A family history in three boxes. I think.

21. March 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: family follies · Tags:

Today, I did something that I had been planning for a long time.

4-generationsMy mother left all my grandmother’s diaries and journals to me in her will. I had had them, along with a lot of other stuff from my mother and grandmother, in our storage room for a long time. But I didn’t know they were to be mine till after my mom died.

At one point, while my mom was still alive, I went through all the stuff she’d left with us when she moved back east and put it all in new boxes. She’d had to move in a hurry and a lot of things were just thrown into any old box she could find. I wanted them to be stored neatly and properly, and shipped back to her. At one point I talked with my youngest brother about getting them shipped, and sent quite a pile of new boxes with him, with that in mind.

Well, circumstances changed and the boxes stayed at my brother’s house. I was pretty sure there were three boxes of journals and I was pretty sure they all went with him. So, last time he and the family were coming to visit us, I asked if he could bring those boxes back.

He brought back two boxes, but only one had journals in it according to the label on the side (the other said it was manuscripts). It turned out that I had one box of journals still here in our storage room. We have a vintage glass-fronted bookcase in the bedroom and it had long been my goal to put the journals all in there, but quite a bit of other furniture reshuffling had to be done before that was possible.

So we’ve reshuffled, I moved the books that were in that bookcase, and went to open up the boxes of journals. The one my brother brought back had only a few journals in it. The rest was just miscellaneous books. I brought in the box from the storage room and found journals from 1940 to 1983 (the year Gran died). I know there is another box with pre-1940 journals in it. I wish I knew where that one went.

Good incentive to clean the storage room, and I guess I’d better check with my brother, too.

Although I’ve skimmed through several of the journals to find references to important family events, there’s a lot more that I haven’t explored. Reading her handwriting is going to be… fun.  :)

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A new year

06. January 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: just thinking... · Tags: , , , ,

I have been really terrible about updating my blogs for the past couple years. I have so many other writing projects that this and my tattoo blog have really fallen by the wayside. I’m trying to work out ways to remedy that in 2013, including writing a book. We’ll see how well I do.

2012 was a good year, all in all. My daughter and her partner traveled to NYC to get married, and my husband and I celebrated our 40th anniversary. My small business is making a small profit. I completed NaNoWriMo for the fourth straight year, and now have 150K+ words written on what will be my third novel. I am determined to get that into good enough shape to send to agents by my birthday at the end of this year.

Tybalt D. Cat is still with us, and will be 19 years old in May. We are dealing with his health problems and count every day we’ve still got him as a blessing. His last remaining sister died this past summer, so he’s now the only one of Caliban’s children left.

The men in the family got my Vespa fixed as my birthday present. I had despaired of ever being able to ride it again. My husband also arranged tickets to Disneyland for my birthday and our daughter treated us to lunch at Blue Bayou, which I had never thought we’d be able to afford. Getting my picture taken with Minnie Mouse remains the only thing I have never done at Disneyland that I wanted to do. I have no idea if we’ll ever go there again, but if not, I’m still happy.

In October I signed up for a pilot program that the American Diabetes Association is running with Weight Watchers. I had never considered Weight Watchers before even though my daughter had been quite successful with their online program. I thought it was too expensive and the program was too restrictive. I’m still of the opinion that it costs a tad more than it needs to (thus keeping many people from joining up) but I have been amazed at how easy the program is and how few changes I really needed to make in my life to be successful. And I have indeed been successful. My weight has gone steadily down and I’m now using half the insulin I once did.  The LA Times had an article about diabetes control in today’s paper (link below) and their reporter certainly hit the nail on the head.

It wasn’t all good news. Our sewer pipe finally clogged up completely right before Christmas and we had the joy of using a porta-potty for a week while the plumber got things sorted out. On the bright side, the job ended up costing less than we thought it would. I had hoped that the money I’m going to earn assembling some rack mount computers would pay for a new MacBook Pro, but it’ll have to go to fixing the sewer instead. That’s a pretty minor first world problem, when you get right down to it, and I can keep saving up for the MacBook and get it next year.

I hope all my readers have high hopes for good things in 2013. I certainly do.

http://www.latimes.com/health/la-me-clinic-diabetes-20130106,0,2996357,full.story

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Aw, Mom.

