Random Idle Musings on Sex

So... Sex. It's great. It's fun. Highly reccommended. Can't say enough about it.

It makes me really feel sorry for the religious fanatics, who, throughout the course of history, have abstained from it.

That's like God saying "I've got this great present for you. It's like the most awesome thing ever. You can have fun with it whenever, wherever. It makes you feel better. It makes you look better -and it's always on your person. It's the best. You're just going to go apeshit when you try it!"
And you saying "Thanks, but I don't think I'll end up using it."

2 Rabbits

My dad always says, if you try to catch 2 rabbits, you'll end up losing them both.

He means that I should try to focus in my life and not pursue so many things at once. I can see his perspective on this but no matter how much I try, I can’t seem to pair down the things in my life that seem important.

I'm a person of many loves, many passions, many pursuits. I can't just drop one for the sake of "focus".

So here's where I am today, and let me tell you that it goes in about a million different directions.

1. I work a full time job doing interior design. Right now, between only 2 people, we're designing 3 condominium complexes, an office building, and several homes as well. So that means a lot of STUFF for me to do. Lots and lots of drawing, shopping and other stuff that I won't go into here. I actually love my job but there's a lot of it. It's a lot and it's nonstop all day so that when I get home, it takes me some serious motivation to roll off the sofa and get anything else done with my day. -This is my only paying gig for now so I can't very well drop this one.

2. I am working on my own clothing line. I'm getting it manufactured outside of the country in Bali, but I'm designing it here so there's a lot of going back and forth with it. Frequently these days you can find me at home, sitting amongst needles and thread and fabric littered all over my tiny living room floor. Besides the sewing, there’s also a lot of fabric and materials sourcing, money transfers, a lot of e mails and photos back and forth- Just a lot of going back and forth. I love the creativity I get to express through this line and I would love to pursue it full time and develop more designs but that would probably mean that I would have to move to Bali for a while to solidify my designs. (which I would love to do but don't have the balls to quit my day job (which I also love) to do it)

3. I am working on a food product. It's something totally original, something tasty and good for you that I think would just fly off the shelves. This also requires a good amount of time. Frequently most mornings, you can find me weighing, then tasting my umpteenth version of this product and taking detailed notes about it. So not only is my house a sewing sweatshop, it’s also turned into a food laboratory!
And even after I’ve created the perfect version of this product, I still have to get it professionally packaged, labeled and sent off for lab work so that I can get accurate nutritional information.

Then provided that all of this works out and I actually have a product that I'm proud of, then I have to do the work to get appointments with people and SELL IT so that I can actually get it on the supermarket shelves.

4. I am looking for a home. And if you already have one, you know that searching for one is a part time job in and of itself. It's definitely not something that you want to get into without having done your homework. So I'm doing a lot of research for that as well, reading a lot of books, going to a lot of open houses, researching home auctions - that sort of thing. Right now there is a mountain of real estate books that is just piling up on my coffee table. I’m actually reading through them pretty quickly though. And I think that I have probably driven my car through the maze of every single street, drive and avenue in the Lake Balboa / Van Nuys area at least three times over. (By the way, if you know of a good real estate agent for this area, please for the sake of my carbon emissions, let a girl know!)

5. I'm helping Roxy (my sister) design her new office space. And thankfully, this isn't taking a whole lot of time yet but I know how the design process goes so I know that eventually it will.

Am I crazy? Am I totally nuts? I feel like I have about a million balls in the air and I'm juggling them all while riding a unicycle and playing the tuba.

At the same time, all of these things seem extremely important and also very time sensitive. My products are all geared towards the summer season so I feel that I need to get them out as soon as I can.

Not only that but most of this stuff is totally new to me. I’ve never developed a clothing line before. I’ve never developed a food product before. I’ve never bought a house before. So I’m having to cut my teeth learning about all of these things as I go along.

And so, little ol’ me is just chugging along and pushing hard to get these things done and learning as I go. And I’m praying to God that some, if not all of this stuff works out. I want these things to get big, huge, bigger than I would have even dared to imagine. I want these things to change my life in a dramatic way. But starting all of these things and going through them day by day, it’s a little bit scary. I’m investing lots of time and money into all of these things. But the scariest part of all this stuff is that it’s not just about money for me. I mean, some of it is, of course. But for me, it’s more about my creation. I just want to see that I can do something that I totally conceived of on my own and take this baby idea and see it actually succeed, you know?

