The following is courtesy of my friend Elizabeth, who is stocking up on her rest:
Don't Be Tardy for the Wedding
House Hunters
Property Brothers
Property Virgins
Kitchen Cousins
Investment Property
Bethenny Ever After
The Real Housewives of Everything
Giuliana and Bill
The Bachelorette
Hoarders
16 and Pregnant (My husband watches this because he claims it's "educational.")
I’m cramming a lot of events and appearances into this month before I realize I should probably do things like figure out how our carseat works and come up with a “birth plan” (just kidding: the “plan” is just for the baby to come out in some relatively uncomplicated fashion.) If you’d like to see/hear me or if you’re just curious to hear about some great events going on around the city, check out these tasty nuggets!
Wednesday June 6
I will be on The Afternoon Shift with Steve Edwards sometime around 2:40 to 3 p.m. this Wednesday talking about something entertaining and intriguing, trying not to say “Yeah!” before beginning every sentence, which, according to my mom, I do a lot.
Thursday June 7
I had a chat with someone yesterday regarding creativity and she brought up two points that I have been trying to avoid thinking about lately: “1.) It seems like you haven’t been blogging quite as much as you used to.” and 2.) “What are your future goals?”
#1 and #2 are both tied into the same topic, which is writing and ambition. I’ve been lucky in life that I manage to get paid to write, but the strange thing about creative success, I’ve found, is that makes you a little less hungry. I don’t spend my free time wracking my brain for blog or freelance topics like I used to because I’ve come to rely upon the semi-permanent writing gigs I do have, or the fact that I can squeak by with blogging three days a week instead of five because someone (that being WBEZ) came along and told me I can. Meanwhile, my goals, creatively, by and large used to be: 1.) Find a way to get paid to write and 2.) Publish a book.
Well, done and done. What next? I suppose I will figure it out after I have this baby.
Last week I was fortunate enough to spend a long holiday as the guest of some very generous friends who have a house in Anguilla, in the British West Indies. One evening we were discussing wildlife on the island, and my friend Lauren said, “My mom says there are crabs on the island that are big enough to steal puppies!”
“What?” My husband said in disbelief.
“It’s true!” Lauren said. “At least, my mom says so. They make a noise like this. ‘Shhhooo, shhooo, shhooo.’” She demonstrated this sound while making a motion that looks a little like the breast stroke.
We may have had some tropical drinks earlier that day.
Anyway, we went to bed, and the next morning I awoke to a tapping sound. I assumed it was my husband puttering around. The tapping continued, and since there aren’t too many activities Steve can do in the morning that involve tapping, I pulled off my sleep mask (yes, I use one; they’re awesome, look into one) to see what was up.
Steve wasn’t in the room, however. I climbed out of bed to see what could be causing the sound. In retrospect I don’t know why I should have expected anything other than what I saw, which was a big crab tapping at my window.
I first learned of today's interviewee in a New Yorker article. By day, Lucy Worsley is Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, the independent charity that looks after The Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Kensington Palace State Apartments, the Banqueting House in Whitehall and Kew Palace in Kew Gardens. She's also a writer, most recently the author of If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home and host of the BBC4 series Elegance and Decadence: The Age of the Regency.
On that series, Worsley she creates living history by cooking the same food, using the same chamberpots, cleaning the clothes with the same pee (yes) and brushing her teeth with the same powdered cuttlefish bone as our forebears, to see how they really lived.
My husband, Steve, and I confessed to our friends Anna and Evan that neither of us is a big fan of flying.
“Well, when I told Evan I was afraid of flying, he said ‘Just think–you’re sitting in the sky,’ and I wasn’t scared anymore!” chirped Anna. Steve and I smiled politely and said we’d try thinking that next time we flew. Later on, Steve said, “I like Anna and all but I’m sorry, that was just dumb.” This is why I love him.
I come from a genetic mix of flying-fearing. It’s not unusual for my dad, who travels for business frequently, to get on a plane five or six times in a month. For him, a plane is just another place for him to fall asleep, one more leg of a trip that will eventually take him back home. After one flight, he told us that the landing gear was sticky and a stewardess had asked him if he’d be able to help manually lower the gear if necessary.
“Weren’t you scared?” I asked, incredulous.
Girl Flower (My boss took at look at those and said "Claire, you're such a girly girl," and clearly didn't mean it as a compliment.)