11. June 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: blowing off steam · Tags: , , ,

My kids lose patience with me pretty quickly. I suppose that runs in the family, since my mother drove me crazy on a regular basis. However, my mother and I communicated by talking with each other, so usually it was not difficult to get the general tone of the conversation.

Being a Modern Mom, I communicate with my kids via text message, Twitter and IM a lot. (For those of you who don’t know me, my “kids” are in their 30s and got their first computer in the mid 1980s.) I first started chatting online in 1984 and know that it’s ridiculously easy to misunderstand, misconstrue and just plain go off into woo-woo land when all you have is letters on a screen, but still…

We rearranged the office not long ago. Part of the new arrangement involves putting my Mac computer in a corner that’s

office arrangement

My little corner of the world

not quite big enough to hold the arrangement I have for its keyboard and mouse. There’s not room for another desk in here, I’ve had bad luck with KVM switches, and… well, trust me, the Mac has its own separate Microsoft Natural ergo keyboard and wireless mouse, and they take up space, and I made a “desk” of sorts for them by putting a Levenger lap board on top of a Dave table from Ikea. This worked wonderfully in Office 1.0. Office 2.0 doesn’t have enough room, even after I chopped about three inches off one end of the Levenger board.

I’m working on my third novel with Scrivener for Mac, because it is the BEST, hands down (the PC version is hot stuff, too, but the Mac edition’s been around longer and has more features). This means that every day I have to try to type while working in less space than I really need.  So, what’s the point, you say? Well, the other night I idly wrote on Twitter that I should start saving up for a Mac laptop. I meant it in terms of “and then I’ll have more options as to where I sit,” and my kids took it as “there she goes, trying to reinstall Windows to fix her wallpaper AGAIN” and came down on me like a ton of bricks.

Honestly, I was surprised and a little hurt by the reaction. I mean, I get enough of that from them when I deserve it, but this caught me completely by surprise. Trying to explain myself just annoyed them more. I could console myself with the thought that they weren’t pulling that on MY mother.  :)

So, I figure that if I save up at the same rate as I did to buy my Mac Mini, I can probably have the least expensive Mac laptop in about a year and a half. Of course, by that time Apple will have abandoned the current cheap model, raised the prices and put in something completely new, but hey, a gal’s gotta have goals.

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Rejoice, rejoice, you have no choice

12. February 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: commentary · Tags: , , , ,

The RainbowRecently, a bunch of terrified religious leaders slapped their names on a “marriage and religious freedom” screed that anyone with two functioning brain cells could see was a horrendous collection of lies. You know, marriage is under attack, religious freedoms are under attack, religious organizations are going to be forced at gunpoint to do all kinds of things they have been taught to believe are totally icky… blah blah blah.

One of the signatories was the Commissioner of the Salvation Army. As it happens, I am a descendant of two of the Salvation Army’s shining stars, and I have their last name. All those other fearful-faithful brethren would not even see a letter I wrote to them expressing my opinion on the subject of Bronze Age superstition clouding 21st century minds beyond all reason… but in that one instance, my name would get me an audience.

I took the opportunity to write. I was polite but firm. Signing that hateful collection of absolute lies was reprehensible. To be honest, I never expected a reply and I was fine with that.

In one of those cosmic connections that defy imagination, I got a reply. It arrived in our mailbox the same day we got the news that our daughter (also a descendant of those two shining stars) and her partner of seven years had gotten married in New York City.

I told the commissioner (among other things) that he was standing square in the footsteps of George Wallace in the schoolhouse door and that my family and I were very sad that his unfortunate lifestyle choices would prevent him from sharing in our happiness.

Marriage equality is inevitable. And the people who frothed at the mouth about it are securing for themselves a place in history right alongside George Wallace, Orval Faubus, Lester Maddox and others who truly believed that they were right.

Creative Commons License photo credit: Kaptain Kobold

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Scrooge and Scrounge

14. November 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: family follies · Tags: , ,

My parents, and my husband’s parents, grew up during the Depression, but they had vastly different experiences with it. While my inlaws were carefully taught to be frugal, to take care of their things, to not waste food, and never to get rid of something that was still good, my parents were insulated from all that. My father’s parents were wealthy, and while my grandmother went through a lot of hardships, my mother was tucked away at boarding school where everything they felt she needed was supplied.

