Family
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Allergy Boy
Last year, Mulder appeared to come down with allergies. He was losing hair at an alarming rate, and was very itchy. His fur felt dry and brittle. He has an undercoat, which is what he was losing, so you couldn’t really TELL that he was losing hair, except that the evidence was all over our house, we could see tufts of hair fly behind him when he walked, our clothes were covered with it, etc. His armpits went bald. It was worrisome, and when he was at the vet, she said it was not uncommon for dogs to develop allergies at about age 3. So, we tried giving him Benadryl,…
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Monday Randomness
Since finding the pomegranate in a bush last year, I have had my eyes out for pomegranate trees and bushes. There is one on the path of my daily walk, and I noticed the other day that it has both flowers and little pomegranate buds. Aren’t they cute? I will be interested to see how many large pomegranates the tree gets. I don’t know whether the people whose yard it is eat them, or if people take them, or perhaps squirrels and birds. We shall see what happens. I’ve lived here for almost 23 years, and this is the first year I’ve really paid attention to pomegranates in the area.…
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Happy Birthday Puppy Boy!
Mulder is 4 years old today! Happy Birthday Puppy Boy! We took him for a nice long walk, and I gave him a piece of bacon this morning. Ted just brushed his teeth and he had a carrot (his reward for teeth brushing or fur brushing), and later I am going to bake him some homemade peanut butter dog cookies. In case you are ever so inclined, here is the recipe. I once made him some from an Ina Garten recipe, but he likes these just as much, and they are fewer ingredients and easier to make, so I’ll go with these. Someone from the dog rescue where we got…
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Cooking with Aunt Flo
My Great Aunt Flo (Florence) has a hoarding problem. She LOVES recipes, and has them all over the front of her house. They cover the dining room table, the coffee table in the living room, the card table in the living room (where my Grandma used to do puzzles), and the coffee table in the family room. She sorts them and looks at them and worries about them. It is her overwhelming passion and hobby at this stage of her life, when she doesn’t have my Grandma to look after anymore. It has taken me awhile to figure out that she loves them and wants to keep them. I had…
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Normandy
After we left Brittany, we drove slowly back toward Paris, with a few stops along the way. On our way out to the coast, we had noticed that we could see Mont-Saint-Michel, which is pretty amazing. You’re just driving along, and then you glance over and see what looks like a medieval fortress that looks like it’s floating. Well, it’s not floating, and it doesn’t look that way when you are close, but from the freeway it appeared that way to me. So we decided to stop and at least look at it on our way to Normandy. Mont-Saint-Michel is an island right off the coast of Normandy (where Normandy…
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Our Time in France – Part 2
Our first day of touring France, aka, not driving 8 hours from Paris to the West Coast of Brittany, Ted’s friend Jean-Marc took us to visit the medieval town of Locronan. As with any village or town in the area, there is a lovely church, St. Ronan. St. Ronan was an Irish pilgrim whose relics were housed for a time in the church. Most of the street signs in Brittany are in two languages, French and Breton. There is a movement to bring back the Breton language, and there are quite a few immersion schools for children to learn Breton. Surprisingly, this was illegal until somewhat recently. Anyway, we drove…
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Our time in France – Part I
We spent our first night in France out by the Charles De Gaulle Airport. Our flight arrived in late afternoon, and we had to get through customs, etc. So we found our hotel, got settled a bit, and had dinner. Maya wanted to shower and go to bed, but Ted and I wanted to try to stay awake a bit. We took a walk, expecting it to be all airport hotels and such, but there was a lovely little village right by the hotel, Roissy en France. There was a charming street with bustling cafes (we wished then that we had not eaten at the hotel, though the food there…
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GRADUATION
It’s been busy around here. Maya had finals, and then we had the graduation. I had family coming into town for the graduation, which made me think, “why not have a party?” So we did. I thought perhaps we would have 20 people, but it turned out to be about 50 people. I am a planner, so my brain gets going and annoys me with its desire to GET THINGS DONE. I planned food for 50, seating for 60 (figuring that people might want to spread out a bit, and what if extra people came, etc.). Planning meals before, who will stay where, how will we get from point A…
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Family Treasures
Monday was my mom’s birthday, and it was also my Great Aunt Flo’s birthday. My mom was born on her 18th birthday, and Aunt Flo always said she was the best birthday gift she ever received. Aunt Flo married my great uncle Wes on her own 26th birthday, and my mom spent her 8th birthday being a flower girl in her beloved aunt’s wedding, a job she cherished. Aunt Flo became a widow after only 11 years of marriage. She never had children of her own, and Uncle Wes’s girls were mostly grown by that point. 2 of them were married, and I believe the 3rd had also moved out…
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Grieving with Flowers
Today is my Mom’s birthday. She would have been 76 years old. I was thinking about her, and remembering how much she loved fuchsias. So I bought one, hoping that I can keep it alive. They do not do well in our micro-climate. It’s too hot in summer, too cold in winter. They do well on the other side of the Oakland hills, in Berkeley, Oakland, and especially San Francisco, where there are lovely fuchsias in Golden Gate Park. My mom would buy them and hang them indoors, but I’m going to try, and am putting mine outside. It’s in the shadiest part of our yard, where they will not…
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Catching Up
Sorry for the long silence. My stupid keyboard broke, the little Bluetooth one that I use with my iPad Mini. A few keys still worked properly, but some did not work at all, and some would spit out completely different characters. I went onto some user forums to see if there was a way to fix it, and there was, but it did not work. Rats. Sure, I could have borrowed Ted’s laptop, or written on our regular computer, but somehow it just never happened. I like writing on my iPad, but I can’t stand the stupid touchpad. When Christmas came around, I thought maybe I would get a new…
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Wordless Wednesday – Happy Birthday to my Lovely Sisters
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Friday Recap
Thanksgiving is over, and it was a lovely day. Mulder and I went for a very long walk in the morning, much longer than usual, and we were tired when we got home. Too bad, because I still had some cooking to do. Thankfully I had started the day before, or I wouldn’t have gotten it done in time. We had all of the family favorites, which means there was way too much food and not everyone ate everything, but we all ate what we wanted. Some ate turkey, some didn’t. Some ate potatoes, some didn’t. Some ate cranberry sauce, some didn’t. The salad I made with Brussels sprouts, pomegranates,…
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Wordless Wednesday
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Throwback Thursday
When my Dad died, we divided up the list of people to notify, and one of the people on my list was my Dad’s ex girlfriend, Kit. Dad and Kit dated for awhile in the early 60s, when he dropped out of college, and they moved to New York together. As Kit tells it, they moved to New York because someone had posted an ad in the paper that they needed someone to drive their car to New York from Oakland, and it seemed like a good idea. The picture above, which Ted likes to call my Dad’s album cover, is of my Dad (on the left) and Kit’s friend…