It's like stepping into a magazine

Walks Among the Stars | Camelback Spa

I absolutely love this. She's so peaceful. It made me think of my friend Elisa, who I know would love her, too.

A Cabana With a View | Camelback Spa

Ladies who Lunch | Camelback Spa

When the day's most pressing concern is that the waiter won't bring your check in time for you to make it to your 1:30 facial, it's a good day.


When you're still at the spa in time for a sunset dinner and the waiter fetches your fondue poolside, it continues to be a good day.

p.s. When you're having dark chocolate fondue for dinner...you guessed it. Cheers.

A day in the life | Camelback Spa

...yeah right, a day in the life. Some days I think that I could handle becoming a lady who lunches. Spa life is definitely something I could get used to; but I know that after a while I would be bored with it. Sure, that may take a long while, but the boredom would eventually win out nonetheless.

For one glorious day, however, Jennifer, Cristina, and I blissfully wandered between native hot stones, papaya mud masques, delicious food, painted toes, and overly attentive staff who let us stay until they were absolutely cleaning around our feet and locking the front doors behind us. I'm already planning my treatments for next year.

Swanky Digs | Scottsdale, Arizona

Other than a trip to the Botanical Gardens (photos coming soon) and an annual retreat at Camelback Spa (ditto), my time in Scottsdale didn't warrant many photos. I was there for eight days and two conferences back to back. At the second conference I accepted an award and presented three different workshops...but PowerPoint doesn't exactly make an interesting blogspot.

Even with very few photos, my memories of spending time with friends and colleagues is the real take-home. Every year we stay in the swanky Doubletree Paradise Valley Resort. We spend every spare moment we have floating in the pool, sweating to death in the lounge chairs attempting a tan, sipping margaritas, mojitos, and berry smoothies in the suite, eating fabulous take out, and doing our best to detox from a stressful year. My friend Mary brought each of us a hand-painted margarita glass from New Mexico...

Ohhhh Cosmo...

When you're up to your eyeballs in reports, end-of-fiscal-year paper work, and action-item emails you'll never see the end of...the Cosmopolitan weekly e-newsletter flashing into your gmail is the most delightful of surprises. Fluff? Yup. Shallow? Yep. Lame? You betcha.

So what *does* my hair say about me? Finally, all those sleepless nights will come to an end! Here's what I learned about myself and my go-to hairstyles. It rivals the Greek Oracles of yore, Cosmo does.

Well now. My reports are exponentially more tedious than they were pre-newsletter, that's for sure.

Common Ground

As Tabesha invited me into her home for the first time, she showed me the many photos hanging on her living room wall: her sons, her daughters, Barack Obama, her mother hanging in a place of honor with floral arrangements on either side of the large frame, a map of Utah, Jesus preaching, class photos of her high school aged children.

I teased her that it looks like she's adopted Barack. I joked that his photo is four times the size of a group shot of her own children. She laughed and laughed and laughed and brushed it off by saying it was a silly thing to have hanging there. I told her it's not silly at all. She responded in all seriousness, "He's a good man. Good ideas."

I can't imagine how empowering and exciting it is for a family of African refugees to be thisclose to an African-American president. I love that a 16x20 poster of his Rolling Stone cover hangs proudly on the wall beside her front door. Framed, no less.

For Lynne | A random assortment of PDX memories

Why not blow your 401K on fine paper? Life's too short.

Good morning, sunshine. Frozen, frozen sunshine.

Paper, Pambiche, and Pix...Oh My!

I'm completely addicted to all-things paper, letter press, greeting cards, stationary, ephemera, hand-made, factory-pressed, you name it. I have an insatiable appetite for Cuban food and it's become a travel theme for me to seek out said genre in each city I visit (possible exception: Laramie, Wyoming). I also have a sweet tooth which, when combined with a discerning foodie eye, leads me to consume deserts that really do belong in an art gallery somewhere.

Lucky lucky me, my friend Katherine just so happens to share a love of all of the above. Also lucky for me, we spent an afternoon in Portland's Hawthorne neighborhood indulging our finer senses. I don't have any photos to share of the treasure trove of paper I carted home to Salt Lake (if we had even a fraction of the options I explored in the Hawthorne neighborhood I wouldn't have to travel the world over to feed my paper obsession...that's all I'm saying), but I do have these to share.