So all of these things, on all sorts of levels, seem very important for me to get done, and hence, my not being able to let any of them go.

Anyways, so that’s where I’m at these days. If you haven’t seen me or Mike around lately, believe me, it’s not because we don’t love you or don’t really really want to spend time with you it’s just that this is where we are right now.

Aaack! all of it's great but it's just that there's ALL of it.

Send us some good Ju Ju ifyou can. I'm hoping to defy the odds and catch 2 rabbits at once.
Hope to see everyone sooner than later.

Luvs - me

I Like my Job :)

Just sitting here,

drafting, taking my time, doing some floor plans for some bathrooms, looking at this, looking at that, tweeking this, tweeking that, coming up with something that looks pretty damn good. - Singing along to the radio .. "SHE WORKS HARD FOR THE MONEY .. SO HARD FOR IT HONEY, SHE WORKS HARD FOR THE MONEY SO YOU BETTER TREAT HER R I - IGHT!"

So awesome to be able to to say that I actually like my job.
And super duper awesome to be able to dork out at work.

And it's Friday to boot Whoo hoo!

Smiling in my Liver

I woke up today in the best mood.

It all started last night when I remembered something that I'd read. I recently finished reading "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert. It's a fascinating read and if you haven't already read it, I would highly reccomend it. - It's about a woman who travels the world in order to find herself. It's about change but also about being the truest version of yourself that you can be.

In the third portion of her book, she's in Bali and talking to a medicine man/guru. He's teaching her to meditate. He tells her that everything she's learned about meditation, it's too complicated. To really do it, all you have to do is sit and smile. Smile with your whole body not just your face. Smile until you are smiling even with your liver.

So as I was going to bed last night, I decided to try this. I started smiling with my head, then my face, then my chest. I sent happy, warm thoughts to every part until I felt like my whole body was happy. Then I fell asleep.

Then the most interesting thing happened. I had a happy dream. This is actually a little bit rare for me. I usually find that I'm being chased and I can't run or my teeth are falling out and I can't catch them as they fall. I don't know why but I often have somewhat perturbing dreams.

Last night was different. I dreamt that I was on a white sandy beach. It was my stretch of beach. I owned it. The sand was like powder, dotted with little swaying tufts of grass. The water, the most aquamarine shade of aquamarine that you can imagine. And I was blissed out, like completely and totally blissed out.

And it gets even better. Not only did I own my own stretch of beach, but all y'all had your own stretches of beach too. It was like a whole coast line owned and enjoyed only by me and my beautiful friends -who all looked gorgeous, by the way, sitting there basking in the sunlight and getting all blissed out with me.

After beach time was over, it was time for all of us to get to work. (here is where it gets silly but Sooo awesome). We all headed to this factory where we made toys. Then Santa Clause came and flew around the ceiling inside factory and made it snow. All the toy animals came to life. All the gears and what nots in the factory started whirring and spinning. Pipes and furniture and things in the factory suddenly turned into strings of beads or banners or more colorful toys. It was sheer wonderment and I just stood there in awe of it all.

So I woke up today, knowing full well that I don't actually own a beach, nor do I actually work for Santa Clause, but man am I in a good mood.

Much love to all you beautiful people, much love and happy sunshine, rainbow fluffy bunnies. - S

The Valley

So I’ve never really been a desert person. I like water and trees and green things and life. This whole, the desert is beautiful thing, Nyah, didn’t really get it. The thought of a weekend squatting amongst sand and cactus was less than completely appealing. But the thought of just sitting around the house for a whole, glorious 4 day weekend was even less appealing.



If I had that much time off of work, and I had to sit around the house watching the umpteenth episode of Cash Cab or go on a Target run just to get out of the house, I think I’d have to jump out a window. So, I reasoned, even if I completely hated the desert, at least it would be a new and different experience. And having a new and different experience that totally sucks is still way better than reliving an old experience that is almost 100% predictable.



