i think the photos pretty much speak for themselves....

i don't know if you can really tell, but the grey part is kinda acid-washed.

the girl in the passenger seat, of course, saw me taking the photos, and the look of "oh. my. sweet. god." on my face. to her credit, she looked a little embarrassed, like "i know. i know. it's his car, not mine, okay?"

celebrity dog butt of the week

this is henry. you remember henry, the one who invoked the wrath of lulu? well, now you can put a butt with the name. he is sydney's baby, a purebred....um...irish setter? i think there are more words in the name of the breed, and i'm embarrassed that i can't remember it exactly. but he is a beauty, and very sweet, and though he's a little crazy because he still has all his male parts because syd wants to breed him, he is generally a good boy.

pookiellamarazzi

yesterday as stephen was biking home past pratt, all the streets were closed off for some big filming to-do. he asked a production lackey what it was all for, and they said it was a movie called the good shepherd. we imdb'd it, and it turns out that there might be some bonafide big-ass hollywood types in our little neghborhood!

1) it's being directed by deniro, but as stephen works in tribeca and has had to deal with tribeca film festival stuff for years, and deniro hasn't been in a good movie in years (please don't defend meet the parents to me. i hated that movie as much as i love zoolander, and that there is a lot of hate), and he's too old and boring to be involved in any fun celebrity scandal/gossip, deniro is really no big whoop. but don't worry, it gets more interesting...

2) billy crudup has a supporting role! i would love to see him and his cheekbones.

3) matt damon is starring! okay, actually that's not too exciting to me either. the only time i think i have ever really given matt damon any thought was like 6 years ago when i did a focus group for a company that was developing a new brand of vodka. they would name existing popular brands of vodka and ask us things like "what's the first thing that pops into your mind when you hear that brand?" and "what celebrity do you associate with that brand, and why?", and when they asked me those questions about absolut, i answered, respectively, "high school and vomitting" and "um, i guess maybe...matt damon? you know, bland, boring, safe, accessible....", which earned me some serious glares of hatred from most of the other girls on the panel, who had just pontificated about how much they loved absolut and used the bottles for vases, and probably thought matt damon was just dreamy. but, hey! it was a focus group—i was there to be honest, not make friends, especially not with a bunch of absolut-swilling ting girls. anyhoo. where was i? oh yeah, about to reveal the crown jewel:

4) mr. absolut's wife is being played by...the jolie! one half of bradgelina, miss superlips herself, is possibly hopefully going to be mere blocks from my house! joe lee!* in my hood! sorry for all the exclamation points, but this is exciting. i may be able to deny or confirm the pregnancy. i might even see brad. maybe he'll be there with the kids, taking care of them while joe lee "acts". the tabloids have landed in clinton hill, people.

so, have no fear—mr. baby man and the camera and i will be out there tomorrow seeing what we can see. we were going to go today but he's still a little sicky and therefore cranky and didn't seem up for a walk. i told him about joe lee, but he just said "nang!" and smacked me in the eye. but tomorrow, i promise.

joe lee!



* sarah told me a few weeks ago that one of her coworkers refers to angelina as "joe lee", and we have since taken it up as well. yes, it is kinda like just saying her last name, but there are subtle differences in intonation, and a definite little pause between the "joe" and "lee". it's pronounced with a teensy bit of a southern accent, with equal emphasis on the "joe" and the "lee", but always with empasis. as in "oh, joe lee," or "what have you done, joe lee?" try it, it's fun!

you might want to get a drink and a comfy chair...

ay yi yi. what a freaking week. to sum up:

monday - we arrive home at approximately 3am b/c we decided to take a little detour to the massachusetts seashore on the way home b/c a bunch of friends who we haven't seen in a while were all there at one friend's family's beach house and it was kinda sorta on the way home if you don't mind turning an 8 hour trip into a 14 hour trip. do i sound a tiny bit bitter? just a tiny bit, really. we had a great time at the beach (it deserves and will get its own post, later), but being in the car in the middle of the night with a baby who wakes up every hour or so and needs to be comforted back to sleep without being taken out of his car seat which means leaning over the carseat and nursing him when all you want to do is be asleep yourself? not. so. much. fun. so of course the rest of the day is totally lost, i am a total zombie (since wile still wakes up around 7! wheee!), and i conclude things by searing my flesh. (update on that: my big puffy water-filled blisters have deflated to smaller puckery brownish callous-blisters that are splitting open and about to start itching like a mofo.)

