Welcome!

Some of you are lucky enough to live in groovy, cosmopolitan areas where keeping up on the arts is an easy thing to do. Keeping-up-on-
the-arts-you-can-share-with-your-progeny is a whole other kettle o' lobster. Here in the ridiculously gorgeous state of Maine, we have much to feast our eyes on in the way of natural beauty (yeah, even compared to California!), but with a small population (five gazillion trees to each human, equaling just under one million people in the entire state), the cultural abyss sometimes stretches a bit too wide.

Sometimes you want to cry uncle and just surrender, as when you drive 75 miles in search of a promised "garlic festival" at an organic farm, and when you finally find it -- a bowl of garlic spread and a platter of pesto pasta on a card table inside the farm store -- you just have to laugh (or you'll weep). Sometime you yearn for the crazy, big city life, like the one we left back in San Francisco, where museums, performance spaces, protest marches, street art, nightclubs, theaters and festivals of all kinds were such a strong counter to the traffic and parking tickets and long lines and overpriced everythings that you actually LOVED living there!

We were Netflix devotees before we moved to Maine, even though we were surrounded by cool DVD shops in SF. The allure and ease of having those little red envelopes appear in the mailbox, like unexpected gifts, was too much to ignore (not to mention the lack of late fees, which we spent a pretty penny on). After being in the Northeast for our first long winter, we upgraded our membership so that we have four discs (instead of two) in the house at any one time. This is usually enough to keep us all happy; usually. My husband D's appetite for B-grade (and lower) film consumption increases in the summer, as his work winds down a bit and he has more free time. After reading or writing for most of the day, his brain wants to shut down (ok, sorry, babe, I mean, it wants to shift gears) to the land of Italian cannibal films or Japanese psycho or '50s horror. Quite often our four-disc situation is supplemented by a trip to our one good DVD store, a locally owned outfit that pretty much rocks. (The local national chain here is better left unmentioned.) Our local library is also a pretty good source for family films.

There's the seque: family films is what brought me to blog-land, after swearing I'd never be a "blogger." A blog is just a web site, fergodsakes, the whole nomenclature/trend thing bugs me to no end. There are millions of averge joes and josephines like me out there, typing away on WordPress and TypePad and Blogger, all thinking that someone out there actually wants to read what they are writing.

I would never be one of those.


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