Flower Girls

I love Spring! Last Sunday at Lovisa's house, the girls covered themselves in the flowers.

Feeling a Little Spacey.

Things I've lost since December:

one--$50.oo gap gift card, Christmas present from Tom

one--very important light pink, but mostly gray Bunnytown, i.e. Stella's BFF

one--Stella's bright red coat, brand new, only one month old.

two--cell phones, one week apart from each other

all--of my contact numbers in said cell phone

Thus, it follows, that I've also lost my mind. If you see it around, call Tom's phone. I have no idea where mine is.

Sincerely,

Lost

A child needs a mother who is not constantly abraded by philosophies that inflate her accountability while obscuring her effort.

Janna Malamud Smith

National Parks & my new interest in Landscapes

ever since I took a class on Land Art, landscapes and representations of landscapes have been transformed for me. Previously, I thought works like the Hudson River School and the like, which glorified the land and therefore the nation, to be rather dull, typical and lacking in depth. It was, however, just my limited perspective. I am now quite inspired by them, looking to the land and to the landscape, as a source of the spiritual, the transcendental, & the sublime. I am reminded of all of my back country hikes with my dad through solitary trails cut off from the everyday chaos of Los Angeles. To him, I am grateful for these trips, travels and escapes where one is alone with the silence of the land. I highly recommend Ken Burn's documentary The National Parks. Inspiring, very inspiring!

Follow the Prophet

This great little gem was on our old laptop that died a terrible dead. Tom recently revived the hard-drive, by pulling it out and putting it in some kind of external hard-dirve backup thing. Among the many poorly written papers and old talks, was this lovely little movie of our Sammy. It requires little introduction itself.

Winter Vacation and the difficulty of starting again

Whinny Post: I had a lovely Christmas vacation--at home with my family and my kids. I have no desire to start writing & working again and that is a bit depressing. Here are some holiday highlights.


Ballet dancing with Stella on a snowy afternoon...


Surprise Spy attach while reading & snuggling a blanket by the fire. . .
(p.s. The gendering going on in these images is certainly not lost on me, but for sentimentalities sake, we're going to kill the critic, skip the formal analysis and just focus on the tenderness for the moment.)

I love my little ones. I'm missing them all over again while I'm at school.

If you can't take the Frankfurt, get out of the kitchen!

I've been reading about how kitchen were redesigned in the 1920s and 1930s by a woman named Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. Called the "Frankfurt Kitchen," Schütte-Lihotzky, among many others, were attempting to make a more efficient, more rational domestic space that would be time-saving. All of this push towards greater functionality is based on Industrial Revolutionary models of productivity--think factory line and Fordism. The Frankfurt Kitchen was the result of detailed time-motion studies (mapping how housewives moved and used the kitchen) and was heavily influenced by the railway dining car kitchens of the period. According to Henri Lefevbre, “The kitchen’s spatial transformations affected the movements, postures, and gestures of its users. Only one person at a time could work in its new, efficient space. To minimize the work effort, the repetitive and monotonous model of the factory work performed alone on the assembly line.” Awesome. So, like academic articles, none of these were illustrated. I went onto google images and I found the this lovely gem above this text.

This image in color and in style reminded me of this lovely gem that I have so many fond memories of:

Ok, well, it's a bit of a poor photo given that the kitchen is under construct at the time it was taken but look! We were so very historically accurate in our color selection for our 1930s little home! How very Frankfurt of us! Luckily, this particular kitchen was late 1930s and there was a little more room for a few more bums in the kitchen.

Halloween, TO Cheap or Not to Cheap that is the question?

We, at the Hurtado house, love Halloween. I think its because its a pretty simple holiday which involved eating candy, is only on one day, and doesn't require a large amount of cooking. Simplicity and Sugar--what more could one ask for?!?

Stella, for the forth year running, was a witch. I love classic Halloween staples like the witch. Adorable! Adorable!



2 year Witch Comparison--October 2007 vs. October 2009

Here is Sam, a Jedi! this year. This was the first year that I broke down and just bought store manufactured costumes in advance. McFrugal, cheap, whatever you call it, I typically prefer just coming up with something around the house and calling it a costume.

Last year, however, ended up not working well and we learned our lesson. In 2008, Sam dressed in all black with one black glove in a vain and yet failed attempt at Luke Skywalker. The no weapons rule at school really did this one in. Stella, actually started off as a scarecrow in old overalls and one of sammy's shirts and real corn husky that we grew in our garden. She ended up looking raggamuffin and unloved. When the first trick-or-treaters knocked on our door and said, "Oh, the old ever trusted Hobo costume! I love it!" and then the wife swiftly corrected him, "No, Ron! I think that's just what she's wearing. I don't think she in a costume." I knew we had not succeeded in properly costuming our children that yet. I quickly sent Stellie upstairs to don the ever trusty witch costume. Funny, I don't have any pictures from that Halloween!

Poor Souls!


Sam's 2 year Halloween Comparison
2007 vs. 2009
In a much more successfully thrown together pirate costume which included worn out shorts of his, a striped shirt of mine, Tom's belt and a sword we had around the house.