Family
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Happy Birthday Q!
This is Ted and me back in 1988…we had been dating for almost a year, and we were at his Uncle’s wedding. Maya used to say that this is when Ted was the girl, and I was the boy, because his hair is long and mine is so short. 🙂 Today is Ted’s 41st birthday, and I feel so incredibly lucky to have met him, to have convinced him to date me, and to have married him. He’s a great guy…a wondrful husband, an amazing father, an incredible teacher (when he gets the chance), and a great radio personality as well. He genuinely likes people (as long as they don’t…
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Misc. Weekend Thoughts
It’s Sunday evening, downright balmy (almost 90 degrees) here, and we just finished dinner. Ted made cheese tortellini with a tomato sauce, and salad with lettuce, spinach, and pears. Mmmm. So, here’s a sort of weekend wrap up, mixed with a couple of thankfulnesses, and so on. On Friday, we went to our Parent Teacher conference at Maya’s school. The news is that she is a very good student, works hard, no problems. Good at math, good at science, good at reading, good at writing. I’m thankful for that. We know several people whose children have trouble with one subject or another, or many. Or behavioral problems, which Maya also…
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My Shotgun…
OK, drinks were offered…well, one drink, but I’ll take it. So now I’ll tell you the tale of my shotgun. Go ahead, sit a spell. Now, I may be a card carrying liberal…I drink Chardonnay, give money to Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, I believe in gay marriage and a decent living for migrant workers. I’m a secular christian, meaning I don’t really think there’s a god above, but I love Christmas and Easter and Hannukah and all of that (I know, Hannukah isn’t Christian, but maybe Jesus had a dreidel? You think? I don’t know tech stuff.(quick, what’s that movie reference? The tech stuff one?) ) But I have…
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My Fabulous Fur Coat
The world has gotten a lot more complicated in the last 50 years, I think. What I mean by that is that people (most, at least) used to feel no guilt about having diamonds and wanting fur coats. And if they DID feel guilt, it was for being too materialistic. Nowadays, however, we not only know how many little minks go into a fur coat, we also know how much suffering and corruption goes into a diamond ring, and it gives us pause. My Grandma is getting older, as we all are, and is starting to give away some of her more prized possessions. This is partly because she’s getting…
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Happy Birthday Mom!
Today is my Mom’s birthday…You may think you have a good mom, but my mom will trump her in almost any category…and since today is her birthday, we’ll just take out the ‘almost’ and say, Any Category. She rocks. She was a single mom, who somehow managed to take care of two young children, go to school (Berkeley), and work to support us. She moved us up to Alaska when she was but 27 years old, still single, living out in the woods on a homestead with no running water and no telephone. She worked so hard to get us whatever we needed when we were growing up…I’m not talking…
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Here’s the post where I climb up on my soapbox…
Family Dinner Table I’ve been hearing and reading about the “Family Dinner Table” lately, and I’m sure that I’m preaching to the choir here, but come on people what the hell is so hard about sitting down to a meal together? I keep reading reports that talk about how only 58% of families sit down to dinner together 5 or more nights a week, and then I hear that within this 58%, for a large number of these folks, that means they each heat up their own microwave meal and scarf it down, and then go their seperate ways. This is upsetting to me. Do you want to hear the…
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Overnight in Reno…
We went on an overnight trip last night to Reno, Nevada. Ted’s friend from High School, Scott, loves making films, and about 5 years ago, he remade an old Twilight Zone episode into a 40 minute feature, “The Shelter“. He was showing the film at a high school (Hug High School…mascot, the Hawks…fun to say, Hug High Hawks) in Reno today, so we thought it might be fun to drive up and see the film, and maybe play in the snow. News flash: No snow in Reno. It was in the 50s. Anyway, we drove up yesterday afternoon, and found our hotel. We stayed at the Siena, which was NOT…
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Happy Birthday Monkey!!
