Halloween!!!

Halloween is so much fun with the boys! Finn is an old pro, but this was Jack's first year trick or treating and he showed a precocious genius. He squeaked out a "Trick or Treat" that was so cute that he got twice as much candy as anyone else!

In case you can't tell, Finn was a jelly fish. His mama put together a good looking costume that even glowed in the dark! Some of the tentacles were missing by the end of the night, but I think that Finn had one of the more original costumes out there. Please note that Finn also designed the creepy pumpkin in front of our house.

Jack was Max from Where the Wild Things Are, and never has there been a more appropriate costume. As soon as we put it on he started jumping up and down like crazy. I'm sure that he would wear it all the time if he could and make mischief of one kind and another. I think that Jack liked trick or treating, but I think that he really liked our Halloween tradition of taking a candy break while walking around.

It was all fun, but one thing we noticed was a larger number of extra-scary houses: sound effects, smoke, people jumping out at you, etc. I guess that people are getting into the spirit, but some of the houses were too much for our little guys.

By the way, mama had a great costume also - any guesses? That's right! Isadora Duncan!

I think that daddy needs a costume next year.

Ice Cream Castles in the Air...

Finn went to a birthday this weekend for Lorelei Lusby, the daughter of our friends Josh & Adrienne. The party was at a fun gym place in Burbank, but I thought that the coolest thing was this engineering feat by our friend Fred Wensloff. He cut a bunch of ice cream out of their containers and built a formidable ice cream castle. It was then pimped out Halloween style, and the final result was pretty great!

Needless to say, after the kids came in, it lasted about three minutes. At least Finn seemed to like it - the girls next to him seem a little more ambivalent, or maybe just sick from all of the ice cream.

Satisfaction Brought Him Back!!!

Here's a good one. Pandora is a website that streams music, working like a radio station that you create yourself. The way it works is simple and brilliant. You pick a few artists or songs that you like and then the site starts to play other stuff that it figures you may also like. If you dig it, you give it thumbs up & visa versa.

The station gets smarter and the music gets really good! It's all based on a huge and complicated algorhythm called the music genome project, but the upshot is that you get to hear some great music that you've never heard before. I've got two stations: Doreradio and Dore Folk - create your own stations or listen in on mine. Enjoy!

http://www.pandora.com/

Happy Birthday Amy!!!

Hello, everyone – this is Em, temporarily hacking into Patrick’s blog. Last week was very exciting for us. My beautiful, amazing sister, Rosada came to visit with her daughter, Ryann and Ryann’s two adorable daughters, Eleanor and Naomi. Finn and Eleanor were very excited to see each other – especially during the two days that we got to spend at Disneyland – hooray! As an extra bonus, my nephew Christopher and his wife Joyce were able to join us at Disneyland one of the days and we arranged for a babysitter through the Disneyland hotel that night so that we could go on some of the grown up rides – whee! The flying ride at California Adventure was truly amazing, but in my opinion, nothing can compare to Space Mountain. Bell and I laughed so hard on that ride; our jaws were actually hurting afterwards.

In addition to our fabulous Disneyland trip, my aunt Holly also came up from San Diego one night for a wonderful Thai dinner that almost made us forget the truly wretched dinner we had the night before at Hank’s. Boo! Usually, Hank’s is pretty reliable (and I have to say, my salmon was still great) but this time it took them almost two hours to bring our dinner and when it finally came, they forgot both Bell and Zod’s orders. Of course, it wouldn’t be a proper Monahan reunion without at least one good fiasco for all of us to laugh over, so there you go.

Unfortunately, I had to leave half way through Zod and Ryann’s visit to fly to Austin with Adrienne for the Austin Film Festival. I was sad to leave my family, but Adrienne and I were very excited that our script, Relativity was a finalist at the festival. Our script did not win in our category, but we had a great time meeting lots of amazing writers and we were also happy to run into our friend, Toby Wilkins, whose film, Splinter was debuting at the festival. Splinter is a scary low-budget horror movie about these weird little tentacle-type things (inspired by sea urchins) that stick into human skin – either alive or dead – and then take control of it. I think Toby may have regretted inviting me to his screening, since I was practically sitting in his lap by the end of it, but I had a great time getting the bejeezus scared out of me. Admittedly, I’m not the biggest horror movie aficionado, so it probably doesn’t take all that much to scare me, but I was really impressed by the creepy way his creature moved.

Anyway, it was an amazing, excitement-filled trip, but I missed my boys terribly. I’ve never been away from Finn or Jack for more than one night and I’m not sure I’ve been away from Patrick for much longer than that - so I am very, very glad to be home. It’s been hard adjusting to not having Zod around. I love my sisters so much, it’s crazy and I really wish that we could all live closer together. But I’m grateful for whatever time we have together.

