Musings
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Ode to Forest Park
When we go to Portland, Maya’s favorite thing to do is to hike in Forest Park. She told me that Forest Park is her favorite place on earth. This most recent trip was no exception, and happily, Ted was able to join us this time, and I think he may be hooked as well. For Maya and I to enjoy hiking is definitely saying something, because we are two girls who do NOT like to get hot and sweaty. Sadly, there is almost no way to hike around here without getting hot and sweaty, because there are simply not enough trees to keep you shaded. So the sun is beating…
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Convoluted Vacation Wrap Up
Hello Bloggy Blog Blog Blog, I’ve missed you so. I’ve posted, sure, but it’s not the same as actually writing something NEW, and I haven’t been reading my friends’ blogs, and I haven’t been commenting, and boy, I have a LOT of catching up to do. Let me start by saying, I’m still Biff, because I’m thinking…One Week Ago Right Now…I was getting ready to go to Seattle…on vacation. Sigh. So, today I’ll tell you what we did on our vacation to the Pacific Northwest. (Mostly Portland.) We left home and drove to Ashland, where we hoped to see a play, but we got a bit of a late start,…
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Stupid Human Tricks
Cherry and I were discussing the time I murdered a salmon in Alaska…I was telling her that my SIL and I hit the fish in the head with a rock, hoping that would be kinder than leaving the poor fish to flop around and suffocate in the open air. This brought up the topic of suffocation for pleasure…how some people like to suffocate themselves just to the point of almost losing consciousness, because it gives them a high. This reminded me of a very stupid trick my girlfriend Neva and I used to do, when we were in the 6th or 7th grade. I don’t know where we got the…
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How To Be Annoying….
Back in my sordid days as a front desk clerk at a fancy hotel in SF, (OK, they weren’t really sordid…I just say that to give myself street cred) I had a VERY annoying coworker whom I shall call Biff, because, well, his name was Biff. Really, his name was Jason, but he went by Biff. Why anyone with a perfectly good name like Jason would go by Biff is beyond me. Maybe there were too many Jasons in the family, and that was his family’s way of telling them all apart. Maybe they read too much Superman. (Wasn’t there a character named Biff in the Superman comics?) Anyway, in…
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Our Weekend So Far
Yesterday, Maya had a pretty cool art class, where they got to learn some cartooning skills from a Pixar animator. She really liked it. Ted and I took the opportunity to go see Scoop, which is the newest Woody Allen movie. Ted LOVES Woody Allen. I like him OK, but not like Ted does. That’s ok, I’m game for a good movie now and again. 😉 At one point during the film, however, I discovered that my husband has become an old man. I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but the evidence came forward when Woody Allen was asked what his religion was…he said “”I was born into the…
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My French is, How You Say, Tres’ Mal
I work at a small ‘virtual company’, and by this I mean that we all work from home and communicate mostly via email, sometimes via telephone. The company wasn’t always like this, but some of my coworkers have always been in other parts of the country, and we are mostly on an email basis. One of the VPs, whom I shall call ‘D’, for some reason emailed me once using a word or two in French. I don’t know if that was the start of our French email relationship or if something I said triggered him, but I went along with it. I went online, found a free translator, and…
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Enough Light Banter!
While listening to my beloved iPod last week, walking the dog, enjoying “To the Best of Our Knowledge”, these questions were raised: What do you live for? What would you die for? What would you kill for? The answers were interesting. Most folks said they lived for their families, would die for their families ,and kill for their families. Some folks said they lived for art and love, would die for their ideals, and wouldn’t kill for anything. Me? I’m not sure. I’ve thought about it quite a bit over the last few days, and here are my answers, some lighthearted, some not so much: I live for: Kisses from…
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Churning….
Ever have one of those days when your insides are just all jumbled, and you feel tense, and although nothing bad really happens to you, you’re pretty much ready to snap? No, me neither, but if they DID, I wouldn’t be a fun person to be around, and I wouldn’t want to be my husband or my child. 😉 A bit more seriously, there was a time not long ago when I felt like this much of the time…tense, on edge, pretty much unable to relax. I decided to take a yoga class to try to help me through this problem…maybe if I could find the right class, one that…
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Congratulations, Achebe!
