chez pita

Please visit me at my new blog… http://chezpita.tumblr.com.

I just got back from an informative (and fun!) trip to Europe to visit with our Swiss, Swedish, and English customers and teammates.  We met some great people, toured some beautiful cities, and learned some cheeky new words!

My favorite people shots…

My favorite city shots…

We went out to Restaurante Luciano in Bellevue last night… good food and good wine = happy faces…

I was having lunch with a friend the other day, and we saw this squirrel stealing napkins from the dispensers outside.  He kept taking more and more and bunching them in his mouth.  I guess he was having a dinner party or something…

It was a funny scene indeed, but the real reason why I was excited, was the hope of having my little squirrel featured on FU Penguin.  I already emailed off the photos, so cross your fingers!

The other day I saw a little girl walking across the parking lot of a busy store.  She was holding her mom’s hand and seemed to be jumping at random times.  Finally I realized that she was jumping over the shadows of the cars, and I remembered that kids make everything fun.  Every journey, no matter how mundane, even if they are alone.  And they persevere, be it through a boring shopping trip with their mom, or something much worse.  It’s a nice way to live.

Winter is a dreary time in Seattle.  The rain and cold and darkness are really terrible, and there is no pretty white snow to make things better.  Thank goodness for the forced bulb!

I recently learned that all sorts of bulbs, normally planted in the ground, can be forced to bloom indoors in the winter.  Some require chilling in advance — perhaps an adventure for another year — but many require little effort.  Rocks, water, and a pretty vase is all you need!  This year I tried paperwhites and amaryllis and got some beautiful results.  See for yourself…

The amaryllis is really something else, eh?  Oh, and Happy New Year!

We were the first house on our street to put up our Christmas lights, and it being our first year and all, we were quite proud of ourselves.

Of course, it was a family affair, with the animals out and about, “helping” in their usual way.  Yoshi made a horrible scene, proclaiming loudly to the whole neighborhood that he resented being tied to the car.  We finally threw him in the backyard, from where he made pitiful pleas to be allowed to return.  Mango pranced around and teased him, playing in the neighbor’s front yard just to prove that she could.  And Izzy gave us the death stare for generally disrupting her afternoon plans of sitting on the front stoop.  Bah, humbug!

Anyways, the lights turned out great!  Although, we did have a bit of a mishap with the garland above the garage.  We had originally hung it in 4 loops, but after the whole thing got knocked down by the wind, we finally settled for the smiley face look, reminiscent of the American Express commercial.

Do you see it?

Dirty feet and all!

I can’t draw, and I’ve never been able to figure out why.  Maybe I’m not trying hard enough?  Maybe I have an eye-hand coordination condition?  Well I decided to Bing (i.e. Google) “I can’t draw” to see if there are others like me.  Here is what I found:

A blog “Dude Can’t Draw” written by a guy (AKA Dude) who claims that he can’t draw, when really he can.  Not cool.

A totally rude, but funny commentary of several kid drawings.

And it was while looking at that last link that I realized that I still draw like a child.  Remember when you were a kid, and you used to draw people wearing squares for shirts and triangles for dresses?  Well, I still draw like that.

Take this picture of a cat that Nishant just whipped up on the whiteboard:

Well, here is my take:

This not my take on a cat, of course, but my take on Nishant’s drawing of a cat.  I can’t even draw that.  And as an aside, one of our cat does frequently say “Weh!”.

Finally, I arrived at this page and learned that apparently I have a “self-defeating attitude that prevents [me] from experimenting and improving with practice”!  The article goes on to describe several inspiring individuals who have been creating art despite some pretty severe disabilities (e.g. paralysis), and it ends with this note of encouragement:

“OK guys, if you still say “I can’t”, then you are hopeless.  You are doomed to a life of boredom because you don’t want to risk anything to improve yourself.  We’ve seen several people who didn’t let anything keep them from their art.  There are many more like them.  It’s quite simple.  You are able to draw and if you say “I can’t”, you are too lazy or have no confidence in yourself.”

Wow.  I guess I can draw after all!

I just finished The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, by Canadian author Alan Bradley.  It is a murder mystery involving stamps – yes, stamps – set in an English village in 1950, and the sleuth of the novel is a precocious eleven-year-old chemist named Flavia.  The book is fun and unexpected, and it’s a quick read.  The title comes from a line from a William King poem: “Unless some sweetness at the bottom lie, who cares for all the crinkling of the pie?”.  I find this amusing.  The crinkling is the best part!

A week ago, I finished another book – Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.  This book is wonderful.  It’s an account of the author’s journey of self-discovery, that led her to Italy, to experience worldly pleasures such as pasta, gelato, and chocolate, to India, to experience faith, devotion, and God, and to Bali, to experience balance.  It wasn’t her adventure that I found remarkable, but her ability to capture it honestly and openly in writing.  And she is funny!  I laughed out loud on the airplane.