tuesday - i don't really remember tuesday, people. between the lingering exhaustion and the injury, the day is kind of a blur. not much gets accomplished besides making sure that mr. baby man gets fed and changed and doesn't hurt himself. so this is now two days in which i have a) not unpacked my suitcases, and b) not done a damn thing to get ready for the big 1st birthday party that we are throwing on saturday....

wednesday - wile's annual physical! yay! i've adjusted to having a gnarled monkey claw instead of a right hand by now, so manage to get us on and off the bus and to the doctor's office pretty easily. i've decided not to get him any shots on this visit just in case he has a reaction to them b/c i don't want to chance him being sick for his party. (please reread that last sentence and commit it to memory and file it under "irony".) he gets all checked out and passes with flying colors and has fun playing with the doctors' hoberman sphere, and then i remember that we need to take some blood from him to check his lead level (since he likes to pick the paint chips off the walls in the kitchen like the little baby in the poster) and see if he's inherited my weird blood disorder and is going to follow in my footsteps to the operating table for his very own splenectomy! i'm a little worried that our so far so good doctor's visit is going to end in screaming, but he is awesome. the nurse comes in and ties the rubber band around his arm—even moving it from one to the other b/c she can't find a good vein in his left arm—and he just looks down at it with mild interest. hmm. then she sticks the needle in and i brace myself for the screaming but he just lets out one little cry/yelp, looks up at me, i smile at him and tell him it's okay, and he decides to believe me and looks down to watch what the nurse is doing. she puts the second vial on the end of the little tubey contraption and he reaches down, starts playing with it, and pulls it right off the tube. so of course the nurse takes it from him, gently, and reattaches it...and then he starts crying. because we won't let him play with his own blood. later that night, my mom (aka the nana) arrives from florida covered in hives.

thursday - the nana, the boo and i trek all over downtown brooklyn in the hot hot heat gathering the food for the party. it's actually not so bad, we get plenty of great stuff at the farmer's market. wile is a little cranky when we get home, but i chalk it up to a long day.

friday - wile is still a little cranky, and very warm, so we break out the thermometer...and he has a 102.5˚ fever. the day before we have 30 people coming over to celebrate his first birthday. aaaaaaaaawesome. so i call the doctor, just to make sure there's nothing i should be doing besides what i'm doing (keeping him in air conditioning, plenty of fluids, rest), and she says (okay, break out that sentence you filed away now!) that there's something going around, she's seen a bunch of cases of it lately, it's fever and sometimes a runny nose and cough and usually doesn't last long. so but i'm supposed to be getting ready for the party (which we are contemplating cancelling), and instead i have a little 22-lb barnacle who is on me like stink on shit (break down!). he won't sleep unless he has the boob in his mouth. it's like we've regressed back to the first two months of his life. i'm holed up in the bedroom sending detailed missives down to the nana and my aunt peg, who has come down early for the party. no fun for anybody. they are envying me being in the air conditioning, and i'm envying them the use of their limbs for something besides supporting a sweaty overheated sickypants. poor little monkey.

saturday - wile's temperature is back down to normal so we decide to go ahead with the party. and considering that the heat index is 110˚ with the humidity, it's a fairly successful party! wile and i take many trips up to the air conditioning to cool off, and though he's not his normal devastatingly charming self, he seems to have a good time and entertain everybody pretty well. but everyone leaves for the sanctuary of their air-conditioned cars as quickly as decent manners allow, and i can't say i'm entirely sad to see them go, since it means i can get back to my air conditioned haven....

sunday - reprieve: we head out to long island to swim in the schmergels' pool.

monday - wile's temperature is back up, so i call the doctor, like she told me to do on friday if it went back up. we make an appointment and head in, she tells us that it's nothing serious, just a bug like she thought and it should pass, and we slog back home through the heat. wile won't sleep for more than 45 minutes at a time once he goes down for the night....

