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Dirtbag Wine Country Living…

Arann Harris and the Farm Band, Sam Chase and Marty O’Reilly were supposed to play at the Mystic Theater tonight…paigegreenFarmConcert050215-044

But as it turned out, the venue double booked the night and so they canceled the show.

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At first my husband was crushed.

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But then we started brainstorming…

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Where else could they play in Petaluma?

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We wanted somewhere authentic.

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Somewhere people would naturally want to be.

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We went through a long list of potential options, but we always came back to the farm.

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And after experiencing the pure joy and love (as my three year old put it) that happened today…

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It makes you wonder why…paigegreenFarmConcert050215-014

Arann Harris and The Farm Band would ever want to play anywhere else. paigegreenFarmConcert050215-038

Which is why I am urging him to host more concerts for other musicians on a regular basis.

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It’d be like Prairie Home Companion meets Dirt Bag Wine Country Living

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And he’d be like Garrison Keillor, but with a bloody nose… definitely not for everyone, but definitely authentic.

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All those in favor of more farm concerts please send your vote to Arann Harris now:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Arann-Harris-and-The-Farm-Band/182690278460478?fref=ts

Well, if we have to grow old…

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At least we get to grow old together…

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And at least we know we’ll have fun while we are doing it…

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Happy Birthday to my Favorite Chicken…

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I am so glad you are my person…

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And I look forward to seeing what happens…

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Homage…

I am excited to kick off a creative new year with a group photography show at Toby’s Feed Barn in Point Reyes Station…

Each photographer was asked to pay “homage” to something and I chose to pay “homage” to the amazing women I have been lucky to photograph.

We would love for you to come celebrate with us this Sunday….

I want to send a special thank you to: Michael for bringing us all together, Jude for hanging my photographs while my family and I were crossing the country, Mary and Nicole Fassbinder for the amazing frames, Sean at Light Waves for facillitating the printing, Tyler for the awesome postcard, and Arann for everything else.

Thank you,

Just the two of us, and Michigan…

When our friends Sarah and James announced that they were getting married this summer in Michigan, I immediately said we’d be there.

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan was a very important part of Arann’s (pre-Paige) life and yet in the eight years we have been together I still had never been there… so we decided to make a trip out of it. We decided to actually take a vacation.

That statement is misleading because we do take lots of wonderful vacations, but usually the trips we take are with my family because I live thousands of miles away from them, so we happily spend our free time with them. But every once and awhile it is nice to get away alone, just the two of us, so we decided July 2011 it was Michigan or bust.

The plan for our 10 days in Michigan… was not to plan. Or so I thought.

As far as I knew, the only thing on our schedule was that we had to be in Cross Village by Thursday for pre-wedding prep. Other than that we had no reservations, no route marked on a map, and no prearranged accommodations… except for two nights with friends of friends in Detroit… because I definitely wanted to go to Detroit.

From all of the media hype over the last few years, it sounded to me like Detroit was becoming the renewed frontier. It is the place to be for artists and farmers because old industry is gone and land is once again cheap, so if you can make your own job and grow your own food then you can have a pretty good life in Detroit.

Unfortunately we weren’t there long enough to say if all that is really true, but in the 48 hours we were there we did see lots of big beautiful houses for sale and lots of wide open vacant lots, we met lots of very friendly people and we went to the largest and most crowded farmers’ market that I have ever been to.

So I can say that Detroit made a good first impression on me and I would love to go back and spend more time getting to know the communities and the people who are making it work in this new version of an old city.

After Detroit, we headed north-east along Lake Huron, at what I thought was going to be a leisurely pace… but this is when Arann started to get antsy. I soon discovered that while I was thinking we had all the time in the world to wander and explore this big beautiful state… the only thing Arann could think about was getting to The UP.

So we hurriedly passed through several very random small American towns…

Stopping only to succumb to basic needs, but happy to discover that the Cheese Capitol of Michigan was one of those stops…

…and we had a cheese picnic, of course.

When we finally made it to The (one-and-only) UP, Arann immediately ate his first pasty and slowly started to breathe normally again.

And when we arrived in Marquette, I finally understood the reason for Arann’s anxious behavior. It turns out that Arann knows a wonderful community of people from when he lived there 10 years ago. Word spread quickly that “Arann Harris was back in town,” so we spent the next 24 hours reminiscing with his long-lost friends.

On our memory lane tour, I finally saw the log cabin that Arann “helped” build.

