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Year of Wonders
Last night, I finished the 4th book in the Winter Stacks Reading Challenge, Year of Wonders. This is the tale of an English village beset by Plague in 1665-1666. The protagonist of the story is a young widow, Anna. Anna’s husband was an Iron miner, and died in a mining accident, leaving her to support and care for her two young children. In addition to working as a servant at the rectory, she takes in a boarder to supplement her income. Her boarder is a tailor, and they get along very well. He enjoys her children, and brings laughter back into the home. There is the start of a romance,…
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A Good Day’s Work…
We put up the tree the other night…I love our fake little tree, though I wish we had a bigger living room, so it wouldn’t have to be smashed between the chair and the TV like that. But it’s a cozy little tree. 🙂 I bought about half of the ornaments all at once, when I first moved out on my own, and wanted a tree in my San Francisco flat. The other half have been bought or given to us since then. I’m a Donald fan, so there are several Donald Ducks, and lots of other cute ones, but one of my favorites is this one, that I brought…
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Favorite Holiday Songs
I like Christmas music ok, but not when it’s played all day, every day, on the radio. Ugh. And I like a Hanukkah song or two, which is why I titled this, Favorite Holiday Songs, and not Favorite Christmas songs, though, really, they’re mostly Christmas songs. Sorry. And, even though I was raised atheist, and don’t really go in for Christmas being that much about Jesus, kinda think it’s more about pagans and the winter solstice, and it was coopted by the Catholic Church early on while trying to convert said pagans, blah blah blah, etc. etc., there is truly something so wonderful and hopeful about the more religious songs,…
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I’m Starting to Hate Blogger…
When I joined this bloggy world, just over a year ago, I quickly became addicted. Now, I’m not a snob when it comes to techie things. Blogger was free, and it was the service my friends had chosen, so I just joined right in. And it worked OK. Sure, there were issues…times when I would be unable to post a picture via the linky way, but that’s OK, I know enough HTML that I could add a picture anyway. The visual verification pretty much sucks the life out of a person, so I put my comments on Haloscan. There were the unintended outages, and the posts so carefully written that…
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I’m not sure how I feel about this…
I’m such a huge Buffy fan, and yet…and yet, not so sure that I’ll be enjoying reading about the adventures of the Scooby Gang via the comic book genre rather than seeing them on Tuesday evenings via my TV screen. Will it satisfy me? Will it satisfy Maya, who was crushed by the idea that Buffy was no longer the only slayer (well, aside from Kendra, who died, and Faith, who didn’t, but I digress…)? Will we become obsessed, I mean, MORE obsessed than we already are? Will we become huge comic book fans? I shudder to think. I’ve never really been a fan of comic books, except maybe Betty…
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WTF?
I wasn’t going to write about this today…I like the happy date-a-versary thing, and why be a downer and take away from the fun? But this story I read in the paper is needling me, threatening to drive me nuts if I don’t write something about it, to get it on ‘paper’ and out of my head. Iran is holding a two day conference to determine whether the Holocaust indeed happened. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust a ‘myth’, and Israel a ‘tumor’. Clearly, the goal here is to show that he is a President who can stand up to the West, as well as to support claims that…
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19 Years? How can it be?
Today is the 19th anniversary of Ted and my first date…crazy, hard to believe, because really, doesn’t that make me, um, old? I mean, come on now. It’s not truly possible. If I were 21 then, and it was 19 years ago, that would make me, um….40. Wait, I do seem to remember a big 40th birthday bash for me last December, so yeah, I guess that’s right. Anyway, 19 years ago, I went on a date that would change my life, because it was my first date with the man who would become my husband, my partner-in-crime, my love, my best friend. I think if I knew then what…
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Monday Already?