tuesday - the illness has entered the next phase: runny nose and cough. if there is any sound more patheitic than a baby cough, i haven't heard it. we lay low, the last dregs of disarray from the party remain un-cleaned-up. at least the weather is nicer. then in the evening the nana and i escape to shea so that she can get in one mets game while she's up north. we're waiting in line to buy our tickets when this guy comes over, puts two mezzanine tickets in my hand, says "here, they're free, i'm taking a group and not everybody showed up, they're good seats", and walks away before i can even say thank you. amazing! and it's a great game, benson pitches well and cliff blasts a big homer and everyone is on base at least once, even david wright who doesn't get a hit but walks ahead of cliff's homer, and i learn that cliff's first name is cornelius (!!!), and i see our benefactor later on and get to say thank you, which is good because they really are great seats: 2nd row mezzanine reserved, just under the eave so that when it starts to rain we stay dry.... unfortunately stephen, who is home with the little man, doesn't have quite as good a night: the yankees lose in extra innings to the devil rays (the winning run is walked in), and wile won't sleep for longer than 30 minutes at a time.

today - still massive amounts of snot, still heart-wrenching baby cough, still with the clinging and not sleeping, but no temperature and improved spirits and seemingly on the road to recovery. the suitcases remain un-unpacked, but i've made my peace with that. the nana and the little man and i have a lovely last day together—walking, gardening, playing ball—and i put her in a tinted-window car service car and wave her back to the sunshine state. tomorrow is another day....


[alas, i will not be posting any photos from our trip to the maine wilderness right now because stephen...well....while i have you here, let me tell you a little story: we were in our hotel room in portland (having left the wilderness the day before), and i was putting wile down for his afternoon nap. stephen was hiding out in the bathroom, where he was going to check some baseball scores on his phone, take a shower, and clear some photos off the memory card so that we had room to take pictures at bean's wedding that night. all of the sudden i heard him go "oh my god", followed by a strangled yelp. kinda loud. i couldn't tell if he'd seen something funny (on the camera or the phone) or if something terrible had just happened—it was an indeterminate exclamation/yelp. then he poked his head out of the door holding the camera and whispered "i just erased the whole vacation!". and though i felt for him, especially since he was on the verge of tears, i really couldn't move or talk—wile was on the verge of nappage, and i do not fuck with that. so he throws on some clothes and bolts. i get wile to sleep, then text him "are you okay? where are you?", and find out that he's in the lobby and just got off the phone with the canon help line. he didn't erase the pictures of wile swimming naked and sitting on the rocks at pemaquid and eating his first lobster completely, he just erased the formatting. which means that if we buy some auxillary piece of equipment and "image recovery software", we can have them back. as he said, we will take the money for those things out of his "bonehead fund."]

right here, not so much

in case you were wnodering why there haven't been any posts in the past week, it's because i was on vacation in the maine wilderness without a computer. i meant to post before we left that i wasn't going to be posting, but obviously thst didn't happen. and then tonight i was all geared up to import some photos and post all kinds of funny stories from the trip, but then i grabbed a hot pan handle like a total jackass and gave myself second degree burns all over my hand. so, a) i'm in horrific pain, and b) typing left-hand-only is slow and annoying.

so i'm going to go try to get my shit together a little bit, and i'll be bck soon. hopefully. barring further injury or mental lapses.

ps - if you're looking for something to read while you're waiting for me to post again (hee), i read a good book in maine: oh the glory of it all by sean wilsey.

snausages

notice of procedural change

i originally set the comments so that you had to sign in to leave one, because i had heard so many tales of spam woe. but then another blogger who wishes to remain anonymous told me that she's never made people sign in and she's never been bothered by spam, so i changed the setting: you can now comment without signing in. so if you were holding off on commenting because you didn't want to deal with signing in, fire away. if you never wanted to comment anyway, well, as you were.

are you joshing?*

if this is a joke, it's pretty brilliant. if it's not, it's possibly even more brilliant. you have to read the comments for the full effect.

