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I is for Incredible!
Today’s post is a ‘guest post’. My sister Maya and her family built a garden house in their back yard in Portland a couple of years ago, and she posted about it recently on Facebook. I asked her if I could share her post here, because I am so amazingly impressed by the entire endeavor. That they did the work themselves, that they used mostly recycled materials, that it came out so beautifully. Truly incredible. I wish I had these powers, but alas, I do not. Without any further ado, here’s my sister’s post. ***** The summer of 2021 a wish/dream of mine came true. The kids had long outgrown…
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H is for Horses
I’ve written about my love of horses before, how I love their beauty and strength. How I’m not much of a rider, and think it would be wonderful to have a horse as a companion pet. Maya and I have decided we want a miniature horse, and we will name it ‘Clip Clop’. Clip Clop would trot around our little townhouse, probably doing damage to our laminate flooring. Clip Clop would come upstairs and sleep at the foot of the bed. Our neighbors would be outraged at first, but then would fall in love with Clip Clop and his/her adorable antics. I would take Clip Clop for long walks and…
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G is for Giverny
Giverny is the village where Impressionist painter Claude Monet built his beautiful gardens, which he painted over and over again. I’ve been fortunate enough to see these lovely gardens twice, first in early June of 2018, and then again in late September of 2022. It was lovely to see the difference in flowers, between late spring and late summer. The first 3 pictures above are from my 2022 visit, and the bottom 3 are from 2018. Here I am last September in Paris, at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, which in addition to these huge paintings of his water lilies also houses a lovely collection of impressionist art. Not…
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F is for French Toast
First, a thought…I have seen some of the participants in NaBloPoMo posting About Me stuff, since we are meeting new people. Accordingly, I have resurrected and updated my About Me page, if anyone is interested. I’ve added it to my sidebar, above my blogroll. Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. Since yesterday’s post was a repeat recipe, why not continue? Longtime readers are perhaps thinking, wow, J sure is stretching the parameters of this NaBloPoMo thing, posting repeats like this. But these are tasty, and it makes me sad to think you might be missing out. The story on this recipe is that it was a work in progress…
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E is for Eggs
Do you have thoughts on eggs? I do. I love eggs. Most of the time when I have eggs, I have them scrambled. I’m picky though, I like them scrambled soft so they are still a little wet. Add in some chives and I’m in heaven. I like them over medium (runny yolks, set whites), especially with bacon. I like them poached, though no matter how many times people say it’s not difficult, it’s difficult enough that I don’t enjoy doing it. I like them soft boiled, especially in a salad or something like that. Ditto hard boiled. The only way I don’t really like eggs is when they are…
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D is for Decor
Elisabeth recently redecorated her daughter’s bedroom, and posted wonderful pictures of the final project. This brought to mind one room we have redone in our home, the downstairs bathroom. Back in 2018 we had a leak under our home that caused a lot of disruption, due to re-piping the downstairs from under the slab to through the walls. You can read about it, and see pictures of the open walls and pipes, here if you’re so inclined. When they re-piped the bathroom, they took down the horrible huge mirror, and tore open the wall behind it, to get to the pipes. After they closed everything up again, the room needed…
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C is for Côte d’Azur
Last September, my cousin Carey and I took a 2 1/2 week trip to France. She and her wife have a time share situation, which they pay a lot of money for, and she offered me the opportunity to go with her to France, since Diane (her wife) didn’t want to go to Europe. Carey lived in France for awhile in the mid-80s, and hadn’t been back since. We spent our first week in the South of France, the Côte d’Azur, in the hillside town of Mougins. Mougins is certainly a touristic area, though not as busy as Nice, Cannes, or Antibes. Like so many of the hillside towns, Mougins…
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B is for Brittany
Back in 2018, we took a trip to France to celebrate our daughter Maya’s graduation from UC Berkeley, as well as our 25th wedding anniversary. Ted and Maya had gone to England the year before, with his mom and brother, to visit family there. On that trip, they took a couple of days on their own in Paris, which they loved. The last time I had been in France was in 1993, on our honeymoon. Ted has a friend, Jean-Marc, from his days in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. Jean-Marc is French and was at Penn studying US History, and now is a professor in Brest, on the…
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A is for Acceptance
Let us not look for you only in memory,Where we would grow lonely without you.You would want us to find you in presence,Beside us when beauty brightens,When kindness glowsAnd music echoes eternal tones. On the Death of the Beloved ~ John O’Donohue Acceptance is supposed to be the final stage of grief, though of course the stages aren’t really linear, they are more chaotic, and you don’t really know what is coming next. Perhaps denial. Perhaps bargaining. Certainly tears. Acceptance doesn’t mean you like what has happened. You aren’t glad to have lost your parents, your sibling, your friend, or your sweet dog. You don’t want to have the disappointment…
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Dinners Last Week
Last week, we saw a drop in temperature. Monday and Tuesday were not hot, no a/c needed, but they were warm enough that I didn’t want to turn on the oven if I could help it. Wednesday cooled off enough for soup weather. Yay! Soup weather!
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NaBloPoMo 2023
November is fast approaching, and I am looking forward to participating in NaBloPoMo again this year. I have taken part many times since I started blogging in 2005, though certainly not every year. In the earlier days of blogging, it was a big deal, with hundreds of participants. One year I won an iPad Mini through BlogHer during NaBloPoMo, which was certainly a wonderful surprise. Because there were so many participants, the challenge was to post every day in November, and perhaps try to visit some new blogs, see if you found new friends this way. Over time it faded away, and I would sometimes do a personal challenge anyway.…
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Playing Tourist at Home
This last weekend, my cousin spent a couple of days with us, and we played tourist together. She lives in Oceanside, which is near San Diego, and came up to visit us, to see our Great Aunt, and to spend a few days in the Sacramento area, where she has quite a few friends, before jetting off to Orlando with one of these friends for a vacation. This is the cousin that I went to France with last year, and we always have fun together. She flew in on Thursday, and we went to lunch and walked around a bit downtown. In all of her visits to see us, she…
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Wordless Wednesday
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Meme Monday
This is pretty much how I feel when I don’t wear makeup. I didn’t feel that way when I was younger, but now the years of sun damage really show. Sigh. Anyway, this isn’t a post about much, just catching up, and I thought the meme was funny. These are our seats to see Peter Gabriel in concert last Wednesday! It was a great show. The seating for the upper levels is REALLY steep, however, and tightly packed, so much so that I didn’t even feel comfortable standing up to dance, I was afraid I might fall. Those fancy rooms you can see across the way look like the way…
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What I’ve Been Reading
Tom Lake takes place in 2020, a family in lockdown on their cherry orchard in Northern Michigan. It is harvest season, and while the family picks cherries, the mother, Lara, tells her three adult daughters the story of her summer at a summer stock theater, Tom Lake, when she played Emily in Our Town, and dated an actor who later went on to be an Oscar Winner. Ann Patchett gives us a beautifully written book that weaves back and forth from the 1980s to the 2020s, as the daughters learn about their mother’s time as an actress in Los Angeles and in Michigan, about her life before marriage. We also…
