Sunken Garden @ Filoli House, originally uploaded by mslaura.

Today I took my hiking group to Filoli House and Gardens in Woodside. It was lovely. Not really hiking, per se, but many members are currently gimpy or pregnant, and not up for strenuous hiking.

We met in the cafe there, then toured the house and gardens. Very impressive. Wow, those people really knew how to live...ballrooms, drawing rooms, fruit orchards, cutting gardens, libraries, even a Men's Lounge (where children and women were not allowed). Hrrrumpf.

The swimming pool is magnificent, and I love this sunken garden with reflecting pool. I am tempted to turn our underused bocce ball court into a water tank like this. At least part of it. The rest can be a glassed-in office for Dan/workroom for me and the kids. It would be especially nice in winter when the house gets dark and cold.

I'd like to get the guided tour of Filoli sometime...the self-guided tour was much more sparse on details, but as it was I think I'm the only one who did it all the way, the rest of the moms just wandered wherever. But their babies are smaller and fussier.

The photo at right is of the study at Filoli. The oak floor is gorgeous. It looks like it was burned with hot metal, but actually it was etched with the pattern and then stained, that's what makes the crosshatch design.

Wow, the Bay Area has so many cool places to visit. I'm trying to cram in outings before it starts getting cold. The weather right now is perfect..warm but not too hot. So much to see and do.

Posted by msLaura at 06:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just found this website:

Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes from the Horrible '70s by James Lilek, a brutal examination of the unlovely, unattractive, unlivable and unforgivable homes of the 1970s. All eras have some bad taste, of course – but it took the 70s to make bad taste triumphant and universal. It took the 70s to convince everyone to stick foil wallpaper on the wall, paint the bathtub purple, smother the floors in shag so deep it tickled the tops of your ankles, and hang art that managed to clash with everything, including itself.

Total crackup. I bought the book and can't wait to get it. I definitely remember some silver foil wallpaper in a bathroom growing up. It was silver foil with...was it an intertwined light pink velvet pattern? I thought it was pretty interesting at the time. Wish I had a photo of that now.

Hey Mom, remember that time I came home from boarding school and you had painted every single item in my room hot rosy pink? Hot pink with light pink accents. That was pretty crazy. I had a mostly white room before that, with a few yellow accents and natural wood, but after that it was ALL pink, all the time! Quite shocking. Literally *everything* in my room was painted. Too funny. With a muti-shaded pink braided rug too. Ha!

Too bad this James Lilek guy's apparently a venemous right-wing neocon nutcase in real life. But this stuff is funny, so oh well.

He also has a book on "Regrettable Food", but you know, I think nothing can possibly beat the Weight Watchers Recipe Cards from 1974, most entertainingly annotated by Wendy McClure.

Snappy Mackerel Casserole, yum yum. And Jellied Tomato Refresher, served in a brandy snifter! Or the goodie at left, which was described as a "prolapsed anus" by one reader, and described using the term "bukkake" by another. Priceless!

Laughs, just laughs. And don't forget to read the page titles for each recipe, at the top of your browser.

Posted by msLaura at 03:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oh me oh my. I found the greatest website.

http://www.metaefficient.com

This is a geek girl (or guy)'s wet dream come true. It is "a Guide to the Most Efficient Things in the World", which means products that are often times revolutionary, sometimes just interesting, but in some way completely different from what you're used to seeing out there.

Bamboo socks anyone? After reading that bamboo fabric is silky, light, breathable, and one of the softest textiles in the world, I'm ready! Plus, it requires zero pesticides for cultivation.

How about a solar and biodiesel-powered RV? I also found some fully biodegradable diapers on this site too, and they are very cool. I like them a lot.

There are too many cool things to list on this site, but they even have a guide to the best indoor plants for removing common toxic household gases (like formaldehyde) from the air.

Check it out!

Posted by msLaura at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OK, I've switched over from Blogger to Moveable Type, and it looks like MT is going to work much better. It's even free! BUT I still have to transfer over all 180+ of my old posts, and get my template back looking like it was before.

I've been troubleshooting for Julian's entire nap today, and I finally got a few old posts to show up, but I will have to manually open and change code in each one to get it to transfer. Haven't even started working on the look and feel stuff yet. I'm still publishing with the lame, generic Moveable Type template, which is why this page looks like this, if you're looking at a drab, blue, semi-ugly page right now.

This would be a fun challenge, if I weren't a busy mom with nearly zero free time for geeking out. And now that Julian's up from his nap, my geek time today is over. Sigh.

Now on to finishing up the VERY last step in my Pate en brioche....adding the port-and-beef-flavored aspic to fill in the space between the pate and the brioche. I have to chill it to almost solid, then pour it in through the tiny hole in the top of my creation. So far so good, I think. I hope I don't blow it at this point. Yikes.

Posted by msLaura at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Considering that this was a very last-minute Halloween, we had a great time last night.

We carved our pumpkins on Sunday evening, and they came out wonderful. Even the Bugs one that was supposed to be a dog turned out OK.

None of us had costumes, so I ended up throwing together a vampire cape that I had tucked away, a black wig that I had tucked away, and smeared eyeliner all around my eyes. Not a bad result!

After we put our pumpkins out, I was going to trim the bushes in front of the porch with our groovy rechargeable trimmer/chainsaw, and then once I had it in my hand...aha! What a great prop!

I also had a old CD burned of several hours of scary Halloween sound effects, so I set that up playing on semi-hidden PC speakers out front. VERY effective. And then I had candles burning in the front yard all over. Very low-tech, but more spooky that way.

