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Until such time as I can get my act together and grow my own, I am very fortunate to live across the street from Madeline and Cosmo, our very generous green-thumb neighbors.
These days Whole Foods sells heirloom tomatoes that are as lumpy and misshapen as this and taste (almost) as heavenly, and yet I still see people choosing the perfectly spherical, perfectly red, perfectly tasteless imported variety. HUH?
07:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)
1. Yiyo Le - Havana Swingsters
2. Wild Horses - Old and In The Way
3. I've Been to Memphis (live) - Lyle Lovett
4. Red Staggerwing - Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris
5. Billy and Bonnie - Steve Earle
6. Before You Accuse Me (live) - Eric Clapton
7. The Last Train to Clarksville - The Monkees
8. Thunder Road - Bruce Springsteen
9. Straight to My Heart - Sting
10. Slow Turning (live) - John Hiatt & the Guilty Dogs
09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
FilmCritic.com - Movie Reviews
The code for this badge was wonky and I couldn't fix it; in case you can't read it, I got a 71%, which includes a few I got right on wild guesses for movies I'd never seen.
09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
In Steph's and Pete's cases, no news is good news. They had little to report about their first day of school but were smiling and cheerful when I picked them up. (And I'm eavesdropping on them now telling their grandparents on the phone that they had good days.) Steph's biggest news was that the fifth graders get to have their snack whenever they feel like it, and Pete was very pumped that he was chosen to be the AV guy.
Julie, on the other hand, was not only grinning from ear to ear when I picked her up but bursting to tell me all about her (half-)day. Another part of the unusual kindergarten program we have here is that only the "A" team went today, only the "B" team will go tomorrow (so yes, Julie will be home with me), and then the whole class will begin together on Monday. So there were just 11 kids with the teacher today, which is a great way to do the first day of kindergarten. They had a tour of the school, a practice fire drill, story time, snack, recess, "discovery time," and more.
If people weren't abusing and overusing this statement, I'd say, "It's all good."
07:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tonight Julie had a marker poised over a piece of paper and asked me, "How do you spell I LIKE EVERYTHING?"
09:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
At long last, tomorrow is the first day of school! Unfortunately Andy has to be in New York, because I could really use a hand getting all three kids settled into new classrooms—not to mention schlepping the 5 grocery bags full of "required" school supplies ($200 at Staples!) down the street. This afternoon we went over to the school to meet Steph and Pete's teachers and to hug Julie's teacher, locate the kids' cubbies, try out the new and improved playground, and just shmooze.
In our city, grades 1–5 go to school from 8:30 to 3:00 every day except for Tuesday, when they go from 8:30 to 12:30. Kindergarteners go from 8:30 to 12:30 every day, except half of each class ("A" team) stays until 3:00 on Mondays and Wednesdays and half of each class ("B" team) stays until 3:00 on Thursdays and Fridays. It sounds confusing, but it's a really great system, because it gives them a chance to ease into the full-day thing, and the student-teacher ratio is twice as good for those few hours each week. But the stay-days don't start until October.
09:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Today we had a visit from Dr. Jake, our beloved vet. He pronounced the cats in fine health and said that Mr. Jones is not fat after all! He really is just a big cat! That's what I've been saying all this time, but I didn't even believe myself.
But the exciting news was that Dr. Jake's first book just came out: What's Wrong With My Dog? He's planning on doing a cat version in another year or so.
06:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Time to learn something!
1. Go to Wikipedia.
2. Click on "Random article" in the left-hand sidebar box.
3. Post it!
Here's what the ol' Wiki 8-ball turned up today:
Lillian Marie Bounds (b. February 15, 1900, Spalding, Idaho – d. December 16, 1997, Los Angeles, California) was the wife of Walt Disney from 1925 until his death in 1966. She later married John L. Truyens in 1969 and remained married to him until his death in 1981.
Lillian and Walt Disney married in 1925 and had two daughters - Diane Marie Disney and Sharon Mae Disney, the latter of whom was an adoptee. She is aunt of Roy Edward Disney and grandmother to Chris Miller, Joanna Miller, Tamara Scheer, Jennifer Miller-Goff, Walter Elias Disney Miller, Ronald Miller and Victoria Brown.
