This is the time of year when my chrysanthemums go nuts, and I just love it. I discovered a few years ago that mums do really well in our soil and with our southern exposure. They swell and grow all summer long, getting bigger and greener, and by October, they're really spectacular.
I had two enormous white mums right by the path to the front door that were always at their peak at Halloween, and several years a few of the trick-or-treaters would pet them as they passed. They did look like big fluffy dogs. But one died this spring, and the other is about half-dead. Fortunately, I have another one nearby that has become just as monstrous this year:
I planted one last year that I think is like the Cadillac of chrysanthemums...red with yellow centers. I'd love to find some more like it:
The last several years, I've been buying mums in pots for the front porch steps and then planting them in the flowerbeds when they've faded. This year all I found were white, yellow and purple, nothing too exotic. In my experience, the white ones really thrive and the yellow ones are more half-hearted. I'm not sure about the purple ones...I don't think I've had any planted long enough to tell yet. I just love a plant that gives you plenty of bang for your buck: lots of growth, lots of flowers, and several years' worth of both.
We had a very nice Halloween; our friends Cheryl and Chris Potthast and their son Matthew came over for baked potatoes and hot cider. We sat on the front porch for a while and handed out candy. Not a lot of trick-or-treaters this year...my estimate was about 40 kids. This means we have a pile of Tootsie Roll pops to dispose of...somehow.
Oh, what a sad and tiring weekend it was. I don't think I knew before just how tired grief can make a person feel.
As I was flying home on Friday morning, my childhood friend Eric Wenger passed away. My family has been friends with his family for many years--our grandmothers were good friends, in fact. We went to the same church and for several years attended the same school and were in the same class. He was a year older than I.
Eric had a challenging life. A brain tumor and surgery in childhood left him slightly--but only slightly--delayed. He had the sweetest, most joyful spirit. Even after a stroke in his early thirties, which left him wheelchair-bound and unable to speak clearly, he always gave me a huge smile whenever I saw him. A final stroke two weeks ago sent him home to his parents' house to wait for the end, and he went to Heaven on Friday.
It's hard for me to articulate here how remarkable he was and how I felt about him...the feelings run a little too deeply to be easily shared. It was a very sad weekend.
We had a beautiful funeral for Grandma on one of the beautiful cool early-fall mornings that Ohio specializes in. A wonderful breeze blew during the graveside service, and it was good to stand there and feel it on my face. If the measure of a life is how much one was loved, then Grandma had a tremendous life indeed. Which she did.
I'm trying very hard not to give in to that post-Christmas let-down feeling, because it's no good to head into a New Year feeling blue, but January is so grim after sybaritic December. You have to start watching what you spend and eat again, whip your house into shape, make stalwart resolutions that you know you won't keep...oh, it's grim!
Actually, I have a lot of things I'm looking forward to accomplishing and enjoying in 2010, and I hope it will be a good year...but first I've got to get through the next week or two of putting the Christmas stuff away, getting re-organized, making lists and plans. Boring!
Our holiday company left this morning, too, so that contributes to the anti-climactic feeling. The house feels empty without John and Viv in it.
We had a nice Christmas together. On Christmas Eve morning we went up and strolled around Colonial Williamsburg, taking in the holiday decorations. It was COLD.
The decorations were gorgeous...every shop and house puts up different kinds of wreaths and hangings, and it's fun to see what they come up with.
I thought my cheeks were going to freeze off.
Christmas morning we got up, had breakfast, opened some presents, and then my friend Beverly came up from Virginia Beach to have lunch with us. It was a really relaxing day.
Bev got me a "Slanket," among other things, for Christmas. I had been thinking wistfully about those things earlier in the week, because it's been so cold here, and voila! One for my very own. It's warm, too!
I got Bev a bunch of tropical-themed stuff, among which was "Blue Hawaii" with Elvis, so we watched that after dinner and laughed our heads off. Then after she went home, we played a game and sank into a ham-and-cookie coma.
