Musings
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Of Curry and Singing…
Growing up, we at one point lived in a house in ‘downtown Fairbanks’, Alaska. I put that in quotes, because it was such a small town, I don’t know if it would be legal to call it a downtown. Anyway, we had several roommates during our time in that house, one of whom was a chef named Jerry. One of Jerry’s specialties was a chicken curry, which became a Christmas dinner tradition in our household for many years. My mom loved making the curry, and our good friend Linda and she would put it together every year. I think it was more of a Jamacian curry than an Indian one,…
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Happy New Year!
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Happy Birthday to Me!
Today is my 41st birthday…that seems wild, since I don’t feel any more mature than I did when I was 21 or 22…maybe that’s the secret to the fountain of youth…stay immature! For my birthday dinner tonight, I asked Ted if he would get me cracked crab with garlic butter, some wine (or maybe champagne?) and some french bread. He decided to do me one better on the French Bread, and get garlic noodles from Thanh Long. Oh my. They are SO yummy. So, yesterday, we drove into the city in search of garlic noodles…but we thought, why go all of the way to San Francisco, our favorite city, and…
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The Memory Keepers Daughter
I’m about 2/5 of the way through this book. Reading this has been a difficult task for me…not that it would be for everyone, but it was for me. Those of you who have read my blog for awhile know that I didn’t know my father or my sisters growing up, that I met them when I was 21 (dad) and 22 (sisters), so I missed out on a lot of their lives, as they did mine. One thing that I missed out on was that I had an uncle, Bobby, who had Downs Syndrome. He was my father’s older brother, and he died before I had a chance to…
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A Question…
Me: Why do you think some people start their Christmas shopping in August, while others wait until December 23rd? Ted: Because some people are women, while others are men. Me: That sounds about right.
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Hair Envy
Those of you with Naturally Curly Hair, and you know who you are, you vixens like Frieda from Charlie Brown fame, or miss Shakira here…please stop bemoaning the frizz factor, the fact that to get it straight, you have to blow dry it. Don’t you realize that the women with the BEST straight hair (Asian and Native American excepted, because their hair is course enough to be straight AND thick) are really naturally curly folks with flat irons or hair dryers? I know it’s a pain in the butt, but at least your hair has BODY, and it doesn’t lie there like a limp noodle, begging for more product, wishing…
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Holidays at our House
It’s the 6th night of Hanukkah, and we’ve lit the menorah, and the candles are burning low…the Christmas tree is lit, and there are depressing Aimee Mann Christmas songs playing. Just another holiday at our house. A few years ago, we decided, for fun, to start celebrating Hanukkah. Neither Ted nor I know of any Jewish folks on either side of our families, so this is a pretty secular celebration of a religious holiday, but we kind of felt like since we’re not Christian, and we celebrate Christmas, it would be nice to expose Maya to some of the other traditions of the season, and heck, what’s not to like…
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Good News for Mango Lovers
While I took Genevieve and my beloved iPod for a walk yesterday, I was listening to To the Best of Our Knowledge. The final segment of the show was an interview with Madhur Jaffrey, author of Climbing the Mango Tree: A Memoir of a Childhood in India. I haven’t heard of Ms. Jaffrey before, but she is considered the “Julia Child of India”, and she is also an accomplished actress. In her memoir, and in the interview I was listening to, she talks about growing up as part of a huge extended family, where there were often 40 people at dinner time, and how she never even knew that her…
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Monday Already?
Here we are, and it’s Monday morning already. How does that happen so quickly? Seems like just yesterday it was Friday morning…sigh. We had a lovely weekend, though. Ted got off of work early on Friday, though I was too busy with work stuff to clock out early with him, so he went to see a movie in Berkeley, about his new girlfriends, The Dixie Chicks. Maya went straight from school to her Girlscout troop leader’s house, where they made fleece scarfs, which they then delivered to the Bay Area Crisis Nursery, a local shelter that the troop seems to have adopted. In addition to delivering scarfs for the children…
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Where Were You When…
It seems that there are these moments that define a generation…where were you when you heard about Pearl Harbor, where were you when you found out Kennedy had been shot, and then RFK, and then MLK…. For my generation, the first of those sad moments was when John Lennon was killed, on December 8th, 1980. I was a geeky kid then, sort of into the Beatles, but not really yet. I got into them much more in High School. I was watching “Little House on the Prarie” on TV, and the announcer came on and gave us the sad news. I was shocked. I thought people were finished with that kind…
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Giving Money…
I remember several years ago, reading an article about kids and money. The author suggested giving your child money, and dividing it three ways. One part goes to spending on whatever they want, one part goes to saving for bigger items or college or whatever your particular values are in that area, and one part goes to charity. Ted and I liked this idea, so when she was old enough, we started giving her an allowance of $5 a week….$3 she can spend on whatever she wants, $1 she saves (right now for Christmas gifts), $1 is for charity. Sometimes her ‘giving money’, as we call it, goes to organizations…
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Heartbreaker
When I was 9 1/2, and in 3rd grade (my mom held my brother and I back in school a year, for reasons that I shall not go into in this post), we moved from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Stockton, California. I know, you feel sorry for me. Rightfully so. Stockton had no snow, which sucked, but on the other hand it had my grandparents, and the sun peeked well above the horizon even in the dead of winter, so it wasn’t all bad. Anyway, when we first moved to Stockton, we stayed with my grandparents in their mobile home, until we could find a place to live. That wasn’t as…
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What’s in a name?
When Ted and I got married, lo those many many years ago (13 1/2), I had the decision to make…to change my name, and take his last name? Or to keep my maiden name? If I kept my maiden name, then what last name would our child have? Hyphen? My name? His name? I wasn’t sure. What I was sure about was that I knew that changing your name doesn’t change who you are, it doesn’t change your identity. At least, that’s true for me. When I was 10 years old, my mother decided to leave her married name behind, and go back to her maiden name. She had been…
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Mean Girl
I read on Kvetch the other day, about the pain involved in realizing that she didn’t fit in with her friends anymore when she was in Jr. High School, until she discovered that there were other kids that felt that way as well, and she could move on. When she did so, she very bravely mustered the courage to call her old friends, and tell them that she couldn’t be friends with them anymore. I wish I had been so brave. When I was in 8th grade, I made friends with a girl who had just moved in across the street from me, M. We both loved horses, we were…
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Packaging…
I went to Target the other day, and I picked up some contact lens solution. Pretty good deal, right? It’s not buy one get one free, but the pricing was great, and it LOOKED like buy one, get one free. See how both of the containers are equal in size? Nice. See Ted in the background? See how happy he is? Also nice. Then, I picked up some toothpaste, and look, a FREE tube of toothpaste comes with the one you pay for. Gotta love that. The way this is packaged, even though the front of the box clearly says that the FREE tube is going to be 4.2 oz,…