So, Friday morning, we stuffed the SUV with the necessary camping accoutrements and headed off to Death Valley. We had no idea what to expect. Neither of us had ever been there and the most research that we’d done was a whole 5 minutes of looking up Death Valley on weather.com and Googling a few photos.



We drove for 5 hours past sand, more sand, rocks, a junk car lot, an abandoned mining operation and one, lone porta potty that was just sitting out there in the middle of nowhere (Thank God). At 2 in the afternoon, we finally arrived at our destination, Stovepipe Wells Camping Ground. It’s about as much civilization as you’re going to find there, just a couple of aluminum sided buildings, a general store, a bathroom, and a large parking lot full of dusty R.V.’s. We got out of the car and rounded the corner to the general store. Roxy was there, just sitting around on a warm bench and Bryan was there, sitting around on a warm bench, but also swinging a golf club.



There was a moment of "Oh there you are". Quick hugs. Then they informed us that all the campsites at Stovepipe were already taken. Stephanie and Dacia had gone to look for another place to set up camp. That was our first brilliant piece of luck. Looking around at the digs, I wasn’t so much feeling like pitching my tent in a parking lot. If I’d wanted to do that, I could’ve stayed home and pitched it at Target.



Thankfully, the girls scouted us a great location. We just had to off road it for a few miles and we were alone, on a dry riverbed, flanked by huge, red mountains. If you ever want to know what it would be like to camp on Mars, go to Death Valley.


At first, it’s so barren, it’s eerie. At night, the winds pick up and it gets cold. Kit foxes come out of hiding and scavenge for food. Then there’s the weird noises. From the inside of our tent, I kept hearing this scratchy sound that sounded like somebody using a gaint pair of scissors to cut out string of giant sized gingerbread men, or like some pyromaniac repeatedly trying to light us on fire with an oversized lighter, and being thwarted by the wind. My imagination was going crazy with all the things it might be. Then Mike finally unzipped the door, stuck his head outside and found out that it was just a piece of our tent that kept getting loose and rubbing up against another piece.



The next morning, we took a hike in a place called the Artist’s palette. Coming upon it, it’s immediately obvious why it’s called that. The minerals in the rock paint it with shades of mint green, mauve pink, black and orange. Mike, Roxy and I get seperated from the group pretty early on. We hike into the mountain. The rock walls become warped and wavy and wrap around behind us. It’s cavernous, beige, peach and glowing and we’re standing in the middle of it all. I can honestly say that I’ve never experienced anything like it, and that was definitely the point.



When we get back to our party, Dacia is taking photos, Stephanie has turned into a tyrannosaurus rex, Bryan has become one with the sand and it's all good.



At around dusk, we head off to the sand dunes, another first for me. To get there, you just park your car on the side of the road and walk straight into the horizon. There’s just seemingly endless mounds of gray, powder soft sand that stretch out forever. You have to take your shoes off cuz it’s about a million times more fun than leaving them on. The sand is so soft. It’s cold. It feels ancient. I know this is going to sound crazy, but you get the sense that it wants you to have fun on it.



We run up the dunes, and roll down them. We laugh hysterically and get sand in our teeth and don’t care. We make sand angels. We jump on the sand just to hear the deep thud it makes when you do it. We do it again and again. We run around some more. We pass sand from hand to hand, just to feel the weight shift. Who knew sand could be so fun? Then again, I haven’t been in a sand box since pre-school.



Then the moon comes up. It’s a huge glowing yellow disk that peeks up from behind the mountains. Roxy, at first, doesn’t even know what it is. “What IS that?, seriously, what is it?” as she points and runs towards it.



It’s the biggest thing I think I’ve ever seen and it’s ascending over the dunes. That moon, over the sand, and all of us just laying around in it, completely in awe of something that we’ve seen a million times but never like this, it was a site I think I’ll never forget.



That night, after we got back to camp, I had one of the best dinners I think I’ve ever had in my life. And it was a potato.



There's just something about food cooked over a campfire that makes you wonder why appliances were ever invented. I cooked my potato directly on the embers. It came out charred and black on the outside but fluffy and white on the inside. I melted a pat of butter on it and doused it with tobasco sauce. I wouldn’t have traded that potato for a king’s feast. At the moment, it was just about the most perfect thing in the world.