I hope everybody else had a great Christmas, too.
My friend Beverly and I went to see "Julie and Julia" yesterday, which is a film based on Julie Powell's book of the same name, in which Powell writes about the year she spent cooking her way through Julia Child's book Mastering the Art of French Cooking and blogging about it.
I read the book several years ago and enjoyed it, although it's a little less about food and a little more about being almost 30 and struggling with the idea that your life isn't going the way you thought it would. Powell's blogging/cooking project gives her a new path to follow, and a sort of guardian angel in the person of Julia Child.
I was surprised to hear that a movie was coming out based on the book, because there didn't seem to be quite enough in the book to base a movie on. The moviemakers must have agreed with me, because they split the movie roughly in half, and showed two parallel stories at the same time--Julie Powell's (played by Amy Adams) cooking adventure and Julia Child's (played by Meryl Streep) cooking adventure.
The Julia Child segments are based on another book, one of the best memoirs I've ever read: Julia Child's My Life in France, the story of her marriage, moving to France and falling into what was to become the defining task of her life: learning French cooking and teaching it to Americans.
So in the movie we have the modern-day segments, with Amy Adams battling subway crowds to work and then coming home to cook in her lousy Long Island apartment kitchen, and then the Julia segments, which take place in Paris in the 1940s and 50s and which feature Meryl Streep doing a dead-on and completely delightful version of Julia Child. Two guesses as to which storyline is more interesting!
The stories do play off each other perfectly, as each woman is trying to find her niche in life, supported by a loving husband, but although Amy Adams is a perfectly good actress, every time Meryl Streep comes onto the screen, you forget all about whatever Adams was doing in the scene before. You can't take your eyes off Julia, who is as bright and vivid and full of life as she was in real life. Stanley Tucci plays her devoted husband Paul Child, and you just want their scenes to go on forever, it's such a pleasure to watch them together.
Plus the costumes, the cars, the sets from the Julia segments are pure eye candy. Bev and I loved this movie. It was funny and inspiring and beautifully filmed. Sort of a chick flick, but the men in the audience seemed to enjoy it as much as the women did. It was also a pretty clean movie (much cleaner than Powell's book, anyway) with just one or two obscenities and only implied sex between loving married couples. (It's mother-in-law-friendly, Viv!) We walked out of the theatre smiling.I wonder if this is the first movie about blogging?!
My friend Cheryl took me in to get my stitches taken out today and then took me for lunch at Red Robin--aah! Sunshine! People! Activity! Conversation! And salad! What a pleasure!
Now all I have to do is sit back and relax until my check-up next Thursday. And try not to itch. And maybe go out and search for a bra that fits right. And getting a decent night's sleep would also really help.
I keep having these very long, involved, intense dreams with lots and lots of detail and storyline...I'd blame the pain pills, but I seem to have them no matter whether I've taken a pill or not. So my nights generally run like this:
Sleep for an hour or two, get up to pee, look at the clock and heave a sigh, lay back down. Wake up after a dream that feels like a Cecil B. DeMille movie (hours long with a cast of thousands,) get up to pee, look at the clock and blink in disbelief because it's only an hour since the last time I got up. Go downstairs, put in a movie, lay down on the couch and repeat the process for the rest of the night. Urgh, it's tiresome.
And a couple of the dreams have been really upsetting--there was one about the death of someone I love very much, which seemed to go on FOREVER and was so real, I still feel like maybe it happened, in the back of my mind.So it would be great to lay down on my tummy and sleep hard the whole night through with no dreams, and wake up feeling rested. But other than that, and the itching, I am doing awesome. The sore throat's mostly gone, and everything is as it should be with the girls. Thanks, Cheryl, for getting me out of the house today, I really needed it!
I've been having insomnia lately again, but it's the good kind where I have lots of ideas to think about, and not the bad kind where I get all anxious and full of dread thinking about every possible bad thing that could happen to me and the people I love. Hate that kind of insomnia.
