Spin 'round, 'round baby

Julian loves to dance and sing when Ian plays guitar. If you can't get enough of Julian's spinning antics, you can see another video later today over on my YouTube account.

Little pirates

Julian's day care had a Halloween party earlier this week. He went as a pirate, adorned with a vest I made out of one of his old baby blankets. There was another pirate as well as two Dorothys, but the highlight was probably the piñata, at which Julian took a few swings (right in the sweet spot, as you can see in the photo). There are more photos over on Flickr.

Virtual housecleaning

Sundays are for housecleaning online as well. I added an RSS feed button (that little orange box with a volume/speaker/RSS logo in it) for those of you who want to subscribe to La Vie Dansante. If you're not familiar with RSS feeds or feed readers, don't just zone out here.

Feed readers, such as Google Reader (which I'm a fan of), help you more efficiently read your favorite blogs and Web sites. Instead of going to each of the 15 or 150 blogs you like, you set up an account with a feed reader (Google Reader, Bloglines, Newsgator, etc) and then "subscribe" to a blog either by clicking on the now ubiquitous orange box like the one at the top of this page or typing in the blog URL in the "add subscription" box in the reader.

Then, when you log into your reader, any new blog posts pop up in that screen. So why go through the hassle of doing this? If you take the time to set it up, it will save you the time of going to your favorite blogs every day just to find out if there's been a new post. If you only read 4-5 blogs, it's probably not worth it. But if you have several dozen that you at least want to keep an eye on, it is pointless to use your bookmark tab.

Also, I set up a Flickr account for GaGa so she can see all the adorable photos of Julian, but I haven't received any other friend requests from Flickr(!). I'll reiterate that Flickr is EASY TO JOIN and will be the ONLY WAY to see most of the kiddo pictures (I've given a sampling of the previous posts photos in this post). Just go to Flickr.com and sign up, then search "broylesa" and I should come up. Then hover over my photo and click "add as contact."

Web 2.0 is easy. Taking advantage of the social media functions of Web sites is fun. Like Gary Vaynerchuk says, Don't be a lurker!

I meant to post this on Sunday and do some housecleaning around addiebroyles.com, especially with the section of my clips from the Statesman. I've had a bunch of cool stuff lately that I've neglected to share on here or there, and I ran out of time yesterday to do so. Hopefully I'll find time later this week...

Oh, time, precious time.

Yes, Virginia, beauty does exist in Houston

I encountered some very beautiful things on my journey to Houston and back. Painted naked ladies, real almost-naked ladies, a young Richard Gere.

The most beautiful thing, however, was sharing a few minutes with my mentor from college. I was at this AASFE conference to speak on multimedia and food panel, and she was there to be inducted into the organization's hall of fame (although she admitted in her acceptance speech that she'd never been a features writer just that she always tried to write news stories with elements of features-like storytelling). I didn't know until Thursday night that she was going to be there. It had been about 3 years since I'd seen her. Before Julian. Before Ian. Before Austin. Before Troy died. (She was Troy's favorite sensei first.)

I caught up with her right before the luncheon. We caught up on life in general and the journalism industry, but for a wordsmith master and a wordsmith-in-training, it didn't take many words to communicate our thoughts and emotions.

I've always thought of Jacqui as so much more than a teacher, and for the first time, I realized she probably feels the same way about me.

We parted; she had a gravely ill mother waiting on the other side of yet another long plane ride, and I had my job, my baby, my family awaiting me in Austin. Such different lives, but always connected by a bright, hopeful, encouraging thread.

That, young grasshoppers, is far more beautiful than a 28-year-old Richard Gere.

Ohhh-klahoma, where the families camp

A few weeks ago, the Knox-Broyles family drove six hours north to meet up with the Broyles duo, who had driven six hours south. A little place called Chickasaw National Recreation Area was our home for two days. We cooked. We hiked. We saw tarantulas. See for yourself in this photo gallery. (If you can't see it, you need to become my friend of Flickr. It's a pain, I know, but if you have a Yahoo account it's even easier. I have to keep one iota of privacy here, people.:))

Dreams of space travel and simple days

I'm enjoying a very nice cup of coffee in Hotel ZaZa, a hip, upscale place right in the middle of Herman Park and the Museum District in Houston, where my balcony overlook the Museum of Fine Art and many of the park's lush trees.

