Come visit our new Web sites:

Vesna's blog:
http://vesnavuynovich.blogspot.com

Don's blog:
http://bloggingforpancakes.blogspot.com


Vesna's published work:
http://vesnaswriting.blogspot.com


See you there!

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Today U and I went to not one, but two summer festivals on the Northside.

The first was the Savor the Summer Festival at Troy Community Gardens. U and I went two summers ago, but missed the one in 2006.

A co-worker who went to the 2006 fest told me, the following Monday, that she'd seen the sign in the gardens with my picture on it. There are signs all over with color photos of ...   more »

Watching Blue's Clues this morning with U before work, while Donald made us all a delicious and sustaining breakfast, as usual.

In this ep, the Blue's house is becoming a restaurant for a day: Cafe Blue. (I would have liked "Chez Blue" -- tres groovy!) Blue and Joe (the show's human host) go into the kitchen, where two of the regular animated characters are cooking up a storm. (Mr. Salt and Mrs. Pepper, for those ...   more »

High summer in Wisconsin, and the weather is perfect for being outdoors: sunny, not too hot, mild breezes. I was dying to pick up and find some woods to hike through.

Donald, meantime, wanted nothing other than to relax alone with his final volume of the Harry Potter series, which had arrived in its special muggle-proof cardboard box from Amazon.com in yesterday's mail. The publishing event of the decade, at least.

So Ulysses and I ...   more »

Daisy Age 2004  -- Daisy Age 2006




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Rhythm and Booms -- the Midwest's largest fireworks display -- takes place about a mile from our home each year. People come from all over, of course, and fill nearby Warner Park with campers and picnic blankets. People who live in the neighborhood are likely to invite folks over for cookouts, meantime.

Ulysses and I walked up to the playground on the grassy hill on the property of the mobile home park. We danced in ...   more »

Don's mother was in town for about a week earlier this month. She took Ulysses to Sears to get portraits made. After paying for the pictures, we got a valuable coupon for future purchases at Sears! Some exclusions apply, but the text of the coupon is priceless. Here it is. The coupon is written in all caps, but I'll spare you that much. When you get to the end, compare the "Valid from" dates with ...   more »

New word last night.

Our living room couch is a convertible futon sofa. It folds flat into a futon bed. Last year, U developed the dangerous habit of climbing up to the top of the couch to sit and hang out. We couldn't get him to stop. So we folded the couch flat, into its bed shape, and decided that would be the configuration until he was mature enough to be safer.

On Monday, earlier ...   more »

New words since February. There are more. I'll add as I think of 'em.

hug
wolf
ay-soh        dinosaur
cheshire      treasure
egg
jaja          Serbian for egg
tea
chai          Serbian for tea
game
cheech        grape
yes 
shee-shee     TV
ball
chip-chop, chip-chop    What you say when you stomp in a puddle


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I posted this today on a message board at lowcarbfriends.com, in the following thread:

	Low Carb Friends > Eating and Exercise Plans > Other Plans
Macrobiotic Diet...thoughts

 
I'm posting it here, too, because I'm kinda psyched about finally writing out some of the things I've been kicking around in my head, and ranting about verbally, for so many years. The first part, in QUOTE tags, was posted by someone who was responding to another LCF member who had harsh criticism of macrobiotics.

[QUOTE]While Nero's proposed eating plan may be considered macrobiotic, that doesn't mean he can't follow it's general guidelines with success...
<snip>
I still believe it's a workable framework.....[/QUOTE]

This is a reasonable point of view. But in this case the general guidelines aren't worth a hill of adzuki beans. Let's take a look at those guidelines and what they're based on.

The macrobiotic diet is...   more »

A new word for Ulysses this past weekend was toast -- or, as he pronounces it, "toatch." He puts a hard "tch" on the end of lots of his words: "boatch" for boat, "mootch" for move, and so on. Lot of other words, he puts a "k" or "g" at the front end: "guck" for truck, "guck" for duck, "guck" for stuck, "gock" for sock, "cock" for clock. All these words sound almost alike to ...   more »

Ulysses drew this picture on his magnetic doodle pad, then took it to show Donald, saying, "Fish!" So Donald snapped a photo, and sent me Internet chat at work to tell me about it. I was so excited, I told everyone in the room, and I couldn't wait to get home and see my little boy's first picture!
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Ulysses turned three years old on Friday, Feb. 16! We had a party on Saturday. Check out the slideshow, and also the YouTube movies. (Click the "more >>" link to read more and to see more YouTube starter frames.)

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What does Ulysses say? Here's a glossary, in approximate reverse order of development. That is, the higher up on a list the word appears, the more recently it's appeared.
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Now! View photos taken this month.


Blogware has a nice photo album feature that I'll be making more use of. My plan is to create month-by-month albums for months to come.

Blogware also lets you "post to the past." I'll take advantage of that to fill in past months, as well. The post-to-the-past feature was one of the main reasons I signed up with this service, back when...   more »

Here are some photos we took during December 2006.


Looking over these, I realize most of what I take is pictures of Ulysses, pictures of some great food we cooked, and pictures of Ulysses eating some great food we cooked. So our obsessions are pretty clear.

Also note Ulysses' disdain for clothing in general, even in December. In Wisconsin. When we can get a shirt on him, we're so happy about it, we don't care how long...   more »

About two weeks ago, Ulysses used the word "boo-boo" for the first time. I've never used it, myself -- Don says he's said it. And it's used in a couple of often-seen TV episodes I can think of (Spongebob Squarepants: No Weenies Allowed; Go, Diego, Go: A Boo-Boo on the Pygmy Marmoset) Ulysses didn't just say it; he used it.

