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Friday Randomness
This week’s randomness is pretty random. Silly, sad, poignant, all of the feelings and things. Spotted at Total Wine in the check out aisle. Don’t worry, if Pinot is not your thing, they had a white and a rose as well. Spotted on my morning walk. It’s not really watermelon season yet, but here we are. This is the same area where the woman with the cat on her shoulder was a few weeks ago. The other day I was listening to my local NPR station, to a locally produced show, Forum. It’s a discussion and call in show, and this episode was about rivers as living beings. In the…
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Go As A River
Go As A River ~ Shelley Read After Victoria “Torie” Nash’s mother, aunt, and cousin are killed in a car accident, she is left behind as the ‘woman of the house’ at her family peach orchard in Colorado with her father, her brother, and her uncle. Her father has changed since losing his wife, he is despondent and angry. Her brother, Seth, has always been a cruel bully, and without their mother’s stern discipline, he becomes more so. Her uncle is an angry man who came home from WWII in a wheel chair, and depends upon his family to care for him. Go As A River begins when Torie is…
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Sinners
Sinners is a tale of monsters, both supernatural and immorally human, that takes place in the early 1930s Jim Crow south. Identical twins Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan), veterans of WWI, return to Mississippi from Chicago, where they’ve been working with the likes of Al Capone. Their dream is to open a juke joint in an abandoned warehouse, and they have the savings to get it done. They come to town and hire a crew of locals, including cooks, grocers, musicians, a bouncer. Their young cousin, Preacher Boy (Miles Caton) dreams of playing guitar and singing, and after hearing of his talent playing a famous guitar, they invite him…
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Dream Count
Dream Count ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Dream Count is told from the point of view of four African women, three are wealthy and successful women from Nigeria, one is a hotel employee from Ghana. Chiamaka is a travel writer from a wealthy Nigerian family, and as the book begins she is in the lockdown part of the pandemic, and is considering her shitty taste in men. Zikora is a successful lawyer, and her section begins as she is in labor, attended by her mother, the baby’s father nowhere in sight. Omelogor is Chiamaka’s cousin, a former banker, now intellectual studying how pornography is currently teaching youth unrealistic lessons about sex.…
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Friday Randomness
A Mystery SolvedBirchie and I had some delicious ice cream after our evening snack last week, at Salt and Straw. Birchie had the Sea Salt with Caramel Ribbons (I’m 80% sure), and I had the Coffee and Love Nuts (coffee ice cream with chocolate covered pecans – delicious!) I paid using the credit card I always use for restaurants, because it gives me 3 points per dollar spent. I requested a paper receipt, as I generally do, because I don’t want to sign up for more emails, but I do want a receipt in case something goes wrong. When I got home and checked my email, I saw that I…
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Cucumber-Avocado Salad
This recipe popped up in my Facebook feed yesterday, and I decided to give it a try. I served it with bbq grilled chicken, fruit salad, and potato salad. Maya didn’t want bbq fake chicken, so she had a frozen pizza instead, but she had some of the salad and really enjoyed it. The avocados at the grocery store yesterday were either really overripe or barely ripe, and I went with barely ripe. My avocado didn’t break down and get glossy, but the overripe ones would have been black in the middle. I used lime juice instead of lemon or rice vinegar, and I probably could have been a bit…
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LA Randomness
OK, you all know that Ted and I went to Los Angeles last weekend and had a great time at the Cruel World Festival, but surely you have questions. Such as, How did you get there? Where did you stay? What did you eat? Did you see any stars? What else did you do? If you do not have these questions, skip this post. If you do, I am here to give you answers. How did we get there?We considered flying, it’s a quick one, but when you factor in time getting to the airport, being there ahead of time, and the fact that we would need to rent a…
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Cruel World Music Festival
A month or so ago, Ted read that one of our favorite bands, ‘Til Tuesday, was reuniting for the Cruel World music festival in Los Angeles. They haven’t played together in decades, and with the all original lineup, it’s been about 35 years I think. We looked at the lineup for the concert, and it looked like a lot of fun, and the price wasn’t horrible, so we decided to go. We drove down on Friday, and came home on Sunday, so it was a quick trip for sure. We considered flying, but couldn’t find any flights that made money sense, especially since we would need to rent a car…
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Cool Blogger Meet Up!
I got together with Birchie! And San! We had Tapas! As you may know, Birchie was in California recently, and split her time between Sacramento and San Francisco. So I drove to Sacramento last Tuesday after work to meet her for dinner, so we could also meet up with San. When I got there, San was still at work, so I picked Birchie up at her AirBnB, and we went to a little park nearby. The main attraction is Sutter’s Fort, which is one of the first European colonial forts in the Central Valley of California, before the Gold Rush, but it was closed, so we couldn’t go inside. That…
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Friday Randomness
The most exciting thing this week was time spent with Birchie and San (!!!), but that deserves its own post, so you will have to wait on that. Instead you will get my regular weekly roundup type post. What else then? Well, I had a lovely Mother’s Day weekend. On Saturday, Maya took me to lunch downtown, where she had Penne con Vodka, and I had a citrus and arugula salad. We did some shopping and she bought me expensive face cream to add to my collection. Ted’s mom is awaiting hip replacement surgery, and isn’t up to going to a restaurant, so he brought her a seafood lunch from…
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33 Place Brugmann
33 Place Brugmann ~ Alice Austin It is August, 1939, in a wealthy Brussels neighborhood. The residents of a prosperous apartment building include a Jewish art dealer, Leo Raphael, his wife Sophia, and their children, Julian and Esther; an architect, Francois Sauvin and his art student daughter, Charlotte; an army colonel; a lawyer; a seamstress; a notary; and a few other well-to-do tenants. The art dealer and his family emigrate to England, where Julian joins the Royal Air Force, and Esther becomes a war nurse. The remaining residents stay in Brussels and have to find their way under the increasing limitations and dangers of Nazi occupation. The story unfolds in…
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Wordless Sunday – Happy Mother’s Day
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Friday Randomness
Mother’s Day is coming up this weekend, and I wish you all joy. If you have kids, I hope you have a good relationship with them and are able to celebrate in some way. If you still have your mom, I hope you have a good relationship with her, and are able to celebrate in some way. If you have a bad relationship with your mother or your child(ren), I wish you peace. If you no longer have your mother or your child(ren), I wish you peace. Mother’s Day can be a complicated and difficult day. Ever since my mom died in 2008, it has been a complicated and difficult…
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The Paris Express
The Paris Express ~ Emma Donoghue A full cast of characters ride the express train from Granville, Normandy to Paris in October of 1895. Among them are a young physiologist, a painter, an aging Russian housekeeper, a young boy traveling alone, a (very) pregnant woman, a few parliamentarians, and a young anarchist with dreams of glory for her cause (and a bomb). The train itself is a character and has some consciousness of the danger, but no emotions nor any control over preventing it. As we travel along the route, we learn more of each character, of their secrets and hopes. Mado, the anarchist, has made a bomb and is…
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Never Say Never
I’ve never thought of myself as a cruise person. I know plenty of people who *love* them, but they seem really crowded to me, and I’m not thrilled with the idea of being on a tight schedule when in port. One exception I might make would be an Alaskan cruise, because the opportunity to see so many little towns along the southeast, without having to pack and unpack, is really appealing, and being on a ship and seeing the fjords and wildlife of that region would be amazing. My cousin Carey and her family enjoy cruises, and have been on several. They’ve been to Alaska a couple of times, and…
