we tell ourselves stories…

An updated blogroll, you say? What a grand way to celebrate America’s birthday! And so, I’ve cut and trimmed and added in the spirit of sharing and community. I’m on a quest for compulsively readable book and travel blogs. In the meantime, it seems as if the cooking and design world has gotten the jump on everyone else in the blogosphere and I am happy to content myself with the reading material therein.

Recent additions:

Orangette

The Kitchen Sink

Hogwash

Whipped

Smitten Kitchen

Poppytalk

Bloesem

Enjoy! And feel free to add your suggestions in the comments–if it’s well-written there is a good chance I will read it. There’s no work distraction like a blog habit distraction.

I wouldn’t say that I’m in a funk. That would (a) require taking my own surname in vain and (b) imply that I’m unhappy. I don’t like doing the first, and I don’t think the second is true. No, unhappy is the wrong word. I’m just mildly apathetic–stretched thin by school, work, travel, relationship travails, and socializing, I’ve noticed myself struggling to muster up interest in much of anything. I’ve been staring blankly at books, shunning my sewing machine and knitting needles, ambivalent about any new episodes of This American Life, and overwhelmed by a cooking task as easy as boiling pasta. End result: Far too much time to think. And apathy does not breed the prettiest of thoughts.

But there is a light that keeps me from the brink, or perhaps it is just the sound of a few distant bells that cannot even yet be seen. For my current savior is music. There is no time better for music than a summer day in July. Truly. These are the days of outdoor concerts, melodies that seem woven from the heat and the sun’s rays just for summer nights, and long road trips requiring an appropriate soundtrack. With my earbuds in place and red iPod always near, I wonder why I need books when I have the Avett Brothers to tell me a story or how I keep myself from breaking out into a sidewalk dance of sheer happiness and reckless abandon whenever Old Crow Medicine Show sets their banjos to playing. And the day I get tired of Paolo Nutini… well, I don’t want to be around for that day for it shall be a sad one.

With these men in my life–or at least my iPod, drowning my thoughts–who needs to care about anything else?

The aforementioned road trip was a means to an end: the annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival. We didn’t have tickets due to an inability to commit to an event more than 24 hours in advance, but that seemed more like a minor roadblock than an actual reason to not drive 6 hours each way across the state of Colorado. So with more cash than I have ever carried on my person before and a single previous scalping experience, we made the pilgrimage to music heaven.

And we didn’t get in.

But I did learn how to not get in, and I feel compelled to share these lessons with those who find themselves in a similar position:

1. Do not believe the shady looking scalper when he tells you to wait around 20-30 minutes and then disappears. Odds are he is not coming back with tickets. In fact, he may not be coming back at all.

2. Do not ford the river. The refreshing looking water was probably snow only a short time ago. Hypothermia and bluegrass do not mix well.

3. Do not invest in a horse to ford the river for you. They will still want you to be wearing a wrist band.

4. Do not jimmy the already used wrist bands of random biker couples unless you have some heavy duty tape or a high tolerance for holding a flame to your wrist to melt the wrist band back together. There are three rounds of security (1) do you have an wristband? (2) do you have anything dangerous in your purse? (3) do you mind if we pull really hard on your wrist band to see if you’ve jimmied it? P.S. If it doesn’t stay on when we pull you could be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

In the end, if you can’t get in. Support the local kids’ lemonade stands, take a seat along the river, soak in the beauty all around you, and let the music pour over you. Who needs to know what Brett Dennen is wearing anyway?

I’ve recently become fascinated with cupcakes. And can you blame me? It’s a cupcake world. I began noticing this when I moved within a few blocks of Love Cafe, where I could get a coffee and a CakeLove cupcake to make studying a little less of a chore. Then A started singing the praises of Georgetown Cupcake (who is rumored to sell out of cupcakes almost daily), and I noticed that a Hello Cupcake was going in near my Metro station. And finally, while browsing the Anthropologie in Seattle, I saw it: a book filled with cupcake recipes and lovely photography for only $10.

I bought it, drooling over pages of delicious sounding recipes, and planning my career as a famous cupcaketeer (this was pre-sheep/llama farm plans).

And now this wondrous book is at A’s house.

And A is out of town.

And his birthday is in less than 48 hours.

