Family
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Convoluted Vacation Wrap Up
Hello Bloggy Blog Blog Blog, I’ve missed you so. I’ve posted, sure, but it’s not the same as actually writing something NEW, and I haven’t been reading my friends’ blogs, and I haven’t been commenting, and boy, I have a LOT of catching up to do. Let me start by saying, I’m still Biff, because I’m thinking…One Week Ago Right Now…I was getting ready to go to Seattle…on vacation. Sigh. So, today I’ll tell you what we did on our vacation to the Pacific Northwest. (Mostly Portland.) We left home and drove to Ashland, where we hoped to see a play, but we got a bit of a late start,…
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Time for Bacation
We’re off for a week of R & R in the Pacific Northwest, which will include a stop for dinner and a play in Ashland, OR, sleep overnight there, and then on to Portland to visit with the family, including my new baby niece, Sophie! Hopefully we will see the beautiful Chloe and her family, too. Yay! We may have blogging access while we’re there (we’re going to try, so check back from time to time), but we may not (ACK! Can I survive without my blog? Without reading YOUR blogs? I don’t KNOW!). If you don’t hear from me in awhile….you’ll know that I’m far away in the wilderness…
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Hospital Food
I read with interest this article about Kaiser’s desire to change over to more locally produced, fresh produce in their patient care menus. I think this is a great idea…really, who could use good, healthy, fresh food more than folks on the mend? Unfortunately, ‘hospital food’ reminds me of a story that makes my blood boil a bit. Last summer, my mom had surgery at UC Davis Med Center. The care she received was 90% wonderful. Her surgeon was wonderful, the nurses were mostly great, etc. However…when it came to food, I found them lacking. My mother is border-line diabetic, meaning she can control her diabetes through diet, and doesn’t…
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Grandma’s Famous Slaw
I consider myself fortunate in that I still have both of my grandmas. No grandpas left to speak of, sadly, but the women in my family tend to live a loooonnnngggg time. My mother’s mother lives in Stockton, and my father’s mother moved from Modesto to Portland last year. (We’ll be seeing her next week…)When she lived in Modesto, we used to go visit her a few times a year, and she would sometimes cook lunch for us. On one such visit in 1994, she served us dried out chicken and cole slaw. The chicken wasn’t anything to write home about, unless the folks back home enjoy reading about dried…
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Stupid Human Tricks
Cherry and I were discussing the time I murdered a salmon in Alaska…I was telling her that my SIL and I hit the fish in the head with a rock, hoping that would be kinder than leaving the poor fish to flop around and suffocate in the open air. This brought up the topic of suffocation for pleasure…how some people like to suffocate themselves just to the point of almost losing consciousness, because it gives them a high. This reminded me of a very stupid trick my girlfriend Neva and I used to do, when we were in the 6th or 7th grade. I don’t know where we got the…
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How to raise a child/Save a marriage
The other night I was up too late, watching stupid TV, and I saw two shows back to back that made me realize that we know a lot more than we think we know. First, I watched Supernanny, and then I watched One Week to Save Your Marriage. The moral of both shows, it seemed, was communication, consistency, kindness, and fun. If you haven’t seen Supernanny, you should probably watch it at least once (and once is enough, really, because it’s always the same). Just so you can laugh and feel all superior, because these kids are such beasts. They hit their parents and call them names. They beat up…
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Friday Dog Blogging
Samantha 1972 – 1988 Dear Samantha, my sweet doggy love, Thank you, for letting me come into your house and watch as you gave birth to your 13 puppies… for being my ambassador when we moved – I made so many friends while taking you for walks, because they wanted to know about my dog… for jumping over trash cans (upright, even!) when I pretended you were a horse… for letting me dress you up in long frilly dresses… for sleeping in my bed and keeping me company… for defending me from the creepy cable guy that one time… for forgiving me when I treated you badly… when I bit…
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A Few Tings
