Note to self: next time, get a house with AC.
Today, in our sweet little Necco Wafer colored house, it was 87 degrees at 6:00. We do not have AC. We have nothing except windows that open and let in hot air. We are grateful for windows that open, that keep bugs out and let air in. We would be bereft without windows. But we wish we had AC.
I do not do well in heat. Yes, I am taking deep breaths and trying to be zen about it all. I am alive. (But hot.) I am well. (But hot.) I am whole, safe, happy. (But I am fucking hot.) It isn't the occasional hot day that gets you down, it's the third or fourth day of over 95 degrees that makes you melt. The house holds the heat. (Now we all know it won't do that in the winter! It will leak heat like a Wiki-leak aficionado, like a mole in the Pentagon.) It holds the heat and when the nights barely get below 60 degrees, there isn't enough difference to make it cool off much. After a couple of days of scorching heat, the house gives up and just lets us bake. All.Night.Long.
I loved the past two and a half days when it sort of rained, was cloudy, looked cold and cozy but was actually rather warm, a bit moist and pretend-gloomy. It made me happy for a moment but it is now gone. Gone, gone, gone. Check the weather channel, we are in for at least ten days of plus 90 weather. I am so happy, pissed off about all that sunshine. But still, I am alive, safe, whole, happy. I will deal. I will not complain to anyone except my small dog who is also pissed off. I will probably sigh loudly and often, I will probably act "put upon" (whatever that means) but I will try not to be too cranky.
yeah, good luck with that.
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Last year June 24 was a Sunday. Late that afternoon I talked on the phone to my excellent friend Martha. She was leaving the following day for Wisconsin for a short visit. We made plans to meet up the following weekend.
Last year June 25 was a Monday. In the evening, still filled with daylight, I received a call from Steve that was difficult to understand because he was sobbing. Martha had been killed in a horrific car crash, just moments after being picked up from the airport. In a car with three others, she was the only one who died. One other passenger was in the hospital for weeks with major brain trauma. She, today, a year later, is recuperating well.
Last year on June 26, in the morning, I made flight arrangements for Steve to go to Wisconsin and be with Martha's family, to see her body, to witness what had happened to his best friend and fiance.
This year, on the anniversary of Martha's death, I am again making flight arrangements for Steve to fly to Wisconsin in two weeks. The sentencing hearing is taking place for the man responsible for killing Martha with his truck. Steve and family members will be at that hearing.
We have so little control of so much in our lives. We think we can decide things, can plan our futures, can guide the outcome of choices. Sometimes we can. So often we cannot. I miss Martha every day; so often I have wished for her opinion on some random subject, I have wanted to hear her laugh, I have wanted to share a glass of wine with her on Steve's porch.
Love those you love, tell them you love them, do now what you have always put off. Be kind. Live the life you have.
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This goes out to the few lost souls who do not yet understand the power of Trader Joe's Coffee Bean Blast Ice Cream. Honestly, I have loved, loved, loved coffee ice cream for about 40 years. Tasted dozens, had my faves. But nothing compares to TJ's. It is smooth as butter, has more coffee flavor than any other ice cream I have had and even has tiny, visible coffee grains but has no grainy feeling. It is the best.
HOWEVER, and this is crucial: once you try it, and love it, and then run into your local Trader Joe's to replenish your stash, make sure you are getting the coffee. Not the chocolate. They look exactly the same, same color, same size. Just different words. I ran in yesterday to get coffee ice cream, multi-grain corn chips (yum!), TJ house brand bourbon (a staple in my hidden closet) and their delicious pork buns (in the freezer case, you will thank me.) Four things. Hard to fuck up. Came home, everything in its right place. Went to get that delicious coffee ice cream last night and Zut Alors! That coffee ice cream was chocolate! I was so disappointed in myself but I had to try it and it was friggin good! Not comparable with the coffee but for chocolate, it was fine.
My dinner tonight was Trader Joe's weird fried pea snacks. Odd. But whatever. And I was planning on having some of that chocolate ice cream, this time with a little home-made caramel sauce. And I found a really, really easy caramely sauce that you can make in less than 10 minutes with what you have in the house. Here it is:
half cup packed brown sugar
quarter cup cream or half and half
2 or 3 ounces butter
salt
put those in a small saucepan and cook over medium low heat, let it boil a bit, stirring, for about 5 -7 minutes. add a bit of vanilla, like a half teaspoon, cook another minute. Let it cool. That's it. Add more salt if you want that salty-butterscotch flavor (which I do) and spoon it over that chocolate ice cream or vanilla, or over biscuits or over chicken or over hot dogs, or anything you are bored with but must eat. It keeps in the fridge for a while but, honestly, if you make it and don't eat it in three or four days, you are a loser. Double it and then keep it in the fridge for a week. You are less of a loser then but you still have to devour it in a week. Trust me. Or not.
OK, my chocolate ice cream is calling me. It knows it is not the coffee ice cream I prefer, so it is offering to sacrifice itself, with the salty caramel sauce, so that I can go back to TJ's and get the Coffee Bean Blast ice cream. And perhaps.... put caramel sauce on that! Yum
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Being optimistic has its downside, of course. One can hope for good and still anticipate the bad. I had tall hopes for my short plants in April. I sort of thought that by now, two months later, those plants would be lush and juicy and bearing at least the promise of fruit. Ha! I was mistaken.