Huntington Gardens!!

Em left town this weekend - she and Adrienne were at the Austin Film Festival where their script was up for an award! So the guys and I met up with my sister Amy, her husband Jamie, and their baby Felix and headed to the Huntington Gardens. That place is so great! It was amazingly beautiful & fun for us and for the kids.

The boys had a blast in the kid's garden - we ran around in the mist and Jack got totally soaked. Finn loved the Japanese and chinese gardens with all of the amazing koi fish - Jack kept saying "shark, shark!" And of course, since they're boys, there was much running around with sticks.

One unexpected bonus was an amazing orchid show that was being held in the humid rain forest room. It was literally like a sauna inside, but the orchids were incredible - the pictures really don't do them justice. I felt like Nero Wolfe at a flower show. It was really a great day!

Almost Halloween!!!

"That's not a planet...it's a space station! No wait, it's a pumpkin."

Memorial

My Grandma Barbie passed away last week and the memorial was held for her this Wednesday at her son (my uncle) Rick's house in Oceanside. My grandma was a passionate, angry, smart, caring, and beautiful woman who had her share of hard times, but seemed to finally find her destiny within her family. Surely one of her greatest accomplishments was raising a brace of children, including most of her daughter's children, in the face of many challenges. Her later years were filled with triumphs as her grandchildren that lived with her won awards, went to college, and got married. She was probably as busy as anyone at her age could possibly be, and we didn't see her that much. But I remember when, as the first grandchild, I spent many hours with her reading our tarot card fortunes in Los Feliz, walking to the House of Pies, and helping her organize the audio-visual department at Immaculate Heart college.

It was at Immaculate Heart that she showed me how to draw dragon fire and let me take (steal?) the greatest headsets that I've ever seen for the spaceship in our garage. No one did more for me then. Twenty years later she broke into an expert swing dance at our Christmas party, and I realized that there was a lot that I didn't know about her. Her hero was Martha Stewart who, it seems, also tried to make the best of a messy world. During her memorial, a slideshow played on the television of pictures of her life, and I was amazed at how much of it was a complete mystery to me. I wish that she could have been there to explain it. May you rest in the peace of the Lord, Grandma Barbie. With love, Patrick.

HOMEGROWN REVOLUTION

Now this is more like it. He's a little self-satisfied, and the spade at the end is way too much, but it's still pretty inspiring. How I wish I had a bigger yard (and a few more hours in the day) right now!

Child of countless trees...

Happy 61st to Bob Weir!

Dancing About Architecture

Em & I got tickets today to go see Van Morrison at the Hollywood Bowl on November 7. We've been wanting to go see more shows lately & this seems like a pretty good one. Van is supposed to perform the songs from Astral Weeks as well as some more of his older material & call me an old fogey, but I can't wait to see it. Just the thought of seeing him do Madame George gives me chills.


Speaking of which, if you've never heard of Lester Bangs, he was the greatest rock and roll writer of all time & one of the greatest writers period of the 1960's and 70's (this is who Philip Seymour Hoffman is portraying in Almost Famous). If you want to know how I can make such a claim, go to the following link and read Lester on Astral Weeks. Actually, I don't care why you do it, but just go and read it - the whole thing. Preferably while listening to "Madame George" on the jukebox down below. If this doesn't get to you, well then, I just don't know.

http://personal.cis.strath.ac.uk/~murray/astral.html

Barbara Cohenour

Rest in peace Grandma Barbie 1927-2008.

Many a quaint and curious volume...

Here's a site that blogs nothing but images and illustrations from old books. How much more cool could that be? The answer is none. None more cool. It's at:

http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/

This one's from Arthur Rackham.

Eagle Rock House Party!!

Morning Glory played a birthday party for a cool Eagle Rock guy named Scott last weekend. Scotty was turning 40 and has been to about 50 Dead shows, so he seemed to appreciate our deal. It was definitely sad as it was our first gig without Suzy, but the people were really terrific, and it is so great to have Joel in the band now. Joel actually played Scott's 20th birthday in the same place 20 years ago! I guess things really don't change that much in Eagle Rock.

Besides the requisite Dan altercation at the end of the gig (handicapped guy in a wheelchair - don't ask), it was a nice night with good people and good music (and ridiculous amounts of food and drink). After playing the bar scene for a while, it's a pleasure to play for down to Earth people out in the open air! The vocals were definitely hurting, but we did manage to pull off a sick Scarlett/Fire jam. I think that if we could play Eagle Rock house parties every weekend, we probably would.