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Holidays at our House
It’s the 6th night of Hanukkah, and we’ve lit the menorah, and the candles are burning low…the Christmas tree is lit, and there are depressing Aimee Mann Christmas songs playing. Just another holiday at our house. A few years ago, we decided, for fun, to start celebrating Hanukkah. Neither Ted nor I know of any Jewish folks on either side of our families, so this is a pretty secular celebration of a religious holiday, but we kind of felt like since we’re not Christian, and we celebrate Christmas, it would be nice to expose Maya to some of the other traditions of the season, and heck, what’s not to like…
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Almost Ready….
Christmas Cards sent….check Christmas Gifts purchased…check Christmas Gifts wrapped….check Christmas Gifts mailed…check Hanukkah celebration attended…check Latkes and jelly donuts eaten…check Menorah candles lit…in progress Scrooged watched….check Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer watched…check Tree decorated…check The Year Without a Santa Claus watched….check (love those Miser brothers…they’re too much!) Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town watched…check A Charlie Brown Christmas watched…check How The Grinch Stole Christmas watched…check Yummy treats baked and eaten…check Holiday luncheon for work to attend…later today Lunch with Cherry, and yummy cookies to receive…tomorrow Go to San Francisco to see A Christmas Carol…not yet – This weekend or not at all Plan dishes to bring to Christmas dinner…not yet…
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Good News for Mango Lovers
While I took Genevieve and my beloved iPod for a walk yesterday, I was listening to To the Best of Our Knowledge. The final segment of the show was an interview with Madhur Jaffrey, author of Climbing the Mango Tree: A Memoir of a Childhood in India. I haven’t heard of Ms. Jaffrey before, but she is considered the “Julia Child of India”, and she is also an accomplished actress. In her memoir, and in the interview I was listening to, she talks about growing up as part of a huge extended family, where there were often 40 people at dinner time, and how she never even knew that her…
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Year of Wonders
Last night, I finished the 4th book in the Winter Stacks Reading Challenge, Year of Wonders. This is the tale of an English village beset by Plague in 1665-1666. The protagonist of the story is a young widow, Anna. Anna’s husband was an Iron miner, and died in a mining accident, leaving her to support and care for her two young children. In addition to working as a servant at the rectory, she takes in a boarder to supplement her income. Her boarder is a tailor, and they get along very well. He enjoys her children, and brings laughter back into the home. There is the start of a romance,…
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A Good Day’s Work…
We put up the tree the other night…I love our fake little tree, though I wish we had a bigger living room, so it wouldn’t have to be smashed between the chair and the TV like that. But it’s a cozy little tree. 🙂 I bought about half of the ornaments all at once, when I first moved out on my own, and wanted a tree in my San Francisco flat. The other half have been bought or given to us since then. I’m a Donald fan, so there are several Donald Ducks, and lots of other cute ones, but one of my favorites is this one, that I brought…
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Favorite Holiday Songs
I like Christmas music ok, but not when it’s played all day, every day, on the radio. Ugh. And I like a Hanukkah song or two, which is why I titled this, Favorite Holiday Songs, and not Favorite Christmas songs, though, really, they’re mostly Christmas songs. Sorry. And, even though I was raised atheist, and don’t really go in for Christmas being that much about Jesus, kinda think it’s more about pagans and the winter solstice, and it was coopted by the Catholic Church early on while trying to convert said pagans, blah blah blah, etc. etc., there is truly something so wonderful and hopeful about the more religious songs,…
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I’m Starting to Hate Blogger…
When I joined this bloggy world, just over a year ago, I quickly became addicted. Now, I’m not a snob when it comes to techie things. Blogger was free, and it was the service my friends had chosen, so I just joined right in. And it worked OK. Sure, there were issues…times when I would be unable to post a picture via the linky way, but that’s OK, I know enough HTML that I could add a picture anyway. The visual verification pretty much sucks the life out of a person, so I put my comments on Haloscan. There were the unintended outages, and the posts so carefully written that…
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I’m not sure how I feel about this…
I’m such a huge Buffy fan, and yet…and yet, not so sure that I’ll be enjoying reading about the adventures of the Scooby Gang via the comic book genre rather than seeing them on Tuesday evenings via my TV screen. Will it satisfy me? Will it satisfy Maya, who was crushed by the idea that Buffy was no longer the only slayer (well, aside from Kendra, who died, and Faith, who didn’t, but I digress…)? Will we become obsessed, I mean, MORE obsessed than we already are? Will we become huge comic book fans? I shudder to think. I’ve never really been a fan of comic books, except maybe Betty…
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WTF?
