07.09.10
Posted in Events at 6:58 pm by Bridget Zinn
Summer of Love, Part II in Lake Nebagamon was lovely. There was even a little breeze off the lake.
Thanks to Barrett’s mom and everyone who worked to make this day so nice! Unfortunately, most of the pics of the event ended up getting censored due to cleavage issues. Either my bosom got bigger in one week (curse you tasty Madison food!) or the straps of my dress got stretched. In any case, that just means a possible wardrobe change for the Summer of Love, Part III in Portland which we will set a date for very soon. It’s not too late to RSVP!
Fortunately we have lots of pre-event shots featuring some of the awesome Party People who put the event together (featuring my pre-party outfit which had slightly less distressing cleavage issues).
Thanks to everyone who came to Summer of Love, Part II!
Love to you all,
Bridget & Barrett
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04.30.10
Posted in Events, Uncategorized at 10:47 am by Bridget Zinn
You are invited to Barrett and Bridget’s Summer of Love!
Click here to go to the invite.
We are finally continuing what we began with our wedding celebrations last spring with a whole summer full of love. Come join us at one of our parties!
If anyone with organizational skills in the Madison area would like to take charge of the volunteers for that event that would be awesome. We’re still caught up in kicking cancer (there’s just a little bit left — I say Out damn spot! We’re ready to move on to more fun adventures). With this distraction, I worry that I might end up suggesting everyone bring cake or something and forget to ask people to bring forks and then we’ll end up having to eat cake with our hands. So an organizing type person would be super fab.
We haven’t filled out details yet for our Portland event because the two earlier big events (and many small ones while we are in WI) is all we can handle right at the moment but we will update that page as soon as we can. We realize some Portlanders were at one of the weddings last year and are maybe so over celebrating it with us, BUT we promise it will be extra fun and worth the repeat. It was a small group out of necessity last year and we want to be able to celebrate with all of our PNW friends.
Fun times will be had.
Hope to see you all at one event or another!
With love,
Bridget
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11.17.09
Posted in Events, Recipe at 9:20 am by Bridget Zinn
I know a lot of you have already seen the happiest Buddha on facebook, but
I wanted to make sure that everyone got a chance to see him. I feel slightly guilty that he used to make the day of all of the shoppers in Port Townsend where he lived as a doorstop and now he just makes Barrett’s and my day living next to our fireplace. Doesn’t he make you smile?
The lovely Reiki practitioner that I work with (she’s awesome, check her out here) commented that it looks as though my happy Buddha is drawing energy down into his heart — I think she’s probably right and we can use all of the good energy in our house that we can get, but sometimes I just want to give him a high five.
In other news, I baked last week, something I’ve only been dreaming about doing for months. There’s something so enticing about baking — it makes your house smell great and there’s this feeling of transforming disparate pieces into an entirely new whole that’s like magic. I used a recipe for banana bread that I found online here. It uses agave nectar which I’ve been eager to try. I’m a big fan of most foods that are reputed to be gifts from the gods. It turns out that agave nectar is quite tasty and the banana bread got a thumbs up.
If my tech guy weren’t busy working at his other job, I would post pics of the cool things my talented and fabulous friends gave me for my birthday (as you can see from the Buddha above, my pic-taking is not quite up to Barrett’s standards). Carolyn and Adrienne both gave me homemade jam which are like jars full of edible sunshine and my friend Cyndi made this scarf that looks exactly like fudge ripple ice cream and there are more cool things, but without pics, I feel like I’m just taunting you and no one likes a taunter. I have no idea how I have been so lucky as to have fallen in with talented people who know how to make things (outside of banana bread which is about as much as I can do), but I am greatly enjoying the results.
And I have more news from my other talented and fabulous friends who have been helping to keep us out of debtor’s prison (which I have mentioned before is a grim and cakeless place) due to our surprise medical bills this year — an online auction run by Cailin and our friends in Madison. If you didn’t get a chance to be part of the fun of the last online auction, now’s your chance! Jone, who so generously ran the Portland online auction, sums it up all very nicely here. You can also see a picture of Barrett, myself, and cake.
I hope you are having a fabulous week!
Love to you all,
Bridget
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11.03.09
Posted in Events at 9:48 pm by Bridget Zinn
We went to the beach on Sunday and it was gorgeous — not too cold, not at all crowded, really, it was absolutely gorgeous. I got to watch Barrett watch his first sunset into the ocean — the way the sun just suddenly dips down like the ocean is swallowing it up is so amazing the first time you see it and just as amazing the however many times I’ve seen it too. And I was feeling pretty great and thinking “ha ha, I’m going to be a whole year older tomorrow, take that Fate, you can’t slow me down with your stupid cancer, I’m still going to keep having birthdays and getting older and YOU can’t stop me!” And I may have even done some fist shaking and triumphant laughing, it’s all a bit of a blur now.
Then, two hours later, after a nice dinner at the cutest little pizza parlor in Manzanita, I came down with a fever. Not just any fever, one of those volcano lava alternating with freezing ice bones alternating with volcano lava on the inside/ice sheet on the outside and then vice versa fevers. I probably don’t need to tell you that chemotherapy patients aren’t really allowed to get fevers. We are under strict instructions to go immediately to the ER with a fever over 100.5. I won’t get into why, but getting another year older was starting to look dodgy.
