Friday Five (belated)

I’ve recently found this “Friday Five” thing on various blogs. It’s a day late, but here’s mine:

At this moment, what is your favorite...

1. ...song?

Well, right now Outkast’s “Hey Now” is stuck in my brain, thanks to my last post.

2. ...food?

All things Southwestern, thanks to my previous post. Especially my favorite Spinach, Roasted Red Pepper and Corn Enchiladas because I make the enchilada sauce with Chimayo Chile Powder from New Mexico.

3. ...tv show?

I’ve been watching the re-runs of the PBS series, The Forsyte Saga. Part II starts February 8th!!

4. ...scent?

Brownies. Fresh from the oven.

5. ...quote?

Hmm… I’m not especially given to quotes, though I love the ones at Whiskey River. Here’s one I found on a piece of paper in my desk drawer:

“If we were to notice all the beauty of the world what would become of us? The sunflower would stop us in our tracks, the cloud-tossed sky delay us for hours. We’d never get to school. We’d never get in the car.”
– Sharman Apt Russell in An Obsession With Butterflies

3:10:25 PM      trackback [] 

Hey Ya, Charlie Brown!

This is great! (Via boing boing.) It's the Peanuts cartoon edited with Outkast's "Hey Ya."

Update: This appears to have been taken down. I guess the "Don't sue us" note at the end wasn't sufficient.

12:17:20 PM      trackback [] 

Santa Fe dreaming

Tonya, the Adventure Journalist, posts some beautiful photographs of New Mexico. A friend of mine, Richard, lived in Santa Fe in for several years and I visited him in 1999 – twice. The first time I went, in late February, the landscape seemed peculiar rather than beautiful. It’s so different from anywhere I’d been – New England where I grew up or any of the places I’d visited on either coast or in the northern Rockies or Hawaii. This was just very brown and dry and expansive. I remember consciously deciding that I would just look at it and absorb it.

Boy did I absorb it. It sounds flaky to me even now but when I got back home I would look at the New England rolling hills and get this sensation in my chest that I can only describe as longing, but very physical. And I’d get a flash of the hills around Santa Fe covered in piñon and chamisa, with the mountains in the distance. I had an overwhelming urge to redecorate, too, in the Santa Fe style! I felt like Richard Dreyfuss in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” where he keeps building mounds of potatoes or trash or whatever to recreate what he saw in his “encounter.”

Of course I had to go back, and when I went in early September that year it was warmer and a bit more colorful with wildflowers. It was chili harvest time and I bought a fresh ristra to bring home – it still hangs in my kitchen, long since dried. Richard was a fun and generous host on both occasions. We ate some of the best food I’ve ever had anywhere (Geronimo for my birthday, Pasquales, Coyote Café, and many fabulous lesser-knowns), we went for massages at Ten Thousand Waves, we drove up into the Santa Fe Basin and another time to Bandelier, we went to Fiesta, we did the gallery walk, we went out and heard live music at the Pink Adobe’s Dragon Room. While he was working, I shopped in the Plaza or I went to the museums, including the Museum of International Folk Art, which was one of the most amazing museums I’ve even been to. I didn’t think I liked folk art.

Well, it’s been many years now since I’ve been to Santa Fe. I couldn’t imagine living there since it seems so isolated, so far from friends and family, and I’d miss the ocean. It can also be hard to make a living there. But I’d love to go back and visit again. When I see landscape photographs like those at the Adventure Journalist I still feel that strange tug in my chest.

11:06:25 AM      trackback []