Our 20 year old Volvo passed a major milestone on Friday….he went from 199,000 miles over to 200,000! It’s kind of like his birthday or something! If he were human, I’d buy a cake. But, since he’s a car, I’ll just say, “Good Going, Achebe!” (And yes, he was named for the famous Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe…I read a book of his in grad school (Things Fall Apart) and I was pretty blown away by how DIFFERENT it was from the other things I was reading, and I always liked the name. I hope the author isn’t insulted that I named a car after him…I mean, Ted named his mom’s…
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Sweet Relief
Take a peek at this…it’s the view toward San Francisco, from the Lawrence Hall of Science in the Berkeley Hills. Maybe I’ll pull this post later, when the view changes, but right now, it’s all foggy foggy sky, which is sweet relief, and bringing cooler breezes out our way.
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The Dark Side of Genealogy
Many years ago, in my mis-spent youth, I worked at the front desk at a big San Francisco hotel. One evening, a very cute black man checked in, whose last name was Ward. “Hey,” I said, semi-flirtatiously, “that’s my last name, too.” He smiled and said, “Yeah, it’s that southern thing.” Ugh. Stopped me cold. Maybe he thought that somewhere back in time, some of my ancestors owned his ancestors. Which is surely not true, since, 1. My Ward surname came from my mom’s step-dad, so I wasn’t descended from him by blood; and, 2. Our Ward family was poor Irish in Oklahoma, and surely never had the kind of…
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Escaping Ennui
Ted and I went to escape the heat as well as taking advantage of Maya’s going to her best friend’s house on Saturday (free babysitting!), and we drove into Berkeley to see “A Scanner Darkly.” It’s a complicated tale, and one wonders how and why the main character (played by Keanu Reeves….whoa….) got to be where he is. In one flashback that may or may not be real, we see him in his home, with a lovely wife and two children. The wife and kids are playing a board game, and he is reading the newspaper. He gets up to make some popcorn, bonks his head on an open cupboard…
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Mom Always Said Not to Play Ball In the House
Since it was 115 yesterday (according to this morning’s Chron…I never saw it get over 112…HA!), we pretty much didn’t leave the house after 10am, except to take out the garbage. As I mentioned, TV Land had a Brady Bunch marathon on, and after an early dinner, we were watching the top 10 most popular episodes, and of course, the episode with the broken vase came on. I suddenly thought, hey, why was that only Peter’s fault? All three of the boys were playing basketball in the house…it was just Peter who got unlucky enough that he bounced the ball down the hall, over the ledge, and broke the vase.…
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I Think the Sun Is Trying to Kill Us
According to my local paper, the high yesterday was 111 F. Ugh. It was so stinking hot. Maya went to her best friend’s house to play, and Ted and I decided to go see a movie…the A/C had conked out at the theater, so it was kind of like an oven in there. We bailed. But when it’s 111 degrees out, you don’t want to do a lot outside, so we drove to Berkeley (where it was a frigid 92 degrees…), and found our movie there. We saw “A Scanner Darkly“, which was a pretty serious cautionary tale about drug use. I liked it, but I kind of think that…
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Brentwood Corn
There are two Brentwoods in California….the Brentwood down near Hollywood, where the rich and famous reside, and the Brentwood in the ‘Far East Bay’ or the ‘Far Western San Joaquin Valley’, whichever sounds better to you. 😉 Our local Brentwood is known for the quality of their corn. When you go to the grocery stores or farmers’ market, the signs proudly proclaim, “Brentwood Corn”, and you know you’re getting the good stuff. Well, we went to Brentwood the other night for dinner. Ted’s mom had heard good things about Cap’s Oak Street Bar & Grill, so we all piled in the car and took her there for her birthday dinner.…