Letters From Home

Life looks at infmom / infmom looks at life

November 30, 2007
by infmom
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Thanksgiving miscellany

Still working a week behind!

Thanksgiving was a lot of fun even though I did get rather harried before all was said and done.

For some reason, I have never been able to get a turkey cooked in the time it’s supposed to.  It almost always ends up cooking too fast, even though I check the temperature of the oven and follow the recipe to the letter.  This year was no exception.

I was using a new recipe that I got from “The Week” magazine, that was supposed to include basting the turkey with an orange or tangerine glaze during the last half hour or so of cooking.  Unfortunately, when I went to baste the turkey about 90 minutes before it was supposed to be done, I poked it with my instant-read thermometer… and it was done.

Yeeow!

We had guests coming and they hadn’t arrived yet.  None of the vegetables were cooked.  I had not finished the mushroom pie that was our vegetarian entree.  The stuffing was only partially done.

So I went into Warp Speed Cooking mode.  First I turned down the oven to “warm” and left the turkey in it.  Then I dealt with the sweet potatoes.  I was just getting going on slicing up the squash when our first contingent of guests arrived.  Phew.  At least, I thought, someone will be here to eat the turkey before it all dries up!

I scurried and hurried and got everything all done, and then took the turkey out and set it on its platter to rest while I made gravy and mashed the sweet potatoes.  Our guests had a good time talking (and, in the case of their 5-year-old son, checking out the coloring book and crayons I bought him) and then everyone helped carry stuff to the picnic table outside.

Hooray for California weather in November, when you don’t have enough space to feed everybody inside!

Our other guests had a snarl-up with LA public transit, and didn’t arrive till the rest of us were winding down, but the turkey was still good and there was plenty of everything else left, too.  After they ate, we all had pecan pie together.

Afterwards, of course, the kitchen looked like a bomb went off in it…  but who cared?  I had a lot to be thankful for!

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November 28, 2007
by infmom
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where’d she go?

I know, I know. I haven’t posted for way too long. An eternity in cyberspace years.

Life intervenes, sometimes.

A couple weeks ago, I met one of my cousins for the very first time. See, my dad was very boy-centric, so his interest in his family focused mostly on his father’s relatives. And his father didn’t have very many relatives. Not close ones, anyway. There’d been only one boy per family per generation since 1860. My dad had only one first cousin and we didn’t hear about him much because he was the son of my grandfather’s sister. And my brothers and I only met his children, our second cousins, once in our lives.

Yeah. Boy centric. Don’t get me started.

Anyway, there’s this whole other side of the family. I didn’t find out till just a couple years ago that my dad’s mother was one of six siblings, and she and all her brothers and sisters had multiple children each, and thus my dad had plenty of first cousins on his mother’s side and my brothers and I therefore have plenty of second cousins (all but one of my dad’s generation, and of course all their parents, are gone now).

It was one of these second cousins who came to visit. She found me through a family tree I’d posted on one of the genealogy web sites. I had rather plaintively asked for information, not expecting to hear anything, because my grandmother’s maiden name was one of those extremely common ones. Not quite as common as Smith, or Miller, but pretty close. So it was really a wonder that she recognized me for who I was and was kind enough to email me and say so.

And she was going to be traveling, and her travels were going to bring her to our area, so I invited her to come to our house and meet me and my family and my youngest brother and his family (my second brother, who also lives in California, is back east caring for our mother).

My cousin turned out to be just the most delightful, down-to-earth person anyone could imagine. I felt like we were old friends already. We had a big cookout in the back yard and got to know each other a bit, and she stayed overnight and then I dropped her off at Union Station the next day (via a bit of sightseeing in Chinatown) to catch the Flyaway bus to the airport to continue her travels.

I hope she can come back again sometime, or we can visit her in New Jersey. She’s a person definitely worth knowing. Being part of the family is just frosting on the cake.

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November 17, 2007
by infmom
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Experiments in WordPress

Don’t mind me.  I’m always on the lookout for good WordPress plugins and I’m experimenting with some new ones today.  We now return you to your regularly scheduled eccentricities.

