Tomorrow is my Great Aunt Flo’s 98th birthday, and we are going to gather to celebrate with her. It will be picnic type potluck outside at her retirement home, and the menu is mostly take out, KFC, Strawberry pie, that kind of thing. I decided to make a black bean and corn salad that I adore. I first got the recipe from my blog friend Jess Riley in 2007, and while I have it printed out, I had a horrible thought…what if she were to shutter her blog, and I lose my printed copy, and the recipe is gone forever???? I can’t bear the idea. So, I’m going to copy…

My darling friend Marilee, who lives in Upstate New York, near Niagara Falls, sent me a link to a Literature Clock. When you go to that website, a quote from literature will appear that corresponds (sometimes exactly, sometimes loosely) to the current time. I forget about it for days or weeks at a time, then I see it in my Safari tab, and I check it out. I like it, it’s a small pleasure. As you can see by my last 2 posts, Maya and Mulder both had birthdays recently. For Maya’s birthday, we had a party on Saturday, and the menu was appetizers…we have varied dietary restrictions around here,…

My BFF Rosemary sent me this picture a few weeks ago. Rosemary, her brother David, David’s girlfriend Stephani, and my brother Richard, we were all good friends. I am at David and Stephani’s wedding reception. I’m a bridesmaid, and that suntan tells you everything you need to know about why I go see a dermatologist every year now. My mom is smiling next to me, wearing purple, and Richard is a groomsman, and you can see him over my shoulder at the far right of the photo, with the beard. Richard was also very good friends with David and Stephani. David was the best man at Richard and Kathy’s wedding.…

This weekend’s decluttering task was the kitchen drawers. It’s disturbing how satisfying it is to throw things away. I pick things out that I think Goodwill might sell, and put those in a bag to donate. I pick things out that I think I can give away on my Buy Nothing group, and I post those. But a lot of things are just plain worn out. Next weekend SHOULD be the cupboards where the pots and pans go, but I think I am going to skip that and come back to it. Our bathroom cabinets are a disaster and it is very difficult to find things. We have eleventy billion…

Most years, I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. I feel like we can be as intractable or changeable as we desire any day of the year, no real need to focus it all at the beginning of a New Year. Sometimes I go for it, though, because it can be easier to track a change and when it started if it started at the beginning of a week, month, year, etc. One year, my resolution was to floss more. Actually, that was my resolution for several years, but one year it finally stuck. Later that year, I was pleasantly surprised in what a difference it made in the amount of…

I know I’ve posted this meme before, way back in 2015 when it was dry dry summer and I was sick of it all. Today I am writing in a much better mood, having watched the weather report on the evening news, which said that we are predicted to get rain starting Tuesday, and then on and off (meaning some every day) for the next week. More importantly for California, we recently got about 8 feet of snow in the mountains, and can expect about that much again in this upcoming week. Thank God. That takes a combination of storms and cold. Too warm, and we don’t get the snowpack…