I wasn’t going to write about this today…I like the happy date-a-versary thing, and why be a downer and take away from the fun? But this story I read in the paper is needling me, threatening to drive me nuts if I don’t write something about it, to get it on ‘paper’ and out of my head. Iran is holding a two day conference to determine whether the Holocaust indeed happened. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust a ‘myth’, and Israel a ‘tumor’. Clearly, the goal here is to show that he is a President who can stand up to the West, as well as to support claims that…
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19 Years? How can it be?
Today is the 19th anniversary of Ted and my first date…crazy, hard to believe, because really, doesn’t that make me, um, old? I mean, come on now. It’s not truly possible. If I were 21 then, and it was 19 years ago, that would make me, um….40. Wait, I do seem to remember a big 40th birthday bash for me last December, so yeah, I guess that’s right. Anyway, 19 years ago, I went on a date that would change my life, because it was my first date with the man who would become my husband, my partner-in-crime, my love, my best friend. I think if I knew then what…
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Monday Already?
Here we are, and it’s Monday morning already. How does that happen so quickly? Seems like just yesterday it was Friday morning…sigh. We had a lovely weekend, though. Ted got off of work early on Friday, though I was too busy with work stuff to clock out early with him, so he went to see a movie in Berkeley, about his new girlfriends, The Dixie Chicks. Maya went straight from school to her Girlscout troop leader’s house, where they made fleece scarfs, which they then delivered to the Bay Area Crisis Nursery, a local shelter that the troop seems to have adopted. In addition to delivering scarfs for the children…
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Happy Birthday Julie!
This is a picture of Maya and my step mom, Julie. Today is Julie’s birthday, and I wish we could be there to share a piece of cake with her to celebrate. Julie and my dad live in Portland, and have a beautiful house and a pretty good life there. Julie owns a yoga studio, and has been teaching yoga for about 35 years. She’s without question the best yoga instructor in the Pacific Northwest, so if you’re ever in the market for a really good yoga class in Portland, check her studio out. In addition to being a wonderful yoga instructor, and a pretty savvy businesswoman, Julie is a…
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Holiday Depression…
I’ve been hearing lately about how the holidays are a hard time for so many people…how they depress people and stress the hell out of people, and I’ve been wondering, what is it about Christmas (and Hannukah…do any of my Jewish friends get depressed around this time of year?) that brings folks down? Isn’t this supposed to be a happy time? So I thought, what is it that we do to ourselves around the holidays? 1. Maybe too much pressure put on shopping and gifts, you think? In a culture where the majority of retailers go into the black finally in the last month of the year, and our whole…
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Where Were You When…
It seems that there are these moments that define a generation…where were you when you heard about Pearl Harbor, where were you when you found out Kennedy had been shot, and then RFK, and then MLK…. For my generation, the first of those sad moments was when John Lennon was killed, on December 8th, 1980. I was a geeky kid then, sort of into the Beatles, but not really yet. I got into them much more in High School. I was watching “Little House on the Prarie” on TV, and the announcer came on and gave us the sad news. I was shocked. I thought people were finished with that kind…
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Wish They All Could Be…
What American accent do you have?    Your Result: The West Your accent is the lowest common denominator of American speech. Unless you’re a SoCal surfer, no one thinks you have an accent. And really, you may not even be from the West at all, you could easily be from Florida or one of those big Southern cities like Dallas or Atlanta. The Midland Boston North Central The Inland North Philadelphia The South The Northeast What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz I tried to make the text more readable, and only made it smaller…so here we go, I’ll paste it here, in case you’re wondering what the…