So far this week is going much better than last week...but then, any week without a trip to the dentist has to be better than one with a trip to the dentist, right?
Sunday I went to the home and garden show at the VA Beach convention center with my friend Beverly, and we had a fantastic time. She and I both have an extremely irreverent and often inappropriate sense of humor, and we tend to exacerbate that in each other. We bring out each other's inner 12-year-old, I guess is what I'm saying.
I'd never been to a home and garden show before, and although much of it was what I'd expected (vinyl siding, hot tubs, replacement gutters and windows) there were a few surprise booths. The Sham-Wow guy was there...well, not the guy from the infomercial, but his brother or cousin maybe. It was hilarious watching the crowd watching his patter, as he mopped up water and soda and everybody oohed and aahed, and after a three-minute routine, he sold about $200 worth of Sham-Wows as we--I mean, they--all rushed the stage.
Okay, I'll admit it--I rushed the stage, too. I've always wanted to sop up liquids with a super-absorbent bright orange towel, and now I can. The Vita-Mix people and the super-sharp knife people were there, too, but I managed to resist their blandishments.
There was a huge booth advertising certified Angus beef...because when you think "home," don't you think of a big old slab of beef? They had all these tables with spices and spoons and little baggies where you could mix up a special rub with dried rosemary, thyme, salt, pepper, and coffee. Yes, because when you think "beef," don't you think of Starbucks?
I mixed one up and it's been sitting on my counter and making my house smell like coffee all day. Coffee that ain't quite right, like maybe it's been sitting in the pot for a couple of days and you spilled a little soup in it by accident. Queasy.
My favorite booth by far was the wine-tasting booth, where I got a little wineglass and got to go around and sample wines from three different Virginia wineries. Now, I'm not much of a wine-drinker. I've never really gotten the big deal or understood when people talked about wines being oaky or having hints of pear and chocolate or whatever.
But when I stood and sipped seven or eight wines in a row, taking my time and thinking about what I was tasting, I began to get a glimmer of what people were talking about and why some people like wine tasting. It's very sensual, you're really concentrating on what's moving around in your mouth. Then when I moved to another winery's table and tasted four or five of their wines, I started to see how tastes could vary from winemaker to winemaker.
I also got slightly lit, which is probably the main reason people like wine-tasting. Anyway, it really was eye-opening for me. Eye-opening experiences are always fun. And I bought a really nice wine called Virginia Breeze Red from Davis Valley Winery in western VA.
Monday morning I stopped off at an estate sale on my way home from the grocery store--it had run all weekend and Monday was the dregs, at half-off. I found a few little treasures there that I'll share tomorrow.
Work on the bathroom has been in idle mode, but I am definitely going to get the vanity doors painted this week, and Todd's definitely going to get the second coat put on along the wall tops. Then the sink top will definitely come off, because I'm tired of driving around with the new one squeaking in its styrofoam padding in the back of the car. Then we will definitely put in a new medicine cabinet, and then we'll definitely install a new shower curtain rod.
Then by that time it will be mid-March and we'll be able to put in the new floor, because it's going to take two weeks for it to come in, and Todd's dad can't get here to help Todd install it till then. So the brown floor will be around a little longer, but that's fine--it gives us time to get everything else done.Oh, one last thing--we have been watching this Canadian show called "Slings and Arrows" on DVD from Netflix. It's about a small-town theater company that's known for its Shakespeare festivals. Long ago Todd and I had a very good friend who was an actor, and who later was the managing director of a small community theater, and let's just say this show rings true. The writing is excellent, and the show's creators (one of whom is Mark McKinney from The Kids in the Hall--he's also in the show) really, really understand actors and theater and the drama and self-absorption of that world and how it can all come together to make art. The show's a little uneven in the first couple episodes, and some of the actors are better than others, but it's funny, funny. And the first season revolves around a production of "Hamlet" and how different directors interpret it. It's very clever. Not PG-rated, though. Unsuitable for kids or in-laws, Viv, in case you're reading this!All right, I'm pooped and cold, time to hit the hay.
