Seattle, How I Do Love You; and More.

I admit it, I have Seattle envy. It's not New York or LA that claim my heart. It's not charming village in Vermont, or a mountainside in Colorado. It's Seattle. Everytime I visit I think: can I move here? would my entire extended East Coast family move with me? can I afford the real estate/school combinations that we'd need?

So this site, discovered today when a personal email from one of its writers appeared in my inbox, is my new pornography. The Red Triangle "Pint sized news for savvy grown-ups" is my new must-check-out site for my Seattle fantasies. Front page when I clicked on was an annotated list of world cuisine restaurants that are kid friendly. How wonderful to have all these, and have a website and writers that care about sharing important information, both.

In other news, here at home we're in that move from summer to fall, though school won't begin until Wednesday. My older daughter turns 8 tomorrow. Eight seems so, so mature. One of my traditions is to write a letter on each of her birthdays, a letter about her, one that I compose and put away and will give to her, all in a pile when she's much older. I describe what she likes, and whether she's liked school and camp that year. I find some adjectives to describe her, perhaps narrate something funny or poignant that she's done, and I definitely list her friends. I don't look at the letters from year to year. And I try not to overthink it, for if I did, the letter would never reach completion in my search for the perfect words. It's just a snapshot, some words to go with the pictures she'll see, some clues for her future self, should she search, later in life as so many of us do, for the puzzle that was childhood.

Finally, my favorite media paragraph this weekend (yes, for all my media criticism, I'm always on the lookout for eye-stopping good sentences and ideas that make me sigh) comes from the NYT Magazine article on the actress Vera Farmiga, whom I'd never heard of. The article's question was one we've heard before, where are the good roles for actresses now that Hollywood eschews dramas and prefers action movies geared toward teenage boys? Is it even possible to be a young Meryl Streep, say, when there are so few substantial roles for women. Farmiga's been in a ton of indie films, but they have terribly small or no distribution, which is why she's not yet well known.

The part I loved came near the end. The director Anthony Minghella's being quoted. He's directing a film, "Breaking and Entering," with Vera Farmiga, and is a big fan of hers. Here, he's commenting on the lack of complex roles for women, and lamenting it: “Unfortunately, Hollywood is too interested in stories about power and strength. Women’s lives are more complicated: they have to manage private and public lives in a way that men don’t. I, for one, am tired of seeing movies about men damaging each other. I would rather see, and make, films about women.”

Women's lives ar more complicated; they have to manage private and public lives in a way that men don't: it's this line that had the ring of clarity to it, and how nice to hear it from a man, too. It's what women, and mothers, say among each other all the time, and I for one, was quietly cheered by seeing it this way, in print.