Musings
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A Tale of Two Nurses
I’ve been fortunate enough in my own life thus far that I have seldom needed the help of a nurse. Not that nurses are bad, but often you find them in hospitals, and I’m fortunate to have only been in hospital myself when I had Maya. I was reminded of two nurse stories by two different comments on Facebook, by two friends who do not know each other, neither of whom I’ve met in real life. One is a bloggy friend of mine, who commented that Karma is real, and we need just wait for it to catch up with us. The other is Kelli, who was an online friend…
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Wordless Wednesday
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Revenge
There’s something about grandchildren, where they exact revenge upon the parents, and the grandparents sit back and laugh. When I was young, I did this or that or the other thing to my mom, which surely drove her crazy. She survived whatever it was, but then, when Maya came along and did to those same things to me, and drove me nuts, HA! My mom was so happy. Grandchildren are the best revenge, right? What I didn’t know before, was that children can also be some kind of revenge exacted upon your grandparents as well. (See how I skipped an entire generation there? Crazy, huh?) Way back when I was…
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Happy 17th Birthday, Maya!
Gah, look at that face! She was so little, so young, so cute. Now…she’s gorgeous, funny, kind, smart, and growing up SO FAST it’s causing my head to spin. She’s 17 years old. I cannot fathom that sometimes. She’s driving (taking her test soon). She’s finishing up her Junior year of high school, and it’s all about colleges and SATs and the prom. How did this happen to me? Wait, not me. Her. How did she grow up so darned fast? Sometimes I can believe it’s been 17 years since she was born. Other times it is almost as though the in-between years never happened, and she was a baby,…
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Friday Randomness
Friday again…what’s new pussycat? I hope you’re well. I haven’t been around here much lately, and it’s not because life is so darned exciting that I haven’t the time, or so darned horrid that I can’t manage it. It’s just how it’s been lately, I guess. The spirit hasn’t moved me. But it’s moving me a bit now, so I’ll give you some random ‘Thinking About…” type stuff, OK? Maya and her chorale group from school sang at a swanky fundraiser last night at our local swanky rep center. The fundraiser was to raise money for the city education foundation, which spends its money on crazy, extravagant things like librarian…
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Small Victories & Occasional Randomness
I went to the store the other day, in need of a new pair of jeans. I have a certain brand and cut that I like, and alas, they are phasing that cut out. No big pile with four washes from which to choose, which is how it was the last time I went to the store. So I looked all over, dug through pile after pile, and the only pair I found was 7 sizes too big. Rats. Every other pair in the store was a stupid low rise cut, meaning I can’t bend over without people knowing what kind of underwear I have on. I don’t like…
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Girl with a Pearl Earring
One of the benefits of membership to our local PBS station is that they sometimes have a ‘free member day’ at local museums. Several years ago, that took us to the SF MOMA to see a Picasso exhibit, and Maya and I spent a lovely day in San Francisco together. This time the ‘free member day’ was for the de Young Museum, one of two fine art museums in San Francisco. They have several exhibits, but the current Special Exhibit is a collection of paintings from the Mauritshuis in Holland, which is a museum that is being expanded and is under renovation until mid-2014. While they’re tearing up the place,…
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On School Shootings and Facebook
I want to write something about the mass shooting in Connecticut. I feel like I should. But it hurts to go into a lot of detail. I hate it. Those poor families. Those poor children. Those poor teachers. That whole, devastated community. I cannot imagine what they are going through. I hate that people get sick enough that they would do such a thing. I hate that we live in a country where guns are so available, that we can have two shootings in one week. It was just Tuesday that I heard on the radio about a guy who shot up a mall outside of Portland, and I quickly…
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Super Moist Roast Chicken
(Image courtesy of America’s Test Kitchen, since I didn’t take one.) We enjoy a nice latke and applesauce dinner for the first night of Hanukkah, but we also enjoy a little more to the meal, if you know what I mean. Generally, that means a roast chicken and some easy to prepare veggies. Latkes are kind of worky, and homemade applesauce does take some time of peeling and cutting, so it’s nice to have a recipe that you can pop in the oven and ignore while you make your latkes and applesauce. I saw this recipe on America’s Test Kitchen, and it was just weird enough to make me wonder.…
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Under the Table
No, not drinking someone under the table. Napping under the table. When I was a kid, I loved to nap. I still love to nap. Now, my favorite napping place is on my sofa with my cozy napping blanket, or maybe on my bed. But when I was a kid, I loved to nap under things. Especially under tables. It felt so cozy, like a little cave, and if there were a party going on, I could hear the adults laughing and talking, and just soak it up until I dozed off. I know, I’m weird. I once fell asleep under a piano on a river boat*, and didn’t wake…
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Phobia
(absolutely perfect graphic found here) I don’t have a lot of phobias, I don’t think. I’m not excited about the idea of hanging out in an extremely crowded place with a lot of pushy strangers, but I can handle it. I don’t love finding a spider struggling to get out of my shower, but I can handle it. I’m not thrilled with Ferris wheels, but I wouldn’t say I have a fear of heights. I’ve been to the top of the Empire State Building, and it didn’t freak me out in the least. One fear I do have, however, is sleeping on a ground floor with the window open. You…
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Giving Tuesday
The day after Thanksgiving is Black Friday, the day when retailers hope to move from being in the red to being in the black. It has also become a day when shoppers go forth, hoping to find great deals, either for their Christmas and Hanukkah shopping, or perhaps for themselves. There is also Small Business Saturday, when shoppers are encouraged to frequent small, locally owned businesses, rather than the big box stores that are so popular on Black Friday. Yesterday was Cyber Monday, when shoppers go online and shop while they’re supposed to be working. A person can supposedly get really good deals on this particular Monday, though I find…
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Grandma Weekend
This is my Grandma and my cousin’s daughter, Julia, last year Thanksgiving Day was a lovely day of fun, family, and wonderful food, as it should be. It also brought the disquieting news that my Grandma, my mom’s mom, had fallen pretty hard and broken her wrist, and was in the hospital. Blech. So Friday I drove to Stockton to see her, to verify with my own eyes that she was OK, to try to find out what was going on. The news was not good. And sitting in a hospital is rarely fun. You wait and wait and wait all day for someone to come and tell you what…
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Rereading ‘Gone With The Wind’
The story of Scarlett O’Hara and the ruin of the south is so tied in with the film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, “Gone With The Wind“, that if you’ve seen the film, it’s difficult to separate the two in your mind. I first read “Gone With the Wind” in the 8th grade, and the love triangle between Scarlett, Ashley, and Rhett absorbed me completely. I’ve read the book so many times since that I can open it at any page and know what’s going on, just by reading one sentence. It’s one of those books. I was thinking about it recently, however, and I realized that I’ve only read…
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Cotogna
photo mix found on the Contogna website Yesterday found me taking BART into the City to meet my dear friend MAS for luncheon, at a lovely restaurant that I hadn’t tried before, Cotogna. Turns out, they are the sister restaurant to Quince, which inhabits the space once occupied by Myth, a restaurant that Ted and I happened upon one night several years ago. It was the kind of lunch that Ladies of Leisure enjoy…we had appetizers, potato gnocchi with castelmagno cheese, wine (I had wine, MAS had sparkling water), veggies, and a delicious apple-quince crostata with vanilla ice cream (seen in the picture there). We lingered for well over 3…