New feet!

First pedicure ever!

once a mother, always a mother

It seems to me that the never-ending job of a mother is to help her children to find worthwhile activities, suited to their interests, for them to participate in. Hence my reason for posting the link above! (Be sure to read the "About" part of the page...)

Hey -- after all, it was listed under "Kids & Family" in the newspaper!!

today has been a good day...

...with a lot of help from a cousin and a friend, and I'm sure others' prayers and loving thoughts figured in there heavily, as usual! Thanks all! I feel very much peace this evening.

Click here (or on the title above) for a visual treat! I haven't had time to go to this great website for a few days, so I was glad to have a few minutes just now and find this photo.

just a couple of links for Star Wars fans, waiters, and foodies...

I found these two articles in the L.A. Times today really interesting, and I thought some of my readers might, too.

The first one brings back such memories of Joseph and Hank playing with Hank's Star Wars spaceships (I know I'm not saying that correctly, but cut me some slack, I am really beat...)

The other reminded me of conversations with Hank about waiting tables, and with certain family members and others about food...

Banana Peach Bread

Just wanted to post this link -- I had ripe bananas and some fresh peaches, nectarines, and a few leftover blueberries, and found the recipe linked above. So far it seems to be turning out great! I substituted yogurt for the sour cream and used the fruit listed above instead of using canned peaches. Will add an addendum about how it tastes later...I just pulled it out of the oven and have to leave in a bit for pilates class...

Update: Delicious and moist!

I can't remember what I was going to blog about...

So, I can't recall what were the earthshaking things (oops, not literally!) I was going to blog about...it was one of those falling-asleep moments when everything becomes crystal clear... So I'll just say that it's morning here and it looks deceptively cool and inviting out the front windows of my mom's apartment.

The pictures I take just don't convey what I'm really seeing. So just take my word for it -- bright blue sky, big trees, lots of shady lawn, flowers, quiet, quiet...

Here are some other views of Redlands and the surrounding mountains, in a different season...

The title of this post links to one of the prettiest buildings in Redlands, the Morey Mansion. But there are lots of other really great houses here, too -- I mean, the architecture is unusual and the house are really well preserved. Almost everybody has a garden, and the town is awash in roses, crepe myrtle, and other beautiful and exotic flowers that I don't know the name of. Outside mom's back door there is a lemon tree which is covered in lemons (mostly green at the moment) and several rose bushes, and further on there are some large bushes behind someone else's patio that are sometimes covered in morning glory vines with huge purple blossoms -- they were recently cut back but they still persist, as morning glories will! (I know they look blue, but they are really purple!)


My exciting outing of the weekend, since I managed to miss the dance performance Friday night at the Redlands Bowl (I am very sad about this!), was a little nostalgia trip to what is commonly known as "the Fifth Avenue Pool". I went there as a child with my aunt and her children, among them my cousin Mary. This time it was Mary and her 20-year-old son Luke and his girlfriend and me. I remember the pool, an old reservoir, as being huge, so big you can barely swim across it... well, like many places of my youth, it has shrunk down quite a bit! But the water is still cool, if not cold, and there are lovely old trees to shade the lounge chairs and patio tables. Even a slide, if i could only have worked up the nerve to go down it -- no fear of the sliding part, just embarrassment about being about 45 years older than the other kids using it!) Anyway, I came home refreshed from the good company and a dip in the pool.

My missing paternal grandfather -- found!

Today while my Mom was going through some photos, she came across one that had special significance for me. It was a photo of my paternal grandparents, and though I knew my paternal grandmother, I had never in all my 55 years seen (that I can remember) a photo of my father's father, who died in a car accident in 1926 when my Dad was two years old. For those of you who may be interested, here they are, Bill and Bess Lackie:

My Mom thinks this was probably taken at Bess' parents' house, though Mom never went there herself.
On the back of the photo, it reads:

Pet. if you will send this
picture back to me I will
send you some more
that you can keep
Ever your brother
W Lackie
this is Bess and Bill

(I'm not sure of the "W" -- it could be "H".)

Earthquake!

Yes, we felt it here in Redlands! It lasted from 5-7 seconds or so... It felt to me like some huge piece of furniture or maybe a grand piano was being moved upstairs, causing a lot of rumbling and the building to shake... actually, that's what I thought it was at first, until I realized what a dumb idea that was... We are all fine here. Mom didn't even notice the quake, though her sister, Carrie, did. Of course now it's all over the news.

If you click on the link above, and move your cursor to just below the "R" in San Bernardino, you will see where we are.

long time gone...

This post is just to say a brief hello before I fall into bed... The days are long and the nights very interrupted lately. But I am glad to be with my mom. Her condition at the moment is complicated, but her mobility is improving, that's one good thing. Also, she is not in much pain at all from the hip now.
Mostly I am doing well, just haven't had much sleep in recent days. But I do nap almost every afternoon and hope to get back to swimming & exercising tomorrow!
I miss all of you and hope to be back in more frequent contact at some point. Maybe just posting here will be all I can do for awhile, though.

Going Green!

