Musings
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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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France – Part 3
Saturday in our French trip, we were on our own. Jean-Marc and his lovely wife had some Business to attend to, so he gave us some suggestions, and off we went. We started in Pleyben (little red 4, above), which has a very old Calvary. Sadly, we did not know what a Calvary is, so we did not take a picture of it. We assumed it was the church. Here is Maya in front of the church. I didn’t really use my phone while I was in France, trying to save money, and Ted was driving, and Maya was just along for the ride. So zero research was done. When…
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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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Fun with Plumbing
Back in April, Ted noticed that he could hear water running, and the sound seemed to come from the wall. Once he pointed it out to me, I could hear it as well. We did some internet research, and found some possible causes. A leak, of course, or perhaps sedimentation build up in our water heater. Quite a few years ago, we had to replace our water heater due to sediment. We have very hard water here, with a lot of minerals. Further research informed us that we should flush our water heater once a year. What? We’ve had the thing for at least 10 years, and have never done…
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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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Good Eats / Birthday Weekend / Bloody Mary recipe
Thursday was Maya’s birthday, and we celebrated by going to our favorite Dim Sum restaurant in San Francisco, then we did some shopping near Union Square with her gift cards. At some Dim Sum restaurants, you order off of a menu (like the place we went last year). At others, the staff bring food around to the tables, either on carts or on trays, and you say yes or no to each item as they bring it around. So they come by and say, “shrimp dumplings?” and you say yes or no, and if you say yes, they give you the shrimp dumplings and mark your check to show that…
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Tuesday Thoughts
Ted and I have recently found a delicious Chinese restaurant in our neighboring town, Sichuan Fortune House (Link is to Yelp, they don’t have a website). It’s not really a place to go with Maya, because she is more a fan of sweet and sour chicken and pot stickers and steamed pork buns, and this place has really delicious dry cooked (spicy) green beans, a wonderful mushroom dish, yummy hot and sour soup, really nice cod, etc. All things that are delicious and not up her ally. I mean, they DO have sweet and sour pork (no chicken, but maybe they would make it for her?) and pot stickers, but…
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Where we are now
Here we are, at the beginning of the first full week of February, and it’s going to be 75 degrees today. The birds are chirping merrily, the flowering trees are full of flowers, the sun is bright and warm. It would be lovely if only it weren’t so ominous, that this is going to be another drought year. Already, parts of Southern California are in drought. Up here, we’re getting there, again. There is still, surely, a lot of water in our reservoirs from last year’s deluge, but I do wish mightily that our snow pack were deeper. It’s not too late. We could have a wet LATE February (the…
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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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Chicken with Wine and Shallots
I came across this recipe, I think on Facebook, which should be evidence that Facebook is not entirely useless. You can find the recipe (and picture) here. I made this for dinner one night, and it is delicious. I generally read comments on online recipes, and one person in the comments said they added peas at the end. That sounded good to me, so I added a bunch of peas at the end, when you add the cherry tomatoes. Really good. I buy bone-in, skin on thighs, because I think they give flavor to the dish. I cook with the skin, and then remove it when we eat it. Give…
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Throwback Thursday
I have a friend and she comes from the high plains Wise as the hills and fresh as the rains I have a friend and she taught me daring Threw back the windows and let the air in For all she knows Bless my blue moon rose I have a friend and we talk about books She comes around and she drinks while I cook Took me an atlas to find her town And to realise that the world was round For all she knows Bless my blue moon rose ~ Everything But the Girl My darling friend Rosemary and me, above, in Old Town Sacramento, probably early 1984. We…
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I Hate Appliances
Specifically, I hate modern appliances. Why? Because one tiny thing breaks and it ends up costing a ton of money. For example, our stove, which we bought a long time ago, only lasted one year (just past the warranty) before some tiny piece of plastic inside the doohickey behind one of the knobs broke, and suddenly you couldn’t turn off one of the burners. It was always on. Thankfully it was a back burner, and Maya wasn’t a little child, and we would just turn off the power to the stove when we weren’t using it, but yeah, not good. The fridge has had myriad issues. The door compartment, where…
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Save the Titans
Near the California/Oregon border, near Crescent City, is Redwood National Park. Within this beautiful park (which I have not personally visited), there is a small grove of giant redwoods, discovered in the 1990s, nicknamed the “Grove of Titans”. The biggest two are the fourth and fifth largest known coastal redwoods in the world, and they are surely magnificent. There was a story in today’s paper about the grove, talking about how secret it used to be, but how popular it now is, which is dangerous for the very trees that people are trekking in to see. Redwood trees have very shallow roots, and are sensitive to people walking on the…
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Bad Sunrise Photos
This whole trying to post EVERY DAY in November is tapping my creativity. I think I have an idea for a post, and then I look, and I realize that I already wrote about it, so I have to try to come up with something else. So, what you get today is bad pictures of the beautiful sunrise this morning. Had I realized it was going to be such a lovely sunrise, I would have gone to Heather Farm for our morning walk, and gotten some great pics. But I didn’t know. So we took a shorter walk down the trail near our house, which follows the old path of…