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Friday Randomness
The Return of Fabulous FridaysLet’s start with the excellent news that Fabulous Fridays are back! Technically, they never went away. In past years, either the CEO or HR sent an email telling us that the perk of a 4 day work week was continuing. When we heard NOTHING this year, our boss decided to err on the side of caution, and told us to work 5 8-hour days instead of 4 10s. So we worked last Friday, and we noticed that gosh, most people were not around, so our boss checked with HR, and it looks like it’s a manager discretion type thing, so YAY! Back to having Fridays off!…
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Shadows and Light
iHanna has a blog photo challenge, where participants go through their photo libraries and find pictures that fit a certain theme. The idea is that you spot that theme in photos that you have already taken, not that you go out and take new photos that would work. I like the idea, so I’m playing along. January’s theme is Shadows. Here are my shadow pictures from my iPad photos. The picture above is an oak tree on one of our walks, and I am so often struck by the beauty of the shadows in amongst the branches. I take pictures, trying to capture it, but I don’t end up sharing…
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Friday Randomness
Just some random thoughts that have nothing to do with the heartbreaking fires in Southern California. I don’t know what to say about the fires except that it is shocking and horrible. Lives lost, homes lost, communities destroyed. This drone footage reminds me so much of the fires in Paradise and Santa Rosa from several years ago. I am shallow enough to be specifically sad about the homes that I visited 5 years ago that were prominent in the TV show, Beverly Hills, 90210, which are about 1/2 block from each other in Altadena. I cannot tell you how stupidly happy it made me to stand in front of these…
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The Night We Lost Him
The Night We Lost Him ~ Laura Dave Nora Noone is a successful architect living in New York, who has recently gone through the horrible loss of both of her parents, her mother from cancer, her father when he fell from a cliff side above the ocean in California. They divorced when she was young, and her father remarried, twice. Nora was extremely close with her mother, and is having a lot of trouble processing that loss. She loved her father, but they weren’t terribly close, and she was not close with her twin brothers, who he had with his second wife. She is struggling with her grief, which is…
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Anne Lamott on Dieting
Bay Area author Anne Lamott posts a version of this on Facebook every year. One of my cousins posted it, and I liked what she has to say about radical self care and not dieting, and I thought I would share it with you. That’s it for me, the rest of this post is her words. ************************************************** Here is a version of the anti-diet piece I publish every year just before New Year’s Day: We need to have the same little talk we have every year at this time: You want to feel healthier and that is an excellent goal, but I know many of you are secretly planning to…
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A Lovely Day
Goodness you guys, I had the most wonderful birthday yesterday. It truly was A Lovely Day. Ready for a bunch of pictures? Here we go. The day started when I awoke maybe an hour before anyone else. I came downstairs to a decorated table, with flowers and gifts. If you’re curious, the gifts are AWESOME. Wine, a wonderful cookbook (which I will share when I’ve tried a couple of recipes), a gift card for a massage (!!), and two memoirs, for Ina Garten and Kelly Bishop. After I finished my final yoga session for 2024 (which was actually a meditation and really, JUST what I needed), I had breakfast and…
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My Year of Yoga
I don’t really do New Year’s Resolutions, or set many goals for myself for a year. There have been years when I do, like when I decided to get serious about flossing my teeth, but generally I take care of things as they come up. Last year, though, I decided that I wanted to do 30 days of Yoga in January. I had been kind of doing yoga for a couple of years, mostly through the Yoga with Adriene channel on YouTube. It’s been quite a few years since I took an in person yoga class. Adriene Mishler has been offering yoga videos on YouTube since 2012, and for the…
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Penelope
Penelope is an immersive and quiet coming of age story, about a 16 year old girl who, seemingly on a whim, leaves her family, friends, and technology behind and decides to live a hermit-like life in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. The 8 episode Netflix series (about 1/2 hour each) begins with Penelope who is at some kind of camp with a lot of other folks, including her parents. The first episode begins with a ‘silent dance party’, where a large group of teenagers are dancing near some cabins, wearing headphones to dampen the noise. Penelope spies a wolf on the edge of the party, and is stunned. She…
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Saturday Randomness
I hope that everyone has enjoyed their Christmas/Hanukkah celebrations, and that life is returning to normal (if that is what you want) or that the festivities are continuing (if that’s more your jam). My company gave us both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as holidays, and then next week we will have both New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day as holidays, plus we still have Fabulous Fridays off (at least we did yesterday, they haven’t told us whether this wonderful benefit will carry in to 2025, and let me tell you, WE ARE ON PINS AND NEEDLES waiting to find out!), so I went ahead and took a couple…
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Wordless Wednesday
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Meme Monday
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, wonderful, peaceful, joyful holidays to all who celebrate them. Our Christmas plans include dinner at Ted’s parents’ house, which will be ‘white people Christmas’, as Ted put it. Standing rib roast, mashed potatoes, peas with pearl onions, and pumpkin pie. For Ted’s mom, who is pescatarian, salmon tikka masala. For Maya, who is also pescatarian but not really a big fan of most fish (??), fake turkey cutlets as she can’t think of anything she would like more. Our Hanukkah plans will be pushed back, as his family doesn’t celebrate. We will have latkes and such on the 26th. For those who are new here, we…
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Cool Bloggers Cookie Swap
Suzanne is hosting a cookie swap this week, and I am here for it. I have 4 recipes for you. I will link to 2 recipes that I have shared before, and also share 2 ‘new’ ones. I say ‘new’, because when I search my blog, I have never written them up, though I have linked to them in the past. First the links to past cookie recipes: Now for the ‘new’ recipes. When I was growing up, my mom always made fudge for my grandpa, who had the biggest sweet tooth in the family (perhaps more than my Aunt Flo even, though that’s difficult to fathom). The recipe was…
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Happy Winter Solstice
I know I’ve shown you this picture before. This is a time lapse photo of the arc of the sun on the Winter Solstice, at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. Fairbanks is just outside of the arctic circle, so you do get a glimpse of the sun for an hour or two, but it never really gets light. Pretty cool photo. Starting tomorrow* our evenings will darken a bit later every day. It still takes longer for the sun to come up in the mornings for a couple more weeks, though, which I don’t really understand, but Jamie explained a couple of years ago. Also, obviously, Happy Summer Solstice…
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Wordless Wednesday – Silly Fun Edition
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Wellness
Wellness ~ Nathan Hill Jack and Elizabeth meet in 1993. They are neighbors who have been creepily spying upon each others through their windows, kind of like the cast of Friends spying on Ugly Naked Guy. They fall in love quickly and completely after finally meeting in a bar when Jack rescues Elizabeth from a creeper trying to pick her up. 20 years later, they’re trying to figure out how to maintain their marriage, planning the layout of their new luxury condo. Will they have open shelving or cabinets? One en-suite bedroom, or two? Can they find the meaning that they are missing by making such decisions? They are unhappy.…