I got a delightful envelope in the mail today--Mimi's ATC swap! Seven little rectangles of art--the theme was "a favorite quote."
Mine is the one with the tea cup--the others were made by Stephanie and Molly (top row), and Kristina, Mimi, Nancy, and Sue (bottom row.)
Thanks for hosting this, Mimi! Such a nice treat, getting art in the mail!
My neighbor across the ravine in back is mowing his grass and wafting the smell in through the back windows. My favorite smell in the whole world.
I'm trying to decide whether to watch the debate tonight, since they've pre-empted "The Office" for it, so I won't be watching THAT. (Grrrrr.....) I don't like Palin, but I'm not a fan of Biden, either, so it should be fun to watch 'em go at it. Or excruciatingly uncomfortable. Whichever...
On a sad note, we found out today that Todd's former manager at his job in Ohio is in the hospital, in the final stages of liver and kidney failure, and will be going into hospice very soon. His name is Rick, and if you have a prayer or a good thought to spare, please send one up for him and his family. He's a lovely man, and he has a wife and two daughters.
That's all for now...I have pictures and a couple more scrapbook pages to share, sometime later.
I met a guy online last fall and developed a tiny crush on him. His name was Lester, he hung out at the PaperbackSwap forums, and, oh yeah, he was 81 years old.
Lester is hands-down THE coolest person I've ever come into contact with on the Internet, and maybe in my whole life. Smart, articulate, wise, kind, hip. He was a huge favorite at PBS. Grant Wood's American Gothic was his avatar picture, as he was a proud Iowan.
When I came home from vacation on Sunday night, I was dismayed to read a post from Lester's wife stating that he had had a very serious stroke at the end of June. His daughter updated briefly to say that he'd been moved to a skilled nursing facility. Tonight the family seems to have closed his account at PBS, and there's no way of knowing what that means. They did not sound optimistic about his recovery, though.
Lester was a wonderful and genuine conversationalist, but he also had a knack for rolling just the right thought off his fingers at just the right time. Some of the folks at PBS have been gathering some of their favorite Lester quotes from the past few years, and I wanted to share some of my faves here. He is a gem, and he's very much in my thoughts and prayers right now.
"If there's nothing else to do, and my eyes are too tired to read, I watch the Weather Channel. Yup, old people's MTV."
"What on earth makes you think that I have started to feel like a grownup? I know that I have to act like a grownup, but it's an act. Sure, there's some wisdom that comes along with growing older, one hopes, and some perspective, and there ain't much that life can throw at me that it hasn't already thrown at me once already, but if you mean 'grownup' to be the person who always knows the right thing to do, the one who can always be in charge, the automatic authority for all matters spiritual and temporal... ...then I guess my certificate of grownupness got lost in the mail."
"If you live your life with zest and continue to be curious about things, if you have something or someone that you care about, if you have passion about something - even if it's collecting... I don't know ... matchbook covers or something - but have a passion, you will likely never feel old."
"I don't think you have to be able to recite a recipe from memory, or name all the Presidents in order, or be able to describe the Krebs cycle on demand. But I do think a certain ... awareness of the culture in which you (generic you) live is required in order to live life fully and to understand and put into appropriate context the things you see and hear daily. I think anything else is mental poverty, and sad."
"I'm willing to judge a person by their actions, I guess, but not by what they read, neither do I define myself by what I read. Books are like friends to us readers, and not every friend has to be an attorney or a brain surgeon or some "worthy" person. Some friends you just kick around with and have a brewski and bask in the warmth of friendship. Life is long, and tastes in friends change. Tastes in reading do, too."
"Oh, man, there is no feeling in the world like holding that grandbaby. When my kids were born, fathers weren't allowed anywhere near the delivery room, so the first time I'd held a minutes-old baby was when my first grandchild was born. Oh, I still get a little bit misty just thinking about it. The intensity and fierceness of the love is beyond anything. I mean, I would die for my children, even now. But I would kill for my grandkids. I think you understand the distinction."