Colorful Cuban at Pambiche. Mmmm I can taste the banana sauce.

Divine deserts at Pix Patisserie. Katherine has a great photo of one of these delightful delicacies, but alas, my camera would. not. play. nice. When I got back to the hotel I shared the treats with my friend Lynne. If you've experienced Pix and can't compute the word "share" in the same sentence, you understand why I'm only two miracles away from becoming a saint.

Small Town Charm | Silverton

After hiking in the falls we had dinner in the small town of Silverton. Now and forever, in my mind Silverton will always be this mural. I couldn't decide which photo I wanted to post, so I'm posting all four. This may seem weird, but I thought it was interesting to see the process and evolution of a photo. Two inches closer to the iron animal's head and it's entirely different.

Delicate Details | Silver Falls Park

It's a bit like searching for Waldo, but if you spot the pink flower in this photo you'll see just why I love it so much. It's such a tender contrast to the powerful waterfall.

Mossy Trees | Silver Falls Park

I forget just how dry Utah is...until I visit the Northwest...where standing still for five minutes means you'll be soaking wet and covered in moss. Kind of like the Victorians and lace.

Silver Falls Park | Oregon

...and back to the posts about Portland. On the same pre-conference vacation day that we visited the Tulip Festival in Woodburn, we went hiking in Silver Falls Park. From what I understand there are eleven different falls. While we didn't get to all of them, we saw quite a few.

My favorite thing about this park is that it's so sneaky. I'm used to hiking up into large mountain ranges and thinking of waterfalls and such being atop the Wasatch range somewhere. Not here. You hike down, down, down, down into these massive ravines and then...surprise! You don't hear water, you don't see water, but you turn the corner and smack into massive waterfalls. It's magical.

I can't remember the name of my favorite fall, but I do remember how huge it is. You hike in behind it, through a little cave-overhang-thing. To look out through the rushing water is an incredible experience. It reminded me of hiking the waterfalls in Hawai'i: You're soaking wet, your shoes are muddy, your glasses fog up, your camera barely works in the spray and splatter, and it's beautiful. It also reminded me of the time I spent with my dad at Niagara Falls. I'm a water person and really turn on to those memories.

It's difficult to express in words the magnitude and the force of the water - what it's like to stand behind a rushing waterfall so huge. It's equally difficult to capture a photograph that really does it justice. You can at least see in this photo the trail that comes out the left side of the fall.

If you would like to (sort of) experience what it was like, watch this horrible-quality video taken on my digital camera. Super loud sound on your speakers will help. If nothing else, posting this video is simply an indulgence of my own memory, more so than an effective tool for you to join me.

My New Adventure

It's been about 18 months since I stopped volunteering with the Utah AIDS Foundation. Every other week for nearly three years I delivered hot meals to home-bound end-stage HIV patients. It was an incredible experience. Incredibly difficult and incredibly meaningful. When I stopped volunteering for UAF life quickly filled in the gaps, I let myself be consumed by work and other concerns, and before I knew it, even my other regular volunteer commitment (selling hand-made artisan crafts at Ten Thousand Villages), became less and less frequent. I was still very active in the community and involved in all sorts of volunteer and committee work...but nothing as concentrated as my time delivering meals.

Recognizing my desire to engage once again in that concentrated way, I began exploring my options. I've always wanted to work with the refugee community. I have scouted out countless opportunities over the years, made a handful of phone calls, and kept in touch with various friends in the field, but nothing ever seemed to fit. It knew it was something I wanted to do, but it wasn't quite right. Yet.

Late one night a few months back I saw a PSA on PBS featuring Catherine Barnhart, Executive Director of the English Skills Learning Center. The ESLC provides 16 hours of training, manuals and resources for me to keep, one-on-one personalized matching services, and ongoing in-service workshops. That's it. That was the opportunity I'd been waiting for.

How, do you ask, do I plan to fit two 90-minute tutoring sessions into each week, find time to create custom lesson plans for my student, and do it all in and around my demanding work and travel schedule? I honestly can't tell you. I feel as though this entire experience, up until this very moment, has been operating on complete auto-pilot. I saw the PSA, the next day I made the call, their quarterly training was the very next week...and I was off. I completed the 16-hour training, received my certification, and have been successfully matched with my student.

