Ginger Makela’s Small-Time Blog-Thing

• After a mini-shoot at Boulder’s Chautauqua Park, Jason and I headed out to dinner with our make-up artist friend Jessica and her boyfriend Chris, who both live in Boulder, which gives me an intense sense of jealousy.
• Why? Boulder feels like a small town, but has the sophistication of a much larger city. And you can bike everywhere, and people do bike everywhere. Every time I blinked, I saw another girl in flip-flops on a candy-colored Townie bike merrily coasting along.
• Noticing my envy, Jessica reminded me that bike-status is to Boulder what car-status is to LA. In Boulder you deal with hipsters on fixed-gear bikes sliding through intersections.
• We ate at Radda Trattoria in North Boulder, a neighborhood-style restaurant in a retro strip mall built in 1958. I was enamored as we pulled into the parking lot. The strip mall kept all its old charm - a low zig-zag roofline and lots and lots of neon. Why more strip malls don’t use neon is beyond me — it always makes me feel like a giddy, excited kid sneaking a peek into a mysterious adult word. Here’s a streetview I snapped of the mall. Imagine it less pixelated and trimmed with multi-colored neon!
• Radda’s menu is full of little dishes inspired by Tuscany. I ordered the Rucola (baby arugula salad) and a contorni that I thought was going to be grilled escolar. But I had misread the menu in my pinot grigio haze — I need to stop scanning and start reading entire words again — and what I was really ordering was a nice grilled bowl of escarole. Lovely: two salads for dinner. Luckily I had also ordered a side of Patate Fritte (a little bowl of gorgeously golden french fries), and Jason donated a couple slices of his Margherita pizza, so all was not lost. Overall: one of the best dining experiences I’ve had in Colorado. Next time, I’m ordering the Tuna Ravioli.
• On the 30-minute ride home back to Denver, I daydreamed about selling our place, moving up to Boulder, trading my Beetle in for a Townie. When we got home, I jumped online and starting looking at Boulder housing. For the cost of our townhouse in Denver, we’d get half the square footage at twice the price in Boulder. Not so much.

Jason and I roadtripped to New Mexico for a few days to visit his uncle and family, whom I’ve never met and Jason hasn’t seen in 20 years.

A little bit older than 70, Jason’s uncle has 3 sons, 13 grandchildren, and 5 great grandchildren, all of whom live in New Mexico, and most live within 15 minutes of each other.

From Denver, we drove down I-25 through Pueblo, across through Walsenburg over the Rockies on 160 to Durango, then down south on 550 to Bloomfield, NM, where Jason’s uncle lives.

Once you cross the Colorado/New Mexico border, the terrain feels like it’s drying up and crumbling off.

There’s such a difference from the tourist-friendly alpine greenness of Durango and the arid, desolate buttes and mesas of San Juan County that you feel like you’ve crossed over to another planet, like Tatooine.

Nothing glamorous in Bloomfield. The most prominent feature on the horizon is an oil refinery — a sprawling industrial complex whose extensive piping oddly fits into the beige chalky landscape.

Bloomfield doesn’t feel like a destination; it’s a workhorse. A place you pass through unless you live there. Most of the six thousand people who live in Bloomfield work for the oil and gas-related companies in the area.

There’s a Motel 8, where we stayed. A couple gas stations. A handful of roadside restaurants. A Burger King. And a brand-spanking new Starbucks Coffee with a drive thru. I did a double take when we first drove into town. Wha? This was the oddest place I’ve seen a Starbucks. It’s newness and sleekness make it look like a mirage.

We stopped in for an ice coffee. Count Basie was playing over the speakers and the Top Pot glazed donuts in the pastry case had the dull sheen we’re all familiar with. Same as everywhere.

Jason’s uncle owns a pawn shop in Bloomfield. It’s a family business that’s been around for 30 years, and Jason’s cousins take turns working there.

I’d never been in a pawn shop before. This one was full of neatly organized rows of chain saws, saddles, tools, guns, ammo, pocket knives, Indian blankets and a case full of turquoise and silver jewelry.

And it was busy with people.

Jason’s uncle reminds me of Richard Farnsworth – soft spoken and genial with an Oklahoma accent.

He and Jason’s aunt are silver-haired raconteurs whose anecdotes tumble out in a steady stream punctuated by “and then…”

Jason’s cousins have the same demeanor, all good-natured and bonded by a familiarity and volubility that I’ve never had with my my own family.

They never run out of things to talk about – the pawn shop is a perpetual klatch. A cornerstone in the community.

People from Bloomfield stop in, BS a while. Jason’s aunt told me that a psychologist they know stops in frequently to remind himself that normal people exist.

But to me, they seemed unusual: Jason’s second cousins, part of our generation, have all chosen to stay in New Mexico, and many of them in Bloomfield.