OK, here's the rundown. The tomatoes, which I got when they were about ten inches high, are now four feet high. they are rangy but they still have lots of blossoms. One has about 15 small tomatoes which will hopefully turn into big tomatoes. One has even taller stalks and only two tomatoes. One has yellow leaves at the bottom. The other doesn't. They both got exactly the same treatment. I expected more tomatoes but I am going to be very, very happy if I just get a few home-grown tomatoes. Like more than one. Or three.
Beans: I ended up transplanting two into bigger pots and they are doing fine. I have eaten four beans off them so far, raw, and they are delicious. Maybe I will get another dozen by the end of their lives. Two are languishing in the ground, maybe bad soil, maybe too much water or too little. Their leaves are turning yellow and yet they are trying to produce a bean or two. One died. The last one in the six-pack is doing as well as the ones in the pots, even though it is in the ground, in a corner of the yard, pretty much ignored except for some water now and then.
Peas: the peas were planted from seeds, thanks to Judy and Pat, and they are very cute. Their little tendrils are winding around the elaborate cat's cradle trellis I made for them out of kite string. They are fun to watch and even if I get no peas, I am still happy with them.
Basil and arugula: three arugulas went into the ground, three in a pot. The ones in the ground were great, they got big, are still producing lots of peppery leaves. The ones in the pots probably became root-bound, didn't do as well. The basil, on the other hand, didn't care about being root-bound (in pots as well) and did very well. Lots of basil, still producing although the plants are looking a little sketchy right now. However, since you can buy a huge bunch of basil at any farmers market for a dollar, I am not sure it makes monetary sense to grow it. Still, it grew, didn't die, and that is a small victory.
Cilantro: my one cilantro plant is now about 4 feet tall. It produced a lot of herb but in the hot Santa Rosa sun, it bolted quickly and went to seed, so I didn't get a lot of use out of it. But still, it looks dramatic and it didn't die.
Lettuce: the local nursery was selling all their vegetable six-packs for half off, so I just planted some lettuces. They seem to be doing well and if I get just three servings of salad out of them it will have been worth the discounted investment. Of course, it's early, those leaves are very tender and I could come out one morning and find them decimated by snails or birds, so the jury is out on the lettuce production until later this summer.
There is one squash plant with one squash on it and a couple of other zucchini's that I grew from seed that are still rather small. It's only mid-June and I have hopes that these plants will continue to grow and possibly produce some zukes by September or October. But who knows? They could die, like some of the flowers I planted. It's all been a big experiment. Given the amount of water it takes and given how expensive water is here in SR, I would have been better off financially just buying fresh produce from the SR farmers market but it was worth trying, at least once. It's sort of zen-like to spend 15 minutes after work watering the little suckers and I like that part. I remember my Dad standing outside on the front lawn, beer in hand, watering the lawn before dinner, ten minutes of quiet time. I think of him every time I water my puny plants, and for that I am grateful.
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Today, if you went to google.com, there was a tribute to Maurice Sendak in the form of an animated little film of some of Sendak's books, especially "Where the Wild Things Are." I found it by accident but was so taken with it that I felt it was my own personal birthday present. Turns out that Maurice and I shared the same birthday, albeit his was a few years before mine. But just seeing that little film for the minute that it took to play brought me back to birthdays from a long time ago.
My kids and I and their Dad probably read "Where The Wild Things Are" more than 100 times. We had our own copy, of course, after taking it out of the library over and over. It never ceased to entertain us; I think John and I liked it as much as the kids did, at least the first 50 times. But it was so brilliant that even if we tired of reading it, we couldn't be tired of reading it because it was original and smart. There wasn't the plethora of good kids books back then (and let's face it, it was more than 30 years ago) and WTWTA was one of the best. Google did a good thing when they created that little tribute.
When it's your birthday and you are my age, you think about the things in your life that you have done and you think about the things you haven't done. I have done a lot of things I wanted to do and I have had a lot of fun but there are still so many things I have not yet finished. Or even started. Too many to mention. Some will never happen, some might. But the one, best thing I did was have our two kids. Two amazing people. If I add up all thing things I still want to do and add that total to all the cool, good things I have already done, that would still not measure up to the simple sum of my two kids. They are the best thing anyone could have accomplished in any life. No matter what.
Birthday cake, gifts, songs, phone calls, good wishes...... thank you to all of you who gave me those things today. I had a good day, even if I am three times 21. Heck, it's still younger than three times 22!
Happy Birthday, Maurice. Happy Birthday to me, too.
I am having a birthday soon, and while I don't really think about my birthday a lot (really, another year older and deeper in debt about sums it up) this year one of my siblings is turning 60, and that is something to think about. So, thinking about her birthday made me think about mine and I realized that I am going to be three times older than I was at 21. Remember turning 21? Remember going out to a bar for the first time (with a real drivers license, of course) and having your first legal drink? Remember later that same night, puking and wondering how that happened? And yet, doing it all over again a day or two later? Remember being 21 and getting to vote for the first time? (Yes, now you can vote at 18. In the old days, you couldn't.) Remember how it felt to cast that vote and still have your guy loose to an imbecile like Nixon? Remember being 21 and thinking you knew so much and at the exact same time you had absolutely no idea what you were doing with your life?
The day I turned 21 I had been married for 5 months. I was so, so young. We all were, at 21.
OK, so now I am three times that age. Can't yet collect social security, have run through two husbands, don't own much of anything, have a job I like that pays terribly, have a small handful of friends, great kids, good siblings, very good health and I am sometimes happy. I guess I was sometimes happy 42 years ago but I don't think I knew what that meant then. It's mercurial, that's for sure, but then, so is life. At least a birthday can make you stop for a few minutes and see what's around you. As Ferris said, "life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
Happy Day, birthday or not.
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