Antares picks Matt Damon

When given the choice between Matt Damon and Ryan Gosling, Antares chooses Matt Damon. Good kitty.
Antares, unlike any other cat I've seen, actually watches television. When I'm watching a movie, he will come out from under his hiding place and sit attentively and watch the screen. It is very cute.

Two Traditions

Two Christmas Traditions I love:

Christmas Meat Pie. A newer tradition, I can't get over how much I love ground pork cooked in a pastry crust. This year the crust included pastry stars which not only is pretty, but gives you more crust. Delicious!

Christmas cookies.

The MAunts get together and bake many kinds of Christmas cookies in preparation of the big day. There is also a baklava making day. I really enjoy having all of the different varsities of homemade cookies. I also like that we always have a few Greek cookies. I appreciate even more that they appear without any work on my part. A cookie baker, I'm not.

Cute Kitties

Antares likes to be very near Sentinel.

I think sometimes Sentinel finds it a bit overbearing.

Key Lime Pie

The Christmas Eve Eve--the night before the night before Christmas a.k.a December 23--tradition in our family is that we have soup at my place. In addition to soup, I made key lime pie for dessert. Really it was plain old lime pie, but Cooks Illustrated said that was okay, and who am I to argue?

It was delicious! So delicious I forgot to take a picture.

Comic Art Trip: Food

We got a recommendation of the Glenwood from a friend. I had a delicious piece of cake.

Having eaten, our journey to Eugene ended with a long, dark drive back. It was a fun day.

Mattman!

Matt used his amazing super power to locate this bat symbol

(Yes, I am shamelessly padding this blog with multiple posts from a day trip.)

Kid Comic: Woman

Despite her lack of name, I thought this superhero was quite well done.

Very nice collage effect.

Kid comic: Supersnail

Supersnail was perhaps my favorite creation. I think this concept is brilliant.

The cover of the first issue

I guess if you are faster than something, a speeding rock is a good thing.

Every super hero needs a super villain:

Actually, my money is on Mr. Salt, here.

Kid comics: Combine boy.

The exhibit itself was interesting. It was fun to see the original pieces of comic art. You could see the whiteout in some places, and the guidelines the artists had drawn. In addition, I got an insider's tour, of sorts, because Matt knows so much about comics.

Also fun were the kid comics downstairs. There were many different examples of student created superheros. Here is Combine Boy drawn by a second grader.

And Combine Boy himself:

Comic Art

Parking resolved, we head off to the museum. I've not been to the University of Oregon campus. It's lovely in that brick college way.
Matt poses in front of the sign.

Comic Art: parking

We took a day trip to Eugene to see the art exhibit Faster than a Speeding Bullet: The Art of the Superhero at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. I read the directions of how to get there. They said nothing about parking meters. Not having any change, I ended up going to the campus bookstore and buying a commemorative UO Rose Bowl Key Chain to get change.
I'm noticing now that the web site has a Parking Site Map which explains about metered parking. Still, a link between the driving directions and the parking site map would be useful.

Who doesn't love kittens?

Even Matt, who's main concern with getting another cat was that it be one that stayed away from him, tries to tempt him out.
In other news, after the first two days of ignoring the kitten, Sentinel abruptly changed his mind and flopped down in front of the couch, meowing for Antares to come out. He wanted a buddy after all.
Such cute kitties!
Antares sits like this a lot. He wants to see what is going on, but he is ready, at moment's notice, to spring under the couch again.

Atari emerges. And gets a new name

So I've been bribing the cats: Sentinel to associate Atari with more food and Atari to come out from under the couch, which is where he spends a lot of his time. It's going well. Both cats like to eat.
In other news, Matt is opposed to the name Atari, which I was happy to keep for him. Something about not having an Atari gaming system as a child. We arrived at Deborah's Hanukkah early and while keeping out of her last-minute party prep way we grabbed an astronomy book. Matt had the great idea to look for a new name for Atari. We found Antares, which is the brightest star in the constellation Scorpio. It also sounds a lot like Atari. So he has been renamed. Trial period is still going on. But it's going well.

Atari Arrives

Talks over, we brought Atari home from his foster mother's house for a two week trial. She lives near us, so the ride wasn't long, but he didn't like the transport over, yowling a few times. When we let him out he immediately sought shelter behind this bookcase. I manged to take a picture and then we left him alone.

Later, Atari stuck his head out to see who this Sentinel cat was was, and Sentinel hissed at him. I've seek cats hiss and swat and Sentinel and he never bats an eye. I've never seen him hiss at any cat. Then, we bring home a buddy for him and the first thing he does is hiss.