Sure, they’re been to college or culinary school, or some other professional program, but they’ve decided ultimately to stay around their family –- helping each other remodel homes that they’ve bought, taking care of each other’s children, racing together in weekend stock car races.

When I asked them about their futures, what they wanted for themselves, it was a given that they stay together. Leaving New Mexico didn’t seem like even a remote possibility.

Which seems to me counter to our culture’s current sway: move where the career opportunities are, where you – the individual – can grow.

This is an issue that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately since my family is dispersed throughout the midwest, all in different states. How do you balance career opportunity with family relationships and quality of life? How do you balance the need to fit into a group with a desire to strike out as an individual? What’s the cost of living far away from those you grew up with?

Maybe Jason’s cousins are on to something. In a recent study, economist Nattavudh Powdthavee put a price on the happiness that being with family and friends brings us, and found that

Increasing face time with friends and relatives from “once or twice a month” to “on most days” feels like getting a $179,000 raise.

So maybe moving to another city for a job that pays $30K more isn’t really worth it, if it means being away from people you love.

There’s a part of me that wants to return to the sort of community that Jason’s family in Bloomfield has: family businesses, Sunday homecooked dinners, permanent roots, the feeling of being taken care of.

But then there’s pull of opportunity – of newness, of the possibility of something that will transform me into something else.

In the past couple of months, ever since I’ve been searching for a new job, I’ve had recurring dreams that I’m in an airport, trying to find my gate, but I’m constantly turning up too late, getting sidetracked by wrong turns and lost laptops.

In the dreams, it’s a feeling of being in limbo: not being in the right place but unable to get to another destination.

Maybe the desolation I thought endemic to Bloomfield isn’t really there — that the quesy intermediate feeling is really all about me.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about social media sites and how they’ll end up making money from advertising, if that’s the direction they choose to go.

I’ve read about Google’s Network Node Targeting Patent, SocialMedia’s FriendRank ad model and a bunch of other models from ad start-ups, and it seems the algorithms that they’re cooking up to solve this social media business model problem examine the connective tissue between personal relationships and place ads in the middle.

The concerns about the models have mostly been in the privacy/creepiness vein.

But there have been few arguments that connecting social norms and market norms might kill the essence of social media that drives people to use it in the first place.

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This morning, after I made coffee, I starting thinking about what I was going to eat for dinner.

6:30 am, and I’m nexting (I got this wonderful term from Daniel Gilbert’s excellent book Stumbling on Happiness) about dinner, and I haven’t even eaten breakfast yet.

Maybe I’m strange in this regard. Maybe not. There are probably people out there who plan their entire week of meals before Monday.

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Back when I worked at the Big G, the Ad Planner was my favorite internal-only tool. I got an invite to the Ad Planner beta this morning, and I’ve been having a grand time playing around with it.

Internally it was called the Audience Tool, and it’s gone through some major UI improvements since I’ve used it last.

Besides using it to build media plans for Google advertisers, I used Ad Planner personally to find cool sites that people like me were going to but I didn’t know about.

It works a lot like a recommendation engine (people who go to FriendFeed also go to…); I could plug in a well-know site like kottke.org and get back a bunch of smaller blogs that were highly compatible.

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This weekend Jason and I flew up to Minnesota for my nephew Gavin’s baptism. My brother and sister-in-law asked us to be Gavin’s godparents, and we immediately accepted.

Friday, my Dad picked us up at the Minneapolis airport, and we made our way to Hutchinson via the Minnesota River Valley and Highway 212, through the towns of Chaska, Cologne, Young America, Plato, and Glencoe — one of the prettiest rural drives you will ever encounter in America.

I grew up in Minnesota, but it took me leaving home and living somewhere arid to appreciate how lush the MN landscape is.

On Highway 212, you’ll find neat farmhouses presiding over rolling hills and seas of shimmering corn. Some cows. Some horses.

You’ll also see many small but well-kept Protestant churches with encouraging outdoor signs: “BLOOM WHERE YOU ARE PLANTED” and “HOW MANY SIGNS DO YOU NEED? - GOD”.

Driving through the small towns I felt a coziness, a feeling of human scale, and imagined the lives of the people here.

The towns’ architecture — older homes with neatly organized lawn ornaments and flourishing gardens — seem to question big ambition and the need to live a glamorous life with that nagging desire for more.

A couple years years ago my parents built a house at the edge of a cornfield in Hutchinson. My dad designed it: a two-story old-style farmhouse with off-white paint (the manufacturer called it “Dirty Socks” and it’s an accurate name) with green shutters and a wrap-around porch in the middle of a former farmstead windbreak. They have a large garden in back, planted with lettuces, carrots, potatoes, onions, asparagas, raspberries, grapes and strawberries.

He calls the place Kotimaa: meaning Homeland, in Finnish.

