Thankful Thoughts
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Thankful
My plan for today’s blog was to make a Thursday 13, and list 13 things for which I am thankful. Family, friends, our health, having a job, good elections, etc. etc. As so often happens, though, life got in the way. Let me tell you what happened. Ted and I use WordPress to maintain our blogs. Ted’s really good about updating his blog to the most current version of WordPress, but often the update comes with a small hand full of problems. There will be something new that he has to tweak, and it takes time, and blah blah blah. Me? I’m more the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix…
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Grateful
The writing prompt for this week’s Sunday Scribblings is Grateful. I’m thinking of writing of things I’m thankful for on Thanksgiving, so at first I thought that this might be redundant. Then I decided that instead of writing about all of the things for which I am thankful, I would write about my mom, and how grateful I am that I had the time that I had with her. I am grateful for those early years, living in the Bay Area as a small child. My mom was working and going to school and raising two small children. Money was very tight, but she never let that be a big…
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Banyan Tree
Have you ever seen something that made you realize that the world doesn’t always work the way that you think it does? Often it’s a matter of nature…an animal or a plant that is so different than what you might expect to see, that it makes you stop in your tracks and think. While in Hawaii, I was struck by this very strange looking tree…turns out it’s an Indian Banyan Tree, which originates in India. The branches of the Banyan tree fan out over a large canopy, much like an Oak tree. One problem with Oak trees is that when the branches grow long and cover a large space, they…
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Home Again
(photo found here) Monday morning, and the vacation was, as most vacations are, all too brief. Now there’s laundry to be done, groceries to shop for, library books to return, and prescriptions to pick up. Back to the old grind, as they say. But it was a great week. I would say that the high point of the week was Thursday. When we went kayaking on Tuesday, we mentioned to our guide that we really liked the snorkeling, and he suggested that we might enjoy the snorkeling at Shark’s Cove. So on Thursday, we rented a convertible and drove up to the North Shore of the Island, to Pupukea. Isn’t…
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Hawaii Update
(photo found here) Hi Everyone, It’s Tuesday afternoon now…we had an AWESOME day today. We got up early and went on a kayaking tour, which meant kayaking out about a mile in the ocean to a little bird sanctuary in Kailua Bay, getting a short lecture on the formation of the Hawaiian Islands (interesting!), lunch and a swim, then kayaking down to a wonderful beach, where we did some snorkeling, and saw lots of beautiful fish. I have the say, the area that we were at today was SO MUCH nicer than the super-crowded Waikiki beach, which is closer to where we’re staying in Honolulu. It wasn’t crowded, the sand…
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Vacation
It’s 7:15 on Monday morning, and Ted and Maya are still asleep. But my body thinks it’s after 10:00, and can’t sleep anymore. Besides, there’s a woman outside in the common area of our condo with a really loud, weird laugh. 🙂 We arrived in Honolulu at about 11:30 yesterday morning, and within a few hours we: Rode in a limo (same price as a taxi, so why not?) Ate mahi-mahi for lunch (Maya had a cheese quesadilla, Ted had an Ahi wrap) Swam in the ocean (forgot to put on sunscreen, so it was a short visit to the beach. Don’t worry, I’ll be smarter today.) Relaxed in the…
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Wordless Wednesday
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Monday Meme ~ Christmas Version
We’re still in the wonderful week of Hanukkah, and we’ve eaten the Stollen for St. Nicholas Day. What a confusing family, huh? Basically, we just love to celebrate many differnt cultures, even if they are not our own. This coming Saturday we’ll be baking Christmas Cookies and so on, and it’s a most wonderful time of the year. How better to commemorate it than with a meme? This one came from Scarlett, who started this meme herself just for us, and calls it “12 of my favorite things”. Here are her rules: Please share 12 of your favorite Christmas things: they can be memories, traditions, songs, presents, beliefs, whatever it…
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‘Tis the Season for Sharing
Dee tagged me for a timely little idea she had. I won’t call it a meme, though I’m doing it for meme Monday anyway. Dee wants me to help get the word out about a charity that she is passionate about, which got me to thinking about the charities that I am passionate about, and people I love are passionate about, and how at this time of year, some folks do some end of the year giving in the name of loved ones or so on, and heck, maybe someone might not know about one of my favorite charities. So, not only am I going to tell you about Dee’s…
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Thanksgiving, Past and Present
photo found here The first few years that Ted and I were dating, he would go to his family’s house for Thanksgiving, and I would go to my Grandma’s house. I had a lovely time at Grandma’s house, even with the talk of diets and the dry dry turkey and the taste of cigarretes, and it was nice to see my family, as I was living in San Francisco now, and saw them mainly on the holidays. But as time went on, Ted and I decided we wanted to spend our Thanksgivings together. So, one year, I invited Ted to Thanksgiving at my Grandma’s house. I think he was in…
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Thursday 13 ~ Thank God for Showers
The other day when I was climbing into my nice steamy hot shower, I was reminded of Maya donating money to Unicef to bring clean water to children elsewhere. Then I thought of the book I had just finished, March, and how they didn’t have hot steamy showers, either. Pretty much, for the length of human history, no hot steamy showers. Want to take a bath? If you’re lucky enough to have access to a well, you can heat up water on your stove and use that. Otherwise, it’s the creek or river. No fun. And yet, that’s how it’s been for hundreds of thousands of years, and how it…
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Why I Heart This American Life…
You may or may not know that I like to download podcasts of a few of my favorite NPR programs, which I then listen to on my beloved iPod while walking Genevieve in the morning. I download three shows from NPR. The first is Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me, which makes the people walking past me think I’m insane, because I just start laughing out loud to myself, seemingly at nothing. The second is To The Best of Our Knowledge, which I’ll admit is last in my queue, and sometimes I get to it, and love it, and other times it falls by the wayside. The third show I download…
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Happy Labor Day
Summer repeats…this is a post from last Labor Day. Enjoy your long weekend, and take a moment to thank those who worked so hard to get you the day off. 😉 Who Put the Labor in Labor Day? We did, that’s who. When I think of labor day, my mind first thinks of the end of summer…the crisp fall weather on the horizon, the cool weather clothes, school starting up again, the return of the good TV shows… Then there are the Labor Day celebrations…one last bbq of summer, maybe a trip to the beach, the lake, or the shore… For some people it is a chance to get caught…
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Friday Update
 Hi Bloggy Friends, I’m in Colorado, coming home today. YAY. It’s been a very short, intense business trip. Short, because I flew in on Wednesday for a meeting on Thursday, and I’m flying home today. Intense, because on Wednesday, while I was flying in, some of my coworkers were in a helecopter crash. Thank goodness, everyone is OK, and the very shaken up folks who were in the crash left early, and are already safely home. But needless to say, everyone here is reflecting on how much worse things could have gone for our tiny company, for the families involved, and we’re very thankful that all are unharmed. And it…
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Birth Order & IQ
A study came out a few weeks ago, claiming that firstborn children are smarter than their younger siblings, by an average of 2 to 3 IQ points. One factor, the study’s authors concluded, was that firstborn children (and only children) tend to receive more of their parents’ attention. When siblings come into the equation, the amount of time and attention that is available is divided, and therefore, the less attention each individual child receives. So an eldest child that is an only for awhile has more of an advantage than an eldest child whose younger sibling follows closely. And an only child has the benefit of never having to share…