Musings
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Q is for Quiet
One thing I love about cooler weather is that we sleep with our windows closed at night. Our bedroom is on the second floor, and faces the full afternoon sun, so in summertime it can be pretty warm. We don’t like to sleep with the air conditioner on (our electricity bill is high enough without doing that!), so if it’s cool outside, we sleep with the window open. I love the delicious feel of the cool air when I’m sleeping, but boy, it gets loud. We live in a pretty busy part of our suburb. You can hear the freeway noise, plus the noise from the busy road nearby, and…
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P is for Paris
I’ve been to Paris three times now. First on my honeymoon, pictured above. Then I went with Ted and Maya in 2018, celebrating her graduation from college and our 25th wedding anniversary. The third time was last year when I went with my cousin. Every time, I love Paris more. I haven’t traveled all that much in my life (it’s expensive!), but so far, Paris is my favorite city. So much beauty, so much art, such a cool vibe, such delicious food and wine. The picture above is of the Palais Garnier, which is called the Opera house, but now is mostly where the ballets are held, since they built…
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N is for Normandy
I’ve spent a few days in Normandy, France. Both times I went to Monet’s Gardens in Giverny, to Rouen, and to Mont Saint-Michel. In 2018 we also went to the coast to see Omaha beach, one of the beaches where the Allies came ashore in World War II. When we stopped at Omaha Beach, preparations were underway for the June anniversary commemorations, so there were ugly fences and bleachers up, but I got some good pictures. The fields of poppies always make me think of World War I, even though Flanders is not French. In the historic center of Rouen, between Omaha Beach and Paris, there is a lovely square…
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M is for Mornings
I’m a morning person. I tend to wake up relatively early, and once I’m awake, I’m up. I’ve never been a person who likes to lay about in bed for 1/2 hour or whatever. My morning routine on a work day looks like this. I wake up – sometimes I am woken by my daughter getting up to get ready for work. She wakes up at about 5:15. Sometimes I sleep through that, but not often. Sometimes I wake up before her. Come downstairs, make a cup of tea, and do my Wordle. I love doing Wordle. I always start with the same word, PRICE. Why? I don’t know. When…
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I is for Incredible!
Today’s post is a ‘guest post’. My sister Maya and her family built a garden house in their back yard in Portland a couple of years ago, and she posted about it recently on Facebook. I asked her if I could share her post here, because I am so amazingly impressed by the entire endeavor. That they did the work themselves, that they used mostly recycled materials, that it came out so beautifully. Truly incredible. I wish I had these powers, but alas, I do not. Without any further ado, here’s my sister’s post. ***** The summer of 2021 a wish/dream of mine came true. The kids had long outgrown…
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H is for Horses
I’ve written about my love of horses before, how I love their beauty and strength. How I’m not much of a rider, and think it would be wonderful to have a horse as a companion pet. Maya and I have decided we want a miniature horse, and we will name it ‘Clip Clop’. Clip Clop would trot around our little townhouse, probably doing damage to our laminate flooring. Clip Clop would come upstairs and sleep at the foot of the bed. Our neighbors would be outraged at first, but then would fall in love with Clip Clop and his/her adorable antics. I would take Clip Clop for long walks and…
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G is for Giverny
Giverny is the village where Impressionist painter Claude Monet built his beautiful gardens, which he painted over and over again. I’ve been fortunate enough to see these lovely gardens twice, first in early June of 2018, and then again in late September of 2022. It was lovely to see the difference in flowers, between late spring and late summer. The first 3 pictures above are from my 2022 visit, and the bottom 3 are from 2018. Here I am last September in Paris, at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, which in addition to these huge paintings of his water lilies also houses a lovely collection of impressionist art. Not…
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D is for Decor