In 1987, Lillian Disney pledged $50,000,000 USD towards the construction of a new home for the L.A. Philharmonic. After many delays, the Walt Disney Concert Hall opened in 2003, six years after her death.
Her filmography includes work as an ink artist on the film Plane Crazy. She is credited with having named her husband's most famous character, Mickey Mouse, during a train trip from New York to California in 1928. Walt showed a drawing of the cartoon mouse to his wife and told her that he was going to name it "Mortimer Mouse". She replied that the name sounded "too sissified" and suggested "Mickey" instead.[1]
In the 1990s, reflecting on her marriage of 41 years to Walt Disney, she said "We shared a wonderful, exciting life, and we loved every minute of it. He was a wonderful husband to me and wonderful and joyful father and grandfather".
Lillian Disney suffered a stroke on December 15, 1997, exactly 31 years after the death of Walt Disney. She died the following morning at her home, aged 97.
Who knew?
05:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
I finished reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle a couple of weeks ago but haven't felt ready to write my review of it yet. As I mentioned before, reading this book was truly a life-changing experience for me. I think the last time I described a book that way, I was talking about The Poisonwood Bible (also by Barbara Kingsolver—coincidence, you say?), but in that case, I meant that it had a profound effect on me and would be unforgettable. This time I mean that I will be making actual, tangible changes to my life because of it.
To recap: Kingsolver and her family—biology-professor husband Steven Hopp and daughters Camille and Lily—leave Tucson, where almost nothing edible grows anymore, and move to a farm in Virginia. They embark on a year-long experiment in living off the land (their own and their community's), eating only locally raised food. They make certain exceptions—for instance, Hopp won't even consider the move unless he can have coffee, which must be brought in, but at least they do their research and find a source of fair-trade coffee; Kingsolver herself knows she'd never be able to cook without olive oil, so they find a good source for that; and so on. To no one's great surprise, this "experiment" turns out to become a way of life. They enjoy eating the fruits (literally!) of their own labor, buying from their neighbors at the farmers' market, supporting the community, ridding their bodies of pesticides and hormones and God-knows-what-else, and even saving money in the process.
I learned so much from this book, I barely know where to begin. For one thing, I hadn't realized that the U.S. agribusiness machine was so powerful and out of control. For instance, did you know that we export 1.1 million tons of potatoes while we also import 1.4 million tons of potatoes? What's wrong with this picture? We could instead be supporting our own farms—and eating fresh potatoes! I also learned about the atrocities of CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), where chickens and cows are forced to live in darkness, standing in mountains of their own excrement, eating foods they were never meant to eat (including body parts of their own kind—turning them into cannibals). Do you want to eat the meat of an animal that has spent its entire miserable little life exuding stress hormones? (And, speaking of eating meat, Kingsolver does an admirable job of "justifying" her reasons for not being a vegetarian.)
Why is it that food, of all things, is the area in which we are most likely to shop by price? We do it all the time—saving a buck here and there on trucked-in produce regardless of the fact that it's less fresh and tasty than the local variety and has lost many of its nutrients in transit (and I'm not even addressing the use of fuel required to get it here). No one I know can afford to completely disregard price when choosing food, but shouldn't we first consider the health benefits and the flavor, even if we don't think we can afford to care about supporting our local farmers and reducing our dependence on petroleum? Let's say someone presented you with two tomatoes that were the same price. One was mushy and flavorless, had already lost most of its antioxidants, and probably still contained residue from pesticides; the other was bursting with flavor, had been picked the previous day, and had been grown without the use of any pesticides. Everyone would choose the second one, right? Well, what if it cost one nickel more? One dime? How much is it worth to feed your family food that tastes better and is more healthy for them? How much more can you spend on milk that comes from cows that never had estrogen injections or on blackberries that weren't sprayed with toxic chemicals? These are some of the questions we need to start asking ourselves. I know I can find other places to trim my budget, and I intend to.