Check out Sally and Sadie's new book, Going Green! I am excited that this is finally in print, and hope that it will sell very well!!

More photos...this time, my own!

Here are a few photos from my recent trip to Baltimore. Some are from the Longwood Gardens, and some need no explanation :)

Wow!

Hi, all!
Click on title for an amazing photo.
Will try to post again soon!

Constellations

Just sitting here among the random clutter that accumulates in a week or so (that's how long since I dumped the last pile on the dining room table to be sorted out) and wondering if I will ever get back to posting more often... Yes, I will, when this current storm of students abates, which won't be long now: all the schooled kids' exams start in three to four weeks. But in the meanwhile...

I had a conversation with a student about constellations recently, and we talked about the Ancients seeing their gods and heroes in the stars... then this poem came in the daily Poem-a-Day e-mail a few days ago. A happy confluence of events!

I hope all the folks in NC and Indiana will go out and vote today! Keep the momentum going!!

new links

I've added a few new links to the list in my sidebar: xkcd, which I ought to have had a long time ago; Anamorphic Sidewalk Painting, just because i think it's amazing; and a link to Timmy Abell's website, which I discovered the other night when I was looking for Jim Taylor's cd "Come Before Winter" (my favorite cd ever.) Timmy Abell is a fantastic folksinger for children and families, and Jim Taylor...well, you'll just have to listen to his music sometime -- I can't do it, or him, justice in words.

Maybe someday I'll have time to do a "real" post again...sigh....

National Poem in your Pocket Day

Just a quick note to let my readers know about this special day coming up Thursday!
I found out about it from this article in the Charlotte Observer.

I'll probably be carrying Milne, but not sure which poem... How about you?

quick funny! ...for all you advanced students out there...

Click on the title above to read something that will make you smile, I can almost guarantee it!
I'll try to get back to posting more often one of these days, now that my "far" travels are over for a little while.

Happy Pi Day!

No time to write much today, but I direct my readers to the article about Pi linked in the title of this post.

All my theme songs for today involve circles....

A newsy week...

...but most of it is other people's news, so I'll keep mum for the time being and let them share it, or in other cases, just let the story unfold.

So in the meantime, I have a movie recommendation: The Painted Veil. I just watched it, and it is wonderful. The acting (mostly panned by Lawrence Toppman, but I'm not so choosy as he is, I guess), the story, the score, the cinematography -- all so well done, so rich. Those of you who speak French -- you would love this song that is in it near the end, and if/when you do see it, I wish you would tell me what the song is about.... I am very sad that I never learned French. The music reviewer linked above doesn't agree with me about this, but I thought the song very appropriate, and quite beautiful.

Another item of interest -- completely different topic: Kay McSpadden's latest column will resonate with those of you who are regular readers of this blog (well, as regular a reader as you can be when I'm such a sporadic writer!) Actually, it will resonate with anyone who is a regular reader of anything -- books, magazines, cereal boxes, billboards, whatever. Please consider her plea seriously and do what you can to help. My reading this column this evening came on the heels of reading an article I had clipped awhile ago about the alarming number of, and rise in, dropouts from high school and middle school. I believe there is a very close connection between the two issues of early reading experiences and students failing to complete their education. As many of you know, I am a strong supporter of homeschooling, but the reality is that the vast majority of the young people in this country do not have that option. So I believe that it is only right and just that we do whatever we can to improve the schools and enhance opportunities for students who are attending school. There is a lot of bad going on in education today, but there is a lot of good, also. Kay McSpadden is an example of the best of the teachers out there, and I believe she can help us all find ways to participate in improving the futures of schooled students. (She recently published her first book, Notes from a Classroom. I have it and started reading it just the other day...a great read!)

Okay, I know these are really two different blog posts, but I'm too tired to try to figure that out now. I've been battling the flu since Wednesday night and hope to get past it soon.

Update: I realized this morning (3/9) that there really is a connection between my two topics above: there is scene near the end of the movie, not really essential to the plot or anything, that has a bunch of Chinese orphans lining up and receiving a book each, one by one... I don't know why the director put that in there, but it did serve as a reminder to me that I wanted to write about the article by Kay McSpadden.

instability

Help! My Firefox has become unstable -- for the past couple months it has been having this bad habit of locking up on me at random moments. I have tried defragging my hard drive and uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox, but I don't know what else to do. I have looked on their site for a FAQ addressing this but what I found hasn't helped so far, except that they recommend I run the program in Firefox Safe Mode. I'm doing that. So far so good...but is that a fix? Any suggestions???

More for the Foodies :-)

Just noticed this article in yesterday's Observer's previously untouched Food Section. The title of one of the recipes, "Lighter Than Mom's Tuna-Noodle Casserole", caught my eye. I think some of my regular readers have expressed interest in Tuna Noodle Casserole (a la Grandma) on occasion... maybe this will be a healthier version, if not tastier (because of course, there is nothing quite like the original!)
Also, some of you might be interested in another approach to cooking dinner -- the write-up was in Co-op America's newsletter, Real Money.