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Alaska Railroad Adventure
The next phase of our vacation began with a rescue. When I had lunch with Aimee on Monday, she casually mentioned that she had a van big enough to carry all 5 of us and our luggage, and if we needed a ride to the train station Wednesday morning, to give her a call. We dropped off the car on Tuesday evening, and were planning on taking a taxi to the train station early on Wednesday. This turned out to be not as easy as we had hoped, as Ted called company after company, and none of them seemed to have vans or cars big enough for all of us.…
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Visiting the Old Neighborhood
We lived in Alaska for 5 years when I was young, before moving back to California when the overcrowding from the pipeline construction forced us out of Fairbanks. My mom moved back to Alaska, to Juneau, in 1993, and my brother and his wife followed in 1994. My brother and his wife (Richard and Kathy) had never been to Juneau, so it was a huge leap for them to move there sight unseen, but they fell in love with its spectacular beauty, with the cool weather, so different than Stockton and Sacramento, and the slower pace of life in a much smaller town. As did my mom. I have been…
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Home from Alaska!
We flew home from Alaska last night, we had a wonderful time. 11 days, and we went to Fairbanks, Anchorage, Homer, and Juneau. I have a lot to say and am still figuring out how I want to write about it here. I think I will end up making a lot of smaller posts, to avoid overwhelming with a ton of pictures and so on. For now, here is a picture I liked, from Homer. Loved this little otter just hanging out near the boats.
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5 Things Friday
5 Things I’m thinking about lately, in no particular order.
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Feeling Less Tilty
It’s been awhile since I wrote about my vestibular issues, hasn’t it? To recap, last year I went on an amazing trip to France with my cousin. When we returned, I had horrible jet lag, and didn’t sleep more than 2 hours a night for about a week. After that, I started feeling dizzy, like the ground wasn’t quite where I expected it to be. I saw my Primary Care Physician, who said it was likely jet lag, take a Benadryl before bed every night and call her if it didn’t get better. Then there was a period of it getting somewhat better and then much worse again, so I…
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Peach Salsa
Trying to figure out what to make for dinner is a never-ending problem, right? Yesterday was hot, mid-90s, so I didn’t want to use the oven. I didn’t really feel like grilling either, and thought that crab cakes would be a perfect solution. There is a local store here that sells pretty good crab cakes, all you have to do is take them home and cook them. Usually when I make crab cakes, I serve them with green salad, but sometimes a person gets tired of green salad. I knew that I didn’t want coleslaw either, so I did an internet search on ‘what to serve with crab cakes’, and…
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Babysitting Theo
This is Theo, a Keeshond that we babysat over the weekend. He is a foster dog at the rescue where we got both Mulder and Genevieve, Bay Area Keeshonden Rescue (BARK). His foster dad was going out of town for the weekend, and the rescue knew how much we have been missing Mulder, so they asked if we might want to babysit Theo. Theo is 18 months old, and has moved a few times. He came to Northern California from New York, and apparently his most recent family had two other dogs that didn’t adjust to him, so they had to give him up. He’s a very sweet boy, though…
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Miscellaneous Monday
My company extended our 4 day workweek through 2023, so Fridays are my ‘me’ days. My Friday morning walks are more relaxed and meandering than the other weekdays, since I don’t have to be back and at my desk by 8:00. I enjoy them, but not as much as I did when I had Mulder to accompany me in exploring our town. Le Sigh. This last Friday, I had an appointment at 11:00, after which I took myself to lunch, where I enjoyed a lovely grilled asparagus salad with a delicious biscuit and a glass of Sancerre. I finished up my chapters of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for Engee’s…
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Gaslighting
Were you sucked in a few years ago, as I was, by the Serial podcast? They have a new season, The Retrievals, which is about a group of women who were treated for infertility treatment at Yale medical center. It’s riveting. So far there are 2 episodes, and I am hooked. These women all experienced extreme pain during their treatment, and all were ignored. Every single one of them, no matter that they spoke up (some yelled) during their procedures, and followed up. And typical of how gaslighting works, some of them began to think that the issue was indeed with them. Perhaps the fact that they were in pain…
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Throwback Thursday
I found this picture of me, circa 1987 or 1988, when going through shoeboxes of photos for Ted’s slideshow the other day. The picture tells me some very specific things about time and place. 1. Very likely this picture was taken in the summertime. I’m on the Golden Gate Bridge between San Francisco and Marin County, and you can see the fog below the bridge. Also, I’m wearing a long sleeve shirt (You can’t tell this, I just remember the shirt.) and a long black wool coat. Have you ever heard the (not actually) Mark Twain quote, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”? That’s…
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This is Us – 30 Years In
Ted and I are celebrating our 30th anniversary today. Sometimes I cannot believe it has been that long, but then I look in the mirror and realize that we are getting older, and I guess it makes sense. We met in 1987 at San Francisco State University. He was a Film major, and I was an International Relations major, and we were taking one of the required classes, Speech 150. It was not love at first sight, he thought I was a spoiled rich girl, and I thought he was full of himself. As time went by that semester, we got to know each other a bit more. I met…
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Testing a New Theme
OK, I seem to have finally found a WP theme that shows the names of my lovely commenters AND has a sidebar. I really like the sidebar widgets, because I don’t use any sort of reader. I should probably do something about that, but I’m not sure how to go about it. Now I’m seeing if I can get the picture to show at the top of my post on my main page, without the reader having to select it. Well, that worked…but now I’m seeing the picture twice, which is NOT the case when I’m editing it. Grrr. Computers are fun! Oh, now it’s working. Lots to learn, clearly!
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Housekeeping
There’s something wrong with my blog. See my comments there? Your names and links to your blogs are no longer appearing. My theme is no longer supported, so I need to poke around and find one that I like. I’ve tried a couple now, and even some of the new ones have this same issue, though others do not. So I apologize if you get notifications that things have changed (I don’t know whether that happens, or if you would only get a notification of a new post…) While I’m at it, perhaps I will update the photo that pops up when I comment. That one is from my 40th…
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Friday Book Blogging
My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson ~ This book has several short stories and one novella. I listened to it via my Libby app, free from the library. I think I found it doing a search for books with Monticello, after my BFF Rosemary went there a couple of years ago, and found the tour depressing and disturbing. I can say, I LOVED this book. And I loved listening to it, because the first story is narrated by LeVar Burton. The first story, Control Negro, is about a professor who wants to study racism by clinically observing a young black man whom he knows to be decent and good, and…
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Songs About Relationships
I’m not sure if I have mentioned it here before, but my husband Ted has a music podcast, Planet LP, which has morphed over the years. When he first started as a way to entertain himself and stay creative in the early days of the podcast, he talked about music and books. Then he took on a cohost and the format turned to music only. Eventually, his cohost realized that he was too busy for the commitment, and is now an occasional guest. At one point Ted’s podcast was once a week, but when he started at his current job, he realized he had far less down time than his…
