I Can't Believe It's Already August!

It's like that time we went down the shore

and saw two Hercules movies that launched

the TV series.

Our luck was unbelievable that we stumbled across this

wealth of wonderful TV!

Hercules!, Kevin Sorbo, and Xena (pre-Xena), Lucy Lawless,

you guys are awesome.

(In case you were wondering,

yes, that is a bust of Mr. T in a Chinese Communist hat 

with college honor ropes,

a lei, and Academic Decathlon medal.

He's very accomplished, Mr. T.

We recognize.)

Arrested Development: Bluth's Original Frozen Banana Stand (and Luke Bryan)

I spy an oversize banana,

which could only be:

Some marketing folks from Netflix!

They were giving out stuff earlier,

but by the end of the day there was a line to take a photo

with some strangers.

And on my way home,

outside of Letterman, I saw

Luke Bryan!

(I've never heard of him,

but people seemed enamored.)

Meanwhile my cousin Samantha got her picture taken

with Danny Masterson (Hyde from That 70s Show)

because he was hanging out at her office since he has a friend there.

Dance, Dance!

So we're fortunate enough to have cool things like

this come to our building's gym.

And luckily we didn't have other plans

and the weather was pretty terrible,

so I went to both of these classes.

The class was wonderful!

I forgot how choreography is almost cerebral.

It's memorizing and understanding steps and movements,

then adding more.

I've been taking dance classes for years now,

and I've not had to memorize a routine since high school.

I've always just followed the instructor in the front.

But today I felt my brain working.

John was very nice

and his choreography worked surprisingly well with different genres

of music.

We kept doing the same few steps over and over,

and he built on it.

In total it was about 20 steps 

(8 counts each, so about two minutes worth of music)

and then it looped again.

So much fun!

During the stretch portion of class,

he noted that my pointe

(when you point your toes)

was very good and that I must've danced before.

He said very few people are born with a naturally good pointe.

Ah, all those years of pointing paid off!

A bonus of both of these classes was that

Jessica Williams from The Daily Show was in attendance!

She's quite tall.

I couldn't place where I'd seen her for a short while,

but then after ruling out everyone at work and friends of friends

and moving on to TV and movies,

it just made sense.

She's really pretty and is a good dancer.

It'd be fun to have her in more of my gym classes.

Hollywood!

In late September/early October,

I went to LA for my third cousin's wedding.

I couldn't believe that LA was as bad

as a lot of people said it was,

but it was--even with Jon.

Other than layovers, the last time I was there I was a junior in high school.

The band performed at Disneyland,

and we went to the San Diego Zoo.

We had the worst turbulence coming back home,

and I felt so sleep-deprived from that trip

that I was pretty suicidal when I got home.

It was a weird time.

The time before that

I was about twelve or thirteen, 

and I went with my brother and dad.

(My mom and sister went to China on a gymnastics trip.)

We flew in to LA and drove up to SF,

then flew to Oahu and Maui.

It was a really awesome trip,

yet odd because I was at that age where

I hated my body,

and I was really introverted and thought I was being very philosophical.

I had a uniform of

traditional low-top black/white Converses,

indigo jeans, men's tank undershirt (or the light blue girl's one),

and a blue and navy cardigan from Esprit,

and the alternative was jean shorts and polo shirts.

When I wanted to feel girly,

I had a striped polo dress.

I wore everything with my Cons.

 I had to tell myself to stop living in my head

and start experiencing life.

I wrote a lot of terrible poetry then,

if only to get my thoughts out of my head.

When I first landed in LA,

I was in awe of the palm trees.

Actual, real-life palm trees, like on TV and the movies,

existed in LA.

My dad rented a car, 

and we drove north on the PCH highway 

until he got too sleepy to drive further.

I remember eating a lot of salami and pizza (AWESOME!)

and getting car sick from the twists and turns (not awesome at all) on that trip.

When we drove through Malibu, I thought that it was

the scariest place on earth.

There were so many HUGE houses--like mini castles--on top of sprawling hills.

The people crossing to the beaches were so tan and built and blond.

It looked like Baywatch.

Totally unreal.

The first night we stayed at a hotel that was so booked up that

we had to sleep in one of the really fancy suites.

It was so fancy that you had to use your elevator key to get to that floor

AND it had a free buffet breakfast in the special suites' floor lobby area.

I hated eating in public and didn't want to be judged by all those snooty families

that had planned to stay in those suites (not landed there because there were

no vacancies otherwise), so I didn't really take advantage of it like I should have.