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November 11, 2007
by infmom
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Support the troops. No, really.

I just heard the annual fly-over of the WWII era planes, on their way to Forest Lawn.

Today is Armistice Day.  Yes, I know it’s been renamed Veterans Day, but it seems to me that we ought to consider the real reason this holiday got its start.  It was to celebrate the treaty that ended WWI.  A day to be thankful for the day the world had, for however short a time, the illusion of peace.

In those days, war was not sanitized.  There were no John Wayne movies to make combat look bloodless and glorious.  The expected life span of a soldier in the trenches (or in the air) was a matter of weeks.  The specialty of plastic surgery was pretty much invented to deal with the aftermath of horrific wounds.  A lot of people in the USA knew, or knew of, someone who’d been gassed, wounded, frozen or “shell shocked.”  People came home irrevocably changed, or not at all.

Today, it’s all too easy to think that all one nation has to do to straighten up another nation is to invade, bomb the crap out of everything, blow things up and kill people.  The hawks sneer at history that clearly tells us what kinds of leaders follow that philosophy–and what so often happens to their grand delusions.

It’s also all too easy for a lot of people to sit back and mouth platitudes about “supporting the troops” while they still vote for the politicians who have cut VA services and the GI bill every chance they got.  And, no doubt, who plan to keep doing the same till enough people out here in Constituent Land get enough education, brains and backbone to vote them out.

No, this isn’t a new phenomenon.  Take a minute and look up what Woodrow Wilson did to the veterans of WWI.  It’s a shameful legacy.

Instead of slapping a sticker on your bumper and considering your job done, put your money and/or time where your mouth is.   Go volunteer at a nearby VA hospital.  Go down to Skid Row and help out, and not just one day a year when you can feel good about being charitable.   According to the VA, there are 300,000 homeless American veterans.  Another 250,000 are in jail.  Do you think those people are going to get their lives together if you just get one of those loopy yellow plastic stickers for your car or dish out turkey roll one holiday per year?

Like John Prine said, your flag decal won’t get you into heaven any more.

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November 7, 2007
by infmom
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home again, home again, jiggety jig

We just got back from an internet-free vacation. Didn’t plan it that way, but did have to go cold turkey for a week. Yeeow. 🙂

Here are some of the neat places we visited:

Tubac, Arizona (arts and crafts)
ASARCO copper mine & discovery center
Kartchner Caverns
Tombstone
Titan 2 missile silo
and of course the Green Valley Pecan Store

If we ever decide to move into a retirement community, Green Valley is at the top of our list.   The designers really knew what they were doing, and the complete lack of California style McMansions is downright delightful.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled kvetching.  🙂

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October 29, 2007
by infmom
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feng shui for real life

one peaceful catI’ve been watching the show “Fun Shui” on HGTV. Usually the “feng shui” people who do TV shows are just too artsy-fartsy for words. But this lady seems to know what she’s doing and she knows how to explain why the changes she wants made, need to be made. It’s never explained just who pays for the curtains and furniture they use, which is what has me giving the show the fish eye from time to time, but so far the advice she’s given seems spot on, and the rooms look wonderful once she’s rearranged and repainted.

According to the show I watched last night, what we did in moving the office back here was the right thing to do. The couple in that episode had a cramped, poorly laid out home office in a small upstairs bedroom. The host had them move the office down to a rarely-used formal dining room in the back left corner of the first floor (viewed from the front door). Apparently, that is the “wealth corner” and is a dandy spot for a home office.

Well, the “wealth corner” in our house is my son’s room (and a good feng-shui makeover in there would do absolute wonders for it, I have no doubt, but YOU try getting that past the occupant). But this room comes close. The lady suggested that they put in a “water feature” and paint the walls a nice pale lavender. The paint job in here isn’t going to happen overnight (and I’ll have to think long and hard about the lavender) but I could, and did, put in a “water feature” of our own.

