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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

(Sorry the lettering on this pic is hard to read…it was bad on the original as well…)  Yesterday, I attended a seminar on brain development. It was interesting to find myself disagreeing with the keynote speaker, as she talked about how children should not be introduced to letters and numbers until their corpus callosum is completely sealed, which happens at around age 6. Kids that learn to read before that age, she said, aren’t really reading, and if they are “forced” to learn prematurely, they don’t develop correctly socially and so on. Whatever. I read before that age, and so did Maya and all of her Montessori classmates, and you…

It’s been 18 hours since my last Diet Coke.  Ack!  How do I feel, you may well ask?  Well, my neck hurts, right at the spot where it kind of meets my shoulder.  I’m guessing that has nothing to do with caffeine, and more to do with sleeping on it funny.   I’m also kind of cold.  But I just closed the window, so that should help. The giving up of the diet coke has not been easy.  I enjoy it.  But I really need to take good care of my body, and there’s nothing in soda that’s good for me, so away it goes. It’s been over a month since…

When we make rice around here, unless it’s baked in the oven, we make it on the stove top. Mostly, we pour some long grain rice in a pot, pour in some broth, cover and bring to a boil. When it’s boiling, we take off the lid, stir the rice, reduce the heat to low, and replace the lid. Then you leave it until it’s done. Sometimes I go in and check the rice, lifting the lid and stirring the rice. Every time someone is over visiting when they see this occur (unless they are members of Ted’s family…I think they all stir their rice, too) they react as though…