Auto-pilot or not, it's all finally hitting me. I met my student last week (on International Refugee Day, of all appropriate days) and it became very real very quickly. No more abstract talk about TPR and TOEFL techniques for survival skills. My auto-pilot came to a grinding halt and my uber-organizer kicked into high gear. The uber-organizer in me loves her time in the spotlight, but I still don't know quite what this will look like yet. What I can tell you is that life has taught me that when I put my energy into positive actions, toward the greater good, whatever you want to call it, a way is made for me. We each make our path by walking, right?

Tabesha is a refugee from Sudan. She has been in Salt Lake with her husband for eight years now, has five children, and English will be her fourth language behind Nuba and Arabic, in both of which she is fluent, and braille, which she is currently learning. Our second introductory meeting is tomorrow and then the real tutoring begins.

I will respect Tabesha's privacy and that of her family, but I also know that I'll need a space to process my own thoughts. With that in mind, I've created a new label for the posts about this experience, "Adventures with Tabesha." Here goes nothing...

81,538 supporters in 48 hours

I'm not going to go so far as to say I've taken heat for it, but I will say that a spirited dialogue emerged this weekend around this blog post. I praised Obama for opting out of the public campaign finance system. I praised him for making the commitment to fund his entire campaign on the donations the American public gives directly to him. I want to follow up with a few comments I didn't included in that post.

I realize that he stands to raise more money this way than he would have "raised" opting into the public finance system. I don't discount that motivation; nor do I feel it lessens his credibility. The system is broken whether he can raise more money on his own or not. Was he motivated by a broken system *and* the fact that on his own he can raise more money than any Presidential candidate in the history of this nation? Sure. Absolutely. So what?

The federal government offers each candidate roughly $85 million tax-payer dollars (to very much over-simplify the process) and Obama has already raised nearly $300,000,000. He opted out of the $85 million and decided to raise every penny of his campaign through the strength of his nation-wide organization. You read correctly, by the way, that's three hundred million dollars. And guess what? The source of that nearly $300,000,000 is 100% individual contributions. 100%. That's right. That's what I was praising. That is what inspires me and millions of other supporters. Check it out for yourself, via independent watchdog website OpenSecrets.org

Should Obama have stated that motivation as well as his broken-system motivation? Maybe. But a sore John McCain camp - who has a snowball's chance in hell of raising that much money - and the right-wing bloggers whipped into a frenzy over the issue are no match for a surge of 81,538 Obama supporters in 48 hours time. I posted on the afternoon of 20 June, just after Obama made the announcement, and by the evening of 21 June there were 81,538 contributions made. The numbers are only getting higher and that's only the first day after the announcement was made.

Interesting trivia for your next cocktail party: The average contribution to Obama's campaign is $25. Yup...$25 at a time we've reached $300,000,000. Upwards of 69% of those contributors are first-time contributors to *any* political campaign. That, my friends, is giving power back to the people. And this is giving them voice: read what people are saying as they contribute.

He'll change the world as we know it. He already has. Now it's your turn.

Declare independence from a broken system

"This campaign is in your hands like no other campaign before. Now is the time to act." (Barack Obama)

After Barack Obama sent this video, David Plouffe (campaign manager) sent a follow up email explaining the campaign's decision to forgo public financing.

They declare in no uncertain terms: "We will not participate in the public financing system for the general election." This is an incredibly serious decision and I nearly fell out of my chair when I heard it. This is huge. As reported on NPR's Morning Edition, this decision effectively means he turned down nearly $85 million dollars. Plouffe explains the gravity, but also the motivation: "Even though we stood to receive more than $80 million in taxpayer funding for our campaign, the system has been so gamed and exploited by our opponents that it is effectively broken."

Short of taking on the broken electoral system itself (not quite the time or place for that), Obama is taking a stand on the corrupt public funding system. It's so brave and so gusty. As the AP explains it, "No candidate has ignored the general election funds since the law setting up the presidential finance system was approved in 1976."

Plouffe continues, "John McCain, the Republican National Committee, and their allies in so-called 527 groups that raise and spend unlimited contributions, are dedicated to manipulating this broken system to raise as much money as possible -- and they've proven that they're very good at it. [...] In April alone, they raised nearly $45 million. That's more than our campaign and the Democratic National Committee combined. And that doesn't include the plans of 527 groups like the one called "Freedom's Watch," which has said it will spend as much as $250 million under Karl Rove's direction to attack and defeat Barack Obama."