*sorry for the bad pun, i couldn't help myself

btietw

due to the soul-crushing humidity, i actually haven't eaten all that much in the past week..... i've been living mostly on seltzer-and-juice. i'm not kidding. if you live in new york, you understand. if you don't, well, i don't want to hear about it if it's not 170% humidity where you are. (as i'm writing this, the cats are looking at me like "cry me a river, fleshy. try dealing with this wearing all this fur. there's a reason that we lie on the floor like road kill all day." to which i say, "well, then maybe you shouldn't try to wriggle away and/or claw me when i'm trying to brush some of that fur off of you, hmmmmmmmm?")

where was i? oh, right, food. so of the bare minimum of caloric intake that i managed this past week, i'd say the best thing i had was an old favorite: hearts of palm dip. i got the recipe from the times a few years ago, and fell head over heels in love with it the first time i made it. it's barely even a recipe: you take two cans of hearts of palm and throw them in a food processor with a clove or two of garlic (do the garlic on its own first for more even distribution), puree till chunky/smooth, and then pour in 1/3 cup good olive oil while the motor is running till it gets fluffy (honestly, it gets fluffy. cloudlike. like puffy cumulous clouds). the recipe calls for chopped scallions, but after the first couple of times, i decided to skip those. oh and stir in a pinch of salt just before you serve it. it's the easiest and most crowd-pleasing thing that i know how to make (though not universally crowd-pleasing.... just after i first made it, stephen's grandfather took us out to peter luger for his birthday, and i started to talk about the dip—i believe i said something like, "i just found the best recipe for hearts of palm..." and stephen's granfather said "jane [his ladyfriend] got some hearts of palm last weekend...and she ruined them with all this garlic!" at which point i decided to move the conversation in another direction....). it's best on crostini, i think.

bonus: the most disappointing thing i ate this week (well, actually, drank): the new green tea frappucino from starbucks. what can i say, i was intrigued, i hunted it down. it tastes basically like melted green tea ice cream, which isn't shocking, and which is actually god for the first few sips. but by the time i got to the middle of the cup, i was completely over it. too sweet, too glutinous. ick. this sounds much better.

p.s.: i don't know why there are so many parentheses in this post, so don't ask me.

dog butt of the week

stephen likes the hairy weiner dogs.

wait, lactation isn't hot?

when i went out with meg to celebrate her graduamatation from law school, i had the following encounter at the bar of the club:

eurotrash guy with cheesy oblong glasses, a 5 o'clock on the dot shadow, and a freakin' newsboy cap for god's sake: are you having fun?

me: [look at e.t.g. to see who's talking to me, blink, turn back to trying to get bartender's attention]

e.t.g.: the music is good, no?

me: [make "so-so" sign with hand while not looking at e.t.g.]

e.t.g.: do you like to dance?

me: [nod, still no eye contact]

e.t.g.: me too!

me: [.....]

e.t.g.: i like your hair.

me: [big fat eye roll]

[the bartender finally comes over, i order a water]

e.t.g.: why aren't you drinking tonight?

me: [looking him straight in the eye and speaking loudly as to be sure i'm heard] i have a 9-month-old baby and i'm breastfeeding.

e.t.g.: [look of horror, disappears in a puff of smoke]


so, ladies, if you're getting some unwanted attention and blank stares, a snotty attitude, and the total cold shoulder isn't driving the hint home, just tell 'em you're breastfeeding!

[or you could take the route that meg herself took a couple of weeks later, telling a gentleman who'd been at her side for the majority of a party: "look, i'm not going to make out with you in any way, shape or form, so if you want to go try to find someone else, you probably should—the night's almost over." heh.]

oh say can you la tengo?

on the 4th of july, we + aunt syd went down to battery park to see a free concert—yo la tengo and stephen malkmus + the jicks—which we ended up not so much seeing as hearing b/c the line to get in was super long and not moving, despite the fact that there was plenty of room in the cordoned-off part of the lawn where the stage was. but the lawn where we were able to park ourselves was comfy, if the view was obstructed, and we took some good pictures:

no, mama, no....not....the bounty!!!

