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Wordless Wednesday
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Kids These Days
Slide show from El Hogar de los Ninos website. One of Maya’s electives this year is a class called Teens Around the World, in which they learn a bit about geography, but mainly about the issues that face children and teenagers all around the world. Sort of like a class I took in High School, Global Studies, but also different. They study issues like immigration, hunger, child labor, and what they as children and teens can do to help. The teacher is on the board of directors for an organization called El Hogar de los Ninos, which works to help very poor children in Managua, Nicaragua. From their website: In…
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For Jimmy
See Jimmy, you can come over to the light without fear! Join these old boys!
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The Bluest Eye
Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that marigolds did not grow. A little examination and much less melancholy would have proved to us that our seeds were not the only ones that did not sprout; nobody’s did. Not even the gardens fronting the lake showed marigolds that year. But so deeply concerned were we with the health and safe delivery of Pecola’s baby we could think of nothing but our own magic: if we planted the seeds, and said the right words over them, they would blossom, and…
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People are like pigeons
I got a good chuckle out of this story, from Reuters: TEHRAN: Iran failed Friday to register what it said would be the world’s largest sandwich in the Guinness book of World Records after people rushed forward and began eating it — before it was measured. Event organizers had planned to stuff the 1,500-meter-long sandwich with 700 kg of ostrich meat and 700 kg of chicken, and display it in a park in the capital Tehran. But as the sandwich was being measured, chaos ensued. The giant snack was gone in minutes, a Reuters witness said, leaving the three Guinness representatives present with a dilemma. One of the event’s organizers…
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Happy Friday
Hey all, it’s Friday, and I’ll admit that I’m glad. I’m looking forward to sleeping in Saturday and Sunday, maybe wasting a bit of time watching 90210 on Soap TV. (Do I need to clarify that I’m talking about Beverly Hills, 90210, vs. the current teen drama, known just as 90210?) I know, loser. 😉 This morning I have meeting after meeting, and this afternoon Maya has her first school dance, and Ted has an interview in the City.  I hope they both go well. Especially the job interview. Keep your fingers crossed. Tomorrow evening, Maya and some of her classmates are volunteering at a dinner/fundraiser in San Francisco, raising…
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Visit with Grandma
(Grandma, 1941, 18 years old) I went to Stockton on Sunday to see my Grandma and her sister, my Great-Aunt Flo.  I haven’t seen them since the service we had for my mom, in June. They both seem a bit thinner, a bit sadder, but overall stronger and better than they did when my mom first died. Still sad, still somewhat angry, but better. Kate and I went up, hoping to take them to Grandma’s favorite place, Red Lobster. (I’m not a huge fan of the RL, but there isn’t a lot else in Stockton.) But Grandma said, um, no, Kate’s work is precarious, Ted isn’t working, you cannot take…
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Caramelized Butternut Squash
(photo found here) Yesterday was Canadian Thanksgiving, which we celebrated with a turkey dinner, just the three of us. The turkey kinda sucked. I was feeling kind of poor, so I bought a pressed ‘turkey roll’ instead of a fresh, real turkey breast (it was 2/3 price of a plain turkey breast). God, it was salty. I should have spent the money. In addition, we had stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, broccolini, green beans, and caramelized butternut squash. A week or two ago, we found ourselves in a bookstore, and I was looking at a different Barefoot Contessa cookbook than the one I have. There was a yummy looking recipe there…
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Happy Thanksgiving!
To my Canadian friends! (graphic found here)
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Question*
If the answer to life, the universe, and everything is indeed 42, and my age currently is also 42, why the hell has this year indeed sucked so fucking much? Just wondering. A message? Cruel joke? Or merely coincidence? (image found here) *1st, I know I’m a huge dork. 2nd, I have indeed had a glass of wine before writing this. 3rd, Maya is obviously watching The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is funny as hell, and also, distracting as hell when I’m trying to read my book. So I’ve given up on the reading.
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Booking Through Thursday
Deb has several blogs, one of which is a weekly book meme. I thought I’d join in this week, though not on Thursday, as I didn’t get to it in time. So for me, it’s Booking Through Friday. What was the last book you bought? Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations for Working Through Grief, by Martha Whitmore Hickman. It was recommended by a friend of mine, who said that it helped her get through the loss of her mother a few years ago. Name a book you have read MORE than once The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. One of my all time favorites. I’ve also re-read the…
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A Sad Day
I was saddened to read in this morning’s paper that Mother’s Cookies has shut down operations and is filing bankruptcy. I’ll admit to fond memories of growing up with Mother’s Cookies, those yummy super sweet pink and white circus animal cookies, or the taffy sandwich cookies, or Ted’s favorites, the peanut butter gauchos. Sigh. Mother’s has been around a long time (since 1914), though the company has been bought and sold several times in the last 15 – 20 years. Before that, they were a Bay Area institution. They were located in Oakland until just a few years ago, when they moved to Ohio and Canada. I went to buy…
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War/Dance
Ted and Maya watched an amazing movie the other night, while I was holed up reading my book. I’m not sure if I wished I had joined them or not. It was tragic and sad, and yet uplifting and joyful at the same time. We have the DVD, so perhaps I’ll watch it soon. Anyway, the film was War/Dance, and you can read Ted’s excellent and very moving review of it here.
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October is Children’s Magazine Month
Maya receives quite a few magazines. To the question posed to Sarah Palin about what she read, Maya said she would have answered, “I read Cricket, Stone Soup, Discover, Nick Magazine, and National Geographic Kids. Whew. That’s a lot of magazines. We’re pretty willing to spoil her when it comes to reading. It’s hard to say no when she wants a book or a magazine, because we want her to love to read, though of course we have been known to take her to the library quite often, and when she thought she had lost her wallet a few months ago, she was most concerned about the loss of her…
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Possession: A Romance
Maud shivered, as she always shivered, on reading this document. What had Christabel thought, when she read it? Where had Christabel been, and why had she gone, and where had Randolph Ash been, between July 1859 and the summer of 1860? There was no record, Roland said, of Ash not being at home. He had published nothing during 1860 and had written few letters – those there were, were dated from Bloomsbury, as usual. LaMotte scholars had never found any satisfactory explanation for Christabel’s apparent absence at the time of Blanche’s death, and had worked on the supposition of a quarrel between the two women. This quarrel now looked quite…