Gavin’s baptism ceremony was held in my grandmother’s modest Lutheran church on Saturday.

I’d never been to a baptism before, except for my own.

The pastor was a gentle man who had the face of a boy, despite his graying beard. He had longish hair that went down past his clerical collar and tiny wire-framed glasses.

I’d never met him before, but he knows my grandmother well. He’s taken great care to visit her in the hospital when she was recovering from surgery, and visits her at home, now that she is virtually home-bound.

I shook his hand and nervously started talking about the birds that woke me up this morning at 4am and the strawberries I wanted to pick this afternoon.

He didn’t have the one-up, me-too style of conversation so common these days (e.g. Me: “Boy, it’s hot out in Denver today. 96 degrees!” Other person: “That’s nothing. It’s 108 degrees in Phoenix!”) but had a compassionate spirit who actually listened and asked questions, and wanted to know more about the strawberries. He was, in short, a therapist.

I’m not a religious person. I believe in a higher power, cosmic justice, and things that cannot be explained by current science, but I am not a church-goer. Mostly because I’m a rebellious person who distrusts large organizations and charismatic leaders.

When I was a little girl, my grandmother arranged for me to go to Vacation Bible School in the summer, but I think it didn’t have much effect on my mind.

It made me equate religion with making chotchkes (we made Jesus stained glass) and memorization: singing songs that I was supposed to have an emotional connection to, but didn’t, which made me feel guilty.

There was no talk of spiritual feelings and connecting those feelings to Bible stories or to real-life situations.

It was more like postmodern branding, where it’s more important to remember the image than understand what it means.

My grandma is the last alive of sixteen siblings. She grew up on a large dairy farm in Kingston, Minnesota, and her father was a very successful farmer who helped popularize the milking machine in Southern Minnesota.

Though she lived through the Great Depression, she doesn’t remember it having much of an effect on her; she was on a self-sufficient farm with plenty of food.

I’ve never heard her complain about one thing, ever. She keeps any personal pain to herself, even though she’s lived a life with plenty. She never talks about faith, but I think the one thing that has gotten her through life is a belief that there’s a higher power and a reason for things, be it unknown to her.

The baptism ceremony was over very quickly — lasted less than five minutes — and during it I became a godmother.

Being a godmother means that I’ve promised to teach Gavin the ten commandments, among other things. Which I will gladly do.

As an adult I’ve learned that the ten commandments pretty much sum up the basis for a happy life.

Not because there’s an angry God that’s going to throw down thunderbolts because you’ve looked longingly at your neighbor’s Lexus, but because coveting other people’s property prevents you from enjoying what have, and it will make you miserable. Your life will be a hell of longing to get what you don’t have.

After the baptism, we made our way home to Kotimaa, over the fields of green, stopping at a Dairy Queen for ice cream cones.

We’re a distributed family now. My brother, sister-in-law and nephew are in Chicago. My parents in Hutchinson. We’re in Denver. Marriages and jobs have scattered us.

It’s a once-a-year rarity that we all get together in one physical spot. So when we do, there’s a bit of overzealous engineering to make every moment special. But once we get past that, and just let the cards fall where they may, that’s when it’s the most fun and feels the most real.

My mom puttered in the kitchen, making homemade dough for the pizzas later.

I picked strawberries and some of the leafy lettuces — arugula, butter lettuce and spinach — for a salad.

I’ve picked vegetables and fruits before, but I’m always surprised how much physical labor is involved in bending over, picking things, and I feel for the people who do this for a living, every day, in the hot sun.

I have a tendency to romanticize an agrarian life, 100 years ago, thinking that it was simpler and less frenetic.

What isn’t in that picture is the brutality of living back then. As I lopped off the green tops of the two liters of strawberries I picked, I could see how time-consuming everyday living was on a farm, and why women welcomed convenience foods, buying a can of green beans at the store instead of growing, picking, cleaning, and canning their own.

We’re a culture bent on efficiency. We love time-saving machines that help us in our daily life.

And one would think that we would now have abundant leisure time, that we’d all be working 20-hour weeks and spending time in happy repose with family and friends.

Instead, almost everyone talks about how busy they are, and how there’s no time to do anything, and that coffee is our daily fuel.

Where has this leisure-time gone that all of these machines promised?

In the evening after pizza, my brother, the food scientist and beverage master, improvised and made Summer Strawberry Caipiroskas from the strawberries that I picked, and we all sat out on the wrap-around porch, swatted mosquitos away, and were a rapt audience to every one Gavin’s movements and emotions.

At seven months old, he now smiles back with great enthusiasm when you smile at him. And where, two months ago, he warily hid his face at the sight of a camera, he now knows, when something large and black and squarish is held up in front of him, it’s time to smile. And what a smile it is.

My brother is a food scientist and concocts new drinks for the Smirnoff brand, among others. He’s a skilled mixologist, and always comes up with delicious drinks with any ingredients available.

