Winter Things - December Round-up

Whew, I've been off doing, and haven't written in a while! To catch up, I'll throw you the Clifsnotes version of the last couple of months:

December

{Week 1} Web start-up - Decided to work with my friend Ken, from college, to start a Web-based portfolio-building/social networking site. After rounds of re-hashing and lots of research, we finally put a pause on our original plan, but Ken and I might still collaborate on some project. Meanwhile, we learned what it would take to get a great website up and running.

{Week 2} Blues & Bluegrass Festival - Caught day two of the three-day fest with my climbing group and assorted friends. Finally got to hear the Giving Tree Band, and very entertained by the headliner, Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros.

{Week 3} St. Louis reunion! Caught up with great friends I initially met during my Saint Louis University Resident Assistant days. We feasted on great food, visited a holiday fair for a year's worth of folkie craft-browsing, chased a horde of guys in santa suits and kept each other out of frozen-over fountains. Fantastic couple of days.

{Week 4} Acupuncture - First time. I've never been frightened of needles, but I'd been fascinated that being a pincushion once a week could be re-balancing. Sure enough, several of my coworkers consider acupuncture their first 'medicine,' and could recommend me their favorite practitioner. The process was very cool–needles poked at key places based on my particular needs–and the acupuncturist himself was professional, kind and tranquil. For 45 minutes, I zenned out and felt my blood flow. That effect of the needles, meant to release blockages and get your blood and energies flowing, hours after my appointment.

AND Yeasayer concert - I first heard this band in February 2010, and was quickly taken by their energy. Earth-shaking beats, worldly melodies. By the time this concert came around, I'd become a huge fan. The members of Yeasayer melded with their instruments and jammed together like they were the only folks in the venue. They put on a great show–dreamy, rocking, and just the right length.

Lit List - a DIY post

Why, it seems one whole month has gone by! I do apologize for holding back. I'll catch you up:

The week after Thanksgiving, my mom sent me a chain email about classic literature. I tend to read, be amused by and then forget chain emails, but this particular one sucked me in with its bookish hook.

Completely distracted from whatever I was doing, I spent 15 minutes following the message's instructions. In the end, my personal list is still sitting in my 'drafts' folder, for my reference. I'm happy to pass it on if you're keen.

Read on, and perhaps make your own list.

Here's the message, which lost my edited marks in the copy/paste process:

***
Have you read more than six of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!
P.S. - you can underline the ones which you didn't read but saw the movie :-

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings -Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 1984 - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the Durbervilles- Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

1 4 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carrol

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahamn

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

***

Charity: Water - Ethiopian Fundraiser Dinner

Clean water! We all need it, but many people in developing nations don't get enough of it. Unclean water causes numerous diseases and malnutrition. But we can help!

A friend, Emily, and I recently formed 'Chicago 4 Water,' a campaign to raise money through the well-established fundraising organization, Charity: Water. Charity: Water has build thousands of clean water projects (such as pipe systems and water wells) in 17 developing countries internationally.

Chicago 4 Water's plan is to hold informal fundraising events that give people chances to hang out, enjoy themselves and learn about the importance of clean water for good health. Wednesday marked the night of 'Dine for Water,' our modest first effort at fundraising.

Emily and I'd been talking together about holding a simple fundraising dinner in cooperation with a local Ethiopian restaurant – for a while. But when we finally decided to make it happen, we had to set everything up very quickly.

Just three nights before the dinner, I wrote out our campaign objective for our website, created a dinner invitation and started mentioning it to everyone I saw; and with just 24 hours before we planned the event to happen, Emily's contact at the restaurant finally got in touch with her to confirm that they could work with us so that we would earn a percentage of every diner's food and drink bill. [Phew.]

Happily, after that initial logistical flurry, the dinner was all aromatic coffee, honey wine, pungent bread and delicious savory Ethiopian meats and salads. Sweet and easy. Our event drew a cool 15–17 jovial people. Folks complimented the foods, mingled and smiled, asked us more about Charity: Water. Thanks to Emily working with the restaurant, we earned the cause about $170. For a modest first effort at raising money for clean water, this went down 'well.'


***

What's next? Through Charity: Water's website, we have about three more weeks to raise as much money as we can before our funds will be combined with other campaign funds to build a clean water project somewhere in the developing world.

A few direct website donations by private individuals brought our total funds raised to above our initial $500 goal in just four days. Now, we're raising our goal! With the help of some passionate folks at this first dinner, we hope our next fundraising event is an even greater success.

To read more about our cause, or to donate, visit:
http://mycharitywater.org/Chicago4Water


{Thanks for reading!}

Week of Soup

This is the week of homemade soup. Butternut Squash, Curry, French Onion, Roasted Red Pepper...Check back for more photos of soup bowls – and a few recipes – through Sunday.

Ballet Hispanico!

Bright, glossy red wigs and leather stocking-socks, suggestive caressing and thrusts of all kinds, feather-boas and piled, flashy headdresses.

That's what modern ballet is made of.

Ballet Hispanico gave a one-night performance in Chicago on Friday, and my fine-art-critic-aficionado friend got us two prime seats at the event.