Elisabeth recently redecorated her daughter’s bedroom, and posted wonderful pictures of the final project. This brought to mind one room we have redone in our home, the downstairs bathroom. Back in 2018 we had a leak under our home that caused a lot of disruption, due to re-piping the downstairs from under the slab to through the walls. You can read about it, and see pictures of the open walls and pipes, here if you’re so inclined. When they re-piped the bathroom, they took down the horrible huge mirror, and tore open the wall behind it, to get to the pipes. After they closed everything up again, the room needed…
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C is for Côte d’Azur
Last September, my cousin Carey and I took a 2 1/2 week trip to France. She and her wife have a time share situation, which they pay a lot of money for, and she offered me the opportunity to go with her to France, since Diane (her wife) didn’t want to go to Europe. Carey lived in France for awhile in the mid-80s, and hadn’t been back since. We spent our first week in the South of France, the Côte d’Azur, in the hillside town of Mougins. Mougins is certainly a touristic area, though not as busy as Nice, Cannes, or Antibes. Like so many of the hillside towns, Mougins…
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A is for Acceptance
Let us not look for you only in memory,Where we would grow lonely without you.You would want us to find you in presence,Beside us when beauty brightens,When kindness glowsAnd music echoes eternal tones. On the Death of the Beloved ~ John O’Donohue Acceptance is supposed to be the final stage of grief, though of course the stages aren’t really linear, they are more chaotic, and you don’t really know what is coming next. Perhaps denial. Perhaps bargaining. Certainly tears. Acceptance doesn’t mean you like what has happened. You aren’t glad to have lost your parents, your sibling, your friend, or your sweet dog. You don’t want to have the disappointment…
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Playing Tourist at Home
This last weekend, my cousin spent a couple of days with us, and we played tourist together. She lives in Oceanside, which is near San Diego, and came up to visit us, to see our Great Aunt, and to spend a few days in the Sacramento area, where she has quite a few friends, before jetting off to Orlando with one of these friends for a vacation. This is the cousin that I went to France with last year, and we always have fun together. She flew in on Thursday, and we went to lunch and walked around a bit downtown. In all of her visits to see us, she…
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Meme Monday
This is pretty much how I feel when I don’t wear makeup. I didn’t feel that way when I was younger, but now the years of sun damage really show. Sigh. Anyway, this isn’t a post about much, just catching up, and I thought the meme was funny. These are our seats to see Peter Gabriel in concert last Wednesday! It was a great show. The seating for the upper levels is REALLY steep, however, and tightly packed, so much so that I didn’t even feel comfortable standing up to dance, I was afraid I might fall. Those fancy rooms you can see across the way look like the way…
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What I’ve Been Reading
Tom Lake takes place in 2020, a family in lockdown on their cherry orchard in Northern Michigan. It is harvest season, and while the family picks cherries, the mother, Lara, tells her three adult daughters the story of her summer at a summer stock theater, Tom Lake, when she played Emily in Our Town, and dated an actor who later went on to be an Oscar Winner. Ann Patchett gives us a beautifully written book that weaves back and forth from the 1980s to the 2020s, as the daughters learn about their mother’s time as an actress in Los Angeles and in Michigan, about her life before marriage. We also…
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Dinners Last Week
Another week of figuring out what to make for dinner is in the books. I had it pretty easy this week, we went out a couple of times, but I made up for it by cooking Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday. Monday – We had this delicious Garlicky Spinach and Chickpea Soup. I love this soup, it is very tasty. Modifications made for my family’s needs: Ted’s doctor told him that beans are very good for him, but they also are carb heavy, so he needs to balance them out. WTF. I mean, what is he supposed to eat? Frustrating. He had some soup, and some leftover lamb curry for extra…
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Dinners Last Week
When it comes to cooking dinners, I am not a big planner. Since I work from home, I generally go to the store every day. The connection there, if you’re looking for one, is that I like getting out of the house and seeing people. I pretend I’m European, though I can’t walk to the shops, and we don’t have the lovely variety that we found in France (cheese shop, wine shop, produce shop, bread shop, etc.) Suzanne often posts her plans for meals for the upcoming week, which I enjoy because sometimes it gives me ideas. Here, instead, is the meals I cooked last week. Maybe you’ll see something…
