I have a feeling it’s going to be hot today…not this hot, thankfully, but the a/c kicked on at 5:30 this morning.  You read that right.  I hate it when that happens.  Thankfully, it’s been a relatively cool summer, so we haven’t had very many hot hot days.  And I guess it would be too good to be true, to imagine we could get through the summer without hitting the triple digits at least a few times. Yahoo weather says thunder and rain today.  Really.  They do.  Those of you who don’t live in Northern California probably don’t think that’s weird, to have high 90s and scattered showers, but I…

Our neigboring town, Concord, has a great Farmers’ Market every Thursday evening, and in the summer, they have live music and sometimes more (like movies, etc.).  One of the radio stations Ted works for sometimes has a booth there, and they sometimes have a radio personality come and do an announcement during a break in the music portion of the show.  Last week, Ted was asked to be the personality, and since it pays pretty well for a short gig, the weather is nice, and it’s a fun evening, he agreed.  For those same reasons, Maya and I decided to schlep along with him.  I really wish I had brought my camera…

I’ve just started reading “Gilead”, a novel by Marilynne Robinson. It won the Pulitzer Prize, and is in the form of a letter from an elderly father who is dying, to his young son. Early in the book, the elderly father tells of going with his father, when he was but a boy, on a search for his grandfather, who died while in Kansas. They find that the grandfather has died, and go to honor him at his grave in the late 1800s. There was a phrase the author used, about the small graveyard ‘going back to nature’, which struck me. She (he if you count it as being the…

I’ve got nothing today..I’m tired from a deadline at work, and I’m looking forward to the weekend, yet not quite there.  So I’m going to give you some fun random facts that you may or may not know about your body. My dad came to visit last week, and he brought Maya this book.  He was careful to make sure she knew that HE knew that it was well below her reading level, but that it had a lot of good information, and might be a fun book to have nonetheless.  He couldn’t have been more right, and she has enjoyed regaling us with interesting factoids.  Here we go: How…

If you’ve been following our real estate saga, and if you read Ted’s blog as well as mine, you know that we had to make the very difficult decision to fire our real estate agent this last weekend.  She is a wonderful person, and worked very hard for us, so to get to that point SUCKED.  But her boss was a complete asshole, and since he would be getting some of our money from the commission, we bailed. Also, though, our agent was our neighbor, and brand new to real estate.  We like her a lot, and wanted to give her the chance to sell our place.  A few years…

Summer isn’t officially over until September 21st, and around here, the warm weather lasts well into October, sometimes November… Late summer, August, September, into October…that’s one of the best times for yummy summer food around here.  The tomatoes are at their best, the grapes are sweet and juicy (note to self…get tiny natural thomsom seedless next time you’re at the farmer’s market…they’re smaller than the newer varieties, but sweeter…), you can still get strawberries and corn and so many lovely things, local and natural and delicious.  You can make homemade tomato sauce and have a yummy pasta for dinner.  People are trying to get rid of their zucchini, so it’s…

Has anyone else heard of MBT brand shoes  This weekend, while dropping Maya off at a ‘High School Musical 2’ sleepover extravaganza, I started chatting with M’s BFF’s mom BFF’s mom had these huge looking, yet still kinda cute, shoes on her feet. She has told me in the past of her back problems.  She goes to the chiropractor, takes muscle relaxants, does stretching and yoga…nothing helps.  It’s gotten so bad that a few weeks ago, she went to a movie with her husband and daughter, and they had to leave because she was in so much pain.  This is no way for a 34 year old to live her life, let me…

Conventional wisdom seems to dictate that it is better to own your home than to rent it. I’m here to debunk that wisdom. Owning SUCKS. Here’s why. When we rented, if we wanted to move, we moved. End of story. When we rented, if two of the burners had gone out on our stove, the landlord would have bought a new stove. For us, we had to wait until we could afford a new stove, and suffer with the old one for awhile. When we rented, if we wanted to move, we moved. Did I mention that one before? Sorry. It’s at the top of my mind right now. Owning…