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Soundtrack to a Vacation
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=K8AH7yYQpro[/youtube] Great DJ, by the Ting Tings. I like to think of them as being from Guyana, since ‘ting’ is another way of saying ‘thing’ in Guyanese, but they’re not, they’re British. Anyway, this song is in heavy rotation on Ted’s iPhone, and it’s infectious…meaning, it gets in our heads and sticks there. Luckily, it’s a fun fun song, so we’re enjoying it. Hope you enjoy it too! If it comes up with a stupid message saying that the video is not longer available, go straight to YouTube, here.
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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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More Anniversary Stuff!
For anyone who’s interested, Ted and I put together a cute (albeit longish) picture show, with commentary, with some of the pictures from our wedding, lo these 15 years ago. Ted worked on it for HOURS, and it’s pretty groovy. You get a bit of a feel for the day, which was hot, and the wedding, which was Hindu, and the ceremony, which was FUN. Check it out!
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Happy Independence Day, Everyone
Does anyone else remember this little April Fools Joke that ran in the newspapers back in 1996? I remember it because my mom was visiting us, and Maya had just been born (March 29), and we were looking at the newspaper, and Mom got all outraged. I wonder if it was sleep deprivation, due to all of the excitement, or if perhaps the fact of being in such a historic city got the blood all of her patriot ancestors flowing freely, but she decided this was just too much. And to think, George Bush wasn’t even in office yet! Anyway, she was talking to my dad on the phone, and…
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We Are In Love
I know you so well I can tell by the sound of your voice If you’re really in love with me And you are And you are You know I can’t lie If I say to you ‘baby, I love you’ Then baby, I love you Oh, and I do Yes, I do I do… could it be that’s the Phrase you thought never would phase you Well baby, you better hold on tight ‘Cause I’m the one who’s supposed to Kneel down and propose, well alright Ooo, well I might, I might So, when I kiss you good-night Just sleep tight with the thought that you’ll Always be caught…
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(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday
For Ms. Mamma.
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Two Weeks
It’s been two weeks now since my mom died. Two weeks. It’s hard for me to believe sometimes. Everyone wants to know how I’m doing, everyone wants to help me get through this. Which I appreciate. I want to get through this, too. Two weeks ago, I felt hollow, I sobbed rather than cried, and I wasn’t sure that having Maya had been a good idea, since someday, when I die, she would have to go through this horrible pain. To quote a quote within The Year of Magical Thinking, that immediate grief feels like “sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at…
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Reading in Grief
V-Grrrl mentioned in her comment that when her parents died (within 6 weeks of each other! God, Dad, be careful!), she had to put all photos of them away, couldn’t drive past their house, couldn’t bear to be reminded. Not that doing these things helped her to forget, I don’t think anything could do that…but she was too raw to cope otherwise. Which made me think of the different ways that people grieve. My uncle made me a lovely collage of photos of my mom, and I find comfort in looking at it. None of the pictures are of her when she was sick, they’re all of her in her…
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For Want of a Nail
The race was lost…and with it, the latest attempt at the first Triple Crown victory since 1978 (not 1979, as ESPN claims…how pathetic is it when I know more about a sports statistic than ESPN?). Sorry, Big Brown. And, I must add that the trainer’s petulant bitching about how the loss was all the jockey’s fault rubbed me the wrong way from day 1. Asshat.
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Belong to Me
We think our parents are in charge, right? Like they know what they’re doing? But the truth is, they’re making it up as they go along, just like we are. Just like everyone. If we judge them by their worst mistakes, they’re all, like, gargantuan failures. Maybe you should try judging your mom by her intentions, by whether she, like, loves you and is doing her best. Such is the young teen wisdom of a minor character in Marisa de los Santos’ new book, Belong to Me. It is wisdom that spoke to me in my particular moment of grief, and made me think that perhaps my mother might want…
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Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
It’s so smokey and hazy around here lately. We sleep with our windows open, and I fall asleep and awaken to the smell of smoke. There are hundreds of fires in Northern California right now,  and they’re contributing to making the air quality pretty darned bad. So folks with asthma and so on need to stay inside. Thankfully, the fog has come in and cooled things off a bit, because otherwise, we’d be in even deeper shit than we are right now.
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In the afterlife…
Do you think there’s food? I mean, with no body, no hunger, no need for nutrition, there wouldn’t be a need for food, right? And yet good food is such a wonderful part of life as we know it. Hmmm. I was thinking about my mom, and how much it sucked that she had lost her appetite and her enjoyment of food after her surgery, because one of the things she was so looking forward to in coming to California is the wonderful produce. And when I brought it to her, she ate a little bit, but she didn’t enjoy it like she used to. She even gave some of…
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Uh Oh…
I’m not sure what brought this on, but we’re all in trouble now. My brother has a blog.
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My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes
So, I’ve been talking about this book off and on since I first heard of it on NPR’s To the Best of Our Knowledge. I had it in mind for awhile, and then decided to wait to read it until I was ready to take on the Non Fiction Five reading challenge. Since Non-Fiction and I don’t get along that well, I thought this would be a good one to keep until I was ready for it. My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes is a collection of essays by contemporary Iranian writers, discussing everything from feminism to photography, from film-making to reading Exodus. Collectively, these essays…