"Brownies should always be frosted and have walnuts in them. Amend the Constitution now."
"M&Ms, preferably with peanuts, are eaten one at a time, after sufficient cooking time in the hand to ensure the proper melty-ness of the interior."
"We men are simple folk at base. We're driven by food and lust."
"You know what's scary, and that's when you open your mouth and your mother - or father - talks. The first time I said (or hollered) to my kids, 'Don't you make me come upstairs and take care of this fight for you' it was my father's words and my father's voice. That, along with, 'Well, what in the world did you think was going to happen when you stuck your hand in there?' It's as if it's in your DNA or something."
"It's good for kids, I think, to be exposed to things outside their comfortable little world. And adults, come to that."
"Learning to entertain yourself is part of growing up healthy. Some of the best talks I ever had with my siblings happened as we were just watching clouds drift by."
"Living a life of peace and joy, letting the love of God shine out from you and be manifest in your life, without saying a single word about religion, will bring more people to Christ than all the Bible shouting, pamphlets, slogans, threats, and condescending 'Jesus loves you' in the world."
"Half of parenting is learning to keep a straight face."
"Knowing who the VP is has had me praying, sincerely, for the health and well-being of George W. Bush for almost 8 years now."
"I admire people who have -- what's the opposite of a sense of entitlement, anyway? I value people who don't think the world owes them a damn thing, who don't see themselves as victims of something or other."
"I genuinely believe that love does not die. Our energy changes forms, but the love goes on."
"Shakespeare is right when he says that troubles come not as single spies, but in battalions. It's so hard to lose good friends, old companions, people you've known forever even if you aren't close friends. Your world changes a bit, gets a little colder for awhile, with each one. Sometimes you just have to wallow in it, you know? Sometimes you just have to feel bad and cry a little or mope around some, and didn't they deserve that, a little sorrow and some sadness for a little time?"
"I'm about to turn 81. Life just keeps getting better. I don't recall having difficulty with turning 30, 40, 50, although perhaps the cult of youth was not so strong then as it is now. I do remember when I turned 60 realizing that most of my life was behind me, and making a new resolution to make the best of every day, to find the good in every day. Since then I have been more mindful of my life, more aware of the seasons, nature, the small pleasures life brings, or can bring if you're alert for them."
"I like to watch my wife put on makeup. I love the faces she makes at herself in the mirror. I like the way she rejects three lipsticks that all look the same to me and then selects a 4th one that also looks the same to me. It's only fun if she doesn't know I'm watching, though."
"Omigosh, has anyone else seen this? Is it a new form of teenage speak? Text speak? LOLspeak? They're putting an apostrophe before a d. Examples: My wireless router die'd. I got divorce'd. Pre-cooke'd ham. He think's you campe'd in the wood's. If this continues, we will have tomatoe's for sal'e and no parkin'g. Every sign will look like a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem."
"Never give an old man an excuse to talk. :-)"
We met my brother and his wife and two of their friends in Charlottesville on Saturday for a Nickel Creek concert at the Charlottesville Pavilion. The Pavilion is at the end of the Downtown Mall, which is a several-blocks stretch of the old city that has been bricked up and planted with trees and turned into a wide pedestrian mall. There are lots of shops and restaurants in the old buildings along the mall, and the pavilion is down at the far end, sort of sunk down in a little ridge so lollygaggers on the mall can't see the stage and get treated to free concerts.
However, this placement of the pavilion ensures that not a breath of fresh air can penetrate the tent on hot, steamy nights. And it was hot and steamy Saturday night!
