This is Trudy, one of the wonderful ladies on my Meals on Wheels route. Ted and I went to her 99th birthday party to help her celebrate. Trudy is my role model. She’s 99, still lives at home alone (her husband passed away maybe 10 years ago). She cooks some of her own meals, and only stopped driving a year ago. She goes to lunch 2 or 3 days a week. She goes to exercise class (chair exercise, she uses a walker). When her family comes to visit, she cooks for days ahead of time, rather than letting them do the cooking (which they would be eager and willing to…

I’ve taken the week off from work, to correspond with Maya’s Spring Break. One thing that we did with our time was to go to the Legion of Honor in SF, to see the current exhibit of Impressionist Art. I do love impressionism, and Maya has to see one exhibit a semester for her art class. So we went, and we saw beautiful art. We got through the exhibit fairly quickly, and decided to skip the rest of the museum, as we’ve seen it several times, most recently in November. One nice thing about the Legion of Honor is that if you pay your admission there, you also get same…

My friend Nance has been tagged in a meme, and she has taken it and twisted it in her own way.  The meme is a series of questions, and instead of popping them all into one long list with quick answers, she is using each question as a blog post of its own, and telling an entire story around that question. You may have noticed that I haven’t been blogging much lately.  I’ve noticed.  I don’t know why, but I do know that when I get out of the habit of blogging daily, or at least a couple of times a week, my mindset changes, and I forget all about…

My job has a big rush right before and then again right after the year-end, and then it slows down a bit. I know, I take a week off between Christmas and New Year’s, but that’s but a brief lull. Now, after all of the states and cities and provinces have announced their tax changes for the year, now things slow down for a few minutes. Now is the time when I can, and do, take a few minutes for me. So… I made some lovely bread the other day, from a recipe that I snagged from my friend Carla. Delicious. We had it with some split pea soup that…

Frank Gehrke, chief of snow surveys for the California Department of Water Resources, left, leads his group out to measure snow levels near Echo Summit, Calif., on Friday, Jan. 3, 2014. The readings Friday showed the water content in the statewide snowpack at just 20 percent of average for this time of year. Photo: Steve Yeater, Associated Press Friday, Governor Brown declared that we are officially in a drought, making way for federal relief efforts and initiatives to move water from areas that are still well supplied to more parched areas. (Jerry Brown was also governor in the 70s when we had another extremely serious drought. Should we blame him,…

Today is shopping day for Thanksgiving week.  I need to get: dinner for tonight (whatever that turns out to be) ingredients for latkes, homemade applesauce, and chicken for Hanukkah on Wednesday ingredients for apple cake, cranberry sauce*, fruit salad, and yams for Thanksgiving I generally tend to go to the grocery store every day, or at least every day.  So planning on going to the store for enough food to cover 3 entire days is kind of crazy.  My goal, of course, is to avoid the insanity of shopping either the day before Thanksgiving, or, God forbid, actually shopping on Thanksgiving. I predict this shopping will bring me to two…

Ted and I were talking about the difference between ‘boy food’ and ‘girl food’. Prepare for some huge generalizations here, and you will likely think of plenty of exceptions to any rules we can come up with. Nevertheless…girls like small plates. Tapas. My friend Janet (and my friend Katie, and my friend Cherry) and I like to go to a local small plates place where we get a few bites of this, a few bites of that, and maybe (HA! Maybe, that’s funny…the particular joint I’m thinking of has wine flights…) some wine, and by the time we’re full, we’ve sampled many different items and had just enough of each.…

“Believe that there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Believe that you might be that light for someone else.” ~ Kobi Yamada I don’t know that I’m going to make it through NaBloPoMo this year. Actually, I’m pretty sure I won’t. But that’s no reason not to make a last minute attempt at a post today, with a quote that I really adore. This one speaks to so much of what we can be. For a student who is clearly in trouble at home. To a family member who needs some encouragement. Heck, it could be the person in front of you at the grocery store who doesn’t have…

once again, for the umpteenth time, gave up soft drinks.  I’m coming to accept that I have a problem (1st step), and I cannot just have 1 a day.  I’ve tried so many times to cut back to one a day, trying the idea of moderation, but somehow, it just doesn’t work.  I keep reading about how horrid soft drinks are, with all of their chemicals and so on.  The soda I drink happens to be diet, which brings its own set of medical challenges.  So I decided that I don’t want to drink them anymore.  Rats.  I happen to LIKE soda, diet and regular, so it sucks that I…

I intended to take a picture of the chicken, but I forgot.  Then I went looking online for pictures of roast chickens, and then I lost interest.  So just imagine a beautiful roast chicken coming from my oven.  You can picture me in an apron, heels, and pearls if you’d like, though I wasn’t wearing that. This recipe claims to solve the age-old problem when roasting a chicken…the breast dries out while the thighs are undercooked. I used to have this problem a lot, but I think it’s been a decade or 2 since it happened to me. Still, I do like to try out a new roast chicken recipe…