The next morning, we visited an old ghoste town and an abandoned mine. We ate lunch at a casino and Bryan won $100 at black jack.



All in all, I'm so stoked that we went. It’s life, you know? It just rolls out in front of you. And it completely surprises you sometimes.

I can honestly say, the desert? – yeah, it’s beautiful. I get it now.



Oh, and the best thing EVER is that the inside of my car still smells like campfire.

It's rare I ever have a dream about the O-kids

But last night I had one and I'm not even going to be-gin to interpret it but I just thought I'd share.

So I'm in my bathing suit and I'm at the entrance to this water park. Stephanie and Dacia are throwing a party and there's going to be cake and ice cream and water rides and I'm really excited.

There's even a ride that looks like a gigantic dragon. We get to ride down it's back, up and down over the humps like a big, green roller coaster.

Man, I'm really excited, I really want to get in there. Then Maria stops me at the door. She explains that all of us have to see a safety demonstration before we're allowed to enter.

She's pointing at a diagram. It's all done up in color pencil and glitter and feathers, and it's got little cartoon drawings of all of us splashing around in the water. It's even got a color pencil drawing of this dragon ride we're about to get on. Wow. This drawing looks really cool. We all look really cool in the drawing.

Man. I really want to get on this ride though. Then I wake up.

Heh! anyway, that's the peice that I remember.

New Salad Recipe

Yummers! I made up a new salad recipe. (it's a little twist on Roxy's original tabouli recipe) Just thought I'd share.

2 good bunches of parsely chopped up into half inch or smaller sized bits
2 tomatoes chopped into small, half inch or smaller sized bits
1 quarter of a red onion chopped into quarter inch sized bits
1 can of garbanzo beans washed & drained
sea salt & ground pepper to taste
a dollap of olive oil (as in just circle around the bowl a few times)
a dollap of rice vinegar (same # of circles, different bottle)
Juice of one small squeezed lemon

Shake it all up and enjoy.
SOOO good! and a really good way to get your dark leafy greens :o)

Bali Day 5 & 6

Oye! very very late this one. It's been sitting around in my journal for a while but haven't had a chance to type it out until now. If you want to know what we were up to on the previous days, then go backwards in my blogs and you'll find them.


Bali Day 5

Bought a 12 dollar facial. Laying on a chaise on the second story of a Balinese pavilion, letting my herb mask dry, enjoying the breeze, watching the sky turn from powder blue to apricot to pink.
Yup. .. life is not too bad, not too bad at all.



Bali Day 6

We 've always wanted to try it, so today, we signed ourselves up for a white water rafting excursion. At 10am a little guy named Owen picked us up from our hotel. At this point, we've already gotten pretty used to jumping into vans full of strangers and not really knowing what we're going to be in for for the day. Today, when we jumped in the van, there were already 2 Japanese girls sitting in the back seat. They could barely speak English but they were really excited, took lots of pictures, made cute little poses in front of the camera and were good fun to be around despite the language barrier.

The four of us got dropped off at the top of a mountain range that hides a deep river crevace. To get to the river, we had to climb 400 huge, stone carved steps down. This is a weird little quirck about Bali. For short people, they sure like to build giant sized steps. The steps are usually a foot high or more and when you're walking up steps, it feels like you're scaling a mountain, and when you're climbing down the steps, it almost feels like you've entered your legs in some kind of a long legged leaping marathon.

The view at the bottom was well worth the walk. The river is clear and green. We're at the base of a crevace so there are huge walls of rock and rainforest surrounding either side of us. It's so raw and so wild. It's green and black and wet. It's completely unlike anywhere I've ever been or anything I've ever seen but I think I can faintly hear the theme song to Indiana Jones playing somewhere in the back of my head.

After sitting a moment to take it all in, we get issued some equipment, some helmets, some oars, a big red inflatable raft and a tall, muscular, bald Balinese guy as our raft guide. He introduced himself as Leo, not because that's his actual name but because that's his astrological sign. I got the distinct impression that if he'd gone to high school in the U.S., he would have hands down been voted yearbook's biggest flirt and class clown all rolled into one. The minute we get into our raft, he's splashing water on the Japanese girls, making kissy faces, throwing vines on them and screaming to make them think they are snakes. Oh, and my personal favorite was when he points into the jungle and goes "Oh look, look! look! there's spider man! So, of course we all fall for it and we look and when we turn back around, he's got his hands turned upside down on his face to make what he thinks looks like a spider man mask. He thinks this is hysterical. It's mildly funny. It also mildly makes me want to attack Leo with a roll of duct tape.

