Musings
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Saturday Randomness
I hope that everyone has enjoyed their Christmas/Hanukkah celebrations, and that life is returning to normal (if that is what you want) or that the festivities are continuing (if that’s more your jam). My company gave us both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as holidays, and then next week we will have both New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day as holidays, plus we still have Fabulous Fridays off (at least we did yesterday, they haven’t told us whether this wonderful benefit will carry in to 2025, and let me tell you, WE ARE ON PINS AND NEEDLES waiting to find out!), so I went ahead and took a couple…
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Meme Monday
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, wonderful, peaceful, joyful holidays to all who celebrate them. Our Christmas plans include dinner at Ted’s parents’ house, which will be ‘white people Christmas’, as Ted put it. Standing rib roast, mashed potatoes, peas with pearl onions, and pumpkin pie. For Ted’s mom, who is pescatarian, salmon tikka masala. For Maya, who is also pescatarian but not really a big fan of most fish (??), fake turkey cutlets as she can’t think of anything she would like more. Our Hanukkah plans will be pushed back, as his family doesn’t celebrate. We will have latkes and such on the 26th. For those who are new here, we…
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Cool Bloggers Cookie Swap
Suzanne is hosting a cookie swap this week, and I am here for it. I have 4 recipes for you. I will link to 2 recipes that I have shared before, and also share 2 ‘new’ ones. I say ‘new’, because when I search my blog, I have never written them up, though I have linked to them in the past. First the links to past cookie recipes: Now for the ‘new’ recipes. When I was growing up, my mom always made fudge for my grandpa, who had the biggest sweet tooth in the family (perhaps more than my Aunt Flo even, though that’s difficult to fathom). The recipe was…
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Happy Winter Solstice
I know I’ve shown you this picture before. This is a time lapse photo of the arc of the sun on the Winter Solstice, at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. Fairbanks is just outside of the arctic circle, so you do get a glimpse of the sun for an hour or two, but it never really gets light. Pretty cool photo. Starting tomorrow* our evenings will darken a bit later every day. It still takes longer for the sun to come up in the mornings for a couple more weeks, though, which I don’t really understand, but Jamie explained a couple of years ago. Also, obviously, Happy Summer Solstice…
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Friday Randomness
First off, I received my gift from the Secret SANta gift exchange! It’s so fun to receive a gift in the mail (sorry Canadian friends! I hope your postal strike resolves soon!) and to see what someone has picked out for you. A big Thank-You to my Secret SANta, Penny, for this wonderful gift! What a fun holiday themed mug! And lots of treats to go with it! In other blog friend news, Kyria and I are having breakfast today! She’s in the area for the holidays. I’m really looking forward to meeting her. I think we need to do more local meetups, there are several people in Northern California.…
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Wednesday Randomness
YOU GUYS!!! I am HAPPY to report to you that my company has changed their mind and the In Office 2x a Week Mandate has been cancelled. YAY! For those of you who are new here due to NaBloPoMo, I have worked from home since 2006, both at my prior job and my current one. There is an office about 30 miles from here, which can take anywhere from 25 to 90 minutes by car each way, and there is no public transportation that would take less than 100 minutes and involve several transfers. My company decided that it was time to get people ‘back in the office’ 2 days…
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Someone Else’s Shoes
Someone Else’s Shoes ~ Jojo Moyes Two middle aged women accidentally swap gym bags, putting Nisha and Sam quite literally in each other’s shoes. Nisha is extremely wealthy, or more accurately, she is the wife of a very wealthy man. She keeps her body a certain way (very thin, expensive haircuts and so on), dresses a certain way (think Chanel suits and Louboutin heels), and lives in such a way as to make life extremely easy for her much older husband. Sam is struggling to keep her household afloat. She is in low level sales, and her husband is suffering a serious bout of depression and hasn’t worked in a…
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6 Things Saturday
