How do you like your coffee?

"Coffee and Beignets" courtesy of navycrackerjack74.

Leave room in my cup for cream and space in my posts for pictures.

I appreciate your comments and shape The Slow-Cooked Sentence in response to them, so will continue serving up illustrated words. Pictures "magnetize the eye to the page and create an atmosphere for the rest of the piece," according to Skelliewag. The site, dedicated to helping freelancers, bloggers and entrepreneurs excel at what they do, has an excellent article on how to find great images for free.

Unless my images are self-generated, I find almost all of them through Flickr's Creative Commons page or Compfight, a Flickr search tool. All legally mine to use. All free.

Me.

And while on the topic of the connection between word and picture, you must check out this amazing puppet show told in 35 photos. Really. You must. It's at The Big Picture.

Have a happy weekend. I'll see you Monday, coffee in hand.

What's cookin?

So, let's talk about it.

Do you miss the photos?

What?

You didn't even notice.

Ooookay. Go back and look. Three posts with just words.

Love it?

Hate it?

Doesn't make a damn difference to you 'cause you're just here for those slow-cooked sentences?

I don't wanna give the visual up entirely, just thinking of using it less.

Come on. Let's converse. Whadda ya think?

Woohoo for the workers

Hoorah for the secretary! An old ad courtesy of Olivander.

After this weekend's work -- sanding a door, painting a wall, scrubbing a house -- The Slow-Cooked Sentence is playing on this day dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers.

Gone swimmin'

Avalon, New Jersey photo courtesy of Jeff Weston.

I'm taking time off for sand, surf and salt water taffy, and will return Wednesday, July 29. See you then!

Localicious

Image courtesy of Chris Silas Neal.

What's a gal to do who has sworn off store-bought tomatoes, but who's own small plants are maybe two months away from offering up their first fruit, gloriously red and warm when plucked off the vine? I count the blossoms, longingly press my nose against the fuzzy leaves and inhale their perfume.

Backyard tomatoes are as local as one can get, and the new links in the right-hand column are local, if a bit more broadly defined. I start with the image above by Chris Silas Neal, who's not a local artist but whose poster (inspired by Great Depression-era art) is free to post locally, and then I riff from there ... a song, a birth, a lemony kiss, a free wheeling moment, a backyard bird ... local links I love and local loves that are linked. Each of them a tiny yellow flower filled with juicy promise. Go ahead, take a bite.

From the brass section

Photo courtesy of spcbrass.

A tiny bit of horn tooting:

My essay "In which a heart hurts" is featured on Blogger's Best Carnival. A carnival collects links to blog articles on a particular topic, and is like a magazine with a title, a topic, editors, contributors and an audience.

A final burst of joy

For more joyful images, click here.

In the strawberry patch I pose
freshly painted raspberry toes.

Fulfilling a pledge to take a Joy+Ride this month.

Silly soup song

Editor's note: The Slow-Cooked Sentence is devoting itself to song this week as part of its Joy+Ride, a month-long quest that involves planting, polishing and singing.

In the bowl:

Great Big Gobs of Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts
Photo courtesy of meganpru

Sing along with me and my kids. I dare you.

The Recipe: Gopher Guts
Serves: One campsite

Great big gobs of greasy, grimy gopher guts
Chopped up monkey meat
Concentrated birdie feet
Chopped up eyeballs
Baked in a pot of blood
And I forgot my spoon!

Great big gobs of greasy, grimy gopher guts
Chopped up monkey meat
Concentrated birdie feet
Chopped up eyeballs
Baked in a pot of blood
And I forgot my spoon!
But I gotta straw!
(Slurrrp!)
(Aaaaah!)

What happens in the backseat ...

Editor's note: The Slow-Cooked Sentence is devoting itself to song this week as part of its Joy+Ride, a month-long quest that involves planting, polishing and singing.

... stays there. Photo courtesy of Larsz.

So today's my anniversary and I forgot.

"I'm happy," my husband said as he reminded me. "I'm happy with you. The kids. The house."

"I think Ivan's in the toilet," I replied.