I would not recommend shaking one’s fist at fate.
But we didn’t have a thermometer at the hotel, so we couldn’t say FOR SURE that I had a fever of 100.5+. And I really really didn’t want to drive back to Portland to the ER where they would definitely place me as an inpatient where I would definitely have had to spend my birthday (if the fever didn’t get me first). If we didn’t have a thermometer to PROVE I had a fever there was no way I was going in. Possibly I wasn’t nearly as hot as I thought I was.
At 1 a.m. my fever broke in a great big gush causing the necessity of a complete costume change. We headed home in the a.m. and my fever only spiked once during my birthday (which is sort of funny because I just felt a tiny bit warm and it was 100.1, who knows what it was when I actually thought I felt hot). But I made it to my birthday which is all to the good and I didn’t even have to spend time at the hospital.
I will not be shaking my fist at Fate over that though. Just quietly chuckling to myself maybe.
Did not make it on a bakery crawl, but so many treats came my way that it wasn’t even necessary starting with the hand delivered cupcakes from my cousin Chris last week who’s mother gave him cupcake delivering instructions (and scared the pants off me when she e-mailed me and her name came up Grandma Ryan and I thought it was a message from Beyond from my Grandma Ryan who I’d temporarily forgotten didn’t even go by Grandma Ryan when she was alive, she went by Grandma Gert, but then I figured it out and realized that of course it was my Aunt Janet who has been Grandma Ryan to my cousins’ children for a good portion of my life and, in fact, I’m related to a good many Grandma Ryans as my family seems to be trying for world domination by sheernumbers, if not actual military skill). 
Then there were the Restorative Cookies that Barrett baked me to heal me from my fever (oatmeal chocolate chip) and more cupcakes were delivered by Cupcake Jones from my Aunt Jane and her girls. Plus, we had gorgeous leftover Tiramisu Tart Something Great and Crunchy That I Can’t Remember the Name of Cake that Jone baked me and brought to Portland Kidlit Drinks Night on Friday.
So I stayed home mostly and ate treats and read the fabulous books Barrett bought me — Laini’s Lips Touch Three Times and Johanna’s illustrated Clover Twig and the Magical Cottage. I highly recommend both. I think they may have been restorative too. Plus, we got copies of Janet’s book The Great Lakes and if you look inside (you should buy your own copy to see for yourself in real live print) you will see that it was dedicated to Barrett and I. V. exciting.
And I got to read all sorts of lovely birthday messages via e-mail and on facebook from all of you!
Overall, it was a great, if somewhat dramatic, birthday.
And I still have three days of birthday week left! It all ends Thursday and then back to chemo where I’m hoping the nurses are not reading my blog and if they are, they’re thinking “that Bridget and her not coming in when she should, what larks” instead of “how are we going to keep this stupid girl alive if she doesn’t come in when she’s so obviously supposed to.”
Love to you all,
Bridget
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09.10.09
Posted in Events, Portland at 3:18 pm by Bridget Zinn
I’ve gotten so many great suggestions in the comments here and on facebook for funniness! Thanks bunches.
And, if you live anywhere near northern WI, there is more fun to be had. I’ve said before how lucky we are to be rich in friends and it’s still true. Lovely, lovely friends. Not only do you keep us entertained, you are also helpful in so many other ways like keeping us from debtor’s prison which I hear is a very drab and cakeless place.
Our northern WI friends are putting on a Cake Auction (I know, doesn’t that sound fab?) for us on September 30 from 7-9 pm at the Lake Nebagamon Auditorium which is incidentally where I had my college graduation ball and where I both got to wear my ball gown from London and watch my childhood neighbor juggle fire. Good times are had at the Lake Nebagamon Auditorium and the Cake Auction is going to be v. v. fun. I hear rumor that my favorite chocolate cake in the world is going to be there too. Not to be missed!
Here’s the gorgeous poster:
If you go to I want to help Bridget and Barrett on facebook, you can find out more info on the cake auction. Also, if you scroll down to the discussion board and click on Trying to help from AZ., you can get info on our friend Matt Smith’s art prints that he’s been selling to help us out.
Joan has been working hard all summer getting things sorted out from the online auction this past May which is no easy task and which we appreciate immensely. I did a little digging and I’ve got some blog posts for you to read if you’re interested in hearing from some of the auction winners. It’s so nice to see all of the good things that have come from the auction (besides keeping us out of the aforementioned debtor’s prison — cakeless and cold, they probably don’t even have cheese to go with the moldy bread there).
Post-Auction Stories:
Author Grace Linn and her successful promotions meeting with marketing genius Mitali Perkins.
Portland writer and one of my cyberfriends Kim Kasch and her professional critique from the marvelous Margot Finke.
And fun times at the beach for a whole gaggle of fun and talented Portland kidlitters. Author Suzanne Young and her husband Jesse, along with illustrator Matt Holm and his lovely wife, Cyndi, and illustrator Johanna Wright and her husband, Gabe.
If you know of any more success stories from the auction, I’d love to hear them. Please send them my way!
Love to you all,
Bridget
P.S. For those who asked, the ya author who wrote the books where the second one has twins on the cover is Sharon Shinn and the book is The Truth-Teller’s Tale. Highly recommended.
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