I was going to write a Friday Randomness or 5 Things Friday yesterday, but the day got away from me, so Saturday it is. Here we go. My avocado tree seems to be doing well, since I cut it back, treated the soil with a tiny bit of dish soap, and gave it some fertilizer. That asshole squirrel, George Bush, knocked off one of the budding branches when he was burying his acorns, which pissed me off. A neighbor suggested that I put some red pepper flakes on the soil, and that would keep squirrels away. I went online to see if that was safe for the plant, and the…
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Washing Machine
When I lived in San Francisco, we never had our own washer and dryer. The flat that I shared with my roommate Troy had, inexplicably, a dryer, but no washing machine. The two apartments that I shared with Ted had laundry rooms, where you shared the machines with the other tenants. That all changed when we moved to Philadelphia, and we had a washer and drier in our apartment. It was such a relief to not have to guess when the clothes would be dry, to not have to trudge up and down stairs, that kind of thing. When we bought our townhome back in 1998, it had the original…
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Friday Randomness
Time for some randomness to get you all caught up with me, and then hopefully I can come by and get caught up with all of YOU. First off, hurricanes and tornadoes. I’ve been thinking of my Florida bloggers…I hope you’re all safe. I’m on IG and saw some posts from Stephany that she is safe and she and her mom came through it fine. CCR was holed up with her cat in a hotel. Jenny was fully stocked with snacks, and now I see that she is happily untouched by the tornadoes in her area. Any other Floridians that I didn’t know were Floridian? I hope you’re all safe…
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Proof of Life
My poor avocado tree, which I grew from a seed and have had for many years, is not doing well. You may remember that its leaves fried in a 2 week heat wave this summer, though I watered my plants and tried to save them. I trimmed back the leaves, and have been watching to see if it might come back. There is new growth near the bottom of the trunk, but nothing higher up. What to do? It just so happens that one of my cousins knows a lot about plants, and is a Master Gardener. When I’m worried that I may have killed a plant, I consult her.…
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Friday Randomness
Just a few random things I’m thinking about today. First off, while I appreciate the humor of the joke above, I am a firm believer in the Oxford Comma, so the first line bugs me. Enough of that. On to randomness. Kyria posted about things she has learned, and one of them was about how she uses Feedly. I don’t use Feedly, but my blog does have an option when you comment, that you can get an email if someone replies to your comment. However, I have heard (from Ally I think) that it does not work. Color me pleased to read in Kyria’s comments that you need a plugin…
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Staycation, Part II
The second half of our Staycation began on Wednesday, when we drove to wine country on our new tires. Ted’s uncle, aunt, and cousin live in Sonoma County, so we started the day having lunch with them. Long-time readers may remember the wedding we attended in 2019, with two ceremonies, beautiful horses, and a big family reunion. That was Ted’s cousin. She now has a 2 1/2 year old daughter, and is on the beginning of her maternity leave with a new baby, due in early October. We had lunch with Ted’s uncle, aunt, cousin, and the pre-schooler. That is one smart kid, and she’s so sweet. It was fun…
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Staycation, Part I
As mentioned in my last post, Ted and I took this week off from work for a staycation. We live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and people come from around the world to visit, so sometimes it is fun to play tourist in our own area. We decided we wanted to do a variety of things…some days chilling and maybe getting things done, some days out and about. Here’s a recap of the first half of our staycation. Saturday, we went to Ted’s parents’ house to celebrate his step-dad’s birthday. It was a low key party, just us, them, and Ted’s brother. Instead of cooking, we brought in take-out,…
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Friday Randomness
What’s new pussycat? Around here, it’s gotten hot again, though thankfully only for a few days, and never over 100 degrees. Today is the beginning of a cool down. One nice thing about September heat waves as opposed to July or early August heat waves, is that the sun goes down a little earlier, so the full heat of the sun isn’t beating on our house for as long. It’s the little things in life, right? I kept seeing this ad on Facebook. It’s for a t-shirt company. My thought? Hannah’s an actor! (Hannah is Engie’s dog) Do you see a resemblance? Here are some gross things. We recently had…