More about Atari: he was a feral kitten--you can see his clipped ear in this picture, indicating that he has been fixed. He didn't like life in the shelter, but he loved living in his foster home, where there were two male cats he looked up to. Annika, his foster mother was looking for a home for him where he could be with another cat to learn how to be a cat. I figured Sentinel would be good for that, but we shall see.

In talks with...

The foster mother of this kitten, Antares, to see if he might come and live with us.

Celebrity

I learned this great parlor game from my colleague Kristen. Here's what you do. You get together a bunch of friends (or random people or relatives.) You cut up paper into small pieces. Everyone takes a pile of paper and writes down as many celebrities as they can think of, one per piece of paper. After writing on each paper, they fold it in half and put it in a bowl. Everyone keeps writing until the bowl is full. The group should define what "celebrity" means before you start writing. Generally, well-known actors, political figures, authors, sports figures. It depends on your group. Students getting their advanced degrees in literature could probably have an entire game full of obscure literary people/characters. Divide up into teams consisting of about three people and grab a watch or timer that can count off one minute.

The first group picks a person to go first describing. They draw a name and start describing who the person is. For example: "He wrote a lot of books with not many descriptive words and killed himself in Ketchum, Idaho."

If the group consists of anyone literary or with knowledge of Idaho suicides, one of the teammates will shout out, "Ernest Hemingway!" At that point, the person describing sets the name in the team pile and start the process over again. They keep going until one minute has elapsed and the time keepers call time. Then the bowl gets passed to the next time who chooses a describer.

The turns rotate between teams and the person describing rotates within the team so every person has to describe. If the describer is mid-description and the time runs out, they return that name to the bowl. When all the names in the bowl have been described and correctly named by the teams, the winner is the team with the most slips of paper.

Often times, what makes this game so funny is the way people get summed up. Like, "Football/murder guy" (OJ Simpson!). The other thing that happens is that sometimes a team won't be evenly matched. The first time Matt and I played this, Matt was on a team where he was the only one with television/actor/movie knowledge. I was quite impressed with how well he could describe names phonetically as with this interchange:
Matt: Her sister is on Bones and she is an actress.
Team: Huh?
Team: Was that just English?
Matt: Never mind. It's up on the hill over there.
Team: The zoo!
Matt: Right. Now turn that into a girl's name...
Team: Zoo, zoo, zoe!
Matt: a little bit more
Team: Zoey!
Matt. Right. Now, it's a perfume that old women wear.
Team: Obsession
Matt: Older than that.
Team: Chantilly
Matt: Nope, try again
Team: Oh! Chanel.
Matt: Right. Now. It's what the French use for "the"
Team: The?
Matt: Yes, "the" What do French people say instead of "the"?
Team: De
Matt: Not quite
Team: Des?
Matt: Yes! Now put it all together.
Team: um, Chaneldes?

At this point the time ran out and I gasped for breath, wiped the tears from my eyes and eventually stopped laughing. I knew who he was talking about from his first clue (mostly because I wrote the name in the first place.) and it was amusing to watch him try and pull the name out of his teammates. When I pulled the name later in the game, I said:
Me: Starred in Almost Famous and that movie with Will Ferrell and she sings.
My team, who were much more pop culture oriented and who also had been primed by Matt's clever description before said:

"Zoey Deschenel."

Another favorite interchange: My brother draws a name, looks relieved and turns to my Aunts, one of who attends church every week and says, "He's the son of god."

The Aunts gave him a blank stare.

Chris continued "Um. Okay. Made loaves and fishes feed an entire crowd?"

"Oh!" My church-going aunt cried, "Jesus!"

It's also interesting to see which names pop up several times. Based on the two games I've played we all are thinking a lot about Julia Child, George Clooney and Hilary Clinton.

Roots.

I've read that many vegetables roots extend to as far as six feet down in the soil. Looking at the
root of this beet from my garden, I can believe it.

We are cute

We worked hard and we had fun. Then we took pictures.

TSDP, more photos.

If you just couldn't get enough of the TSDP in that last post, here are some photos, and at the very bottom, our dress rehearsal video with bonus footage from alternate cameras at the auction. Thanks to Joshin, for the videos and to either Ariel or Kristen (I'm not sure which one ended up with my camera) for taking these great pictures.

Top Secret November Project- A Million Ways to Edit from Joshin Yamada on Vimeo.