$250 million dollars under Karl Rove's control to attack Obama...and that's only a fraction of the money?! Bleak? Unrealistically difficult to overcome? Daunting odds? Down right terrifying?

No. No. No and no. In Barack's own words, "In the unlikely experiment that is America, there has never been anything false about hope." With the power of this belief behind him, and his ultimate faith in democracy and the voice of the people, nothing is impossible. He's more than a candidate. He is a movement.

"To compete, Barack has put his faith in ordinary people giving only what they can afford. That's been the strategy of this campaign from the beginning, and more than 1,500,000 supporters like you have gotten us this far. We have a historic opportunity to prove that a movement of ordinary people has the power to change the way political campaigns are funded."

Take two minutes and watch Barack himself explain the decision. Supporter or not, you'll be glad you did. If you're not moved by the power of his conviction...check your pulse.

Also, hitting the television waves today is his first post-primary commercial, "The Country I Love." Check it out.

This post is dedicated to Erin, who I know is as excited as I am about this bold move. 1-20-09!

Perfectly Pink Peony

On Tuesday my friend gave me a peony from her front yard and watching it bloom more and more each day has made my week.

R.I.P. Toxic Friends

I'm not sure who to believe in The Great Leaching Toxin Scandal of 2008 - but I will say that in the grand scale of world health crises, yuppie hippies and faux outdoor enthusiasts having to replace their favorite Nalgenes does not at all warrant the energy given to this scoop. No less than 15 stories have come across my NPR airwaves in the past couple weeks. By the way everyone is freaking out you'd think someone discovered Subarus are manufactured by Lockheed Martin.

PBAs a valid health concern or hypochondriacs gone wild, I still found an excuse to go shopping.

Food for Thought

Plant trees in whose shade someone else's children will grow.

Public Transit Poetry

Etched in the ceiling of the 1300 South Trax station:

Surfaces hide more than they tell. Railroad tracks follow the paths of mastodons; winds sweeping canyons of buildings carry the same rains which pocked primeval sand dunes; and ancient glaciers melt to asphalt rivers. Time wheels overhead with stars and ravens, changing lava flows to grocery stores and salt water swamps to car repair shops, changing every old earth shape into every new human hope.

I slept with Chris & Jakob last night

Jakob is an old favorite. He's tender and brings with him that sweet familiarity of an old lover tucked in the back of my black book. The one who always picks up right where we left off. An old lover who still manages to curl my toes, that is. I knew where he was going and I knew what to expect. Some may find that boring. I say if it's not broke...

Chris is a new adventure and, admittedly, one that took a while to ease into. He introduces himself thoughtfully, slowly, and I wasn't sure what to make of his advances. Eventually, once I gave in, he took me on a breathtaking ride. It took a few times around to fully appreciate Chris, but the morning after I'm just now understanding the brilliance.

Snap back to reality...yesterday I wandered into iTunes and downloaded the new Coldplay album (Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends) and Jakob Dylan's debut solo release (Seeing Things).

I realize that Coldplay has been around for, like, ever, but I'm not exactly an early adopter. I've gained a vague appreciation of the band and know a few songs by osmosis (read: Zac Braff soundtracks), but have dismissed them as too wide spread and commercial, never dedicating any real time to the band. I'll admit, however, that their "Viva la Vida" Apple commercial (playing prior to previews in a movie theatre near you) sucker punched me into instant fandom. I still think it's one of the more brilliant tracks, but now I'm also addicted to "Violet Hill" and "Lovers in Japan"...both of which played over and over and over as I drifted off to sleep last night.

Also in the mix of snooze-time sonatas was Jakob Dylan's lush scratchy folky pitch perfect voice. His stint leading The Wallflowers was consumed with efforts to not sound like his legendary father. Those ears raised on his father's albums caught moments of the legacy, but overall Jakob was earnestly trying to be as un-like as possible. His solo album forgets all that silliness and settles into the young Dylan that he is. If you believe the myth that there are music albums/people and lyric albums/people...then Jakob's album is for lyric people. It's fabulous.

Wanna know what else is so fabulous I can barely stand it? This...

Unbelievable Colors