Thus, my inlaws lived frugally, were as self-sufficient as possible and taught their kids that wasting food and throwing peacock and urnthings out that were still good was something akin to a capital offense.  My parents were lah-di-dah about it all, and if things broke, they had no idea how to fix them, and were more likely to just go buy another one.  They also threw other people’s stuff out without a second thought if it got in their way. And it never would have occured to them to buy anything second hand.

When my husband and I married, our parents’ styles didn’t affect us as much as one might think.  For one thing, I was tired of my parents’ needless helplessness and utter cluelessness about money, and there was never a chance in the world I would follow in their footsteps.  I always assumed I could fix things, and I did all the kitchen stuff my mother wasn’t interested in, like baking and making jelly and so forth.

However, the business of “still good” and “don’t waste food” was a bone of contention.  I was not a member of the Clean Plate Club, and I saw no harm in disposing of food that was past its prime.  I didn’t just pick the moldy part off the bread or the cheese and eat the rest.  And while I was as frugal as possible (our financial situation dictated nothing less) I was not a fan of cobbling things together and making do.  When you’re as broke as we were, you do a lot of that, but there’s nothing that says you have to like it.

As time has gone by, and our lives have gotten steadily better,  I’ve been more and more adamant about not cobbling-together, and doing things right the first time.  I saw a book title that was appropriate:  If You Haven’t Got the Time to Do It Right, When Will You Find the Time to Do It Over? And yes, I sometimes toss out, or give away, things that are still good.  We donate bags and bags of books to the library and clothing and household items to the Salvation Army every year.  This satisfies my husband, because it means the items have a chance to be useful for someone else.

What got me going on this today?  Well, one of the things I am taking time to do right is fixing a longstanding problem in our kitchen.  When we moved in here, there was a battered, broken, stained, rotten looking ceramic soap dish (or more properly what was left of it) set into the tile backsplash in the kitchen.  I talked for years about knocking it out and replacing it with decorative tiles.  Even bought the tiles when we were on vacation in Arizona two years ago.  A few weeks ago, my husband dealt with the remains of the soap dish, and I installed my decorative tiles.  The only thing left to do on that project was to remove the ghastly, crumbling caulk around the sink (something else we should have done years ago).

My husband brought home a tube of name brand kitchen/bath silicone sealant that he’d scrounged from somewhere a week or two ago, with the idea of using it to caulk the sink.  Today, since he’s away for a training meeting all weekend and I have the chance to do the work on the sink my way (let’s just say our repair-work styles are mutually incompatible; I’ll talk about that some other day) I got at it with a razor knife and a screwdriver and scraped the last of that godawful old caulk out of there and left it to dry for an hour or so.

And then I picked up the scrounged tube of sealant.  There was an expiration date stamped faintly into the crimp at the end of the tube.  USE BEFORE 04/03, it said.

I got some more at Home Depot.

Creative Commons License photo credit: van swearingen

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The magic bus

23. May 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: just thinking... · Tags: ,

I don’t remember exactly when I took my first ride on a city bus.  I do know I was in grade school at the time, and it’s just about 100% guaranteed that neither of my parents was with me.

My parents came from a society (bedroom communities of New York City) where men of substance rode public transit every day.  There was no social snobbery aimed at men whose wives dropped them off at the train station for their daily commute, nor those who rode the subway to their upper-crust office destinations.

However, despite my parents’ everyone-who-is-anyone-in-NYC pretensions, we didn’t live there.  We lived in central 58s-019 modifiedVirginia.  And in central Virginia, riding the bus was for, you know, THOSE people.  Even though there was a bus stop a block away, and a frequently-arriving bus that would transport him to a stop directly across from the front gate of the college where he taught, I can pretty much guarantee that the notion of riding that bus never once crossed my father’s mind.  Ever.  (If the car was out of order he’d get a ride with a colleague.)

Each morning, he’d pile us kids in the car, drop us off at school, and go merrily on his way to work, where he would park and leave the car for the rest of the day.  That’s what men did.  The fact that my mother therefore had no transportation didn’t enter into it, nor did the fact that we kids had to walk home from school, every day, regardless of the weather.  (No, this isn’t one of those “uphill both ways barefoot in the snow” stories–most of the time, we didn’t mind walking that mile.)  Needless to say, the idea of taking a bus anywhere didn’t occur to my mother, either.

