Category: birthdays

Toby Is Six!

Karen

Toby has a birthday sometime in June so I’ve assigned him a date of the 3rd–which means I always forget it. We had a belated celebration assembling patio furniture last night, but really, every day is a celebration with this cat.

We celebrate making the bed and the interesting new configuration of sheets:
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New patio chairs that appear in the garage are sat on and celebrated:
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There are pigeon-watching parties:
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And we celebrate being home together:
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Because that is the best place to be with the best cat.

Friday Unrelated Information

Karen

1. Happy birthday to the original hippie poet, Walt Whitman.

2. YOU GUYS. My deluxe be-pergola’d outdoor space is getting even MORE DELUXE:

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That is an almost-complete 10×10 redwood deck right there. It’s going to be glorious.

Friday Unrelated Information

Karen

1. If you can’t tell from the lateness of this post, I have the day off (and Toby let me sleep in!). There will be  plant shopping and hiking and sewing and pergola-sitting-under-ing galore in the next four days.

2. It’s Bob Dylan’s  birthday today, whose songs make both my inner hippie and my inner poet happy. I’d pick one to feature but there are just too many: early Bob with “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” early-middle Bob, with “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Visions of Johanna,” or later Bob with “Not Dark Yet” or “Most of the Time.” Happy 73rd birthday, Bob!

Happy Birthday Gary Snyder

Karen

The old Buddhist-hippie-poet-translator-environmentalist is 83 today and still doing his thing. Here’s an early one about summer in the mountains:

Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.

I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.

 

Birthday Project Roundup!

Karen

My nephew Skyler is two years old today! It’s hard to believe that just a year ago he was starting to walk, and that he outgrew his first Hawaiian shirt 20 months ago. He obviously needed another aloha shirt, so I made him one for his birthday.

What do you think, Skyler?

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I think he likes it!IMG_0507

 

Speaking of making things for the Most Darling Nephew Ever, remember how my dad learned how to make balloon animals for Skyler? Look what Dad made for the Nemo-themed party last Saturday:

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“But wait, there’s more!”

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Amazing!  It gets even better, though. My dad even made one of the party games, a bean bag toss: made the frame, cut the holes, and painted it. (My sister-in-law sewed the bean bags.)

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I think it’s fitting that I gave Skyler art supplies for his “fun” present (because who wants a shirt when you’re two?).  I don’t think he can avoid making things in this family.

 

Happy Birthday To My Mom

Karen1 Comment

It’s my mother’s 65th birthday today! How do you even talk about someone who’s such a part of your life? I email her every morning, we talk nearly every day, and she’s just started going to yoga with me, too. (She’s fearless about trying new poses.)

I’m really lucky to have my family be my support and my safety net, and I’m extra lucky to have such a good mom. Happy birthday!

Thirty-three

Karen

Oh yes, it’s my birthday today! Because I’m 33 on January 3, 2013, the birthday goals/New Year’s resolutions are in threes this time around:

I. Be kind

  1. Give people the benefit of the doubt
  2. Extend compassion to myself, too
  3. Volunteer

II. Be calm

  1. “Identify the fear“
  2. Stay in the moment
  3. Go outside every day (not even to hike, just to see that there’s more out there)

III. Be strong

  1. Break bad habits
  2. Do three more yoga poses that I can’t do now (especially boat pose for longer than 20 seconds, headstands, and arm balances)
  3. Start saving to finish the basement and get a new car

These seem doable this year (or at least easy to remember). I think 33 is going to be good, if I can get over my eye wrinkles.

12.12.12

Karen

Happy birthday to my sister-in-law Altair today! She’s a gardener, a reader, a runner, a breadwinner, a hard worker, and a great mama to Skyler.

Her namesake!


Happy Birthday, Carl Sagan

Karen1 Comment

Today is the birthday of my science boyfriend Carl Sagan. It’s hard to narrow down what I want to say about him, or pick a favorite quote, because how can you say that this:

There was a time when the stars seemed an impenetrable mystery, but today we have begun to understand them. In our personal lives, also, we journey from ignorance to knowledge. Our individual growth reflects the advancement of the species. The exploration of the cosmos is a voyage of self-discovery.

is more inspiring than this?

Even The Writer’s Almanac gave him a mention today:

Because he had done extensive research on nearby planets, NASA hired him as an advisor for a mission to send remote-controlled spacecrafts to Venus..In preparation for the mission, Sagan was shocked to learn that there would be no cameras on the robotic spacecrafts, called Mariner I and Mariner II. The other scientists thought cameras would be a waste of valuable space and equipment…Sagan couldn’t believe they would give up the chance to see an alien planet up close[…]

Sagan lost the argument that time, but he won over NASA eventually. The Mariners were the last exploratory spacecraft ever launched by NASA without cameras. He contributed to the Viking, Voyager, and Galileo planetary exploration missions, and his insistence on the use of cameras helped us get the first close-up photographs of the outer planets and their moons.

I think that this latest image from Curiosity–on THE SURFACE OF MARS, fer crissake–reflects his legacy.