Here we all are, looking pretty good for being extremely overheated:
The concert was good, but a little disappointing. The band brought Fiona Apple with them as a "special guest," which turned out to mean that they sang her songs for probably almost half of the set. Apart from a funked-up bluegrass version of her hit "Criminal" and a wonderful cover of "Walking After Midnight" (you can't go wrong with Patsy Cline), this was not really what we wanted to hear. Fiona's deep voice is wonderful, and she blended fabulously with Sara Watkins' high soprano, but they should have incorporated her into their songs, I think, instead of the other way around. Then they closed the concert with three or four Fiona songs in a row, and came out for a one-song encore, which they all sang together.
It just wasn't really what the fans were expecting. This tour is called "Farewell for Now" as the band members are ready to move on and try out other paths, and it seemed to me that the set list should have been chock-full of all the songs the fans want to hear one last time.Here's a mediocre shot of the stage...Sara Watkins on violin, Chris Thile on mandolin, their tour bassist whose name I can't remember or find at the moment, Fiona Apple, Sean Watkins on guitar:
There are much better pictures of the band on their website. They are an extremely talented group of people!
We ran into my cousin Alan, who lives in Charlottesville, at the concert, and had breakfast with him the next morning. Then the Harrisonburg contingent departed around lunchtime to get back to their assorted kiddies, and Todd and I strolled around on the Downtown Mall for a few hours, buying books and eating burgers and the best fries I've ever had--piping hot, salty, doused in malt vinegar. Yum.
Here's Todd at the burger joint, Five Guys:
Here's a shot of part of the mall:
Drove two hours back home, showered, and went to some friends' for a fantastic dinner (pork tenderloin and risotto) and came home and collapsed.
As I said to Todd, "It's fun to do stuff with people." You can tell we don't get out much.
(This week I'll be doing double walking to work off the ice cream, chorizo, cheese, burger, fries, risotto and brownie pie that entered my mouth this weekend. It was worth it, though!)
There's a phenomenon that happens once or twice a year in the scrapbooking world. A phenomenon that reduces otherwise normal women to the level of desperate junkies on the prowl for a fix.
Yes, Target has document boxes in the Dollar Spot again.
What is a document box, you ask? It's a shallow, transparent, hinged plastic box with a clasp, big enough to hold a small stack of 8.5x11 papers.
But that's not what scrappers use them for. It just so happens that document boxes are the perfect size to hold foam stamps, acrylic stamps, acrylic mounts, unmounted stamps, and...well, I don't know what-all other uses there are, since I just put stamps in mine. Often foam stamp sets, in particular, come in unwieldy packages that require jigsaw-puzzle skills to cram all the stamps back in. Document boxes store flat and you just pop one open, pick your stamp, use it, put it back and move on with your life. Convenient and cheap, is there any better combination?
So once or twice a year, Target puts these in their Dollar Spot and then the hysteria begins on the scrapbooking message boards. Which stores have them? Does X store have them yet? Has anybody spotted them in Cleveland yet? Or Grand Rapids?
They usually come out with the back-to-school stuff, but this year Target decided to put them out in the post-Easter products. Probably because some number-cruncher somewhere noticed that they fly out of the stores in the fall, so maybe they should put them out more often.
I noted with interest the first sighting of the boxes on the Two Peas board, a couple days ago, since I have several sets of stamps that I bought since the last time the boxes were out, and I could use some more boxes.
My friend Cheryl snapped into action, checking the Targets in Williamsburg and here in Newport News yesterday, but didn't have any luck. Today I had to go up to Williamsburg, and dropped by the Target, and--there they were. Fifteen left, and I bought 'em all.
Oh yes, that's what makes these buggers so elusive. Even if your store does get them in, you have to be there right after they hit the shelves, or someone will come in and buy them all, and then you're just out of luck. Like all the Williamsburg scrappers who will show up at Target today. Heh heh.
Many people buy them and sell 'em on Ebay at an inflated rate, which I find to be disgusting behavior. Me, I got five for me and ten for Cheryl. I'm generous like that!
Now I have thirty-one wonderful document boxes stacked neatly in the closet, with all my foam stamps tucked inside. And I can retire from the hunt, rest assured that my document box needs have been met until next time. Ahh.
