SEOUL 1988

my little sister amanda and me in seoul, south korea, 

summer of 1988

when i was six years old we lived in south korea. i don't talk about it much mostly because i tend to forget it ever happened. the most distinct memories i have of south korea are the way it smelled (plastic and cigarettes), the itch of a hanbok on your neck, buying rice by the scoopful from giant piles on the floor at the shops, and the amazing korean whistling candies from the store across the street (i always look for them at candy shops but i haven't found them since!). i remember seeing a lot of construction leading up to the the summer olympics, and i barely remember going to see a few events as a family. (we even saw flo jo race.) 

on monday my dad emailed me a few photos he took that summer in 1988. i have SO many memories of my dad taking photos and making videos when we lived in korea. if there had been such a thing as a blogger in 1988, you better believe my dad would have been one. 

p.s. a few of my friends from the city are overseas on work assignments, 

one in singapore, one in england. 

my friend in england reports watching far more sailing and 

equestrian events than she's ever seen on american tv, 

and my friend in singapore told me she was watching 

olympic diving the other day when they suddenly cut to.... 

table tennis. 

hah!

THE GREAT BEAUTY EXPERIMENT

one of the most unexpected things about my life lately is this gig i picked up as a babble writer. a lot of people have asked me how i got this job, and really it was a fluke of luck. 

a few weeks ago my editor approached me about doing a series for family style on beauty treatments and DIYs, sort of a "you try it out, then tell us how it goes" sort of thing. i drafted up a list of beauty treatments to pitch, and they approved them all. with a budget! and then i died.

the very first thing on my pitch list for this series was DIY hair extensions. i lost a lot of hair after huck was born, and i've been dreaming ever since of what having a normal head of hair might do for my self esteem. 

first, we had to go buy a bag of human hair in midtown. um, that was fun. 

and then last night my friend kristen came over with her husband shane, and we watched the olympics and ate chocolate cake and, uh, made us some hair extensions. it was basically the weirdest art project ever.

and now i'm just all babely with my normal amounts of hair. i'll try not to let it get to my head. ;) i documented the process and included step by step instructions in case you'd like to try it too. it's surprisingly inexpensive.  HERE.

CALEXICO IN THE FLATIRON

i really love the flatiron. 

i also love burritos. 

i especially love my friend kristen jex. 

and as it turns out, 

when you combine the three with buying bags of virgin hair in midtown, 

you get a really funny afternoon.

thanks, kjex! you're so pretty!

FRIENDSHIP BRACELETS ON A RAINY DAY

people of my blog! it is LOUSY outside. hooray for that 24-pack of embroidery floss i bought at michael's over the winter. all those years at girls camp apparently didn't go to waste if i can still braid up a friendship bracelet. (also: i still weirdly remember that you can eat black ants if you're lost in the woods and desperate for food, and that they supposedly taste like lemons. though i wasn't brave enough to find that out for myself.) 

i sort of got myself on such a friendship bracelet making kick last week that it was all i did for three whole nights. i was tying knots in my eyelids when i closed my eyes. it was pretty much bliss. 

i may or may not have made matching bracelets for the three of us. okay okay, i did. it was brandon's idea. he texted me from work requesting "a matching friendship bracelet with henny." and i was all, but i'm not making henny a bracelet. and then it dawned on me that i WAS making henny a bracelet. and two for his parents, since that's not nerdy at all.

go team!

IN OTHER BOROUGHS

just a few photos from our trek to greenpoint last week.
enjoy!

embarrassing story: when it came time to transfer to the g train, i realized i didn't know which train to choose--there were two waiting at the platform. total g train virgin here. so i asked the MTA attendant which one i wanted. mistake number one.  he looked at me like i was stupid and gestured toward the one on the right and said, "this one goes first." i thanked him and got on and then he looked at me with narrowed eyes and said, "you're not from here. where are you from." so i sneered right back at him and said, "heaven."

WEEKENDS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

with brandon smack in the middle of his busy season at work, it can sometimes feel like our weekends  together become crazy with expectations. our one day as a family! 

but somehow this weekend fell together perfectly, without anybody even planning a dang thing. there were sugarplums at the farmer's market, pizzas from the pizza truck, bikes with sunflowers in their baskets, impulse c-line custards for dessert, a playground for huck to prowl around in (complete with crazy awesome western murals), and a sunday birthday picnic on the river with friends. brandon even managed to get his home teaching in. what a hero.

hope your weekend was lovely.

A SHAKE SHACK DATE

on friday huck and i had ourselves a little shake shack date, is what.

it looked and felt like autumn outside,  

i didn't even have to use the umbrella i brought 

that i picked out specifically because it looked like my husband.

cheese fries!

and now you know.

BUSTER'S FAVORITES

this was a big week for me and the subways. 

i rode on more subways this week than i probably have in months. and all kinds of subways, cross town subways and down town subways and above ground subways and outer borough subways and subways that were easily a million degrees hotter than the sun, not to mention swampy.  

huck and i have been watching this weird cartoon lately about a bunch of animals on wheels. (who engineered these animals on wheels? and then left them to fend for themselves in the jungle?) they were all excited about this certain flower which smells like whatever your favorite scent is in the world. i thought about it (way too much, you'll see in a minute) and decided that my flower would smell like an approaching subway train on a really hot, sweltering day underground. it kind of smells like humidity and grease and relief, and it comes with such a powerful breeze that it cools your sweat and makes your head tingle and gives you the chills in the best possible way.  

and now i kiiiind of want to talk more about jungle junction. 

so, in my head this cartoon is a sort of dystopian universe where science has gone way wrong in the wilds. like, some kind of mad scientist or evil engineer, or maybe he had good intentions? creates these bizarre animals--truly they are ungodly, these animals. this makes the show sort of hysterically disturbing for me to watch. some further questions i have: do you think elevan was designed to be a passenger van? or more for cargo? what would you do with a frog on wheels? something disturbing i'm guessing... will this devolve into some kind of lord of the flies situation? who's in charge? it's not that pink pig, is it? or is it every animal thing for itself? who sends the gasoline so that they can run? DO they run on gasoline? what happens when they all rust out and are filled with vines and some future civilization discovers them? will this civilization be darwinian and now have to assume that they'd somehow evolved from these creatures with wheels? i am over thinking this.

here are some of buster's favorite shots from this week, with help from the holbsphone (that shot of times square is his view from work!) and the many phones at the fred flare hq.