My first plan was to have a post, with 10 pictures, one from each year of Maya’s life. But the pictures grew unruly, and though I loaded them all into blogger, because of different sizes, etc, it didn’t look that great. Plus, it kind of took away from the post, rather than adding to it, because I was focusing on the captions, rather than the thoughts that I want to express. Then Ted came in with his Mac, and made a slide show in about 2 minutes, using all of the pictures I had scanned. So I will direct you to view my beautiful baby, as she goes from about…
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The weekend so far…
This is a four day weekend for me. 🙂 Friday, Ted and I both went on a fieldtrip to Sacramento. Why both of us? Because it’s better than working, that’s why. So we drove 3 kids to Sacramento. First the class stopped at the old Governor’s Mansion, which was pretty interesting. It’s an old Victorian house, with 23 rooms, and they have it done up like it would have been in the early 1900s. Our tour guide was full of misinformation, which made us wonder, does he know what he’s talking about with this place at all? He told our class that MLK was shot in ’66 or ’67, that…
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The place where you’re from…
I’m reading a short story called “Post and Beam“, by Alice Munro. The main character has moved away from her small town and her small town family, and is now living in the city. Her cousin hops on a bus and travels across Canada to come for a visit. One of the themes of the story is how we leave part of who we are at home when we leave. So here is Polly, the country cousin, who has come to visit Lorna, and is a bit put off by Lorna’s ‘post and beam’ house (reminds me of the Eichler homes that are popular around here…the picture above is of…
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Best to NOT be Poor. Remember that.
I have a cousin, K, who is poor. She has made a lot of mistakes in her life, stupid decisions, and is stuck with the consequences. So she finds herself the single mother of four young children, trying to get off of welfare, two dead-beat dads, etc. (One may pay some child support, I’m not sure.) How to get out of this situation, you may ask? Well, let’s assume that education is the way to go. So, she goes to the local community college to take classes to get into nursing school. What about the 4 kids? Who takes care of them while she’s in class? My grandmother, who is…
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My Cousin…
I have a cousin, Tony, who I only knew as a small child. He was about 10 or 12 years older than me, and I worshiped him. When I was about 4, we moved to a homestead outside of Fairbanks, Alaska, and we really didn’t know anything at all about living in that kind of environment. He was raised there, so he came out to stay with us and show us how to do all of the things we had to do…(when I say ‘we’, I mean my mom…I was, after all, 4). We had no phone, no running water, a coal burning pot bellied stove for heat, a broken…
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Rockin’ Good News!
Some of you know that my mom has had some bad luck this past year…poor health, which led to a pretty invasive surgery, and the loss of her job, all in a few months time. Well, she called me tonight, and she has a new job! YAY YAY YAY! She starts Monday. She works/lives in Juneau, Alaska, and she’ll be working somewhere where they work with teenagers to create anti-alcohol media, at least that’s how I understand the job. YAY! Tomorrow was her last day of Unemployment Eligibility, so things were about to get a lot more stressful in her neck of the woods. Now, this past 6 1/2 months…
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Ashamed…
Tuesday night, Maya brought home a bunch of math homework. She hates math homework. I hate the barrier she puts up around her math homework, where she makes things so much more difficult than they need to be. She’s pretty good with the rest of her homework, but math, she simply does not want to do. She’s actually good at math, too, which makes it even more confusing for me that she dislikes doing the work so much. I was always good at it, and I liked it because I liked being good at it. So she was adding fractions, looking for the lowest common denomonator, and she decided she…
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R.I.P. :(
Our goldfish died last night. Poor Dorothy, poor Elvis. Here’s the story…I HATE cleaning out that fish tank. Hate it. And I’m the only one who ever does it (Maya can’t reach properly), so it gets pretty gross between cleanings, what with the green walls and everything. Well, a month or so ago, we went to a comic book shop in Lafayette, and the guy who owned the shop had a plecostomus in the tank with his goldfish. I didn’t think you could put them together, because I thought plecostomi needed warm water, and goldfish needed cold water. Well, the guy said they’re fine. So I went to the Concord…