Musings
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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…
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Pomegranate Love
I adore pomegranates, but truth be told, I seldom buy them. They’re expensive, $2.50 or more each, and they’re a lot of work. While I’m at the store I might think, “Sure, I’ll de-seed it, and we can snack on the seeds, or I can put them in a salad, or whatever…” But then, the expensive fruit ends up just sitting there, not getting eaten, because none of us obtain the wherewithal to deal with them. Until now. On Saturday, Ted and I went into San Francisco in search of some specific walnuts to make a walnut pie for Thanksgiving (Franquette, which are rumored to have the best walnut flavor)…
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Time Off
I have this week off from work. My company doesn’t allow us to accrue a lot of time (120 hours), and yet I’ve been there over 11 years, so I accrue quickly. When an opportunity comes up to take a few days off, especially if I can time it with a break for Maya, and holidays, I’m happy to do it. I have another week off for Christmas. So this week, I’m trying to think of what to do with myself. Ted has to work several days at least. He’s working as an independent contractor right now, which means, when he doesn’t work, he doesn’t get paid. Blech. Maya has…
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Wordless Wednesday
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Veterans Day
Take a moment to thank all of the Veterans this Veterans’ Day, for their patriotism and service. There is a sad, lovely poem written during the First World War, by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a Canadian soldier and surgeon, after he witnessed the death of a friend. Lieutenant Colonel McCrae died of pneumonia during the war, in 1918. “In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now…
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Heartsick
I’m a volunteer driver for our local Meals on Wheels, which means that one day a week, I take a long lunch (thanks to my kind company, that agree that I’m adult and if I can get my work done, they don’t mind me doing this…in fact, they encourage it), drive to the Senior Center, pick up 16 meals, and drive them to senior citizens who are on fixed budgets and are unable to get out and shop for themselves, or are unable to cook, or both. They are in varying degrees of need, but I don’t think anyone goes on Meals-on-Wheels unless they are needing some assistance. I started…
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Cindy Sherman
This last Monday was the final day of the Cindy Sherman exhibit at the SFMOMA. I’ve been wanting to go for a few months now, but finally we hit a day that worked for all of us. If you’re not familiar with Cindy Sherman, she is an artist who explores identity through photography. She does the makeup, lighting, modeling, clothing, background, all of it. She is the photographer and the subject. The earliest works on display were from the 1970s, and the most current were very recent. I really liked the exhibit. I liked how DIFFERENT all of these identities were, and yet how you could tell so much about…