The bed was so big that it fit me, my brother, and dad with

no overlapping issues.

We went to Monterrey Bay and SF.

It was awesome fun.

And Hawaii was even better.

I remember being so enthralled with the rolling hills and valleys and mountains of CA,

thinking about how when I'm old enough,

I was going to live in each state for at least two years of my life

to really see the USA. And then I thought some states suck,

so I didn't have to live in all of them--just the cool ones.

Now that I'm old enough to know better,

the only states worth living in are NJ or NY,

and I can spend weeks at a time in any other city in the world.

Oh, young Christina.

In any case, here's the Hollywood sign as taken from the top floor 

of one of the buildings at the LACMA.

I think it connotes a lot of different things for everyone.

BEA 2012!

When I went to BEA this past year, I saw:

 Jennifer M. Brown (Children’s Editor)

Lauren Oliver (Author)  

Sharon Creech (Author)

Judith Viost (Author) 

Shannon Messenger (Author)

talk about 

Writing Strong Female Characters 

in Middle Grade Books.

I think I left with the impression

that these author's opinion of a strong female character

meant girls that are tough and can kick butt and have attitudes--

girls that I wouldn't really want to be friends with or read about.

It's like that Simpsons episode

when Bart falls in love the tough girl.

She tells his fortune on his palm,

and spits in his hand and says that's where his pool is.

Hilarious, classic Simpsons.

Why can't girls be nice and strong though?

I have some actual notes I wrote in the back 

of the program booklet that I had been meaning to transpose, 

but I want to post this before BEA 2013 comes around.

The coolest thing was that I just proofread Judith Viost's

latest book, which she talked about:

Lulu Walks the Dogs.

Oh, Lulu.

I kind of wish the brontosaurus made an appearance

in her latest book.

I love brontosauruses.

It was really exciting working on a book that Lane Smith

was illustrating too.

My adolescent self squealed louder than any of those 1-D/Jonas/Bieber fans.

I also got a 4ever sillyband.

A rub on tattoo.

A cool tote bag from Chronicle.

And some signed and not signed books.

And I saw a cute pair of shoes

that I had been lusting after for a few months

that I could no longer find in my size.

They were definitely really cute.

Nathan Myhrvold's Lecture on the Making of Modernist Cuisine

Over a year ago at Astor Center we saw Nathan Myhrvold speak about the making of Modernist Cuisine. Jon got us a signed book plate that they especially made for the books for our edition. It's funny how he just glows in that light.

Nathan's speech was mostly things that he thought was cool about the making of the book. There was wine and water and bread and cheese. It was a nice event. Not stuck up at all. And intimate. (The space was about half the space of the "cocktail" hour space at Blue Hill for private dining. It's reminiscent of that space anyway.)

One of the interesting things was that the ink of all the tomes are something like six pounds or something nuts. The ink additional adds girth to the books too. I never gave much thought to ink before on books I've worked on.

Also, it was here that we first were introduced to Nathan's "pea-ness" joke. Say that outloud: pea-ness. He's mentioned it at every event/talk since then. Oh, Nathan.

Luckily, we recently were able to taste the pea-ness he's talking about. It was really quite delicious. After hearing so much about it, it was exciting to finally taste it. I wish we had a bit more to taste though.

The Time We Saw Gwenyth Paltrow, Apple, and Moses at the New York Hall of Science

When I spotted Gwenyth Paltrow,

she looked like any ordinary mom:

kind of tired but happy to be out with her kids.

Her kids seemed kind of bored of the place

(they were zooming through it as fast as we were, 

and they're only a third our age),

but they had some fun playing with the giant bubbles.

It was in the animation section 

of the New York Hall of Science

that I spotted her.

We were at the New York Hall of Science because

I had a Google Offer coupon that was expiring.

We didn't go with any kids,

so it was really weird and kind of lame for us.

Seeing Gwenyth

was a lot of fun though.

Gwenyth plays with bubbles too!

To not be too obnoxious,

I took these photos of her through fish tank.

(Kind of like a fish eye lens,

but totally not.)

These photos look really stalkerish,

but it's better than being superobvious, I think.

A few adults recognized her and took

"discrete" photos of her too,

but mostly everyone was concerned about making

giant bubbles.

Jon posed 

so I could try to take a better photo of her,

but I really like this photo the best.

Wee's looking at the poor dead fish 

floating at the top of the tank.

Gwenyth is in the back.