We were sitting together at the dining table. I was reading the Web on my ...   more »

When I came home from work today, Donald was excited. "He said lots of words all day long!" he said. "I asked him if he wanted a banana, and he looked at them and said, 'Banana!' Then I offered him some cheese, and he said, 'Cheese!'"

He also insisted on using the cheese slicer, apparently. It's the type that's officially called a "cheese plane" -- pull backward against the cheese and a sliver comes up ...   more »

<a href="http://www.technorati.com/claim/pawj423827" rel="me">Technorati Profile</a>

I'm signing up this blog for Technorati.com. That will make it so these entries will be indexed and searchable all over the place, or something like that, and hopefully make me cooler. I have to include this text for it to happen.
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A woman in Los Angeles has filed a class-action lawsuit against food industry giant Kraft for its misleading guacamole, which contains just a whisper of avocado -- about 2%, according to this LA Times article. Even though the word "guacamole" means, in Aztec, "avocado sauce." (See my article on the etymology of the term.)

What's the goo made of, if not its eponymous fruit? Like most supermarket guacs: food starch, corn syrup and hydrogenated oils. With a dose of blue and yellow food coloring to simulate avocado green.  Mmmm...

I found out about this on slashfood.com.
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Here are some photos we took during November 2006.


Roar! Frozen grapes are delicious!

November includes Thanksgiving and some luscious pecan-topped pumpkin praline pie from the pages of our favorite new magazine, Cook's Country. Oh, boy.
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Here's my Amazon.com review of this book, which I haven't read yet. I discovered it poking around on the site after reading most of The Way We Eat by Peter Singer -- which I plan to write about on this blog. I saw this book, and that it had only 19 reviews. Mostly I just wanted to say a word or two and do the good deed of making the number of customer of reviews ...   more »

My friend Michelle came over to celebrate Slava with us today, and we cooked and feasted into the late hours. Michelle is fast becoming our Serbian holiday co-celebrant de rigeur -- she's already come for two Serbian Christmases in a row.

November 14 is my family Slava -- a Serbian custom celebrating the patron saint of the family. In my case, we have two, Sveti Kuzman i Damian (Cosmas and Damian). Slava originated way back ...   more »

Remember those Audubon birds? Four in a sack marked $2.99 at Savers. Score!

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This summer, we had an intense, painful heat wave. But now it's September, and the highs are often in the 60s.

Donald told me he took the double fan out of the bedroom window today, while I was at work. But it made Ulysses upset. "So, you put it back in?" I asked.

"I had to," he replied. "And then I had to plug it in."

"He wanted it plugged in?"

"He insisted on it! ...   more »

Oh, how I wished I had a camera!

U and I went down to the 8th annual Food for Thought Festival of sustainable agriculture by the Capitol Square. I hadn't planned on going, but attending the reception at L'Etoile yesterday after work got me wanting to go. I was among those invited for working on or helping to publicize the event. It was my third invite -- I had an article about the fest in ...   more »

Saturday. We needed lots of groceries. After a leisurely breakfast, and with U in a good mood, we ran some errands together and then headed to Woodman's. U was in a good mood, but evidently it was not a mood for grocery shopping. Don pushed the cart around the produce section while I alternately ran in circles after U or held him while he squirmed to be put down. As we began down the meat ...   more »

So excited that my comments got included in the unofficial Project Runway podcast! With my name and everything!

Dinksontv.com is a DC-area couple who produce two podcasts each week that the show is running -- a pre-show and a post-show. Sound obsessive? Sure, but what the heck. A few weeks ago, I'd never even watched the darn thing and it sounded completely uninteresting: a reality show based on a competition among fashion designers. OK. So what.

But this is what happened. Don and I watched Hell's Kitchen on Fox all summer, and boy, were we disappointed. Didn't learn a darn ...   more »

U and I went to the Orton Park Festival with our friend Michelle, who recently moved to just about a block from there. It was the third year in a row that U and I had gone down there.  I think. Maybe we just went once, two years ago. We saw Lou and Peter Berryman play -- fantastic, of course -- and bought a dark red long-sleeved T-shirt with the Orton Park Festival logo on it (No year on it, so can't use that as a clue) from a table manned by Cynthia Nolen, who was at the time a ...   more »

Inventing the Child

To use the type of language that quickly becomes familiar to a reader of this book:

The dominant culture reproduces itself by telling itself stories about itself. These stories tell of the rightness of obedience to authority, of the natural order of hierarchy, of power, of the obvious right of the strong to use violence and force to coerce the weak, of the need of the subjugated to be controlled. Children learn these stories, which reinforce the realities that they themselves experience and that they see around them.

By telling these stories about children (or stand-ins for children, as...   more »

In July 2004, I posted this picture of me and Baby U here. This year, we wanted to get an updated shot while the daisies were in bloom.
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A good honest burger made over hot charcoal. Mighty hard to argue with.

Cole slaw recipe courtesy of Tyler Durden, I mean Tyler Florence.

In the background: Southern Sweet Tea, our own recipe. Also, a sliver of Don in his Hawaiian shirt for the day. Chillin' on our Fourth of July weekend vacation.

I picked up the burger ingredients at the new neighborhood grocery, Pierce's, after spending a couple of hours there writing my article for ANEW magazine for August. Subject: beekeeper Mary Celley. Pierce's has a comfy coffeeshop-like area, with free wireless Internet. They even have free coffee, which   more »