August 27, 2010 by kim.

Tomorrow is the day we say farewell to Jersey, and hello to New York!

Symbolically, we are opening the door to our new life in NYC, but this is actually the key to one of our interior doors. They wouldn’t have a key and lock like this to open our front door. We have a dead-bolt, like this:

That’s a lock!

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August 9, 2010 by kim.

The San Rocco Festival took place this weekend (and a couple of days before) in Fort Lee, NJ, (as it has for the last 82 years here), and in many different cities around the country. It’s a festival celebrating Saint Rocco, the patron saint of pestilence, where he was said to have prayed for and cured many of a disease that had struck Italy.

There’s your history lesson for the day.

The festival consisted of food, music, and games in a 3 block area of the town. Yesterday was the day of the procession of Saint Rocco.

A statue is carried around the town, and money is pinned to it to raise funds for the Italian American Mutual Aid Society. Here are a couple of videos of the procession:

Pretty cool, no?

Other than that, it was a pretty small affair. We didn’t go on any rides (too expensive) or play any games (you know how fair those games are), but we walked around and did get plenty to eat:

Italian Sausage with onions and peppers

Deep Fried Oreo

Corn

Cannoli (we shared this)

Dippin’ Dots (ice cream that tasted like Nerds candy – we tried a little, but didn’t eat much of it)

Popcorn (we shared this)

Sno-kone (blue-raspberry flavor – shared it)

Cotton Candy (blue-whatever flavor – again, we shared it)

Surprisingly, we weren’t sick after eating all that junk food. We really did like the deep-fried Oreos, although we initially weren’t too sure about it. Deep-fried? Oreo? It’s not something I’d eat every day, but it was tasty.

Next month – Feast of San Gennaro in NYC!

Posted in Fun, Entertainment, Celebrate, Food, Happy | No Comments »

June 30, 2010 by kim.

Can you believe it has been FOUR years since I started blogging?

How about some of the highlights (and low-lights)?

Kimmi’s Blog (very first post – 06/30/06)

Possum (August 2006)

Kim breaks a wrist (October 2006)

Beautiful Danger (July 2007)

The show is a HIT! (September 2008)

R.I.P. Farrah, Michael, and Suzi Suzuki (June 2009)

The Beast (February 2010)

How about some stats? Let’s see how well I’m doing. Here are the page views for each year (the number of times each page was clicked on):

2006: 9799 (started 6/30/06)
2007: 42706
2008: 98443
2009: 96651
2010: 73211 (as of 6/30/10)

Now, this doesn’t mean that thousands of people are actually looking at my blog, necessarily. 75% could be spam hits, 15% could be me checking each page umpteen times to make sure everything is spelled correctly, and 10% (I hope) of the hits could be coming from loyal blog readers, like you (yes, I’m talking to YOU!). Either way, I like those numbers.

Now, if I just had a dollar for every view …

Posted in Celebrate, Happy | No Comments »

May 15, 2010 by kim.

Even Matilda:

See?

Posted in Fun, Entertainment, Animals, Happy | No Comments »

April 16, 2010 by kim.

No, not the stand-up kind. I’m talking about comic strips. Sunday funnies. The Green Sheet for those of you who remember the old Milwaukee Journal.

I love reading the comics in the Sunday paper. I don’t often buy a paper myself, but my mom will save up the comics from the paper she gets and will mail them to me. That may seem a bit silly to you, but it makes me happy to no end.

So, I was catching up on the comics the other day, and I actually had to look up some of the words I saw. I wasn’t even reading anything heavy like Doonesbury or solving a math riddle given by Jason in Fox Trot. The comics that I got hung up on were Baldo, Get Fuzzy, and Sally Forth (archives).

Let me show you.

First up is Baldo. I wasn’t familiar with this comic, as it must have come from another paper (not my usual Fond du Lac Reporter):

Cascarones was the word that threw me. Initially, I thought that they were throwing hard-boiled colored eggs at each other. After looking it up, I see that they were throwing confetti eggs. Eggs that were hollowed out, rinsed, dried, and filled with confetti. Fun!

Next up – Get Fuzzy:

Being familiar with the characters, I knew that Robert was probably talking about the sport of Rugby. Didn’t mean I knew what he was talking about, though. Here are the definitions:

Scrum
-noun
1. a Rugby play in which, typically, three members of each team line up opposite one another with a group of two and a group of three players behind them, making an eight-person, three-two-three formation on each side; the ball is then rolled between the opposing front lines, the players of which stand with arms around a teammate’s waist, meeting the opponent shoulder to shoulder, and attempt to kick the ball backward to a teammate.

