Portland, Oregon seems like one of those towns I’ll eventually spend some time exploring. Here’s the NYTimes article on what to do, see, and eat if you’re in Portland for the weekend.
I'm more Sprinkles than you are
I first heard about Sprinkles cupcakes because some (trendy) body wanted to treat everybody at Chad’s work to a Sprinkles cupcake for his birthday. He let everybody choose their own deletable flavor online (be sure to scroll over the flavor so you can read the decadent description) and then picked them up and delivered them the next day. It’s like he gave everybody a birthday cake of his/her choice for his birthday!
Then we (me, Bella, and Dawkins – who else?) were at the mall and I was cruising the Paul Frank t-shirts. One of them said, ‘I’m more Sprinkle than you,” and I knew then, that I really, really wanted to know whether a Sprinkles cupcake was worth the hype.
So, I began planning my Beverly Hills day around getting some of these cupcakes. We got to Bruno and Soonie’s a tiny bit late, so Dawkins and I started off immediately after Nu decided to cut Bella’s hair first.
See, Bella got her hair layered. 
Dawkins and I walked two blocks east of Rodeo and walked up to Little Santa Monica Blvd. We headed down the street (I was hobbling a little by that point – having chosen to wear my green suede penny loafer heels from Michael Kors) and walked right by a crowd of people before stopping in front of a very adorable brick storefront called Sprinkles.
I couldn’t get a great pic with my phone because of where the sun was. 
Boy these guys really have the design thing going here: everything about this place is designed to be coveted – Dawkins and I snagged several “flavor” cards and bamboo forks just because they were all so darn cute.
And guess what – that crowd we passed? – the line for Sprinkles. That’s right we joined the rest of the Beverly Hills sheep and stood in line for 45 minutes to get our cupcakes. I even missed Damian Hirst’s butterfly-wing stained glass windows at the Gagosian for the cupcakes. But it was impossible to leave; every time the door swung open, heavenly baked smells wafted out – reminding us of mom and childhood birthday parties, only better.
And to make up for waiting so long, I decided to buy a full dozen cupcakes. What the hell, I figured, Share the cupcake happiness. I got two carrot cake, two red velvet, two vanilla milk chocolate, one coconut, one banana, two dark chocolate, and two mocha. Holy cow – do you see how faulty my reasoning is here? I get back at the company for making me wait by buying triple the number of cupcakes I originally intended on buying.
but it was worth it. Every person I saw in the next 48 hours got a cupcake. I can’t wait for an occasion to buy some more!
Posted in food, los angeles, trends
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Photographers
Chad’s sister Corrina and her friend Steph Fowler are going into business for themselves and they’ve just launched their new website, rosewaterstudio.com.
If you have an event or just want great pics of the family these are the folks to call. Both have family in the hi-desert but live in Los Angeles.
Here are some examples of their photography. How lucky am I that they are shooting my wedding?
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trina turk
I guess it’s a little bit cheating to post my wedding dress shopping under the category “wedding for $2000,” since my mom is paying for the dress – but still, I am looking for a dress in the $100-$300 range versus the $1000-$3000 range.
Yesterday, a friend (thanks Sara!) reminded me of a designer named Trina Turk who has a shop in Palm Springs. I do love her clothes, but have never found anything there that looked good enough on me to spring for the extra bucks.
I stopped by and tried on a few dresses for the hell of it. There were some beautiful things in that shop… but same thing as the last times – the dresses were awfully cute, but didn’t quite suit me.
Here’s one I tried (I know it’s not fancy enough, but I liked the white crochet) 
and another one I tried on… 
and here’s one I didn’t see in the shop, but I would have loved to have worn in my twenties…
Posted in shopping, wedding for $2000
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Cooking Ninjas
I do believe that Maya and I are aspiring cooking ninjas. I called Maya for another cooking date, because I’ve found I just don’t feel like cooking when she’s not around. Luckily she was suffering from the same affliction – so we got together today and made three gigantic lasagnas, four dozen carrot/raisin/bran (and not bran) muffins, and the usual batch of 32 Nut Rice Burgers for the freezer. (Btw, we followed the recipe more precisely this time and I think the burgers are better. Also, we’ve changed the name of the Nut Rice Burgers to “Maui Burgers” in memory of the time Marlena and Damian made them there.)
I thought the un-bran muffins were pretty tasty (Maya forgot to put in the bran and carrots in the first batch!), but Maya says the recipe isn’t delicious enough to post. She had a good point: there lots and lots of mediocre recipes floating around – better to save our energy for sharing the really good ones. We baked one lasagne tonight, but by the time it was finished cooking, Maya had gone home, Bella had gone to bed, and I was stuffed.
