Sometimes I catch golden hour. This shot is from yesterday. I’m shooting a coffee product for a client so I get to take pictures of myself drinking coffee and sell them. Win, win! It’s not this easy but it’s not that hard either.

Yesterday was pretty uneventful. The biggest thing that happened was Bug wore a politically charged t-shirt to school. It was a gift from her dad. I was so worried that she’d get labeled something controversial. That her teachers might pull her aside or worse put something in her file. I worried needlessly. She told me I was more of a problem in my uneducated worrying than her shirt could ever be. “It’s just middle school, mom.” she said. “Most kids don’t even know what you are talking about.” Apparently she’s right because nothing happened except me worrying.

I had to come to see her after school was over to buy her a new violin string. She broke a string while tuning her violin in class. The school is super nice and replaced it for free but I had to show up. There she was standing on the front lawn of her school, chatting away with her orchestra teacher while wearing that shirt. No one said anything. No one even looked at me funny. I guess I’m just a big fat chicken worrier!

But what else is new? We all knew that.

I’m still working on painting my baby shark costumes. It’s coming along, slowly. I’ve been procrastinating on the space costumes and the photoshoot is looming. I hope I can pull it off. I need to sew a cat head and I don’t know how I’m going to do it. I’ll figure something out. I’ve been pondering it constantly. I think I do my most intense work while in the shower. Nothing like warm water running down your back to put you in a deeply thoughtful mood.

I’ve also been working on my puzzle. More than I should. Payam always rolls his eyes when I complain about not having enough time to get anything done but I’m willing to waste twenty minutes looking for pieces to match up. I don’t know what to say. It’s therapy maybe? It is very calming to sit and work on a puzzle. I work on it while I wait for paint to dry.

Yesterday while I was puzzling, Joon offered to make dinner. She wasn’t too keen on what I had planned to cook so she took it into her own hands to make her favorite: Spaghetti Tahdig. It’s kind of awesome having kids this age who will just up and cook dinner or bake a cake if they feel like it.

Peace out!

Thanks, you guys. I’m starting to remember why I don’t blog every day. It’s hard! Not that I don’t love sending out a few typed sentences into the internet. That’s easy and I do love it. But deciding on quality content and really doing a good job putting something together takes longer than a few minutes. As you can see by this hastily drawn belly dancing me, I could put a lot more time into it and do a way better job. But alas, my day calls with a list of things to do.

The other night I took a belly dancing class. I did! It was crazy and fun and totally up my alley. I don’t know why I’ve never looked into taking a class like this before. This class is taught by an older woman in her home. She and her home interest me the most. You can tell that she was really something in her day. She still has the body to prove it. She moves around the room like a twist of sinews. Her feet are veiny and narrower than her calves in a way that makes my tiny size 6.5 feet jealous. Her home is two stories and all wooden floors.

When we got there we knocked on the purple double door and nobody answered. We had to holler up to the second story window (that was open and light flooded out from it) to get her attention to come down and let us in. She was wearing a soft tan colored ballerina wrap-around shirt that tied in a bow at her rib cage. Her belly was wrinkled and hung lightly over her jingly belt and some sort of red satin sheet that was tucked up into her belt. She lead us up the dusty wooden stairs to her studio which was just a small bedroom with no furniture in it and mirrors lining one wall. The windows on the other side were open to the crisp night air.

We stood in the room kind of awkwardly staring at each other (there were just three of us and the teacher). The teacher popped a cd into the ancient CD player surrounded by stacks of ancient cds and we started our lesson. It turns out belly dancing is all in the feet! I had no idea. When you start out grounding your feet to the floor firmly and then lifting up your toes and heels to a beat, the whole belly shimmying thing is so much easier. Like really easy! Like maybe this could be my thing!

I loved it. We learned how to make snake arms and how to pop out our breast bones like opening up a book. It was really good for my ongoing effort to unlock my  better posture. The teacher was really kind to us and constantly told us we were doing well. We were doing so well that she began to teach us choreography to an actual dance but she would lose her place in the dance because she had to stop and teach us basic principles. At the end she let us pick out pretty scarves from a basket and we swirled them around each other in a circle. There we were waving our scarves in and out like children in beginning ballet. It was a blast.