So I decided it was time to consider my options:

a. Break into his apartment for a rescue operation.

b. Return to my roots–Betty Crocker Funfetti

c. Find a recipe from a blogger I trust

I ended up going with d. none of the above, also known as, d. Use a recipe from celebrity you adore who evidently has a knack for making delicious cupcakes. That’s right. I headed to Harris Teeter, Amy Sedaris Cupcake Recipe in hand. And $25 (I was out of even the most basic of ingredients) and 1.5 hours later, I had myself 23 (filled the first batch a teeny tiny bit too full and falling just short of the recipe intended 24) rather successful made-from-scratch cupcakes on my hands. I’ll let you know how the icing phase goes tomorrow…

I could see this obsession taking me places. Forget novel writing and quilting–it’s the life of a pastry chef for me.

Life does not provide me with nearly enough opportunities for driving over the mountains, past the mesas, across the dessert, through the smallest towns on God’s green earth, along the rims of canyons, near the future location of my sheep-llama farm, and finally to music paradise (more on that adventure later) with my little brother. So when the opportunity to do just that arises it’s nice to have a soundtrack worthy of the blessed event.

My brother and I are not strangers to joint automobile ventures. We used to make the drive to high school together everyday for two years. Seven thirty in the morning was not a chatty time for either of us, so we relied heavily on music to fill the twenty minute commute. This was between 1998 and 2000. It was a constant tug of war between my Dave Matthews and Matchbox 20 and his Korn and Rage Against the Machine. Eminem and the Beastie Boys were common ground but a bit much before noon. In fact, it was on one of those morning drives that I believe my baby brother enlightened me as to what nookey was that Limp Bizkit was doing so much for.

And yet I can happily report that somewhere in the past 10 years our music tastes started to merge. So with ears tuned to the same frequency and roughly 300 CDs, we had no problem filling 12 hours of some of America’s prettiest roads.

A sampling from K & J’s trek across Colorado:

Elko -Railroad Earth

‘Round the Wheel -String Cheese Incident

The Legend of Johnny Cash -Johnny Cash

Elevation -Yonder Mountain String Band

Precious Mind -The Heavy Pets

Sunrise Over Sea -John Butler Trio

Brighter Than Creation’s Dark -Drive By Truckers

Live at the Murat -Umphrey’s McGee

For me, it looks a little something like this.

Aside from the Louvre and Musee d’Orsay, museums rarely fall very high on my Must See list. I prefer to be out wandering a city, exploring neighborhoods and cuisine, than inside a building with the rest of the tourists. But there are exceptions to every rule, and the Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt exhibit at the Denver Art Museum proved to be such an exception.

If I needed a dose of craft inspiration to get me through the summer this exhibit did the trick. These quilts are so visually stunning and lovingly stitched that they make the other art pale in comparison to my biased, quilt-loving eyes.

You can learn more about these quilts and the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers on their Web site, at NPR.org, or by reading The Quilts of Gee ’s Bend: Masterpieces from a Lost Place and Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt.

Or go to Denver before July 6.

from my room with the view at the affordable and highly recommendable Moore Hotel

i found seattle to be a literate town

where everyday is market day

and natural beauty is all around.

One of my favorite thing about cities is how wonderful it feels to escape them. Such was the relief that I felt when I boarded the ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge Island. For a measly $6.70, I could leave the hustle and bustle behind for a serene island across Elliot Bay.

The moment my foot landed on the island, the pace of life changed–my heart rate slowed and my ipod playlist shifted from Amy Winehouse to Wailin’ Jennys. Wandering to the top of the hill, I found the main street. If you take a left on that main street, you will come across a store called The Traveler. The Traveler has one of the best (surprise, surprise) travel book collections I’ve come across. Books I had previously been able to find only on Amazon.com were displayed without fanfare on the shelves of this shop. I flipped through a couple of them, contemplating my options. But then my eye caught sight of a title that made me put all the others back in their places without another thought. The book was Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

I couldn’t think of a more fitting place to purchase this book. I had been searching for it for ages, but it was one of those titles that bookstores ignore and libraries only carried one copy of. It sat on my Amazon wish list waiting for my next big online book purchasing frenzy (which are few and far between). And yet, here I was, on an island off the coast of Seattle, in a quaint travel store holding this holy grail of books.

And you know what? Time was soft there, too.

I did laps around the Space Needle observation deck searching for it. I had come some obscene number of miles with the wild hope of seeing it. I had essentially made the trip to the top of the Needle to catch a glimpse of it. And when our plane passed over it, the pilot directed the people on the left side of the plane to catch an amazing view of it.

I, of course, was on the right.

You’re a slippery one, Mount Rainier. But I caught you letting your guard down in the end. Check. Mate.

As for you, Mount St. Helens, next time it is so on.