Most likely, it will be very delicious and the recipe will be post-worthy. So, until then…
Posted in food
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Orange County Schools
One of the main factors in finding a good home is the school district in which it is located. Luckily, it seems that all the high schools in this particular area of south Orange County are miles better than the one Bella would attend were we to stay in Joshua Tree (where the teen pregnancy rate is as high as the college-bound rate – just kidding, surely 22% of the kids don’t get pregnant as teenagers).
I am specifically looking at high schools in the Capistrano and Saddleback school districts: Aliso Niguel, Capistrano Valley, Dana Hills, and Tesoro High; and El Toro, Laguna Hills, Mission Viejo, and Trabuco High, respectively. This link will take you to a page on the California Department of Education website (CDE) that shows the API score for all public schools in Orange County (and includes links to each school’s accountability report card). All the high schools we are looking at have an API near or above 800, which according to my numbers friend, is very good.
For comparison, Yucca Valley High School’s API score is 697 and you can read more about it here. Out of Yucca Valley’s 1109 students, 17 are Asian, and 453 are socio-economically disadvantaged.
Posted in house hunting
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Bella on Babies
After watching a couple of baby videos on youtube (sorry Tiff, I thought they were adorable):
“Mom, everybody thinks their baby is so cute. But they all look alike! They just need to get over it.”
Posted in says bella
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Calligraphy
I am calling upon my middle school drafting skills to hand letter all the wedding invitations. It’s fun and I am improving as I go along, so if your last name begins with a letter early in the alphabet… your invitation won’t look as nice as my guests whose last name begins with a “Z.” Sorry.
I have several calligraphy books at home, but I am still in Laguna, so I am using my Internet resources. For an example of Simple Italic Hand, try this site. For short sweet lessons in the upper case letters, try here.
I used to love practicing my calligraphy, and once I even did the program for my friend, Michelle Wolf’s, Bat Mitzvah. She acknowledged me as a “designer Jeannie,” as we were very into “designer jeans” back in the early 1980’s.
For the wedding invites though, I am not using a special calligraphy pen – just picked up a box of black ink Pilot Precise V5’s extra fine at Office Depot.
Posted in wedding for $2000
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Wedding Invitations
We’re working on our invitations today; we’ve decided that it’s too late to send Save-the-Date cards.
We just have to keep rolling with the punches. We’ve decided definitively to have a private wedding ceremony on Friday, June 22, 2007 in the National Park (up La Contenta Road) attended by immediate family. The wedding reception will be the following night on Saturday, June 23, 2007 for all our friends, also in Joshua Tree National Park.
I thought for hours about the wording of the invitations – but now it is all changed because my father just offered to give us $10,000 for the wedding. This means that the invitations will now reflect that my parents are hosting the wedding and reception, even though Chad and I still intend to keep our expenses under $2000. This is great news as the money will come in very handy for the down payment of the new house.
So I have purchased cards and envelopes from Paper Source (“cement” envelopes and “sage” cards) and now we are experimenting with printing. Once that is done we need to work out our informational card insert, attach the beautiful photo (by Corrina of course), address and stamp all the invitations. We are working with traditional invitation wording from this site. The rule of thumb for addressing the envelopes (from this site) is, “Abbreviate nothing, hand address everything.” We’re going for it – mostly. It’s pretty time-consuming, but I like thinking about each person we are inviting.
In general for the weekend: wedding ceremony Friday night and dinner at the Murdy’s; big Korean BBQ Saturday evening in the Park; bagel and lox brunch at my house Sunday morning.
All this planning is fun. We registered for gifts at Crate & Barrel yesterday!
Posted in wedding for $2000
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Giselle's First Time at the Doggie Park
Ha! Chad and I just got back from the local doggie park – what a gas. First of all, dog people seem to tend toward extroverted, friendly types, so we were chatting with lots of other dog parents. And all the dogs were super friendly too. Giselle was a little overwhelmed by the sheer amount of dog information going on: real dogs sniffing her, people calling out to her, and lots and lots of poop and pee marks to smell.
It only took her a few minutes to get into the swing of things though, and next thing we knew, she was trotting around confidently and playing with dogs about a bajillion times her size. It was all good until a Saint Bernard started up a playful romp with her. In a span of 30 seconds, the friendly chase turned into Giselle yipping and crying and running away at neckbreak speed with her ears plastered back on her head and her eyes rolling back in her head.
She took a few moments to recover in my lap and the Saint Bernard aimiably wandered over to continue his investigation of her. I was sitting on a bench and his head literally was at my face level. I examined his face, fascinated by the loose folds and creases around his nose and mouth. Then my knees began to get very warm – and I realized that I was getting slobbered. Drool was dripping in big glops down onto my jeans and all over poor Giselle. It was like meeting Jabba the Hut and having him sneeze on us.
Give me a little dog any day.
Posted in poochie
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