Thankfully, he shuts up on occasion for just enough time for us to enjoy the jungle. The views from the raft are incredible and If it wasn't for Leo or the current which is quickly tumbling us downstream, I would sit there slack jawed and just stare at it until the crickets reminded me to go home.

We're surrounded by jungle, vines, bamboo, banana trees, every possible shade of green that you can imagine, black sand, huge black boulders that jut out of the river, churn the water and make us scream as we squeeze by- monkeys, sparrows. We even saw a 2 foot iguana sunning himself on a rock.

Occasionally, if you look up up up, past the sheer wall of jungles that you're sitting under, you'll see a little straw hut and the edges of a terraced rice paddy clinging to the hills up above. And it seems impossible that someone could have cultivated anything as tame as that in someplace as wild as this.

There are waterfalls everwhere here. One of the waterfalls is just massive, 200 feet of white water thundering down the rock face. Some of them are just little trickles and some of them are somewhere in between. They're fed by the lake inside the island's volcano. They wind down towards the river and carve out oval pools in the rock face. In some places, the water trickles down the face of a boulder that's just covered in new leaves. The water runs down the leaves and glides off their pointy ends. It streams down in shimmery lines and showers you as you glide past.

It's really fun if you can aim your raft underneath the boulders, that way the showers of water fall in front of you. Then it almost seems as though it's raining but somehow you're staying dry.

I like when the leaves fall. You'll be paddling downriver and one will just fall off and spiral down towards the water. It lands, bobs for a second and then floats along beside you like a happy, little yellow boat.

Several miles down the river, we finished our excursion and docked our raft. All in all it was an amazing experience. Mike loved it and I know that we'll definitely be doing that again.


Ta Ta's for now - S




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Bali Day 4

Wow! still behind on my blogs and we are leaving tomorrow so I don't think I will catch up. So I'll just some up what I can.

Day 4 was equal parts amazing and nauseating. We scheduled ourselves for a snorkeling tour in Talumben, which is a black volcanic sand beach on the east side of the island.

We are staying in Ubud, which is in the middle of the island so nothing is really over 40 miles from here.
Little did we know that the ride would be almost 2 1/2 hours of winding roads, bumps and stop and go traffic. By the time we got there, both of us were green with motion sickness and too nauseated to want to do anything other than just sit down.

Thankfully, at least we had some good company. Stephanie and Tim. She's a social worker from France and he's a pediatric kidney specialist from Germany. Both of them are currently living in Paris. They are coming to California in October or November so there'll be a good chance that ya'll can meet them.

We had tons of time in the car together so we commenced in the usual travel talk, swapping travel stories, talking about good places in the world to live or work, ragging on George Bush, etc, etc. By the time we got to the beach, we were all talked out but we were too motion sick to really talk any more anyways.

Mike and I had to sit a while on the beach just to get to the point where it didn't feel like we were still moving. And once our stomachs finally stopped churning, we actually had to get in the water! Which wasn't exactly pleasant because, for a while there, it was hard to even look at the water! I just wanted to sit on land and stare at things that weren't moving.

But we had limited time and really couldn't miss the snorkeling so we kind of just dragged ourselves in and went for it.

There's a shipwreck down there. It's a sunken supply ship from WW2 that was sunk by the Japanese. Of course, now it's covered in coral, barnacles and other sea life. It's absolutely amazing. It's so huge, you can barely believe what you're looking at. Swimming around, you can still make out the stern, the propeller and other parts that still vaguely resemble a ship.

The sea life is abundant and colorful. Hundreds of tiny yellow fish that spiral downward in large, flurried schools, lots of little flashy blue ones. Huge gray ones, bigger than your face that surround you by the dozen, some random blue striped ones, some little sharks etc. etc.

On the drive back from the dive, Stephanie and Tim mentioned that they wanted to stay in Ubud rather than driving back to their hotel (which was something like over an hour's drive away) so we invited them over to our hotel to shower and hang out with us.

