(Take a look at this cool blog, with info and pics of malls around America…this is the Sunvalley Mall, in Concord, where we were today.) Along the same theme as the near-drowning of a child in a friend’s pool last weekend, Maya and I were at the mall today, and we were near the top of a very tall escalator/stairs combo. We were getting ready to ride the escalator down, and waited for a crowd of people to pass by us. I noticed a toddler slightly behind them, who didn’t fit into the crowd (she was blond, they, all dark haired). This wouldn’t have raised any red flags for me,…

(Image found at www.futureofthebook.org) Have you ever seen someone drown? How about on TV? Between TV and the movies, plus classes I have taken in swimming and CPR, I had the idea that drowning was this loud spashy thing, with arms flailing and chests pumping and loud music and so on. And, I suspect, sometimes it is. But last Saturday, I went to an end-of-the-year party for my PEP group, and it was a small party at one of the volunteer parents houses. She has a pool, and the kids were in the pool, swimming. Maya wasn’t in the pool, as we had arrived later, and she hadn’t decided yet…

art by mockery I’m discouraged that we haven’t had any good offers on our home yet. There was one offer a couple of weeks ago, but it was insulting. To those who would say that all you have to do is lower your price to sell, I would counter that there are quite a few places almost as nice as ours that have lowered their price a few times, and still not sold. It’s a slow market. Part of me says, don’t worry, if you have to accept less on this side of the deal, you’ll make it up on the purchase of your new place, which is in this…

I found this picture at MoCo Loco.com. Ginger’s post the other day about the difference between barbeque and a cook-out made me think of some other regional terms, as well as some that might just depend on the era in which one grew up. For example, a sofa has several other names: Davenport, Settee, Chesterfield, and Couch are the ones that come to my mind. My grandpa used to call it a Davenport or a Chesterfield, and he was born in Oklahoma, but came to California as a young man, so I’m not sure where that came from. I grew up saying ‘soda’ when I wanted a soda. The CEO…

Yesterday’s parenthetical about my ex-coworker (circa 1990) saying he was surprised that Ted ‘let me’ buy floral sheets got me thinking…thinking about the way that couples communicate, and how power struggles come into so many relationships. The idea that I should only buy masculine sheets, because Ted’s virility might somehow be at stake if he slept on floral sheets is insane. The idea that he should only buy floral sheets because I might defect or something on solids or stripes is also insane. It reminds me of a couple we know. I’ll call them Bill and Meg, which aren’t their real names, just in case they ever should come across…

  Anyone who has ever been shopping for new sheets knows, it can be a tricky project.  I remember once going to buy sheets, and not even knowing about thread counts and so on…I came home, put them on the bed, and that night was pure torture…it was like sleeping on sandpaper.  (We won’t even get into a discussion about my then-coworker, who was surprised that Ted “let me” buy floral sheets…I said, “Ted doesn’t ‘let me’ do anything.  I buy what I want.  If he wants more manly sheets, he can buy them.”  Really, I hadn’t considered whether Ted would like them or not…we had just moved in together,…

These last few weeks have been SO busy….the kind of weeks when you realize how much quieter your life would be without children. We had a parent appreciation potluck, which I was inclined to skip, but they were having a play about mother earth, and Maya was playing a member of the Boston Tea Party, so who can skip that? There was an end of year potluck at girl scouts, where they received their bronze award (boy, the girls worked HARD for that one…very proud). There was a talent show at school, in which Maya performed a dance number with her best friend (I have been forbidden from posting video,…

Want to know why?  In addition to getting to ‘meet’ all of you wonderful people, some of whom I feel like have become friends, all of whom I really enjoy reading and ‘knowing’ a bit, sometimes, you get cool stuff! I recently won a drawing over at Lotus Reads, and was awarded a book as a prize.  The book I won is titled, My Name Is Red, and it turns out that it won the Nobel Prize in Literature, which makes it eligible for my Book Awards Reading Challenge.  Double Plus Good!  So, I’m adding it to my list as an alternate, which is pretty handy, since most of my books…

Does anyone but me remember Koogle? According to Wikipedia, it came out in 1971, and was discontinued sometime during the 70s. Gosh, I loved this stuff. Chocolate flavored peanut butter. What’s not to love about that? I’m not sure why we were allowed to buy this stuff, since we weren’t allowed to buy ‘sugar cereal’, but why ask? Just be happy and eat your Koogle. Look at the ingredients…is partially hardened vegetable oil the same thing as partially hydroginated vegetable oil? Hmmm. My mom and I were talking the other day, and we were remembering these raisin cookies that we used to like, but which are no longer available in…