This weekend, during the summer solstice, he made Summer Strawberry Caipiroskas with tiny strawberries straight from my parents’ garden. It’s a perfect drink for a humid summer night.

Summer Strawberry Caipiroska Recipe

In the bottom of a an old-fashioned glass, muddle 1/2 cup fresh strawberries + 1 tablespoon confectioner’s sugar. Add ice to the brim. Add 2 oz. Smirnoff Red (or Blue if you like it stronger) vodka. Top off with a splash of lemonade. Shake with cocktail shaker. Enjoy.

Last Saturday, Jason and I were walking through Cherry Creek (a chi-chi area of Denver), and came across one of these little honeys parked outside of the Cherry Cricket, a popular sports bar:

For cute! I thought. A little tiny Mini Cooper (cute), and dressed up like a margarita! (cute squared). There were a group of cute girls around the car, in tight Cuervo t-shirts, bantering with groups of guys walking past the bar. Fun.

Driving home, I started to get a little indignant about the Cuervo car, though. A little pissed off. Great. Another trick to get my attention. Another place for an ad.

It seems like I can’t pee these days without seeing an ad. In the bathroom stall at my local margarita joint, there’s an ad with a smiling, tanned woman in a wedding dress holding a bouquet of lilies: “Look your best on your wedding day! Darque Tanning (financing available!)”

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Last summer, I was on a strict diet — The Specific Carbohydrate Diet.

Not a diet to lose weight, but a diet to cure the digestive issues I’ve had since I was a little kid.

The diet worked, but it meant cutting out all of my favorite foods: mac-n-cheese, lemon meringue pie, sourdough toast, pepperoni pizza, sugary martinis. You know: all of the good stuff.

Giving up the foods I loved the most, especially junk food, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.

Sounds silly, but that’s the truth.

What kept me sane, when others around me were eating garlic cheese bread and snarfing down sugary cocktails, was a recipe book: Eat Well, Feel Well by Kendall Conrad, which is full of extremely tasty recipes for folks on the SCD.

One of my most favorite recipes was for fresh mango margaritas.

They’re dangerous and delicious: heady, fragrant, and inflused with enough vitamins and fresh fruit that you don’t feel guilty downing a couple (these are healthy, right? I’ll have another).

I made them for just about every small get-together we hosted — and they were incredibly popular, especially with the ladies.

Here’s the recipe from Eat Well, Feel Well:

Fresh Mango Margarita Recipe

2 large fresh mangoes, peeled, pitted, and chopped (2 to 3 mangoes)
1 cup honey
3 cups ice
1 cup fresh lime juice (about 6 limes)
6 ounces tequila
1 cup chopped fresh mint leaves, plus 4 sprigs for garnish
1 cup salt
1 lime, cut into wedges
ice cubes

In a blender, puree the mangoes and honey until smooth. Add 3 cups of the ice, lime juice, and tequila, and blend until slushy.

With a mortar and pestle or in a food processor, crush the mint with the salt. Place on a plate. Rub the rim of the margarita glass with a lime wedge and then invert the glass into the mint-salt to coat the edge. Fill the glass with ice cubes and pour in the mango margarita. Top with a lime wedge and a mint sprig.

A new notes:

• The rigmarole with the mint and salt was too fussy for us, so we ended up ditching it all together.
• Cutting up fresh mangoes is a lot of work, and sometimes it’s difficult finding ripe ones, so we substitute a bag of organic frozen mangoes (pre-chopped) from Whole Foods and let them thaw for a few hours before showtime (otherwise, if the mango is frozen, the honey gets too viscous and won’t incorporate well). Tastes just as good.
• Invest in a cheap lime press!
• Add more than 6 ounces of tequila. We like Patron Silver.
• Keep your martini glasses in the freezer — frosted glasses make me feel like a kid at the A&W again.

Enjoy! There’s no better night than sitting out on the patio with a pitcher of these, good people, and great conversation.

A couple years ago, I often ate lunch at an Arby’s down the road from our office in the Denver Tech Center.

Back in those days, I was always in a hurry: worried about responding to e-mail quickly, worried about getting all of my work done on time, worried about being gone from the office too long.

So, Arby’s was a quick fix. Sure, not healthy, but when you’re starving and in a rush you want something fast and easy, and you want something you know you’re going to enjoy.

One afternoon, pretty late in the day, and after the lunch rush, I sat down in the Arby’s dining room to eat my Roast Beef Sandwich, Traditional Fries, and a Coke.

And I wolfed my food down in a rush, not thinking about it, not really paying attention to anything but the crap running through my head about work.

And then it happened. I inhaled funny, and something stuck and felt weird. I tried to take a swig of Coke, and then I realized, when I tried to breathe, that I couldn’t.

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