Ballet class...

At her locker in school on "Fun Fair" day:

Cheese fondue, special polish sausage (some wrapped in bacon), bread, and vegetables for fondueing.



At 39 I can still work a fondue pot!

By popular demand in my own mind comes another installment of Tuesday Oversharing. Yet another "women with trees" -- well, trees are handy and plentiful, women less so, but there do seem to be endless opportunities for combinations thereof. Does that makes sense?

Let's call these pics "circa 1985."

Saturday our new family had a walk in the Bernheim forest. We even had our own naturalist along to help Jelly appreciate the frozen, non-green landscape.

Here's Jelly in front of a fairy house that she found. The lesson of the day was about seeing the barren-seeming woods with imagination -- Jelly's got the imagination, but not the attention span to really stare at a twig for more than two seconds. She did find and interesting black shiny thing in this fairy house that stumped the naturalist.






Jelly stands on the frozen river. We really did see some amazing things -- minnows darting beneath the ice, leaves frozen in mid-drift down the river -- things we might not have noticed without the naturalist keeping our pace slow and eyes open.




Kristin and Jelly, plus Agron IV, a minor tree-deity in charge of brown-gray lichens.




Kristin and our guide fondle a large fungus.

I was watching Muppets Season 3 last night, the Loretta Lynn episode (very meta, before meta was cool and then not cool and then cool again). For broadband: here's the best song of the ep on YouTube.

Anyway, Loretta's done a lot of living in her many years, I wondered if she even remembered appearing on the Muppets. That something so momentous as appearing on the Muppets could go forgotten signals a life well lived, in my opinion. So going through the official Mango Haiku oversharing box this morning I was pleased to remember a somewhat painful experience from my past (I had a sprained ankle). I made a brief appearance in the Chinese-made movie called (I think) "Young Monks of the Shaolin."

"Young Monks" was made in 1994, pre-digital.




I'm most comfortable in cultureas that don't worry overmuch about children carrying large knives.




This is the signature "young monk" move -- the two-fingered power lift (aka "bamboo rat with heartache eats bag of Oreos in the evening light.")





Myself and a small herd of foreigners charged the young monks, festooned in cameras, and picked them up, hugged them, and asked if we could buy one. The young monks, unaware of this, were mighty confused the first time we did it.




The movie was shot in a temple in Chengdu, Sichuan where they recently had  earthquake disaster.






This actress gathered her foreigners at the "Traffic Hotel" in Chungdu. I had just come back from hiking Tiger Leaping Gorge and wanted to rest. She got to me by saying "J'taime, j'taime", but if you got anywhere near her she would say "F**k you!"

There was a picture in my old photography book, circa mid-80's, that had a haunting image of a woman alone in a forest of aspens (or some kind of skinny, shadowy tree). I always liked that image -- it certainly has stuck with me. (I have forgotten the photographer or I would link to it.) I guess the feeling was one of making your human-way in a confusing, random natural world. Something like contemplating a riot of stars on a clear night. Anyway, whenever I happen to be in a bare, shadowy forest with a friend and a camera I try to re-create the feeling of the image. Here's my college friend in 1990 in the Kashgar Oasis of Xinjiang Province, China:

And here's Kristin and our friend in Wyoming eighteen years later at Veedawoo -- that's some mighty fine tree-holding.




If anyone knows the original photo, let me know!

I love a good facade -- so does the city of Louisville, KY. In fact, they just remove the buildings and keep the facades.