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Poverty & Riches
I’m joining Nance in declaring June to be poetry month, even though officially that was April or something. Who cares. We didn’t know about it then, we know about it now, and we like poetry. There’s a song, Hands, by Jewel that I like a lot. For some reason, it is often the song that comes to mind for me when horrible, huge things happen. Not personal things, not like my mom dying, or Genevieve going blind. I mean the attacks on September 11th, or yet another mass shooting or bombing, perhaps a devastating earthquake. In the face of tragedies like these, I find some comfort in the words of…
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Friday Randomness (belated…)
Isn’t that a cute Graduation Invite, for a proud parent to send out to invite her friends and family to show off her daughter, and celebrate said daughter’s accomplishment in school? Yes, it is. See how cute, the picture of her Kindergarten graduation? Her official Senior photo (in my great aunt’s pearls), her other, casual Senior photos? Sigh. The thing is, Maya doesn’t want a graduation party. She doesn’t want to hang out with a bunch of Ted and my friends, feeling self-conscious because everyone is looking at her. She and her friends will have been partying at the ‘All Knighter’ (They’re the Knights), and she’d rather go from party…
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Maya’s Senior Ball
Last night was the Senior Ball for Maya and her classmates. The ball was held in San Francisco, at the new Exploratorium (which Ted and I have not yet seen). They started out with pictures in a local park, then moved on to dinner, then a limo ride into San Francisco for the dance. Home again, then to an after party/sleepover at a friend’s house. She drug herself in at about 6:30 this morning, and as of this writing, is still asleep. I remember my Senior Prom well, what a good time I had, and how nostalgic I started feeling for my classmates, and how we were on the verge…
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Belle
Belle takes real life characters, switches their stories around a bit, and puts them into a Merchant Ivoryish version of a Jane Austen book, if Jane Austen had written a novel about race, and does so compellingly and satisfyingly. Dido Elizabeth Belle was the mixed-race daughter of a wealthy, titled British soldier in the late 1700s, when Britain was still very much involved in the slave trade. After the death of her mother, she is brought to the sumptuous country estate of her Great Uncle and Great Aunt to be raised, alongside her cousin Elizabeth. The girls grow up together as best friends and almost equals, though Dido doesn’t eat…
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Still Alive
Yes, I’m still alive. I know, it’s been awhile. I hate writing that at the beginning of a blog post, but somehow, I find myself doing it more and more often. Today I took a few minutes and looked at blogs that I link to from my blogroll. So many of them are defunct, or might as well be. Last post in 2011, 2012, 2013. I should clean them up, move them out. But I don’t use an RSS reader or anything like that. My way of checking to see if you have a new blog post is to click my link, and go look. So I keep them. I…
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Trudy
This is Trudy, one of the wonderful ladies on my Meals on Wheels route. Ted and I went to her 99th birthday party to help her celebrate. Trudy is my role model. She’s 99, still lives at home alone (her husband passed away maybe 10 years ago). She cooks some of her own meals, and only stopped driving a year ago. She goes to lunch 2 or 3 days a week. She goes to exercise class (chair exercise, she uses a walker). When her family comes to visit, she cooks for days ahead of time, rather than letting them do the cooking (which they would be eager and willing to…
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Doing Your Part
(Jesus the Homeless, by Timothy Schmalz) Last Saturday morning found Maya and me (and her friend) in San Francisco, handing out meals to homeless people. We had done this once before, when she was in 7th or 8th grade. In that instance, it was for a class, Teens Around the World, in which they learned about kids in other cultures. A group of 10 or 15 kids, the teacher, and several parents went into the city and handed out bag lunches, which the student had assembled the day before in class. It was kind of an amazing experience, and I think it helped Maya to overcome her fear of homeless…
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Friday Randomness