As he pulled out the toddler, I raised my glass in a silent, solo toast to fourteen years, four kids, but not one of them conceived in a backseat. I shrug. Sex, schmex, and then hum a little of that song from "Fiddler on the Roof."

(Tevye) ...
Do you love me?

(Golde)
I'm your wife.

(Tevye)
"I know..."
But do you love me?

(Golde)
Do I love him?
For twenty-five years I've lived with him
Fought with him, starved with him
Twenty-five years my bed is his
If that's not love, what is?

(Tevye)
Then you love me?

(Golde)
I suppose I do.

(Tevye)
And I suppose I love you too.

Want to know where some great backseat action is taking place? Check out Black Cab Sessions Chapter 60 featuring Calexico. I'm digging the song "Not even Stevie Nicks," particularly this line:

With a head like a vulture and heart full of hornets, he drives off the cliff into the blue.

Ain't it a beaut of a sentence? And there's enough in that song for me to pull my husband into the backseat for our own little session.

Mama's mix

Editor's note: The Slow-Cooked Sentence is devoting itself to song this week as part of its Joy+Ride, a month-long quest that involves planting, polishing and singing.

"Casi05" courtesy of INDEED.

Thirty songs plus half
a day all for me equals
sweet, sweet sanity.

The time's been spent, but I can still share my songs. My favorite is "Half Acre," I can listen to The Kinks all day long, and you've got to check out the lyrics to "A Chat With Your Mother."

• I'll Fly Away, Alison Krauss & Gillian Welch
• Julia, The Beatles
• Mother Nature's Son, The Beatles
• Half Acre, Hem
• Your Mother Should Know, The Beatles
• Ghost Town/Poem For Eva, Bill Frisell
• God Bless The Child, Billie Holiday
• Sunspots, Bob Mould
• I'll Come Running, Brian Eno
• All Mama's Children, Carl Perkins
• What A Wonderful World, With L Dan Zanes & Friends
• Leave It Like It Is, David Wilcox
• Do You Realize??, Flaming Lips
• White Winter Hymnal, Fleet Foxes
• After Midnight, J.J. Cale
• Crazy Mama, J.J. Cale
• Boom Boom, John Lee Hooker
• Hot Potatoes, The Kinks
• Have A Cuppa Tea, The Kinks
• Bonjour, Bonjour, L'Autobus A Vapeur
• Our House, Madness
• You Are My Sunshine, Norman Blake
• That Was Your Mother, Paul Simon
• Mother and Child Reunion, Paul Simon
• A Chat with Your Mother, Sally Rogers & Howie Bursen
• Inní mér syngur vitleysingur, Sigur Ros
• I Wish, Stevie Wonder
• Isn't She Lovely, Stevie Wonder
• What Child Is This, Vince Guaraldi
• I Took My Mom To the Prom, The Ziggens

Participating

"Elephant Hiding in a Strawberry Patch" by Evelyn Leavens.

Joy+Ride is a blog devoted to poetry, photography and inspiration that I discovered via Mamazine, a now defunct site that published one of my essays. This month the two editors issued a challenge to rediscover joy. Here's the idea and its rules:

"It’s easy to lose sight of the joy in our lives, easy to forget we have the means to find joy, that we are in the driver’s seat... For the month of May, let’s make a promise to practice joy even when we aren’t feeling that joyful."

The rules:

1. Make a list of three attainable things that give you daily joy.
2. Open your calendar and find a place to fit each joy.
3. Set your own joy pace, but we suggest once or twice a week, at least.

So in a search for joy, I am:

1. Painting my toes pink.
2. Singing out loud.
3. Planting a strawberry patch.

Which made me think of the joke about why the elephant painted its nails red and instantly brought me a tiny burst of joy because I could remember the punchline! I'll keep you posted on my progress. Wanna join me for the joy ride?

Oh my, we love pie!

We have a winner! Courtesy of katyethinks.

Thanks to everyone for participating in the pie survey. Turns out, most of us love to eat pumpkin pie with vanilla ice cream while listening to "American Pie" by Don McLean. The daring among us wanted to try shoofly pie, a molasses pie popular among the Pennsylvania Dutch and in the South. For more in-depth results, check out the pies and links below:


Pumpkin's popular:



Vanilla, please:


What's in a name:



Definitions excerpted from Wikipedia. Click on the pie for a recipe.