people always comment to me on how even-tempered mr. baby man is, and though i take this with a grain of salt becasue he's much better behaved when there are other people around (read: when the little ham has a larger adoring audience), i can agree that on the whole he is a pretty good little monkey.

that is, of course, unless i do the unthinkable. the unforgivable. if i commit the abusive, sadistic act of....cleaning off his hands with a damp paper towel!! aiiiiiiiiggggghhhhhh!!

seriously, every time i try to wipe him down a little after he eats—and therefore has half-chewed pretzel/corn pops/peas all over his hands—he writhes in his highchair like a lunatic, flailing his hands out of my grasp, squealing like a stuck pig, like i'm scrubbing him down with battery acid on a peice of sandpaper.

yesterday we went to the doctor to make sure that the little red spots that mr. baby man is sporting all over his chest and arms aren't fatal (they're not) (just an irritation, maybe bug bites), and she poked into his ears and shone bright lights into his eyes and prodded open his mouth with a stick and he sat there like a little buddha, blinking calmly at her.

so, to sum up: wooden stick to the throat? fine. gentle cleansing of hands with soft wet paper product? hell on earth.

someday i'm going to show him the shower scene from silkwood and tell him, "look! they're making like 1/4 of the fuss you make, and that's steel wool!"

from the home office in brooklyn, ny

stephen told me the other morning that i was creating antagonism toward lulu with all of the things that i've written about her here on pookiellama. i think this was because he noticed that all of my girlfriends now address her as "bitch".

so, even though all of the things i've written about her are 100% true, in the intrest of fair and balanced reporting (that's real "fair and balanced", not fox news–style "fair and balanced"), i give you a top 10 list of nice things about lulu:

1. when stephen gets out of the shower, she dries his ankles for him by weaving around them. it's very sweet. (it would be sweeter if she had ever, even once in the past 6 years dried my ankles...okay, right, sticking with the positive...)

2. when she attacked sydney, she really was just trying to protect her brother. [note on that: syd and henry came to visit again 4th of july weekend, and syd drove up friday afternoon, which meant she had to drop henry off here at the house and then come meet us at shea for the mets-marlins game. we figured it would be okay—she would put henry in his crate, hopefully the cats would just stand at the end of the hallway and hiss insults at him. i should have known better. i got this voicemail as i was walking back to the parking lot with sarah: "kristen, it's syd, your cat won't let me into your house. i don't even have henry with me yet. [he was still in the car] i don't know what to do." by the time i talked to her, she had managed to get past the stripey beast and get henry into his crate without anyone losing any blood, but only becasuse she put the crate immediately inside the door with the opening facing out and basically shoved henry into it from the vestibule.]

3. she is a skilled balancecat:


4. she has a soft white underbelly:


5. when she was a kitten, she used to suck her paw, like a kid sucking her thumb. it was adorable.

6. she likes to get into the clawfoot tub and chase her tail. it's a really good arena for tail-chasing because the sloping sides really facillitate the spinning and flipping. i could watch her do this for hours.

7. unlike her brother, she doesn't knock our belongings off of our dressers and bedside tables when she wants us to get up in the morning to feed her. she just waits. like a good cat.

8. all winter long she sleeps on our bed, at our knees. granted, sometimes she steals the covers, but it's still nice.

9. she can do this:


10. though i can see in her eyes that she would like to take a swipe at wile when he gets too close, she checks herself and just walks away.

so, there. she really isn't pure evil.

but i will also—fair & balanced!—report an incident that took place mere hours ago: trucky sauntered in to the living room, where stephen was lying on the couch. stephen called to him "come here trucky, come sit with me." trucky, amazingly, walked over to the couch and put his front paws up on it and thought about jumping up. at this point lulu, who had been asleep on the arm of the couch, stood up, stretched, gave trucky a look and walked down the couch and sprawled out on stephen's lap. ten minutes later, when trucky was definitely gone, she jumped off his lap and stretched out on the rug.

we report, you decide!

dog (not butt) of the week

this is zoe. she came to stephen's birthday party on saturday with paolo and heather.