However, I had no problem with it.  If I could wheedle the money out of a parent, I could go all kinds of places.  Two bucks would finance a trip to the movies downtown, plus drinks and popcorn, for my oldest brother and me, and my mom started trusting me to manage that destination when I was nine or ten.  I got myself to school and back on the bus after I transferred out of the mile-away elementary school.

To be honest, I liked riding the bus then, and I like riding the bus now.  Granted, I don’t ride it anywhere near as often any more–public transit in Los Angeles sucks, and getting to most useful destinations via the MTA can most charitably be described as slow.  However, I take the local bus service to and from my class at the community college each week and I still feel the same about bus travel as I did as a kid.

There’s a great sense of equal community on the bus.  Here we all are, from our different spheres, having one very important thing in common.  We’re all on the bus.  I have noticed that the old rules don’t seem to apply any more, though–in my youth, any kid who didn’t break land speed records getting up to offer his/her seat to an older person would be ordered to do so in no uncertain terms.  Nowadays, I seem to be the only person who ever offers a seat to an older person, and for pity’s sake, I’m pushing 60 myself.

If you haven’t ridden a bus lately, give it a try.  Pick someplace you can get to easily and go.  You might be pleasantly surprised by the experience–if you can get some zoned-out kid to give you a seat.
Creative Commons License photo credit: Xaragmata

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Not so strange brew

04. May 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: just thinking... · Tags: ,

Lifehacker today did a story about storing coffee beans.  Which got me to thinking about coffee in general.

My parents were big coffee drinkers.  They had one of those old-fashioned stove-top percolator pots that was featured in the Maxwell House commercials that so many people of my generation remember.Comet 5 Cup Range Perk The pot has a basket inside, into which you put the coffee grounds, and you fill the pot with water and put it on the stove.  As the water comes to a boil, it shoots up the stem that the basket sits on, into the glass knob on top, and falls back down into the grounds.  That water steeps through, drops back into the pot and gets re-perked.  The down side of this is pretty obvious; you can end up with coffee thick enough to stand a spoon in in short order.  Plus, you have to keep an eye on the pot and turn it off after whatever the brewing time is.  That’s where my parents had problems.

My mom was prone to going off somewhere and zoning out and forgetting about the pot.  She boiled them dry on a regular basis and once even left it so long that the aluminum actually melted into the stove burner.  After paying for someone to fix the stove, my dad decreed that from then on they would drink instant coffee.  (My mom would then put water on to boil in a saucepan on the stove, zone out elsewhere, and…   well, you get the picture).

Regardless of how the coffee was brewed, my parents poured a lot of milk and sugar into it.  They would take the wet spoon out of the coffee, dip it in the sugar bowl, and leave chunks of coffee-congealed sugar behind.  My brothers and I raised major objections to this, since we didn’t want coffee lumps in our Sugar Coated Sugar Sprinkled Sugar Soggs cereal in the morning.

I always liked the smell of brewing coffee, but loathed the taste.  Every time I was offered a sip I’d try it and gag.  But I loved coffee ice cream, go figure!  I could never figure out what the difference was and why one would be nauseating and the other delicious.

Fast forward many years.  I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes and thus had to revamp my entire set of common food choices, including beverages.  Since I thought diet soda tasted vile (something I have not really changed my opinion about over the years) and I got tired of drinking water, on one business trip I decided to try a cup of coffee with just some cream in it.

What a revelation.  It wasn’t the coffee I had loathed so much, it was all that milk and sugar!

Not long afterwards, my daughter got a part-time job at Starbucks to help pay her college expenses.  One of the benefits of being a Starbucks employee is a free pound of coffee per week.  And so I became a free-coffee beneficiary and got a coffee grinder and thus entered into the wide world of coffee culture.  I had never set foot in a Starbucks till my daughter started working there, and she had to write down for me what she thought I should order.  I’d never heard of “caramel macchiato” in my life.

My son worked at Starbucks for a time, too, and thus my supply of free bags of coffee continued.  I got lazy.  I’d take whatever was brought home.  But after he left Starbucks I had to start making my own decisions about my own coffee.  I tried Armenian coffee from the international market up the street.  I tried small-roaster brands from Whole Foods.  I tried the in-store-roasted coffee from Costco.  Then I started experimenting with cans of coffee from Trader Joe’s.  (All the while ignoring all those mailers from Gevalia.)