Ruck
-noun
A play in Rugby in which a mass of players gathers around a ball dropped by a tackled ball carrier, with each player attempting to gain possession of the ball by kicking it to a teammate.

Maul
-noun
A play in Rugby in which a mass of players gathers around a ball carrier being tackled and attempts to gain possession of the ball when it is released.

Finally, we have Sally Forth:

DSM-IV? Never heard of it. Is that some sort of texting shorthand? No. It means Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition.

Really? Who would have gotten that? A psychiatrist, I suppose …

Point is, you can always learn something new. Even from something as seemingly simple as the funny pages.

Posted in Fun, Entertainment, Happy | 1 Comment »

April 7, 2010 by kim.

Chris finished work on a rap video for the book How to Ruin Your Boyfriend’s Reputation by Simone Elkeles about two months ago, and I’m finally getting around to posting this now. This book is the third in the How to Ruin … series. I assisted by taking pictures, documenting the process with Chris’s video camera, and running playback for filming. Meaning, I pressed PLAY on the iPhone and played the music back for the singing and dancing.

Here are some pics!

Recording the soundtrack

Framing a shot

Watching the action

Directing

Cast and Chris

Cast and Simone

Here is the video!

CAST
Amy played by Allynn Simons

with:
John Alix
Erin Krom
Samantha Schechter
Samantha Shafer
Tim Winski

CREATIVE TEAM
Written by:
Simone Elkeles
www.simoneelkeles.net

Directed, Edited, and Music by:
Chris LoDuca
LoDuca Creative and Production
www.loducacreative.com

Choreographed by:
Kristen Gurbach Jacobson

Director’s Assistant:
Kimberly LoDuca

Shot and recorded at American Movie Company:
www.americanmovieco.com

Woo woo!

Posted in Video, Fun, Happy | 1 Comment »

March 28, 2010 by kim.

I am a big fan of percentages. Whenever I talk about my health and how I feel, it is always in percentages. Today, I feel that I am at about 97% of my normal, healthy, happy self! Hooray!

The 3% of my body that is holding out has some mild tingling/numbness, spasticity, and double vision. Nothing that I can’t handle, and if I stop thinking about it, those issues will go away soon enough.

Because I was feeling so good, we decided to take a little day trip and visit our old neighborhood of Fort Washington to wander around in Fort Tryon Park.

We looked at the flowers in bloom,

went to the Cloisters,

saw the Easter Bunny,

and happened upon the severed head of Spider-man.

Then we went to lunch at a new Mexican restaurant,

and headed back home where I had Chris take a picture of me and where I’m at now:

Looking pretty good, if I do say so myself!

Next weekend I plan to take the final step on my road to healing and travel into the city on the subway. The dirty, grimy, smelly, beautiful, full of character, can’t get enough of it … subway.

I can’t wait!!

Posted in Celebrate, Happy | No Comments »

December 25, 2009 by kim.

Seasons Greetings from us!

Here is a stop motion video that Chris created using our Christmas Village and his 76-year-old Nativity scene that belonged to his grandparents when they first got married:

And here is a video that Chris put together (in about an hour) of a festive fire truck that drove up and down the streets of Fort Lee, NJ on Christmas Eve:

Happy Holidays!

Posted in Fun, Holiday, Happy | No Comments »

November 18, 2009 by kim.

I’ve been a bit busy lately, turning 35 and starting a new temp job. Wow. Two things. Really? Really. How hard is that? I am such a master of excuses …

Anyway, when I get home after seven hours of staring at a computer and two hours (one each way) commuting to and from work, I have a hard time focusing on important things like searching for a full-time job and working on my blog.

Still, I want to keep up on this, so here are a few pics to hold you until I write something more interesting …

The cake I made for myself:

Cute picture of a duck in Central Park diving for food:

Chris and Matilda before the claws dig in …

… and after:

Posted in Celebrate, Fun, Nature, Animals, Happy, Food, Observation | No Comments »

October 13, 2009 by kim.

One weekend before we moved to Jersey, Chris and I went to the Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary in Chicago. Beautiful. Gorgeous. Peaceful. I wish I could hang out there every day, all day. I got so swept up taking pictures that I was able to block out the city completely. Chris took a couple of shots of the skyline, but I focused mostly on foliage and insects.

Sign

Prairie

Flower

Trees

Bee

Black wasp

Grasshoppers

Milkweed Tussock Moth caterpillars

Skyline

Simply sublime!

Posted in Nature, Insects, Happy, Observation | No Comments »