March 1, 2009
Ketchup.
Wow. What a lazy, neglectful blogger I've been. I have been hibernating most of the winter, but I did crawl out of my cave a time or two to have some fun. I spent Christmas in my hometown in New Mexico with my whole family plus my brother-in-law and four crazy dogs. It was good to be home and have everyone there, too.
In January we managed to take in a few films at the Sundance Film Festival. We didn't manage to get any shows in Park City, or go up there to do the celeb-gawking thing, but we saw two films in Salt Lake and another in Ogden. The first was a documentary on New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof called Reporter. The cameras followed him to the Congo, along with a pair of young people who had won an essay contest to travel with him. It was a good picture, with many moving scenes, but I wasn't sure if it was about Kristof or the Congo, and I don't think the producers did either. The second film we saw was Cold Souls. I put the link because explaining it would take far too long. It was darkly funny and overall a pretty enjoyable film. Sophie Barthes, the French director, took the stage afterward to answer questions, and she seemed pretty cool. The third film was screened at the Egyptian Theatre in Ogden, which is a great old theater in very good repair. The grandeur includes high walls decorated with faux-Egyptian art and an elaborate organ that rises in front of the stage. It was manned by a white-haired gentleman who entertained us as we waited for the film to roll. The film was Lulu and Jimmi, a German film about a German girl who falls in love with a black man from the States. What follows is a deluge of nonsense. I wanted the organist back.
On to more recent events, last weekend Lindsay and I traveled to Indiana for the wedding of her friend Lynelle, a former coworker of Lindsay's from her days in Anderson, Indiana. We stayed with another friend and former coworker of hers, Avon, who works the land in a hundred-year-old farmhouse he shares with his wife Doris and chocolate lab, Hershey. We ate Avon's wonderful cooking, I learned to play euchre and Doris taught us the Colombian tradition of putting a little cheese in your hot chocolate in the morning.
The wedding was at a charming rural church and the bride and groom were sent off in a horse drawn coach after the ceremony, which is the only one I've ever been to which included a roast of the couple before the vows were exchanged.
I also learned about the peculiar names of Indiana towns. There is a Mexico, a Peru, a Santa Fe (pronounced 'fee'), an Alexandria, or Alex for short, which is of course pronounced 'elec'. Incidentally, Alex is the home of the worlds largest ball of dried paint. Book your tickets now.
On Sunday we traveled down to Indianapolis and met Lindsay's sister Katie, who drove in from Illinois, for lunch in hip little boho district of Broad Ripple. We spent the afternoon checking out the little shops. After Katie left we toured around Indy for a bit before returning to Broad Ripple for dinner with Lindsay's friend Melanie at a Belgian brewery where we shared a bucket of mussels and a cone of pommes frites, which fit snugly into a hole in the table for that purpose. After dinner we checked out an English style pub. We spent the night at Mel's and flew home the next day.
On Thursday we went and saw Todd Snider at the Murray Theatre. If you've never listened to him, he's a real treat. Great storyteller and hilarious lyricist.
That about catches it up. Right now I'm doing laundry.
Here's a photo of us with Avon and some funny hats:
