen games. At the beginning of today I had a 1 in 128 chance of winning $10,000 in the Yahoo bracket tournament (assuming 50-50 odds on each game). After Louisville took down Florida in a near-heart-attack-inducing game, my chances rose to 1 in 64, and my bracket vaulted to #2 overall out of Yahoo’s 3,170,905 brackets.

That is crazy. Just crazy.

College basketball hasn’t been this exciting for me in a long time, and we all got into it. After halftime in the Syracuse-Ohio State game we broke up the domino game to sit in the living room rooting for Syracuse, who I had picked to make it to the Final Four. It was an exciting game, but Syracuse couldn’t pull out the victory.

I had said that I would throw a party if my bracket came down to the final game. It turns out that today my bracket did come down to its final game, and I got to have a great party with great friends.

That’s worth more than money. Great day.

1) Listening to music. Current mix I’ve made and listened to a dozen times or more:

Ultra Violet (Light My Way) — The Killers cover U2
The Dead Dog — Portugal. The Man.
They Done Wrong/We Done Wrong — White Rabbits
Apartment — Young the Giant
Felicia — The Constellations
Honest — Band of Skulls
I Would Do For You — Slightly Stoopid
Lasso — Phoenix
Cough Syrup — Young the Giant
I Am the Walrus — Bono & Secret Machines (U2 covers The Beatles)
Animal — Neon Trees
Neon Tiger — The Killers
Guns Out — Young the Giant

Some of these bands I discovered at ACL last fall. Not The Killers, though. They’ve been a favorite of mine for a couple of years. I think their cover of Ultra Violet beats the original.

Fallback album: Mumford & Sons Sigh No More

I enjoy deconstructing their songs. The Cave is a mix of The Odyssey and G. K. Chesterton’s biography of St. Francis. Roll Away Your Stone references St. Augustine’s Confessions. Timshel refers to Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Dust Bowl Dance is Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. And so on. It’s a fantastic blend of music and literature, and I’ve been listening to this one album off and on since last summer, sometimes for days at a time.

I’m preparing to participate in SXSW in my small way by going to Antone’s to see Band of Skulls next week with my best friend, The Big M. We got the tickets last fall. He’s a country music guy, but he indulges me. One of the many reasons I love him.

2) Reading

I’m currently re-reading The Count of Monte Cristo. I keep getting distracted by life, which means that when I get back to the book I have to re-re-read chapters to remember the characters. The only novels worse than French novels when it comes to the numerous characters to remember are the Russian novels. Why must every Russian have five different names? I’m *this* close to making a chart just so I can keep track of everyone.

Coolest prison escape ever.

For my online reading group, I’m reading James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. It’s an early-20th-century analysis of mythology and religion. The black magic stuff is fascinating. Warning: do not read about how a Hand of Glory is made when you’re eating an egg and sausage breakfast sandwich.

Be grateful I didn't insert an image of a Hand of Glory. Be very grateful.

3) Watching and/or Listening to Lectures

The Big M and I have been enjoying a series on structural engineering. This is completely outside of my area of knowledge (I don’t say area of expertise because I’m not an expert at anything), but has been really satisfying and interesting learning.

Gustave Eiffel designed this steel railroad bridge to span a giant chasm in France. Yeah, *that* Eiffel.

Listening to a lecture series on the history of Christian theology. I’m still puzzling out Calvinism and the concept of predestination even after reviewing my notes. Many interesting things to note on this blog about early Christianity at some point.

This Calvin is more fun than that John guy.

Listening to a lecture series on The Iliad. Easier than re-reading it.

What do you mean the Trojan horse isn't in The Iliad?! *mind blown*

Watching TED talks. This one is seriously awesome:

4) Tearing apart my laptop.

This was scary, necessary, and totally fun. I took out my completely-full 250GB hard drive and replaced it with a 1TB drive, doubled my RAM, and replaced my battery. Once all of that was done I upgraded my OS. Now I have a new laptop for a total cash outlay of about $250. Sweet.

5) Doing taxes.

Ugh. Also scary and necessary. But not fun.

6) Handling Girl Scout cookie coordinating duties for The Girl’s troop.

This took much more time than one would think and came with the added burden of keeping 100+ boxes of cookies in my house at any given time.

We call them Caramel DeLites in Texas, but that doesn't make them less delicious.

7) Dieting

See #6.

As Granddaddy said, I don't want to dig my grave with my fork.

8) Playing on the internet.

Still addicted to my favorite message boards, among other sites. I don’t want to go back in time because I’d have to live without the internet.

Yeah, pretty much.

9) Learning to write 19th-century Spencerian cursive.

Because I’m a dork. And because this is a temporary art outlet until I get back to drawing.

I shall write as though I lived in the 1850's. And were named Mildred.

10) Discussing many topics with my (not big) friend M.

Latest is the NOVA episode on Wednesday in which physicists hypothesize that our universe is a sort of hologram in which the real material is contained in something like a black hole (or another dimension?). Seems to me that it’s Plato’s allegory of the cave repeated 2,000 years later. Plato said that our reality is really like shadows on a cave wall but that we don’t know any better because our back is to the real reality, the sun. The allegorical sun. The real reality is a group of perfect “forms” contained in another dimension. I could go into the religious parallels, but I’ll spare you. For now.

The ancient piggy bank was merely an illusion.

11) Co-teaching religious education.

It’s been a learning experience to be a first-time teacher. My friend Kathleen is an experienced middle-school teacher. She’s not only more knowledgeable about our subject, she knows how to keep eleven second-graders in line. I’m more of an assistant to her than a Teacher teacher, but it’s still cool.

He is the A and the Ω.

12) Hanging out with family and friends.

This is #1, actually, and the reason I haven’t been reading more.

The kids and I have gotten through one novel so far this year and are working on a second. The one we finished is The Missing Persons League, a book that unfortunately is out of print. It’s about a dystopian future in which the world is so polluted that people disappear to find a better one. It was written in the 1970′s, and these future people make telephone calls on land lines and place ads in newspapers. There is no internet. My kids found that amusing and to some extent incomprehensible. It’s a good story that’s well-told, and that’s a rare combination.

Oh, those psychedelic '70s.

I’ve been enjoying lots of social time this year. I’m blessed to have a loving family and many terrific friends.

I shave my legs for *any* party, girlfriend. And Target rocks.

I hope your 2012 is going well.

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.