I’ve taken the week off from work, to correspond with Maya’s Spring Break. One thing that we did with our time was to go to the Legion of Honor in SF, to see the current exhibit of Impressionist Art. I do love impressionism, and Maya has to see one exhibit a semester for her art class. So we went, and we saw beautiful art. We got through the exhibit fairly quickly, and decided to skip the rest of the museum, as we’ve seen it several times, most recently in November. One nice thing about the Legion of Honor is that if you pay your admission there, you also get same…
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Birthday Girl
Isn’t this a pretty cake? Gah, it’s sideways. I’ve decided to ignore that for now. I love the little brown branches, and the cherry blossoms. I’m afraid to say that the butter cream frosting was just too sweet. Should have tried for a cream cheese frosting, I think. The cake itself was chocolate with a fudge chocolate filling. It was very nice, except perhaps for the too sweet frosting. Maya and her cake. My darling BFF sent her a tiara for her birthday, an appropriate gift indeed. She wore it all day. It’s hard to believe that my baby is 18 already. Our little row in the condo complex is…
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Friday Randomness
I’ve been off almost all week. Tuesday I thought it was Wednesday, Wednesday I thought it was Thursday, and Thursday I thought it was Friday. But finally, Friday is here. Yay Friday! This will be a busy weekend for us, because… Tomorrow is Maya’s birthday! She turns 18, which is INSANE. I cannot believe my baby will legally be an adult. She can gamble, see R rated movies, whatever she wants to do. Every year I find myself reminiscing about those early days…so 18 years ago today, I was going into the hospital. I spent the night, and was induced in the morning. Gross, but effective. OK, gross is not…
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Air Pollution Hits Home
I was looking at the news today and one article in particular made me sad, and for some reason I decided to bring that sadness here. Bad idea, probably. Here’s the article. It is about the 7 million people every year who die from air pollution, 1/2 of whom die from complications of indoor pollution. “One of the main risks of pollution is that tiny particles can get deep into the lungs, causing irritation. Scientists also suspect air pollution may be to blame for inflammation in the heart, leading to chronic problems or a heart attack.” Indoor pollution comes from coal and wood-burning stoves, leaky furnaces, etc. It’s that leaky…
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Spanish Spaghetti with Olives
Speaking of cooking, check out this recipe Ted found yesterday. I mainly cook during the week, and Ted mainly cooks on weekends, a habit leftover from when he had a more 9-5 schedule and didn’t get home until late. Now he sometimes works on weekends, sometimes works very early mornings, so I guess it doesn’t matter when we cook what, but we’ve stuck with the schedule, and it works for us. One thing Ted likes to do when he’s trying to decide what to make is to ask his phone. He says, “What’s for dinner?” and google gives him some ideas. I’m not tech savvy like that, so I don’t…
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Cooking
My friend Nance has been tagged in a meme, and she has taken it and twisted it in her own way. The meme is a series of questions, and instead of popping them all into one long list with quick answers, she is using each question as a blog post of its own, and telling an entire story around that question. You may have noticed that I haven’t been blogging much lately. I’ve noticed. I don’t know why, but I do know that when I get out of the habit of blogging daily, or at least a couple of times a week, my mindset changes, and I forget all about…
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Jury Duty
Wednesday I was summoned to another part of my county to perform my civic duty and report for the dreaded Jury Duty. Jury Duty can be horribly boring, sitting in the Jury room for hours on end, and then perhaps dismissed. Bring a book. I once brought a notepad and wrote my friend a 6 page letter before being dismissed, then went to lunch and then some light shopping. It can be a nice diversion from your regular routine, provided that your company pays you for the time. I wonder if the reason so many people hate it is because they are losing pay or income by being there. I…
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Friday Randomness
Isn’t that a beautiful graphic? It’s been raining here, a bit, and I’m hopeful that the high pressure system that has been over California for the last few months may have broken apart, and we may get some relief from our drought conditions. I don’t know what this means to the Coho Salmon, which may go extinct in much of California, because the rivers have been too dry for them to swim to their spawning ground. I hope the rain doesn’t come too late for them. We’re still taking drought showers, until there is enough rain that the official drought conditions are lifted. Which of course, 2 or 3 little…