I want you all to read this book! Borrow a copy from a friend and use the money you saved to buy eggs from chickens given free range on grass—and did you know that those eggs have more omega-3s than factory-farmed eggs and only about half the cholesterol, and it's mostly LDL (the good kind)? I promise you that despite how preachy I might come across here, Kingsolver manages to escape that tone entirely. She's so smart and funny that I ended up just wishing I could be friends with her. She doesn't expect us to make 180° conversions, or even to do what she has done; I for one know I'll never give up bananas and orange juice just because they can't be grown locally. But there are plenty of other things I can do. I'll leave you with Kingsolver's own words:
I share with almost every adult I know this crazy quilt of optimism and worries, feeling locked into certain habits but keen to change them in the right direction. And the tendency to feel like a jerk for falling short of absolute conversion. I'm not sure why. If a friend had a coronary scare and finally started exercising three days a week, who would hound him about the other four days? It's the worst of bad manners—and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society—to ridicule the small gesture. These earnest efforts might just get us past the train-wreck of the daily news, or the anguish of standing behind a child, looking with her at the road ahead, searching out redemption where we can find it: recycling or carpooling or growing a garden or saving a species or something. Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren't trivial. Ultimately they will, or won't, add up to having been the thing that mattered.
05:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)
I have finally taken the plunge and allowed Steph to get her own email address through my Comcast account. At least for now, I've established a "white list" of addresses that will be accepted so that she won't inadvertently open any XXX spam—and so she won't be able to email with people/companies we don't know. She's allowed to websurf quite a bit, and I worry that she'll sign up for something innocuous looking, like a contest or newsletter, and it will turn out to be a major spambot. Or, as she gets older, that she'll give out her email address to random people she "meets" online. I'll add email addresses to the list as her friends get them, but she won't be able to do that herself yet. I also said that, for the time being anyhow, I will reserve the right to read every message she sends or receives. And, I took some advice from a friend and gave a little speech about never saying anything negative about someone else in an email; these things invariably end up getting forwarded to the wrong person and coming back to haunt the original sender.
Lest you think that she is now sobbing into her pillow, let me assure you that she is so thrilled that I finally gave in that she doesn't even mind the restrictions! She is busily sending out messages now and grinning from ear to ear.
03:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
This loads kinda slowly, but I hope you'll agree it's worth it. (And, let me just say that there's nothing like a clip of the young Dylan to cheer me up on a bad hair day.)
12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
10 Things I'd Save in a Fire*
1. my MacBook Pro (which contains all my photos from the last coupla years, all my music, all my work stuff, etc., plus ... it's a computer!)
2. a bag in which I'd stuff the half-dozen or so albums of baby photos of Steph and Pete and the envelopes of loose baby photos of Julie (yes, I know, I've got to albumize them all one of these days...)
3. my car keys
4. my wallet (so as not to have to deal with replacing my license, credit cards, etc.)
5. if it was the middle of the night, my glasses and/or contacts, so I could see something for the next few days until I could get them replaced
6. again, if it was the middle of the night, Julie's glasses for the same reason
7. the kids' "bed guys," so they'd have something comforting wherever we ended up sleeping
8. a change of clothes for everyone
9. my recipe file
10. kinda scraping the bottom of the barrel here, but my box of earrings
*I'm assuming that the whole family (including Biggest and Gracie) had already gotten out safely, so these are really just things. I'm also assuming that I'm not risking my life by gathering these things, because obviously I'd leave it all without a glance back. Well, maybe not the MacBook.
10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
1. I like going away, but I love coming home. I missed my bed and my cats.
2. Why would anyone want to buy scented tissues? Do you want to smell flowers while you're blowing your nose? I just don't get it.
3. I scored a big French project for September! (How do I just know that something else big is going to come along to stress me out?)
4. Happy Labor Day! Thank you to everyone whose hard work enhances my life in some way.
07:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tonight we were eating dinner on the porch when a black bear lumbered by, right across the back yard! Andy spotted it and we all ran to see, but it took one look back at us and then loped off into the woods again. Wow! I was tempted to run and get my camera, but I couldn't tear myself away from the sight.
09:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
My niece Jen emailed me from her sophomore dorm digs with a double word usage question:
1.
What’s the difference between “further” and “farther”?
2.
How about “toward” and “towards”?
Here was my response:
1. Use farther for actual distances:
Adverb: He can throw the ball farther than I can.
Adjective: That farther target is the one I'm aiming for.
Use further for everything else:
Adjective: I'm awaiting further instructions from you.
Adverb: We were further delayed by a big traffic jam.
Here's a good trick: Try both, and if they both sound OK, use farther. Otherwise only further will work.