We went into town for an excellent dinner of lemongrass oxtail soup and seafood stirfry and then walked up the street to catch a kecak fire show afterward...

Poop! the lady says the internet cafe is closing now.
Gotta go! - later! - S

Bali Day 2

Bali Day 2 was considerably better than Bali Day 1. We booked an Eco Bike tour which was really fun and very educational too.

We got loaded into a van of about 8 other tourists. It was an international crowd of very cool people and all of us chatted all the way to our first stop which was a traditional Balinese plantation.

They grow coco, cinnamon, lemongrass, papaya, vanilla and interestingly, pointsettia there as well. Our guide, Agus, was a very funny, very smiley, round cheeked Balinese guy. He crushed some cinnamon leaves for us to smell, then some lemongrass. Mmm. So nice, I could have sat there sniffing it all day. Then he macheted a coco fruit for us to try. In case you've never seen it or tried it, a coco fruit is actually a hard green thing that's roughly shaped like a papaya. The coco beans come inside squishy white pods which have a mildly sweet, fruit flavor. Mike's comment on the matter was "Wow, that looks nothing like a Hershey bar!".

After visiting the plantation, we went to a traditional Balinese house. I thought the whole experience was great because it was actually somebody's house, not just some museum. People were just hanging out in there doing what they'd normally do and they let us just walk around and see what they were doing for the day.

A traditional Balinese house is not just one structure. It's more of a family compound with several different houses, pig sty, cow stable, work area where they weave bamboo into mats, a family temple and a graveyard. Interestingly, when a couple gets married, the woman goes to the family house of the man. Their honeymoon suite is the house where the grandparents usually sleep. This is the house that's closest to the graveyard. They believe that when a man and woman concieve, that they should be as close as possible to the dead so that their ancestors can reincarnate into the new babies.

Whats more- they never sell their houses. A house can stay in a family for generations and generations. This is because every house has a graveyard and selling their house would be like selling their ancestors. I thought it was really good to get such an in depth explanation of the culture here.

After the visit to the family compound, each of us were issued a bike and a helmet that smelled like old bowling shoes. Unfortunately, bike helmets are mandatory here.We had to wipe ours down with wet wipes just to make them bearable.

The bike ride started at around the top part of the island's largest volcano so lucky for us, it was about 10 miles downhill and only about a half mile back uphill.

We went whizzing down one lane country roads, passing endless terraced rice paddies, temples and wide open countryside. There are farms everywhere and as far as the eye can see.

Most of them have a huge problem with birds. The villagers have just started to learn about recycling. One of the things they do with old plastic bags and plates is make scarecrows out of them. They cut open plastic bags and tape them together into long flags. Sometimes, they tie little bells on the end of them. Or they'll take plastic plates and make something somewhat resembling a human body out of it. Then they'll take a tin can, drop a rock in it and tie it to the scarecrow.

You wouldn't think so but all this stuff, plastic recycling that we would consider just trash his really quite mesmerizing. These long plastic flags float straight out over the green fields and across a watercolor sky streaked with peach and pink. Little bells and rocks make faint tinkling sounds that carry all over the endless green terraces. The effect is alluring and just breathtakingly beautiful.

One of the funnest things about the island is the island kids. They're brown and happy. They walk around in clusters of 3 or 5. They all learn English in primary school and they're very enthusiastic about yelling "Hello! Hello!" and waving at you. Some of them will run up to your bike and stick out their hands to get a high five as you ride past. There's no way in the world that you can have a bad day when you're surrounded by happy island kids.

After our bike ride, we were driven to a covered patio in the middle of a wide open rice field and treated to a huge buffet of traditional Balinese food. -Rice with toasted garlic, roast duck, peppered and pickled sprouts, tofu in a gray and black peanut sauce, some steamed dark green leafy thing that looked like chopped up lily pads but tasted like spinach, fried noodles, etc. etc. I was hurting myself eating so much but it was so so good. - one of those meals that's so good you remember it for a while you know? Yum!

On that note, Mike's waiting for me. After this short stop at the internet cafe we are going to be heading to a Sushi place on the river.

More later - S :)