• Banoffee pie is an English dessert made from bananas, cream and boiled condensed milk (or dulce de leche), either on a pastry base or one made from crumbled biscuits and butter. Its name is a portmanteau constructed from the words "banana" and "toffee."
• Buko pie is a traditional Filipino pastry style, young-coconut(malauhog)-filled pie. Similar to coconut cream pie, it's made with just young coconuts (buko in Tagalog) and has no cream.
• Chess pie is a traditional Southern dessert. Most recipes call for a single crust and a filling of eggs, butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar and vanilla. What sets chess pie apart from many other custard pies is the substitution of corn meal for flour.
• Funeral pie, also called raisin pie, traditionally was served at funerals, probably because it could be made at any season and kept well without refrigeration. It was common at the funerals of Old Order Mennonites and Amish.
• Shoofly pie is a molasses pie considered traditional among the Pennsylvania Dutch and the South.
• Sugar pie is a typical dessert in France and Belgium, Quebec, and the Midwestern United States. It's a single-crust pie with a filling made from flour, butter, salt, vanilla, and cream, with brown sugar or maple syrup (sometimes both) often used as additional filler. When baked, these ingredients combine into something like caramel. The name "finger pie" for the dessert was due to stirring the pie during baking with one's finger. It was stirred this way to avoid breaking the crust.

Pie in the sky

"Pi Pie" courtesy of no-frills marilyn.

The week started with snow and is ending in sunshine, crocus sightings and a Saturday of Pi(e).

In celebration of 3.14, I'm creating some self-referential charts using Google Docs, which allows the easy and free creation of documents, spreadsheets and presentations online. I thought I'd check it out after my husband mentioned it in preparation for last weekend's Nevada Interactive Media Summit, where he gave the rockin' presentation "Data-Driven Web Publishing (without a programmer)." Check it out here.

Aaaanyway, I'm also not going to let March 14th pass without a big piece of pie, or at least a close approximation to one. I've been drooling over pictures of a dark chocolate tart with gingersnap crust, and now I've got a reason to make it.

But we can make some pie together if you participate in my short survey, and come Monday, I'll post those glorious charts. Thanks for participating, and don't let Saturday slip by without a piece of pie!

Anniversaries

Photo courtesy of *PaysImaginaire*

My youngest son and I have reached milestones.

Last November, he slipped into this world, the youngest of four, the final child, our grub. A year has brought metamorphosis: The squishy and portable baby has become an squawking, walking boy. About the same time our last larvae was born, I began blogging regularly, turning thoughts into words, sometimes poetically, sometimes awkwardly, but writing, all the same. This commitment has been a major accomplishment for I am as proud of my 69 posts as I am of my four children.

What does this second year bring for the two of us? For my son, I know it will bring an explosion of communication, and the deciphering and decoding of those first words will delight and confound us. (Curious about my own vocabulary, I entered my blog into Wordle, an online toy that created a word cloud out of my paragraphs, giving greater prominence to those words I use most frequently.) So, what does the new year hold for me? An exploration of fiction, a return to freelancing, and a continued commitment to this blog and to those who read it. Thank you for your interest, encouragement and love.

Tonight, my son and I celebrate our accomplishments by eating cake. And because we should all celebrate and eat cake more often than we do, I hope you raise a fork wherever you are on this earth and join us. Huzzah!

When life throws you a curve ball

Photo courtesy of University of Wisconsin, Madison

I'm three weeks into a blogging habit and my tender new routine is in danger. What threat is hurtling toward me and my computer? Summer. Specifically, summer with kids.

I'm trying to figure how to replace the regularly scheduled program with a new routine, one that will still permit me the space and time to think and write. Now, my thinking happens as I walk them to school in the morning: The straight shot from house to school, right foot in front of left, baby lulled to sleep by the motion, so that when I return, my mind is quiet and ready to pour thoughts on to page. But on Thursday it all ends, and I'm lobbed a curve ball of warm, round summer days that melt into one another.

I don't want to strike out.

In response to Sunday Scribbling's prompt: Curve.