Vacation From Everything

The Fisherman's parents celebrated their birthdays with a month in a Turks and Caicos villa this year, and we joined them for the week of Easter. I meant to take pictures and notes and put together an ode to the wonderful time we had ... and then I spent all week swimming and sunbathing and generally ignoring the fact that I'm a writer who takes photos sometimes. But these photos taken by others pretty much tell the whole story.

Rum punches at Da Conch Shack

Sunset
(We watched ours at Magnolia)

Barefoot at Sea 

(No one even referenced "I'm On A Boat," which is weird now that I think of it.)

(An) Infinity (in the) Pool

(This isn't Dawn Beach Villa, where we stayed, but it's close. Just replace that grill with a Jacuzzi tub in your imagination.)

Passport to Everywhere: 37 stamps to go.

0. Little Whale Cay

1. Bimini

2. Providenciales, Turks and Caicos

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Posted in: PassportToEverywhere

There Is No End

My Twice Baked cofounder Kimra alerted me to this lovely story at NPR about the difference between exploring the world and checking things off the list. A nice reminder:

If "well-read" means "not missing anything," then nobody has a chance. If "well-read" means "making a genuine effort to explore thoughtfully," then yes, we can all be well-read.

In that spirit, I think I'll watch a silly animated movie this weekend.

Photo by tecfan, Flickr

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A Few of My Favorite Things

I like bananas, and chocolate, and coffee. So making these muffins was pretty much a spiritual experience.

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Posted in: TwiceBakedChallenge

"All Quiet": Classic and Devastating

Now this is what I thought the Best Picture Death Race would be like: classic, interesting, thought-inspiring movies. It's not that All Quiet on the Western Front was particularly subtle, or entirely different from anything I'd seen before, or even all that great at telling its story. But it was visually fascinating; you could tell that the director carefully chose the framing of each shot. It was far better acted, with believable and heartwrenching violence. And it just felt like a movie, a good movie, rather than a propaganda piece or a stage show.

For a movie about how dirty and ugly war is, there are plenty of gorgeous scenes here. This one in particular, with its wide view of a crowded landscape, feels like an ancestor to Gone With the Wind.

This simple, artsy shot is the only tranquil scene in the whole movie -- and even this feels sad and sinister. (It's at 9:20.)

And by the end, I was struck by the story's similarities to The Hurt Locker. Soldiers broken by war, dreaming of home until they arrive there and discover they no longer belong.

The scenes themselves are kind of haphazardly strung into a story, but each on its own is genuinely heartbreaking, both because of the way they were crafted, and because we're still telling them -- in film, in books, in the news -- to this day.

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Posted in: BestPicDeathRace

Marble (?) Cake!

I am killing the Twice Baked Challenge lately -- muffins last week, a marble cake today, and more muffins on the horizon when the bananas I brought home yesterday ripen. That means I'll have way, way too much Baked goodness to eat on my own, so I'm giving it away. Seriously. Read about my quasi-marble cake, which is not beautiful but is certainly tasty, and if you want some, let me know. First come, first served.

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Posted in: TwiceBakedChallenge

And now, muffins.

It's been a long day. Somewhere between an hour in the dentist's chair, running and hollering around my neighborhood, a couple of marble bundt cakes (baked, not eaten -- yet) and half of my next Death Race Movie, I forgot to let you know that I made muffins the other day, and that they were tasty. Silly me.

(All my Twice Baked Challenge posts will be over at Twice Baked, by the way.)

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Posted in: TwiceBakedChallenge