Here we are, and it’s Monday morning already. How does that happen so quickly? Seems like just yesterday it was Friday morning…sigh. We had a lovely weekend, though. Ted got off of work early on Friday, though I was too busy with work stuff to clock out early with him, so he went to see a movie in Berkeley, about his new girlfriends, The Dixie Chicks. Maya went straight from school to her Girlscout troop leader’s house, where they made fleece scarfs, which they then delivered to the Bay Area Crisis Nursery, a local shelter that the troop seems to have adopted. In addition to delivering scarfs for the children…
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Happy Birthday Julie!
This is a picture of Maya and my step mom, Julie. Today is Julie’s birthday, and I wish we could be there to share a piece of cake with her to celebrate. Julie and my dad live in Portland, and have a beautiful house and a pretty good life there. Julie owns a yoga studio, and has been teaching yoga for about 35 years. She’s without question the best yoga instructor in the Pacific Northwest, so if you’re ever in the market for a really good yoga class in Portland, check her studio out. In addition to being a wonderful yoga instructor, and a pretty savvy businesswoman, Julie is a…
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Holiday Depression…
I’ve been hearing lately about how the holidays are a hard time for so many people…how they depress people and stress the hell out of people, and I’ve been wondering, what is it about Christmas (and Hannukah…do any of my Jewish friends get depressed around this time of year?) that brings folks down? Isn’t this supposed to be a happy time? So I thought, what is it that we do to ourselves around the holidays? 1. Maybe too much pressure put on shopping and gifts, you think? In a culture where the majority of retailers go into the black finally in the last month of the year, and our whole…
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Where Were You When…
It seems that there are these moments that define a generation…where were you when you heard about Pearl Harbor, where were you when you found out Kennedy had been shot, and then RFK, and then MLK…. For my generation, the first of those sad moments was when John Lennon was killed, on December 8th, 1980. I was a geeky kid then, sort of into the Beatles, but not really yet. I got into them much more in High School. I was watching “Little House on the Prarie” on TV, and the announcer came on and gave us the sad news. I was shocked. I thought people were finished with that kind…
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Wish They All Could Be…
What American accent do you have?    Your Result: The West Your accent is the lowest common denominator of American speech. Unless you’re a SoCal surfer, no one thinks you have an accent. And really, you may not even be from the West at all, you could easily be from Florida or one of those big Southern cities like Dallas or Atlanta. The Midland Boston North Central The Inland North Philadelphia The South The Northeast What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz I tried to make the text more readable, and only made it smaller…so here we go, I’ll paste it here, in case you’re wondering what the…
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Giving Money…
I remember several years ago, reading an article about kids and money. The author suggested giving your child money, and dividing it three ways. One part goes to spending on whatever they want, one part goes to saving for bigger items or college or whatever your particular values are in that area, and one part goes to charity. Ted and I liked this idea, so when she was old enough, we started giving her an allowance of $5 a week….$3 she can spend on whatever she wants, $1 she saves (right now for Christmas gifts), $1 is for charity. Sometimes her ‘giving money’, as we call it, goes to organizations…
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Happy Birthday Richard!
Happy Birthday, to my big brother, Richard! Always there to help me buy big item electronics, or give me advice on video games…even though he lives far far away. Thanks for letting me practice dating on your friends (not that you really had much say in the matter), and for selling me your half of the dog when we were little. Even though that meant I was responsible for picking up the dog poop, still the best purchase I ever made. Thanks for bringing Kathy home, and for being smart enough to marry her, giving me a wonderful sister-in-law. Thanks for being a generous, wonderful, snide, snarky older brother. Happy…
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A to Z Meme
I have a lot of year end type work today, and Maya’s going to school, and I’m still coughing (when do you decide it’s time to go to the doctor, I wonder?), so it’s handy to have a meme or two lying around, which, as a matter of fact, I do. I’ve been tagged by Curiosity Killer, she who lives in Hong Kong and comes to read my posts sometimes. 🙂 This meme is alphabetical…one question for each letter. Here goes. A – Available/single? No. Been together 19 years on December 12th. 🙂 B – Best Friend? Ted. C – Cake or Pie? Pie. Apple, ala mode. Or Marionberry, ala…