So trick-or-treaters would come to our door and there would be the scary sounds emanating all over the front yard...groaning, chains dragging, screams, howling dogs. No fancy stuff, just our pumpkins lit up and candles burning in the yard. They ring the bell and...

SCARY CACKLING UNDEAD MOM ANSWERS THE DOOR WITH A CHAINSAW! Yes, and it was running too! Well, quietly...after all, it is a rechargeable one. A real chainsaw just wouldn't be practical or safe. Undead moms are still moms, you know. Safety is job #1.

So that was great, because I scared the living SHIT out of quite a few people, even grown ups. Lots of people walked away from our door saying to each other, "Wow, that was scary! That was cool!"

Several people screamed out loud when Undead Mom burst out with her chainsaw, and that made my day.

Plus we had good candy, and I got little toys too...bouncy balls and dinosaurs and mini-Play-Doh cans.

The funniest part was my little helper, Scary Baby. Julian would wait until I had already scared the Living Shit out of the T-or-Ters, then when I put down my chainsaw and came back to offer the candy, he would rush to the doorway and yell "YAAAAHHHHHH!" at the top of his baby voice. Sooooo freakin' funny.

Between the scared screaming kids at the door with their O-mouths, and Julian's Scary Baby routine, the whole evening was one big laugh fest. Oh, and we watched the South Park and Simpsons' Halloween episodes, which were also funny.

So now I have to bitch a little. WHERE were the good costumes? I saw NONE. Seriously, not a single costume was memorable. Most of the kids had on some plastic $2.99 crap under a coat. There was a Star Wars guy with a light saber who was decent, and a kid in a full-head monster mask at the end, but otherwise...yawn.

And the girls sucked worse than anyone, because every SINGLE last one of them was some kind of Princess/Harem Girl, and they all were just trying to be sexy/pretty instead of scary or creepy. There wasn't even a single Vampira type, except for me. No one even looked Goth, for crying out loud!

So bah humbug on that. Girls, you have the next forty years at least to look sexy, but only once a year do you get to be as scary as you want to be. Are girls afraid to be scary now?

As for the Princess thing, get over it. Ain't ever gonna happen, so might as well let you down easy right now. No Prince Charming is going to come and sweep you off your feet to live happily ever after. Get a good education, learn how to be comfortable in your own skin, treat others with respect and compassion, and forget that fairy-tale crap.

Brings to mind one memorable Halloween long ago...my best friend Angela, then-boyfriend Andrew and I went to get last-minute costumes at a rental place. All they had left were a Frog, a Pumpkin and Big Bird.

We dressed up, Angela as Frog, Andrew as Big Bird, and Me as Pumpkin. Then we went to a party. (Did I mention that we were in our mid-20's at the time?)

Well, at the party every single chick was dressed Sexy. There were harem girls, Mata Hari spies, princesses, vamps, vampire... sexy, sexy, sexy.

And there we sat in our round, fuzzy, primary-colored costumes, ostracized by everyone. I mean, NOTHING is less sexy than a pumpkin. I could barely sit down, due to my orange roundness.

Oh, and someone slipped us some *speed* too, which is the Devil's Own Stuff, so we sat there relentlessly grinding our teeth, tremendously anxious, paranoid and freaked out. Angela and I clung to our fuzzy comforting Big Bird consort (Andrew felt OK, whereas AJ and I felt like we had just taken 12 consecutive doses of No-DOZ). Not good. Not good at all.

I don't even remember what happened in the end. I think we went home early as soon as our collective uber-anxiety allowed us to leave the safety of Big Bird's feathery embrace. Speed kills, people. Ugh, I can't believe people ever do that stuff on *purpose*. Horrible.

I guess that doesn't exactly reinforce my previous message of dressing scary instead of sexy, but whatever. My real point is that we all had a good Halloween last night, in spite of being ultra-low-tech and basically unprepared until 30 minutes or so before it got dark.

Julian didn't even have a costume, and he still had fun. You GO Scary Baby! (By the way, yes he DID have pants on during the evening. We had just taken him potty before snapping this photo, and didn't really have our acts together to put his pants back on before our photo op. Ooops.)

Posted by msLaura at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Small is definitely the new big, and it's about time.

I love my Honda Civic Hybrid 2003. I just drove over 1000 miles in comfort and style, with plenty of room, and it cost me a mere $68 for gas at $3.09 a gallon. Today I'd probably get a new Toyota Prius, just for the hatchback, the extra bells and whistles, and the slightly better gas mileage.

What I want to know is, where's my hybrid minivan? Why can other countries get them but not the US? I'm supposedly living in the best country in the world, but I have to wait until 2007 to get a bulked-up, less-economical version of the lovely Toyota Estima hybrid minivan that the Japanese, Australians and UK have had for several years now? We Americans get offered a few hybrids SUVs and sedans, but not one minivan or station wagon. What's going on? Don't tell me there's no market here.


While we're exploring small chic, look at these perfect little prefab houses. Adorable and beautifully designed.

I'd rather have yard than house anyways, as long as what house I have is well-designed and efficient. Less space forces you to live without clutter, and is just easier overall.

With more than 2 people, you probably need something more like a Clever Home. Dan and I looked into these and fell in love, and if we ever find ourselves with a piece of land, we will certainly get a Clever Home rather than build anything custom.

One more impressive Small is Good item: the T@B Trailer. I'm absolutely saving up for one of these. I just want to pinch its cheeks. So sleek and small and everything inside serves 4 different purposes. I could easily haul one with my hybrid minivan or station wagon, if only I had one. We could go anywhere and everywhere! Pull over to eat lunch, lay down and take a nap if need be...a huge plus when travelling with small children and babies.

Maybe when they're out long enough I can find one used. Hmmm...

Posted by msLaura at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)