(I say tings because I’m trying to affect a Guyanese accent…) 1st. My mom (aka, Maya’s Granny) wrote a post yesterday that really gave me a peek into growing up in the 50s, being a girl. I would say that this is her best writing so far…good stuff, and definitely worth the time. Check it out. And now that I mention it, today’s post isn’t shabby either…I wrote a quick post back in March about Feminism, and she gives it a more thorough treatment today. She’s on a roll. 😉 2nd. I’m guest blogging over at Birth Stories. My fellow ‘J’ blogger, Black Belt Mama started a new blog, and…
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The Dark Side of Genealogy
Many years ago, in my mis-spent youth, I worked at the front desk at a big San Francisco hotel. One evening, a very cute black man checked in, whose last name was Ward. “Hey,” I said, semi-flirtatiously, “that’s my last name, too.” He smiled and said, “Yeah, it’s that southern thing.” Ugh. Stopped me cold. Maybe he thought that somewhere back in time, some of my ancestors owned his ancestors. Which is surely not true, since, 1. My Ward surname came from my mom’s step-dad, so I wasn’t descended from him by blood; and, 2. Our Ward family was poor Irish in Oklahoma, and surely never had the kind of…
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Happy Birthday
To Vin (Ted’s uncle), who thinks blogs are stupid, so he won’t be reading this. I hope he has a happy birthday, anyway. 🙂 To Pat, my ex-CEO, a guy who defines aging well for me. He rides his bike to the farmers’ market on Sundays. Twice if he needs to load up on heirloom tomatoes. He’s got a gorgeous significant other, and she’s not 40 years younger than he is. He defines a ‘superstar husband’ as one who realizes the value of wife and kids, and does his share in the care of children and home. He wanted to learn more about Civil Rights in the south, so he…
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Our Weekend So Far
This weekend has been busy so far. Friday evening we went to a potluck hosted by some friends from Maya’s school. One nice thing to come out of that was that the only other girl there for Maya to play with was E, a girl who she doesn’t really get along with at school or in scouts. They had a nice time, and I’m hoping that opened her eyes a bit to the possibility that this girl might be OK. Not that they will necessarily hang out at school or scouts, but that maybe when they’re the only people around, they can get along then. There are dynamics involved when…
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The Final Chapter
Thanks everyone for sticking with this long, long tale. Luckily, it is one with a happy ending. I met my dad in 1987, this story was written in 1990, and now here we are, almost 20 years into this parent/child relationship. I feel like I know my father now a lot more than I did then, and we have the best relationship one could expect, seeing as how we have never lived in the same state, talk about the same town or house. Being the oldest of his daughters, I got the privledge of being the first to make him a father-in-law, the first to make him a grandfather. My…
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The Saga Continues…
I hope that some of you are still interested in this very LONG story, which could in reality be summed up thusly: “A man and a woman have a child. Child grows up without man. Meets him at age 21.” The end. But we like stories, we like to know how things come about, why we are who we are, etc. So I’ll continue. Today, Part II. Belated Fatherhood by Susan Stanley (continued) Joycelyn Ward Fleeing the Father The meaning of a tale depends upon the teller. With each telling, the tale shifts, choosing how it wants to be told. We sift, resift and sift still again, accommodating our evolving…
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A Tale In Three Parts
I didn’t grow up in what you might call a ‘traditional’ family. My mother raised my brother and me by herself, and we had no contact at all with our fathers or their families. When I was 21, my mom got in touch with my dad, and he came to California to meet me. That was almost 19 years ago, and we’ve had a pretty good relationship ever since. I will never have the childhood that I would have had if they had stayed in contact with one another, but the childhood I did have was a good one, mostly happy and secure in the love of my mother. A…
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Our Summer So Far…
When planning our summer, with me working from home and Maya home as well, one concern that I had was too much TV/Video games. If we lived in a neighborhood full of kids, this wouldn’t be an issue, because she would be out playing with them enough of the time to counter-balance the time spent on XBox or Disney Channel. But we don’t. The other kids in our neighborhood are in summer day camps and their parents are at work. If I were a stay at home mom, I could keep her occupied for much of the day – we could go on day trips to the zoo, the park,…