I'm playing hooky from the Association of Food Journalists conference, a four day affair with dozens of other newspaper and freelance food writers, restaurant critics and food editors (all very different positions, I assure you), to A) catch up on a wee bit of sleep and B) reminisce about the last time I was in Houston for a conference.

It was a whopping 15 years ago (which is whopping when it's more than half your lifetime), in 1993, for a Young Astronauts conference, a gathering of members of Young Astronaut chapters from across the U.S. We had a pretty strong YA chapter in Aurora, where science-minded students from all elementary school grades would meet after school with teachers and talk about the bernoulli principle and jet propulsion and conduct experiments that involved messy ingredients and homemade hovercrafts that used vacuums to move around the smelly cafeteria where we met.

All very fun for eager 10-year-olds, but not near as much fun as going to NASA and hoping you pushed a wrong button that launched you and your buddies into space.

My mom, who as a teacher was one of the Young Astronaut leaders, had planned to go to that year's YA conference, but although my brain, like most young brains, understood she was going, I didn't comprehend what that meant until the day or two before she left. Once it clicked that she was about to go on a majorly cool adventure, I threw a fit and probably threatened to never talk to her again unless she let me go.

As my wee luck would have it, a small rural school my mom had once worked at was sending a busload of kids overnight to Houston (it was too late to get a plane ticket to go with Mom) and they had an extra seat. So I packed my little kid bags and headed to Bois D'Arc, which is where my parents were living when I was born, the night before the conference started. A TV crew was there, and KY3 anchor Tony Beason picked my little smiling face out of the crowd to interview for the nightly newscast (I ended up interning with him before starting Mizzou. Small world, huh?).

That long, dark bus ride was a milestone for me. Hunched in the rigid seats, I made fast friends with the older students, listening to the Beach Boys and Beatles on their Walkmans and checking out their teen magazines and for the first time getting what it meant to be cool.

By the time the sun rose, we were in a foreign land I now call home. Texas felt like the Deep South and going to NASA and touching the side of a rocket that had been in outer space made me even more sure that one day I, too, would go in space.

Hearing John Lennon sing "Help" might have given me a glimpse of the grown-up world, but I still embraced my childhood dreams.

In fact, as illogical as it might seem, this group of food journalists is going to NASA today, hypothetically to learn about the challenges of feeding astronauts in space, but for at least for one of them, it will be more about revisiting those eager, precocious days where anything was possible, the realities of adulthood be damned.

(If you want to see if I "accidentally" launch us into space on the field trip to NASA today, check out my live-tweeting of the conference, over on Twitter.)

Eat, Memory, Garlic

Eat, Memory: The Sixth Sense

By GARY SHTEYNGART
Published: October 9, 2005

Growing up I dreamed of garlic the way some dream of bright city lights. I had smelled the forbidden vegetable (spice? herb?) during brief trips to Manhattan, roasted garlic coating the poorer sections of town, clinging to the peeling fire escapes, pouring down the tenement stoops to sucker-punch me in the nose, my 10-year-old mind reeling with flavor and summertime heat and the still inchoate idea that sex could somehow be linked with the digestive process (cf. "Seinfeld").

Read the rest here...

(I can see it now, a not-too-bald George (Jason Alexander) crawling out from under the ravenous bedsheet activities to get a bite of a sandwich he's hidden in the bedside stand.)

I read this food column in "Eat, Memory," a compilation of essays published in the New York Times Magazine under the editing of Amanda Hesser, the longtime Times food editor who is coming to the Texas Book Festival early next month.

The writing in this book is taking me back to Jacqui Banaszynski's class -- the last time I can remember my writing being so closely scrutinized -- where we had to sum up our stories and the stories we analyzed in one single solitary word.

In the exercises in her class, we had to get past that we were writing about dessert, for example, to realize our words more precisely represented tradition, comfort or adventure.

In this article, it's lust or maybe passion. But is this article by Tom Perrotta about finickiness or outright control? Is lying to your diners to preserve your perceived originality more about ego or pride?

Of course, we won't all agree, because the meaning we find says more about ourselves than the author's intention, but it's a fun game to play, especially when we're talking about food.