We have a little tabletop fountain that used to be in the livng room, where we never paid enough attention to it and it kept running dry. So, eventually we just stored it away. I got it out and cleaned it up and filled it full of distilled water (to cut down on the inevitable mineral deposits) and it’s happily trickling away on top of the bookshelf as I type. I dunno, maybe it’s wishful thinking, but it definitely feels right.

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October 24, 2007
by infmom
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the quest for the purse of gold

Like most women, I’m always on the lookout for the Perfect Purse. I’m beginning to think that Perfect Purses fall into the same category as perpetual motion machines and world peace–nice idea, not workable in the real world.

The latest entry in my Purse Quest arrived today. It’s the Messenger Bag from Duluth Trading Company. The illustration is the khaki version. Mine is black.

The illustration’s a bit misleading because it shows the backside of the bag. But it’s otherwise accurate enough.

The bag’s a bit smaller than I’d pictured it when I ordered. This is a good thing in that it will encourage me to be better organized and quit hauling around so much junk, but on the other hand I can’t just stuff my big spiral notebook into this one when I’m off to class, as I did with my Victorinox mesenger bag, its predecessor.

Still, I’m replacing the Victorinox because it just wasn’t well enough organized. It’s just one big inner compartment and stuff not only got lost in there, it fell out. After my bus pass disappeared for the second time I figured it was time to take action.

Other good things about this purse:

  • Nylon and therefore easy to keep clean
  • Lots and lots of compartments, with zippers
  • Built-in phone holder
  • Cute little LED flashlight that snaps into the purse flap
  • Expandable bottom gusset (a necessity since the top of the bag is comparatively small)
  • Zippered compartment on the back that will be great for my card case

Things I don’t like so much:

  • The aforementioned small opening at the top
  • Magnetic closure (safe for PDA or not?)
  • Designed to be carried over the left shoulder and not ambidextrously

I’m gonna transfer my stuff over to it and see how well I can fit everything in. I’ve been carrying around an unstructured bag from Marketplace of India when I didn’t want to haul out the big messenger bag, and I think this new bag will be the perfect in-between-those-bags replacement.

Whether it’s the proverbial Purse of Gold remains to be seen. 🙂

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October 22, 2007
by infmom
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fires

Terrible fires burning all around Southern California. It seems we’ve formed our own “ring of fire” here. Nowhere near us, thank goodness, but near relatives and people we know.

I wanted to move to California, and we’ve had a good life here since we arrived with our overstuffed rental truck that day in June 1984, but I’m beginning to look forward to the day we can leave.

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October 20, 2007
by infmom
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testing, testing

No matter how much I fuss about it, I am still always on the lookout for good new WordPress stuff. Look around and see what I’ve added today. 🙂

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October 20, 2007
by infmom
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Dumbledore’s Army!

I just can’t tell you how delighted I was to read this morning that J.K. Rowling told the world yesterday that the most beloved elder in Christendom (and I use that phrase deliberately) Albus Dumbledore is gay.

Wow, who would have thought… generations of children mentored by a homosexual grow up to, oh, you know, get married and have children who save the world. OK, some of those kids turned out to be Crabbe, Goyle and Malfoy (two generations each) but you can’t have everything.

Some people have already expressed their dismay that she didn’t tell us about this from the very first opportunity. Sadly, in this day and age, she couldn’t have carried it off any other way.

The only way to protect herself from the inevitable firestorm was to wait till the series was finished and millions of people had already read it and loved every word. Because if the gay-haters knew about Dumbledore one second sooner, they not only would have started burning books immediately but the controversy would have insured that millions of people would never have laid hands on a Harry Potter book, much less read it.

This way, people who would otherwise have backed away in absolute horror at the very idea of a gay person being a major, beloved character who helps the hero save the world, read Dumbledore’s story–and liked him.

And now, if they have even two brain cells to rub together, they’re going to have to deal with the fact that gay characters don’t cause them any personal harm whatsoever.

It might just be the start of something good. Oh, once we get past the brimstone and bonfires, that is. Guaranteed, the Dark rhetoric starts spewing from pulpits tomorrow.

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