Blogging
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NaBloPoMo – Day 30
Here we are, my 30th post in 30 days. I’m pretty much out of ideas, so I am posting this meme that I saw somewhere. We can talk about that. We can talk about avocados and whether we love them or not. We can talk about other foods that are like this. We can talk about memes and how stupid and funny they can be sometimes. Whatever. I’ll start. I adore avocados. I don’t actually find them to be as persnickety as this meme suggests, and I often find myself in possession of perfectly ripe avocados. We had quesadillas for dinner last night, and I diced a lovely avocado, and…
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Meme Monday – Ready for Christmas?
I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving. Ours was very nice, delicious food, good company, lots of laughs. Overall a winner. After Thanksgiving, we had a little friends and family time. Ted had lunch with his best friend on Friday, and Maya went into San Francisco with a friend to visit another friend of theirs, who recently had an appendectomy. I had to do a bit of work, but not too much. Working from home is a blessing and a curse. I didn’t have to go in to the office, which was the blessing. I did have to work, which maybe I might have avoided if I weren’t so available.…
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Sunday Morning Walk
Our walk on a recent Sunday morning brought us to a local park, which has a large pond. We mostly see birds at this pond…geese and ducks and coots. But we sometimes see a heron of some sort, and if we are lucky, a turtle. Generally the turtles are in the water swimming, and the pictures I get of them are not very good. But if you look at this picture, in the lower right corner, there is a little turtle sitting on a rock or something. Perhaps, like Yertle the Turtle, he is the king of all he surveys. Or perhaps the queen. Or perhaps it is just enjoying…
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Y is for Yes Please
My N post was about items that I will say ‘No, thank you’ if they are offered to me. Being that it is a holiday Friday, and I am lazy, here are a few items that I enjoy, and if they are offered to me, I will say, ‘Yes please’. In no particular order… Potatoes. French fries, potato chips, latkes (Happy Hanukkah tonight!), hashed browns, baked potatoes, whatever. I love them. Salads. So many different salads are delicious. Green salad, pasta salad, tuna salad, chicken salad, arugula salad, Caesar salad… Pasta. So many pastas that I love, but my personal favorite is the mushroom pasta at a restaurant in Oakland,…
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V is for Victory
Last week, as I was putting together my Smokey post, WordPress went wonky on me. I was trying to post a picture of Smokey on the bed with Rags and a few other items, and it would not load. But there was a button that said, ‘retry’, so I kept retrying. Eventually everything went south, and I could not see my plugins or post anything. Very frustrating. Enter Ted, my handy tech support. Ted self hosts our blogs, so he contacted the company that we work with, and walked through the errors we were getting. It wasn’t just my blog, but all of the sites we have. Sometimes we could…
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O is for….
I’m stretching on this one. What the heck should I write about? I’m not going to write about any of the O adjectives above. I’m not going to write about ‘O’, the Oprah Magazine. I’m not going to write about Origami. Maybe a little bit about origami…when I was a baby my mom couldn’t afford a mobile to put over my crib, so she made one of origami cranes, which is an idea that I love. I should have done that for Maya, it would have been much cooler than the cute one we bought for her, but the one we bought would play music and go in circles to…
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J is for Joyful (Wordless Wednesday)
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G is for Green
My favorite colors are blue and green. I adore them both. Not so much for clothes or furniture or cars, but for me, they are the cool, soothing colors of nature. Because it is so dry and brown here much of the year, green is more rare for me than blue, and so I find green more precious. We get a lot of beautiful blue sky here, and not enough green. When we go somewhere that is not California, somewhere with lots of rain, and I see how lush and calming all of that green is, I swoon. Then again, there is that beautiful blue of the ocean and the…
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F is for Free
My readers know of the free tickets that we were given on our flight home from Portland in June, and that we used those tickets to travel to Maui last month. I was so thankful for the opportunity to have a real vacation…traveling to Portland for a long weekend is always lovely, and I was thrilled to see my family there, but it doesn’t really feel like vacation, especially since our main purpose for going up was to scatter my father’s ashes. As I’m sure you have guessed, ‘free’ doesn’t generally mean ‘free’. The tickets were for the cheapest possible seats, and on Alaska Airlines these days, that means you…
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E is for Eye
Our flight to Maui last month included a layover in Seattle. Soon after landing, I started seeing shooting lights in one of my eyes. I (very occasionally) get ocular migraines, which start with weird vision squiggles and blurriness, and sometimes progress to severe nausea. They are related to my sinuses, I am sure. I had some trusty sinus meds in my pocket, and just in case, I went into the news stand store and bought some Excedrin, as that is what always works for me when I have a migraine. I took it and worried and hoped for the best, and we boarded our flight to Maui. After awhile the…
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D is for Dinner
The struggle is real, people. Sometimes, I have an absolute craving and as I cook on week nights, it’s easy to come up with ideas…and sometimes by the time I get off of work, I’m still interested in eating that thing and cooking it even. And sometimes, not. If it weren’t for Ted and Maya, it would be much easier, I would just have nibbles for dinner, which is what I would prefer anyway. Actually, I think Maya would be OK with that too, but it’s hard to do with Ted’s dietary restrictions. Sometimes I think of something I want, and it either doesn’t fit with Ted’s restrictions or Maya’s.…
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A is for ‘Alrighty Then’
The meme there has nothing to do with the name of my post, and the name of my post is my way of committing to post every day this month. Why? Who knows. Just a habit to try to post every day in November, I guess. I’ve done it many years, but then again, NOT several years as well. I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve decided I will use the letters of the alphabet as a prompt, like Nance has been doing. So far I’m not doing very well, ‘Alrighty Then’ for A? That’s a little lame. Oh well, let’s hope I can come up with something better tomorrow.…
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Savory Oatmeal
My grandma used to make me delicious oatmeal, with butter, milk, and brown sugar. Sometimes my mom would make it similarly, and throw raisins in as well. I like oatmeal, but have only had it sweetened, either with brown sugar, or in my middle aged years, seasonal fruit, usually raspberries and blueberries, add a banana if I’m very hungry. I’ve seen people rave about oatmeal with banana and peanut butter, and I tried it once, but it wasn’t really for me. Then Nance posted about eggs in her alphabetical post series, and a discussion ensued about savory oatmeal in the comments. I adore eggs, I like oatmeal, and it seems…
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Thursday Thirteen, Los Angeles version
(Photo courtesy of Wikipedia – there was a TINY bit of snow on the tip of the mountains, nothing like this. I don’t think I realized before that there are mountains RIGHT THERE, but I’ve not really paid much attention to LA in the past.) My BFF Rosemary lives in Pennsylvania. She and I met in High School in 1982, and after HS she moved around a bit for a few years, ending up in PA a few months before we moved back to California. She has two boys in college, one is graduating from Clemson in May, the other is a Freshman at Lewis and Clark in Portland, OR.…
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Puppy Love
I am most happy to introduce you to our new teen-puppy, Mulder! Mulder is 7 1/2 months old Keeshond teen-puppy. Teen-puppy is my term for his age, because he’s almost fully grown (30ish lbs now), but still a puppy in so many ways. Our sweet girl Genevieve was 1/2 kees/1/2 Sheltie. We got her from a local Keeshonden rescue back in 2002, when she was 4. She was such a good dog, and when she died in early 2012 (can you believe it’s been that long?), we were heartbroken. As time went by, we eventually decided we were ready to open our hearts and our home to another dog. We thought…