The performance was comprised of three parts: a dramatic, barefooted story of tribal war and mourning; a montage of sultry modern-burlesque-styled numbers; and a more traditional showcase of hispanic club dancing.

The second part, 'Mad'moiselle' – with its campy red-headed night-doll costumes, provocative male-female interaction and eclectic modern-hip-hop-influenced style – was most surprising. Indeed, it turned out that this performance was the debut showing of the number. Chicago got a preview of the show, before it premieres in New York in the coming weeks. Que bueno!

Aside: these dancers' bodies, true to 'forma,' were delights to watch. Throughout the ballet, the company gracefully extended gorgeous legs, twisted trim torsos and flaunted knotty, pliable backs. And I was just as occupied by pondering the strength one should have to assume such controlled, attractive movements, and the wherewithal – constant wherewithal – to keep up a grin. Pretty self-possession. Y que gracioso estaba todo!


{Thanks for reading!}

Back of House at The Weepies

Have you heard The Weepies? http://www.theweepies.com/

Last week, a very cool friend was invited to attend a Weepies show by a music-biz friend of hers, and she asked me to go along. Apparently, the band was coming to Chicago on Halloween weekend for one night of two sold-out shows. We'd be special guests.

Before I saw the indie-pop-folk Weepies play live last weekend, I'd barely listened to their music at all. Honestly, my first impression had the group pegged as whiny, overly pop-ish and somehow melancholy. The mood a person needs to blue-out to that kind of music hadn't yet hit me.

But, the company at the concert would be great, in any case. There was a rumor that Billy Corgan might make an audience cameo. Plus, I'm generally curious. I hoped to observe whatever musically-genius phenomenon in the Weepies sold out these shows.

And, gosh – there's such an appeal to live music. At the very least, music shows offer great energy, fantastic people-watching, often a very proper atmosphere for thinking. I haven't yet had a bad time watching live music. Have you?

***

Turns out the show was a treat. As we arrived, my friend's music biz connection led us to the back rooms, a cavernous, cozy loft-apartment-like setup where the stage manager observed the boards and the band readied for showtime. Each warmly-lit, hardwood-paneled room was bedecked in plush oriental rugs and velvet noise-buffering curtains, livened by rock-n-roll leather couches and zebra-patterned pillows.

In the adjacent green room, members of the Weepies chatted, chuckled and sponged on white makeup, black lipstick and long, streaky wigs in honor of Halloween. On the counter next to their half-moon leather couch were untouched platters of sandwich meats, semi-dry cheeses, wilting veggies and crackly dips.

Meanwhile, we enjoyed gourmet cupcakes my friend had brought, decadent treats ornamented with shards of gummy 'glass' and injected with vampire 'blood' in honor of Halloween. When the venue in the next room filled and the show was about to start, we were offered drinks and food on the house. We were led past hoards of standers to a reserved table with a clear view of the stage. All my senses were on highs. I felt a bit spoiled, I told my friend. She agreed.

The room went dark, but the Weepies came to the stage and received boisterous applause, and as they started to play, the whole venue lit up with energy.

After spending four years off tour so the lead duo could raise their first child, The Weepies' six-person band sounded palpably cheerful, fresh and cohesive. They crooned, told stories, joked and teased each other – all to the packed venue audience's eager delight.

The lead couple switched their folkie wooden guitars nearly every song and gave blood to their music with charming background anecdotes, the bassists amused each other with skillful riffs and string experimentation. The whole group came to the stage in Halloween costumes, and only discarded them when their long-haired wigs made it difficult to see their instruments.

The Weepies' appeal quickly became apparent. Even more impressive than their unique voices, interesting soulful twanging and impressive vocal ranges was the band's collective charisma. They had a good time, and so we had a good time. Contagious amusement, and another positive experience for this spontaneous concert-goer. Woohoo!



What's the last concert you saw? Why'd you go?

Freelance Chalkboarding

Before:

After:


My knees and neck tingle a bit. My arms are heavy. And my jeans are covered in yellow chalk-dust, but that last one is more of a coincidence.

I worked on my first freelance chalkboarding gig for hours today. Two boards for a small music venue: one drink menu, one informational header. This wasn't at all like the writing or design jobs I've done before, but a very cool opportunity. I was commissioned by a music venue, and to do wall-art! Call me Leah-nardo.

Fonts, colors, layout, vibe. It took an hour to computer-design the menu, and about 20 minutes to lay out the second. Setting up a workspace and supplies took 20 minutes. Applying the design by hand took about 4.5 hours.

The whole process put me in good spirits, but there were challenges: technical details like using carbon paper and working with chalk markers, which I've been used to on smaller projects in my regular work, turned into more complicated maneuvers on the much larger boards. Giving the design some hand-drawn warmth, while making it sharp and polished, took close attention.

Overall, the work was enjoyable, hitch-free, instructive. I charged a lot. I worked diligently. Probably, I could have charged more.

It was empowering.

So I look forward to taking on more artistic freelance work. Any ideas?


{Thank you for reading!}