as stephen said, it was an absolute miracle that she made it through the party with out being stepped on, eaten by lulu, or thrown on the grill.

the metropolitan museum of ba!!!!

wile and i went to the met with grandma barbara last week, and, well...i think we'll be sticking to children's museums for a couple of years.

wile made a fabulous discovery: when one is in a cavernous marble room with 50-foot ceilings, the noises that one makes create an echo! when we walked in to the medieval room just past the entrance, he innocently said "ba!"—and when he heard it come back to him, he sat up straighter in my arms and his eyes lit up as he looked around, all "did i do that?". so he tried again with another normal-volume "ba?" and when he heard the echo on that one again, he looked at me like "i am an acoustic god!!", and unleashed the most powerful "ba!!ba!!ba!!ba!!ba!!ba!!ba!!ba!!ba!!ba!!ba!!ba!!ba!!ba!!ba!!ba!!" i've ever heard.

we decided that the roof garden was the right place for us.

i told him it's a good thing he'e cute, or 100% of the looks we got would have been nasty, instead of only 50%.

miiiiiiine!

at the playground today wile and i ran in to finn and his nanny deena, who we had met one time before. finn is 4 months older than wile—he was one of the walking babies who wile schooled in throwing skills—and a very sweet, gentle little guy who does a lot of observing and seems to really weigh his options before taking any actions.

wile and i were playing ball again, and finn and deena joined us. finn was getting better at throwing—doing a little overhand, even—and things were going fine. then finn took a little too long to get the ball back to wile. first wile looked at me, like "could you tell him to get a move on?" then he looked at finn, like "have you not played ball before? i believe i've even played ball with you before, so you should get the concept. i throw to you, you throw it back." then he looked back at me and started crying. oh dear. deena got finn to throw the ball back, and said "you know what, we have a ball with us too. i'll get it."

this seemed like a good solution—until finn threw his ball to wile, and wile was all "thanks, sucka", and wouldn't give it back. he had his ball in one hand and finn's ball in the other hand, and was not letting go. finn crawled over, reaching for the ball and whimpering/crying. deena said "huh, he's never cried over a toy before." oh, excellent.

apparently, i am that baby's mom....

trucky attacks!!

okay, not really.

wile and i had just made it home from the upper east side—a journey that, from our house, is not for the faint of heart even without an 11-month-old who is two hours overdue for nap time and therefore acting like a schizophrenic monkey on acid—i'm really happy and clapping my hands, whee! now i'm really upset and crying hysterically and clinging to your neck! here, let me climb up your shirt with my monkey claws! ooo! ooo! eee! eee!—and were sitting on his futon nursing. i had the window fan and the ceiling fan on, and the wind was making the door blow open and shut a little bit. he was 3/4 asleep, and i was leaning my head on the wall with my eyes closed. it was so nice and peaceful, after the long trip home from a long and tiring day...then i opened my eyes and saw, at the end of the futon, about three feet from my face, truck charging us like a crazed rhino!! i screamed and clutched the baby (who barely moved, he was so beat), and trucky took a hard right and skidded to a stop under the glider, looking around for whatever he thought was chasing him.

at this point i figured out what had happened: he must have come through the door when it was open and then had it catch him in the ass when the wind blew it shut, which catapulted him into his mad dash straight for us. so of course i started laughing silently, my eyes tearing, trying not to wake up the baby any more. but when i looked down at him, his little eyes were open about a millimeter and he was smiling this totally drunken smile around the boob, trying desperately to get in on the joke. he managed a few feeble little "heh"s before falling asleep again, and i nearly bust a lung trying not to laugh anymore, now both at my poor high-strung cat and my poor exhausted child.

not that i blame trucky for being high-strung, having to live with that crazy bitch up in his face all the time....

it's really, really tiring lying around on the living room floor all day. really.

click here for a larger version that really shows off the fang....

work it baby, own it....

maybe the flash isn't necessary, no?


le tigre (or perhaps blue steel)


you're a monkey, wile! dance, monkey!


you know you wanna take a bite


okay, lady, give me the shiny silver thing now....