Month: August 2007

My friend Destiny has *the* best idea for a baby gift…which she gave to Shug! She did this for her own son, and I’m going to use her idea from now on because it is just so smart: Destiny buys a cake serving set, then has it engraved on the back with the baby’s name and date of birth. She told me that every time her son has a special event, they use it and have the event and the event’s date engraved on the back…how clever is that?!

Above is the one she gave to Shug, with engraving on the back.

This past weekend, we had several big family get-togethers, because it was Shug’s grandfather’s 65th birthday, and we had a nice luncheon at Temple for that and welcoming Shug into the family, too. We used this cake serving set for one of the special occasions this weekend, and I can just see us using it in the future for Shug’s birthdays, his Bar Mitzvah party, etc…

I love this idea and am definitely going to borrow it for babies of our friends! Thanks Destiny! Mwah!!

The latest Oxford American (which has been out a while), “Best of the South II”, has a feature on Henryk Fantazos…ohmygosh…looking for Southern Gothic?

He’s quoted in the magazine:

There is urgency attendant with the subject: the South is a disappearing country. Yes: the world I am painting now is being removed, rolled away, and rubbed out with an eraser as big as Sherman’s army of bulldozers. The South is removed every working hour and replaced with generic anonymity…

…I find the South in cotton stubblefield cotton with thorny chinaberries showing their yellow planets, or among the predeluvial cars overgrown with kudzu and on nameless islands in river, so silent about their secrets. Month after month, I painted an abandoned homestead held together by a grapevine, a collapsed floor of an ancient porch with sounds of a rocking chair still in the air…