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Proof that Maya is Smart
While we don’t believe in paying our child for getting good grades, we have been known to celebrate our successes in life. So when Maya came home on Friday with a report card that showed how hard she’s been working, Ted said we would celebrate, and she could pick what we have for dinner. Anywhere she wanted to go, or we could cook at home. Being an intelligent child, as it is the height of Dungeness Crab season, she said she wanted crab, at home. Yay! It just so happens that I had been eyeballing the crab at a local grocery a day or two before, and had decided that…
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Old Fashioned Clam Chowder
Photo courtesy of Cucina Testa Rossa, and not of this recipe, though that bowl right there is making me want to hop on BART and go into the city tout de suite. Several years ago, I took a cooking class with some friends of mine at a local Home Chef location. This was more so we would have something fun to do together than to learn to cook, though we did manage to pick up a few pointers while we were there. The class we took was on Seafood, and we got some tasty recipes out of it. I was reminded of this class by a post that C wrote,…
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Friday Five Meme
(image stolen from here) I found this little love/hate meme over at Caribousmom, and it seemed like a good Monday Meme idea. Then I decided I couldn’t wait until Monday. Oh well. Since there are Five love/hates, I’ll pretend like it’s a Friday Five, k? I love to eat: almost any flavor of potato chips, esp. those Kettle ones. Beets with Bermuda Triangle cheese. Ripe tomatoes. Crab. Oh, so may yummy things. (gosh, I advertise for these Bermuda Triangle folks enough…don’t you think they’d send me some for free? Please?) I hate to eat: celery and mayonnaise, though I’m trying to get past the celery one. Mayo is actually fine…
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Jimmy Corrigan, or, The Smartest Kid on Earth
If you still think that graphic novels are childish and can’t rip your heart out just as easily as any other novel out there, you haven’t been paying attention to this blog lately. Because this little challenge I’ve been doing has really opened my eyes to a whole new world, and I’m so glad that I decided to take this one on. My latest graphic novel was Jimmy Corrigan, or, The Smartest Boy on Earth, by Chris Ware. Initially I wasn’t sure if I was going to like this book, because the illustrations are quite busy, the writing tiny and sometimes hard to read, and it looked like it might…
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Dang.
First Kucinich, now Edwards. The candidates who had the most to say to the more progressive elements in the Democratic party have dropped out. I can only hope that their influence lives on, and that both Obama and Clinton take some of it to heart, and do more than ‘talk the talk’. Getting tired of politics already. I mean, so few people have voted, and this is indicative of the entire country? Bah. Stupid primaries.
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(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday
Think I’m kidding? Not even.
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The Tale of One Bad Rat
The Tale of One Bad Rat, by Bryan Talbot, is a pretty amazing accomplishment. Mr. Talbot started out with the goal of writing a graphic novel that took place, at least partially, in the Lake District of England, home of Beatrix Potter and the characters of her children’s books. From that beginning, he took the image of a young homeless girl being harassed by a bearded ‘Jesus Freak’, (his words) in the Tube, and constructed a tale around her. For the girl to be homeless, Mr. Talbot decides that she needs a reason to have left home. So his character is the victim of sexual abuse by her father, and…
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Persepolis
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl6kH3xPwDU[/youtube] Persepolis is a story told in two graphic novels, The Story of a Childhood, and The Story of a Return. It is also the name of an award winning animated film based on these graphic novels. The stories are the autobiography of Marjane Satrapi, a woman born in Iran in 1969, and they follow her through the overthrow of the Shah, and give voice to the crushed hopes of the Iranian populace when things go from bad to worse under the fundamentalist rule of the Ayatollah. Marji’s family is very progressive and open minded, and they encourage her to be a free thinker, to read and understand the events…
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It’s Probably A Good Thing…
It’s probably a good thing that we have given up selling our little condo, because it looks like we live in a construction zone right about now. Some of what is going on is improvements, and some of it is repair type work, and some is just plain mud and mess due to rain, but gosh, if I were a prospective buyer, I wouldn’t even walk through the front door. Heck, even the front door is a mess. We live in a condo complex that is almost 30 years old, and the exterior is shingles, for that lovely ‘Tahoe look”, as they call it. 30 year old shingles start to…
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The Inheritance of Loss
I finally finished The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai. I was so looking forward to reading this book, as I had heard nothing but good things about it. I even asked a woman on BART if she were enjoying, as she was reading it while on the way into the city, and she said that she was engrossed, and couldn’t pull herself away. I started this book almost a month ago, and I’m sad to say that I had a really difficult time getting into it. It’s sad, because the book is beautifully written. It’s the congruent story of a retired judge in Northern India, his granddaughter, his cook,…
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The Rocky LaPorte Show
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx2FKXg060U[/youtube](Update…look, through the miracle of YouTube, you can enjoy the first segment of this sitcom…you could then go back and watch more, if you want…I don’t know WHY you would want that, but hey, whatever floats your boat!) I answered the phone the other day, and the kind person on the other side of the line asked me if I would be interested in watching a 1/2 hour sitcom if they sent me a DVD, and then they would call me back and ask me questions about it. Cool, huh? And, to thank me for my time, I would be entered into a drawing to win $100 worth of valuable…
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Pasta Music
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_emz0o638PQ[/youtube] The other night, I was making dinner and listening to my beloved iPod. First I listened to an episode of To The Best of Our Knowledge, which was mighty interesting, and then I decided on some music. I was making a meal of our favorite spaghetti and meatballs recipe and spinach salad with apple and mustard vinaigrette (thanks, Michelle, it was yummy!). The music that I most enjoy cooking to is The Waifs album, Up All Night. I don’t have any of their other albums, so I’m not sure if I would like them as much, but I really, really love this one. Back when I worked in a…
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I Killed Adolf Hitler
I Killed Adolf Hitler, by Jason, is my first book for the Graphic Novels Challenge. I’ve never tried graphic novels before, and haven’t been a huge fan of comic books since my days of Betty and Veronica, with the obvious exception of the Buffy, Season 8 comics. So here I find myself treading into a new medium, where an entire book can be read during lunch, and more is said in pictures than in words. The example I chose for a graphic, I suppose, isn’t a good one, since most of the frames contain words, but there are pages in the book that don’t contain any. Pages where the deadpan…
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Blog for Choice Day
Today is the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and the 3rd annual ‘Blog for Choice Day’. I participated last year, when the writing prompt was, “Why you’re pro choice“, as well as in 2006, when I declared that I think that the rights of the pregnant woman supersede those of the unborn child, and that the answer to the abortion question shouldn’t be to outlaw it, but rather, to improve medical care, education, and family planning access so that fewer and fewer women find themselves having to make this difficult decision. The writing prompt this year is ‘why it’s important to vote pro-choice’. In an election year, especially an…
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What a Challenge
The beautiful C has tagged me for a challenge that I have been mulling over for a few weeks now…The Think Different Challenge. Here are the rules, cribbed from C’s post: The Think Different Challenge is all about finding something in your life you currently have negative thoughts or feelings toward (eg work or your mother-in-law), and deciding to look at it differently. It is about realizing that some things are just a part of life, so we may as well try to find the positives in them. The rules for this writing project are: Write a new blog post in which you “think differentâ€. Follow my suggestions above, or…