Well, gang, I think I have finally found a winner.  Scandinavian Blend from Trader Joe’s.  Best combination of taste and price I’ve found in all my travels.  It’s so good it tempts me to have more than my one cup of regular coffee per day (I’m sensitive to caffeine so I have to be careful how much I consume, and when).  With just a little half-and-half in it, brewed in my Aeropress, it’s as close to perfect as it gets.  At least for me.  (That’s an Aeropress on the left, and if you haven’t tried it you have missed out on some really extraordinary smooth rich coffee…  I’m convinced it’d make even Folgers taste good).

Are you a coffee drinker?  Do you go to great lengths to store and brew “properly” or do you just dip out of the can from the supermarket and enjoy the ease of use?  Have you signed up with Gevalia?  I’m still not convinced about those guys.  :)

Creative Commons Licensephoto credit: phlora

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counting my blessings

29. December 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: just thinking... · Tags: , ,
jeweltones

Image by outlier* via Flickr

Years ago when my kids were in grade school, the annual vocal-music concerts used to have pretty much the same songs every year.  And one of them was “Happiness” from “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.”  (trivia fact o’ the day: F’zer and I saw that in its initial run in New York, with Gary Burghoff as Charlie Brown)

One year, the music director took pictures of various kids for a slideshow to accompany that song.  Vengeant was pictured with “two kinds of ice cream.”  I don’t remember if we were given a copy of that picture.  If we were, I can’t find it.  But it doesn’t matter because I remember it quite clearly.

My grandmother the medicine woman always used to ask people to count their blessings every day–especially people who were feeling blue and unloved.  Do you have a place to live?  Do you have food? Do you have enough clothes?  Do you have family and friends?  Are you healthy?  Did you learn new things this year?

Blessings don’t have to be tangible, and too often we forget how good life really is, in the face of Bad Things Happening.

Well, this year, a few Bad Things did happen.  My mom died.  But the blessing was that she never knew how sick she was.  And the outpouring of love and good memories at her memorial service was amazing.  People with only the most distant connection to the family took the time to show up and pay their respects.

Beyond that, though, I feel like I really do have “two kinds of ice cream” this year.  I’m healthier than I have been in years.  My blood pressure is normal for the first time in 20+ years, and my diabetes is finally under control.  F’zer and I celebrated our 36th anniversary in September.  My kids are happy and healthy and everyone in the family has a job.  We have our house and enough money to live on.  I got to spend time with all my brothers and their families this year for the first time in ages.  I went to my 40th high school reunion and had a great time with people with whom I’ve been friends for over 40 years.  Several of them asked me to move back to town.

F’zer and I are getting to spend more time together for the first time since I can’t remember when.  He can take days off and we can go do things, and as time goes by we’re finding more of those “things” to do.  I have a flexible schedule, so we don’t have to look too hard to find a time when we can be out and about together.  If you’ve ever lived in a situation where there was absolutely no flexibility about work, you know what a blessing this is.

I took some college classes and learned a lot of new skills that I had been interested in learning for a long time.  I have read an average of five books a week all year long, both fiction and nonfiction.  F’zer and I have gone places locally that I had never gone before, even after close to 25 years in the LA Megalopolis.

I recently got rid of the very last remnants of the last bad times in my life.  I burned some sage, as my grandmother had me do, to clear the last of the evil from the house.

From now I can only say, with joy, onward and upward!

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Farewell, Paul Newman

27. September 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: family follies · Tags:

My mother had the hots for Paul Newman from the get-go.  People used to tease her about it, we four kids included, but that bothered her not a whit.

I find it somewhat melancholy to reflect that Paul Newman died of lung cancer, just like my mother, and within a few months of each other.

I do hope Mom is getting to meet him in the afterlife and, um, express her appreciation for his talent.

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Happy birthday, Mom

14. September 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: family follies · Tags:

My mother would have been 79 today.  She always told us she wouldn’t make it to 80 and we always told her she was being silly.  I guess she got the last laugh.

This poem always reminded me of her.  Don’t take it literally; Millay was referring to the Greek version of “hell,” not the Christian one.

Prayer to Persephone

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Be to her, Persephone,
All the things I might not be:
Take her head upon your knee.
She that was so proud and wild,
Flippant, arrogant and free,
She that had no need of me,
Is a little lonely child
Lost in Hell,—Persephone,
Take her head upon your knee:
Say to her, “My dear, my dear,
It is not so dreadful here.”

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