2. People who care about such things (like me!) say that toward
is preferred by Americans and towards by Brits (also forward vs. forwards), but you wouldn't be "wrong" to use towards.
05:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
We rented "Fever Pitch" mainly for Steph, who has already become our family's most obsessive Red Sox fan, but we all ended up enjoying it. This was the first time I'd ever seen Jimmy Fallon (I stopped watching SNL many years ago), and he was very likable; as for Drew Barrymore, I guess the best assessment is that I can take or leave her. But the movie is adorable, and the whole Sox theme is a blast. I was stunned when I realized that it was based on a Nick Hornby novel, but then I realized that British soccer football fans are perhaps the only thing comparable to Red Sox Nation. I'm curious: If any of you in other parts of the U.S. have seen this movie, how did the Boston-centric thing play? I can't imagine enjoying this movie half as much if it had been about the Cubs or the Pirates or something. Meanwhile, IMDB has a fun page of trivia about the movie; the irony of it all is that they were just completing the movie when the Sox went on to actually win the damn Series! The Farrelly brothers had to go back and change the ending. Imagine that!
"Seven Years in Tibet" seems to play out in real time, and on top of that, we're supposed to believe that Brad Pitt is Austrian. Oy. But, if we're committed to watching every single movie ever made about the Dalai Lama (and we are), then hour after hour of an accent reminiscent of Mike Myers doing "Dieter" on SNL is what we must endure. Much, much better than this is Scorsese's "Kundun" (reviewed here).
I guess I got what I expected from "United 93," which was the gut-wrenching story of the one plane that managed to not get flown into a building on 9/11. The scenes set on the plane are obviously fictionalized; they're based in large part on bits of cell phone conversations and data from the flight towers, but the rest is conjecture. And in truth, that may be why I didn't have as strong a reaction to those parts as I did to the scenes of the air traffic controllers trying to do their jobs while the whole horrifying reality of that day was unfolding.
09:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Today was the day we wait for all year, the Lancaster County Fair. The weather was just perfect: sunny and warm, with a nice breeze. We sat on tractors, we fed baby goats, we marveled at the huge Belgian horses, we ate altogether too much fried food, we rode rickety rides, we were cheated out of our money by one carny after another, we devoured the always-amazing Robillard apple crisp, and ... lessee ... what else? Ah yes, I got my annual run at the quarters machines, which have a positively hypnotic effect on me. If I had one of those at home, I'd never shower or get dressed or leave the house at all.
(That's Julie's head in the Sox hat; she's scooping up all Mama's winnings.)
08:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
When the kids were little(r), packing for a weekend up north was a big production. Diapers, sippy cups, tiny spoons, booster seat, nursery monitor, and on and on and on. Sure, there are stores up here if you forget the Cheerios, but you're SOL if you leave the stroller propped up by the mudroom door at home. Nowadays I make sure I have Steph's meds; pretty much everything else is hit-or-miss. We've forgotten ski gear and had to rent, we've left behind the pile of raincoats and gotten soaked, we've neglected to bring the favorite flavor of bagels (egg with poppy seed) and had to settle for plain. No big deal.
We invariably forget something—hopefully not one of the kids' "bed guys" or my glasses—but we manage. So, for this trip, Andy has already realized that he forgot his swimsuit, and we're planning to go to Skeev City Whale's Tale water park tomorrow. So he'll have to just wear his shorts. But last night Pete got up in the middle of the night with a headache, and I realized that for the first time ever, I forgot to bring my little pouch of children's Tylenol, Benadryl, thermometer, cough syrup, etc. I've brought it every other time—and never needed it! I felt so bad that I couldn't give him anything, and the stores up here aren't open all night. So he and I snuck off to an empty bed where I could rub his head and his palms. (I hope you all know that you can temporarily relieve a headache by kneading deeply the pads of the palm where the thumb starts—the headache comes back the instant you stop rubbing, but at least there's some relief to be had.) I also got to spoon him, which is just such a yummy bonus of Mama-hood that I can't tell you. He eventually fell asleep—I didn't, of course, though, until he'd already crept back to his own bed and I tossed and turned for a few more hours. Then, in the morning, he came in and woke me to tell me that his headache was gone! He felt fine! Uh, good morning to you, too.
08:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)