Musings
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Thoughts on Reading…
I’ve seen this posted a few places, most notably here and here. You fill in the blank, either on your blog or in the comments section. Everybody should read _____________________. So, here’s my list of things everybody should read: 1. This Post, from Angry Black Bitch 2. Chrysanthemum 3. The Lorax 4. The 100 Dresses 5. The Red Tent 6. The Unbearable Lightness of Being 7. Bel Canto 8. A Wrinkle in Time 9. The Handmaids Tale 10. The Mists of Avalon 11. The Forgotten Door 12. The Grapes of Wrath 13. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter 14. Invisible Man
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Dream symbolism?
Has anyone seen “The Straight Story“, about a guy who drives his lawnmower a couple of states over to visit his estranged brother? Well, I kind of had that dream last night, except my lawnmower thing was smaller than this one, with no trailer, and I wasn’t going to visit my estranged brother (I have a brother, but we’re not estranged, even in weird David Lynch type dreams). I was driving across the country, which I have done a few times, but usually in a normal car. With stopping for food and sleep, the drive from SF to Philly takes about 4 days. Well, in my dream it was already…
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Weekend Wrap Up
This weekend was jam packed with fun. Got to leave work early on Friday, in celebration of the long weekend. 🙂 I went home and started dinner, which was fancy tuna sandwiches. We went to Ted’s brother’s house to eat dinner and watch Battlestar Galactica, which we do every Friday now. We don’t get Sci-Fi channel on our cable, but his brother has satellite or something. We can’t get it, because of the trees near our house, and we’re too cheap to pay for the expensive cable that would come with the channel. But it’s fun anyway. Saturday was cleaning day. Ugh. My kitchen was so disgusting, it was embarrasing.…
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Why I’m Moving to Vancouver….
I was walking the other day, listening to a podcast on my beloved iPod. The podcast was of an NPR show, To the Best of our Knowledge, and it was about Canada. One of the segments was with a sociologist, Michael Adams, who wrote this book. It’s all about how the values of the United States are not the same as the values of Canada, and how that is becomming more and more the case as time goes by. For example: In the mid-1950’s, 60% of Canadians told pollsters they went to church each Sunday: the proportion in the U.S. was only 50%. Today, only 22% of Canadians claim weekly…
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Sometimes I Miss Philly
You may never hear me say this again, because it doesn’t happen often, but sometimes I miss Philadelphia. We only lived there for 2 years, from 1994-1996, and I never considered it ‘home’, so when I say I don’t miss it often, I’m not saying it isn’t a great city. It is. But when we lived there, I spent a lot of time being homesick for San Francisco. We would come home for Christmas, and we would both just hate the idea of going back to Philly, with its cold, cold winters, and the humid, sultry summers, so far away from our friends and family. But after awhile, we started…
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Happy Valentine’s Day
Why do we celebrate Valentine’s Day? Is it so Hallmark, FTD, and See’s can make money? I think it’s right behind Christmas and Mother’s Day as big money makers for the retail industry. You can’t turn on the radio without hearing ads telling you to buy your wife a pearl, diamond, or ruby. If you’re not married yet, the pressure is to get engaged, NOW, on Valentine’s day. Mostly, though, it’s a completely manufactured holiday, full of all of the pressure of shopping and buying, reservations at fancy restaurants and romance. Now I know these things don’t have to be stressful…but for many people, they are, and the burdon seems…
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Weekend Wrap Up
This was a lovely weekend, which started with a brand new Sofa and Mattress set on Friday afternoon. Yay! The sad story of our old mattress is that it was a King, but to get it up the stairs of our low-ceilinged townhome, you had to kind of bend it…which may be part of why it was hurting our backs, that it got damaged somehow when we moved in. Or, it could just be that it was about time for it to die….it was about 9 years old. So, new mattress came, King size, a week ago, but it couldn’t fit up the stairs. 🙁 So they took it away.…
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Maya’s Mom
Since I live in California, I am contractually obligated to take a yoga class, so I do. I don’t want to fall behind on my committments, and then have to pay some fine or something. Well, I’ve been taking yoga for almost 2 years now, just once a week, and I love it. Thursday night is my favorite night of the week. My teacher not only gets us all bendy and twisty, she teaches us some pretty cool stuff about the philosophies of yoga. I’ve taken yoga before, at the gym, and none of the other classes I’ve taken actually take 10 minutes at the beginning of class to talk…
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What will $1,030,000 buy around here?
After I ate lunch at my desk, I thought I would get outside and enjoy this beautiful springlike weather we’ve been having, so I went to the store and got some M&Ms (peanut, if you care), and walked around the block. I remember when this house was renovating their yard last summer…looks like they did the inside too. It’s a very pretty house…but come on, it’s just a house. In the suburbs. If you have a cool million + some change, it can be yours. And what about this fancy ‘staging’ and website? Wow…real estate can be pretty intimidating, yeah?
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Blame Canada?
Recently, Maya was working on a report about the California Missions for school, and we were reading about how the early explorers of ‘Alta California’ were looking for a passage between the Pacific and the Atlantic, which would be VERY valuable to them in getting wealth from the area back to Spain. They never found a route, though, and instead colonized California. Cut to the modern day: We have found a passage, through the Artic Ocean, called the Northwest Passage. It is seldom used because it is frozen over for much of the year, and the route is exteremly hazardous. One consequence of global warming appears to be that in…
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Surfing in the Bay Area?
I don’t surf, and I don’t really watch people surf, but if you’re not from around here, you may not have heard about an annual surfing contest called Maverick’s. The contest first started in 1999, and is held once a year. When conditions are right to create the huge (up to 50 feet) swells, the word goes out, and participants have about 24 hours to get here and get their game on. If you’re a surfing geek and kind of interested in what is so unique about this area that creates such huge waves, read all about it on SFGate. By the way, if you’re NOT from here, the waves…
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Another Useless Bit of Trivia….
Ted’s friend/sometimes coworker, Ramzi, called Ted last night to ask him who wrote the lyrics to “New York, New York”. Somehow, I thought that song was OLD. Like from the 1940s or 1950’s or something. Nope. I never knew it was written for the 1977 (ok, still almost 30 years old, but really, not what I meant) film, New York, New York, and starring Robert De Niro and Liza Minelli, directed by Martin Scorcese. Actually, I never knew that such a movie existed. Live and learn. Thanks Ramzi, for the question, and thanks to NPR for the info. 🙂
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Proof of the Apocolypse?
Or maybe I just found everyone’s Christmas gifts this year? Hmmm. I’ll have to think about it. Maybe both. In the meantime, ponder this: Old Silly Putty Face (As I used to call him when I was 10) has a new album of old songs from the 50s, and it is #1 on Billboard’s Pop Album chart. Wow.
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I Love California
Sunny High: 70° Low: 43° Ignore the Earthquakes, Traffic, Mudslides, Droughts, $600,000 Condos, Poverty in the Valley, etc. On a day like this, it’s just a great place to be. I mean, come on….It’s FEBRUARY.
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Weekend Wrap Up
Saturday, I went to the movies with Autumn’s Mom. We went to see “Walk the Line“. I’ve never been a big Johnny Cash fan, mostly because I’m not really into country music. Nothing against him. So, not being a fan, I didn’t know anything about him, except that he wore a lot of black, was married to June Carter (I only knew that because they died so close together a couple of years ago), and that he….well, that’s all I knew. The movie was really good…I definately enjoyed it. Very interesting, very well done. Did he come off looking perfect? No, far from it. It’s the story of his romancing…