Vacation...All I ever wanted

I’m on vacation! One week off from work. Because I love my job, they practically had to kick me out because I’ve been there almost 3.5 years and haven’t taken a vacation, so I wasn’t accruing any more days. Like that mini-scene in Sixteen Candles where the parents have to drag their geek kid to the dance and push him in the gym and abandon him there to get him to go have some fun. One of us is supposed to be the geek in this scenario, kids. I am the geek.

So, first day of vacation: so far, I have done laundry and made a pot of spaghetti sauce. Like most good Italian girls, I know how to make my own sauce (if you’re an Italian girl who doesn’t know how to make your own sauce, you’re still a good Italian girl, but you’re simply a product of the late 20th/early 21st century. It happens.). My mother (who’s of French-Canadian descent) learned how to make it from my dad’s mother—a pre-requisite for any non-Italian looking to marry her son, I’m sure. And then, at my urging, my mother taught me. I’ve begun to do some things differently, like adding red wine and using fresh basil and oregano. I don’t know why my family didn’t use red wine—it's not like they were teetotalers. My sister was the one who got me into it. She also learned the same recipe, but started putting wine into it and I thought, hey, yeah! And the fresh basil & oregano? Apparently, fresh herbs weren’t popular when I grew up, when you could just get jarred, dried herbs for 99 cents at the grocery store. Fortunately, we’re all more enlightened now. Everything else I do the same, because hey, it works, and it works well. There’s nothing better than smelling homemade spaghetti sauce cooking on the stove. I refuse to use jarred sauce. I refuse! Even though there are some very high quality brands out there, nothing, but nothing, tastes as good as homemade.

I got to use my salad spinner for the herbs. At work, we have Taco Bar Day one day every week, and I get to use the salad spinner for the lettuce and cilantro. I say “get to use” because I love pulling the ripcord several times like an insane person to make the spinner spin wildly out of control and then making it stop on a dime with the stopper button. Plus it gets more water out that way, doesn’t it? Leah and I have this bantering ritual that is part vaudeville and part infomercial:

Leah: I don’t think you have to use the salad spinner this time. There really shouldn’t be that much water on it.

Gina (taking the cover off and showing the leftover water in the bottom of the bowl): But wait! Let me show you how much water has been taken off!

Leah: Man, was I wrong!

Bah-DUM-bah! We do it every single time, never getting tired of it, and it cracks us both up. And of course, I did it in my head when I used my own salad spinner today. Naturally! Geek, remember?

Also a vacation activity: I have started laying paint to canvas on my latest painting (as yet untitled). The setting is a stage in a carnival tent, so it’s going to be real interesting teaching myself how to do the lighting—having the subject lit by stage footlights, while having the unlit areas of the backdrop, tent and curtain be shadowed, and still maintaining the bright colors. I don’t want to make the background colors too muddy by adding brown or black for the shadowing. I may have to drybrush it. Which would definitely work, but I’ll have to sacrifice a brush or two to do it, because drybrushing on canvas wears them down to nubs. But if I have to take a hit for the team, well, then by god, that’s what I’m gonna do. I was a little scared to take it on, not having any experience in rendering carnival tents, but I had a conversation the other day with a friend, Brie, who's also an artist, and an awesome one at that, and it was rather inspiring to talk shop, so I dove in. Naturally, once it’s done and framed, I’ll be uploading it to Virtual Canvas. At which I happen to be a featured artist on the homepage, at the moment, by the way...ahem.

In addition to being Vacation Week, it’s also Birthday Week! I first read about birthday week in Kymm Z’s journal and in Pamie’s journal, years ago. I’m not sure who came up with it first, or maybe it was simultaneously, independently, but I’m giving them both their props. By the way, read them, both current entries and archives—they’re funny, interesting people, and you’ll be glad you did (Kymm’s now here, though). Basically, you just celebrate your birthday in various ways all week, before culminating in the actual Birthday Gala on your actual day of birth. And if you don’t celebrate it all week, you at least annoy people in your life by mentioning it as much as you can. That can be a birthday gift in itself! So it’s birthday week—mine is on Friday. My sister and I will be having a lovely birthday dinner out and then flying to Las Vegas for the weekend to surprise my folks (they don’t read this—at least, they haven’t found it online yet—so I’m not screwing up the surprise). I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do before dinner, but it’s going to be something meaningful and fun and I’d better not sleep in and waste the day. That I can do any weekend. Some of the things I’m thinking of doing are going antiquing in Ventura, or going to an art gallery or a museum (MOCA, LACMA (they have KLIMT!!), the Norton-Simon...), or The Arboretum or Descanso Gardens or...something that hasn’t occurred to me yet.

Oooh, LACMA just might be the winner...Klimt is one of my favorite artists. My god, just look at his faces, and you’ll understand why. When I was in New York this past summer and my friend SG took me to the Met, I saw a Klimt portrait and I just about lost it! Tears did spring to my eyes, my friends. God help me if ever get to Austria and see his work in museums over there. They'll have to bury me in Vienna.

Here’s to an art-rific birthday week!