A Night with the Beavers

Good Morning -

As you can see, we have ourselves another simple, no-flair Virgen. It's smaller because I've run out of the blocks of wood I've been using and had to get creative. Last night at 9:30, that meant taking a tile I had decorated with my name and the meaning of that name and putting the Virgen over that. The name tile was a Christmas gift one year for my family in which everyone got a decorated tile with their name and its meaning. I had also made one for myself but - and this shouldn't be too surprising - I accidentally over-glittered it so that the text was barely discernible beneath the gold flecks. I hadn't been displaying the tile, and it was acting as a fine dust collector, so made for a good spot for the Virgen. Today I'll have to be a little more proactive and get some more plain tiles or wood at the hardware store because I don't need to add the whole other layer of looking for a suitable surface for my Virgen each night as I do my reflection.

The backing is burlap cut from a bag of coffee, which I got from a friend who wanted the coffee, but not the burlap it came in, and the raffia border is from a box of spa and body love products my partner got from a friend (the burlap bag and Junkies friend, actually) for her birthday.

So simple - not a fleck of flair to be found - and very much a reflection of my day yesterday. I have to work today (Sunday. I know - I want to be quite tragic and dramatic about it, but really it's fine and I get a day later in the month, so it's all good) so had felt some pressure as I started my day yesterday to make sure I had the best weekend day ever because I only get one and then have to work for six whole straight days.

I was amped about making sure I both got done what I wanted to get done - some organizing, a pie made for dinner with friends tonight, other random house chores - and had plenty of time to relax and enjoy myself. Most assuredly, being amped is not the way to create relax and joy.

I was fine in the morning because we had group activities, including going with the friend who was down from Phoenix for the Junkies to Poca Cosa for lunch (http://cafepocacosatucson.com/). If there is anything of my day yesterday that I wish was reflected on the Virgen, it's something from Poca Cosa. This is, hands down, the best restaurant in Tucson.

Should you ever find yourself there, listen politely to the waiter as she goes down the menu (written on a small chalkboard because it changes daily), but then order the Plato Poca Cosa and try to get your dining mates to do the same. The Plato is three items chosen by the chef and no two platos at a table are ever the same, so if you have enough people, you are able to have representation of every dish on the menu at your table. You never know what you'll get until it shows up and, unless you have very specific dietary needs, you aren't allowed to request certain items, which means you get surprised (at some dining establishments, this could be a bad thing, but it's never bad at PC).

You won't have to convince your dining mates to share bites from their plates because they'll be just as eager to sample what you got. The food is amazing - fresh, layered flavors, beautiful. We had three platos yesterday and between them were able to taste each of her amazing dishes and sauces. I'd describe them here, but it's all blended in my mind into a gorgeous meld of meats and sauces and chilies and herbs and spices.

After Poca Cosa, we returned home, where I was to give tarot readings to my partner and friend. After this meal, though, the only thing any of us were able to do was lounge on the couches, gently rub our bellies, and stare with utter satisfaction into space. Our friend decided to take her satisfaction on the road and head back up from whence she came.

After she left, I puttered for a bit - doing a little here, a little there - and before I knew it, it was 6. My ampedness returned - I only had three hours left in my day - 4 max - (I tend to be in bed between 9 and 10, which has me up at 5:30, which is great in the summer here because you get some gentler daylight before the sun really gets going) - and I hadn't done nearly enough to-doing or relaxing. I talked this through with my partner and we set a plan of organizing, then pie making, then dinner while watching the IMAX beaver movie we had from netflix. This was such a good plan, I took a 30-minute nap on the couch to celebrate it before putting it into action.

The nap replaced the organizing, which is fine, and the pie is a lovely fresh rhubarb and strawberry. My partner did the filling, I did the crust and, between us, we have a fine, fine. pie. Dinner was brie and garlic with bread (after the lunch we had, we could do no better for dinner than finger foods). The beaver movie was...fine. It was good. Maybe you've seen it (apparently it was quite popular and had a long run in the IMAX theatres).

Based on the description, we were expecting amazing vistas, wild beavers and fantastic musical composition. What we got was more Milo and Otis with beaver actors, a gorgeous mountain stream in Canada, and some dramatized music. We've experienced actor animals before, but it was more disguised and a bigger disappointment. That movie was a Discovery film about bears that, we found during watching the making of it, used trained black bears because wild bears wouldn't have allowed for the shots of the cubs. This would have been okay (still disappointing because they appeared to be wild and we felt a little misled), if the trainer hadn't been talking with much bravado about how "you can't let 'em think for themselves" and such, which is just not the mentality one anticipates when watching a documentary on bears.

Back to the beavers. This was clearly done with actor beavers and some of the shots were most definitely done in a studio, so we suffered no illusions about the animals in the film. One upside to actor animals is that you don't have to worry about the inevitable predator/prey moment when one of the young gets chased, killed and eaten to the score of very dramatic, testosterone-laced music and good/evil-based narration.

We didn't get a whole lot of learning from the film (a few facts here and there), but enjoyed it all the same. We watched the "making of" after the film and were relieved to hear the IMAX crew talking about how they often sat for days waiting for the actor beavers to fell a tree or go under the frozen water or any other beaver activity. So they were actors, but they were allowed to be natural and not scripted.

All in all it was a lovely evening and I went to bed relaxed, a pie cooling in the kitchen and images of mountain streams and beaver dams dancing in my head. Perhaps this doesn't sound like a simple day, but just as there's a layer of gold glitter lurking under my no-flair Virgen, and just as a simple dish at PC is layered with complex flavors, so, too, can a day that takes 3-pages to describe come off feeling simple.