We met Russel, the crow.

We reunited with more friends, and their children who really loved Russel…


…although I can’t say that Russel really loved meeting them.

And then finally… we made it to the place of many legends, The Huron Mountain Club…

aka: the place where Arann Harris found his calling in life…

Arann likes to tell people that he is a professional camp counselor, and now I can happily say that I got to see The Bridge where it all began so many years ago… and now the new generation of campers can say that the original Pizza Man really does exist.

We were only there for 48 hours but we managed to do a little bit of everything… including donate a significant amount of blood to the local mosquito population.


And after serious exploring and serious relaxing, we were on the move again…

This time we headed south-west to meet our California friends who had descended upon Cross Village, on Lake Michigan, my third Great Lake of the trip, where we…

Skipped rocks.

Tasted the local cuisine.

Helped our dear friends get married and celebrated by playing a whole lot of very cut-throat lawn games.


It was the perfect ending to a well-balanced and carefully planned trip.

And just the kind of recharging we needed before we start our next big adventure…

…as just the three of us.



Don’t look now, but 2011 is rapidly approaching… (and a giveaway lies below)

As I was putting in my own holiday print orders, I started thinking about what else I could give Arann that would be creative and inspiring.

So I decided to make a calendar, with the hopes that the best photos and memories of 2010 will inspire us to be even more creative and adventurous in 2011.

In my search for calendar making companies, I found this cool site that not only lets you make a calendar for yourself, but it also lets you share your calendar with other people too.

But because people generally like to have their calendars before the next year begins that means I need to share my creative surprise calendar for Arann now.

So my creative surprise for Arann is no longer a surprise, but at least maybe it can be a creative surprise for someone you love.

It just so happens that I ordered a couple of extras. And in the spirit of giving back, I would love to give away a calendar, as a thank you for reading my blog. I am always so completely shocked and amazed when people tell me they read my blog. And I get even more excited and inspired when people leave comments.

So if you would like your very own copy of ‘The Best of 2010 Just in Time to Inspire Us in 2011’ calendar, please leave a comment below by midnight on December 24th.

I will announce the winner on Christmas Day.

If you are not a gambling person, or you’re like me and you hate waiting, you can order your own copy right now just click here to go directly to the store.

Always Wear Your Seat Belt…

At 9:18 pm on Tuesday evening, I had just finished dinner with friends in Oakland, when I got a phone call from my mother-in-law saying Arann, my husband, her son, was in the hospital.

She said… he had been hit by a drunk driver at 3:30 pm while driving home from farm camp.

She said… she had been driving in the car behind him and so she saw the whole thing happen. Meaning she saw her youngest child get hit head-on by another car.

She said… he had just gotten out of surgery, they were keeping him over night, and I should get to the hospital as soon as I could.

She also said… he had been wearing his seatbelt and both airbags came out… so he was going to be ok.

She was right… Arann is now home from the hospital and even though everything in his body hurts right now, he is eventually going to be ok.

Whereas the totaled car, which is now sitting in our driveway waiting to be towed away, silently reminds us that we are so, so very lucky that Arann will eventually be ok… because it easily could have been so much worse.

This is film (and my summer)…

I love film and I love summer.

And I couldn’t live without either one.

Well, maybe I could.

But life would be a lot less interesting and a lot less fun.

The only problem is that they are both so very time-consuming.

This summer was so busy that it seemed not to exist at all.

But I know it did because I have the film to prove it.

Even with the endlessly long summer days,

It seemed there still was never enough time…

To stop.

Or even pause and devote the time that film selfishly demanded.

So it sat neglected.

Piling up on my desk.

Waiting in the sidelines, as digital got all the glory.

Waiting for the grand finale.

And finally, here, the first day of October, it is.

A few of the summer film highlights, all at once.

Like cliffs notes.

Or the final minutes of a firework show.

But I still have high hopes of devoting a full post to each of these amazing occasions, faces, relationships.

I have even started the spinning the narratives in my head.

But time is running out.

As it is known to do.

And so this will have to do for now.

This showcase of why I love film and why I hope you will too.

Besides the obvious yet unpredictable beauty of film,

I also love its more discreet yet unfaltering faithfulness.

I feel comforted knowing that if disaster struck, and all my hard drives suddenly crashed tomorrow,

My film would still be there, sitting in a pile on my desk.

Waiting patiently in line to be filed away.

And talking excitedly about the summer that really did exist.

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