T.T.T. in Session

But first ... Shortly after Jeri and Phil left for Tahoe yesterday, I got a text from her telling me they had left a bag of peaches in the outside refrigerator an for us to enjoy them.

We did.

I am becoming a big fan of puff pastry!

However, that doesn't explain T.T.T.

Several years ago, during the Bush Administration, my friends Joan and Nancy and I -- and a couple of other women -- would get together periodically for lunch and it always turned into a Bush Bashing session.  In fact, we decided to call ourselves the Bush Bashing Babes (I think) and started planning Bush Bashing luncheons because they were so much fun and we could let off a lot of steam that way.

Obama hasn't been terribly good fodder for bashing, so our group has kind of lapsed in the past 8 years.  Oh we still have lunch together from time to time, but have nothing whatever to grumble at...which is kind of nice, when you think of it.

Today we were having lunch to say goodbye to our friend Grainne, who was about to return to Ireland.  Grainne is here so often, I sometimes forget that she has returned to Ireland because within a few months she will be back.  She comes and house sits for friends when they go on vacation.

She has friends all over Davis and there is even a bench in Central Park dedicated to her.

So there were six of us gathered together to say goodbye yet again to Grainne (she will be back in two months).

We had a lovely lunch.  My patty melt, on marble rye bread was really impressive.

We had been eating and chatting and enjoying ourselves when Nancy suddenly said "Hey! We haven't even talked politics yet."

Well, you can imagine what erupted.  So much Trump Trashing that we decided we can now refer to it as "Trump Trashing Time."

We did a lot of talking and laughing and expressing ire and amazement at some of the things that come out of that man's mouth.  Grainne shared the opinion of the Irish regarding the Orange One (they think he's an idiot).

We were still in the midst of Trump Trashing when a woman came over and said she had been watching us and trying to decide what we were talking about, because we were having such a good time, but she couldn't hear what we were saying so she finally decided to come and ask.

I told her we were talking about Donald Trump.  In some of these upscale retirement communities, you do feel a little uncomfortable saying that because you never know when you are talking with a dyed in the wool republican, but she said she wished she'd known what we were talking about because she had a lot to offer herself.

Shortly after that, we broke up and headed home.  I walked with Grainne and our friend Pat, freshly out of the hospital following a minor stroke, and we said our goodbyes.

It wasn't long after I got home that I got an e-mail from Nancy with another Trump article and the suggestion that we not wait until Grainne returns, but we needed to get together in another month for another Trump Trashing Time.  Somehow it just, temporarily eases the depression over the possibility that Trump could be elected...and the even more depressing thing about how many truly ugly people this campaign has brought out of the woodwork, people who have hidden their prejudices for decades in their homes, but now Trump has given them the courage to dust off their pointed hats or hate filled signs an parade them on Main street, whooping and hollering about what they will do to African Americans (they don't call them that, of course) when Trump is elected.

And whichever way the election turns out, I suspect they aren't going back into hiding again real soon.

I wonder how the general citizenry of Rome felt as the Roman empire was falling....

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But there are still truly wonderful things in the world and the production we saw tonight of The Hunchback of Notre Dame is certainly up there with them.  I haven't written my review yet, but I suspect it will be full of so many superlatives someone will think they paid me to publicize the show.  From the magnificent set to the augmented chorus that positively filled the theater to the cast, especially John McGinty, a deaf actor playing Quasimodo who was incredible.  He can speak but not sing and his on stage singing voice Jim Hogan worked seamlessly with him so that when Quasimodo needed a singing voice (or a speaking voice for longer speeches) Hogan was there to unobtrusively provide that voice for him

The the whole production was absolutely fantastic.  Music Circus is one of only three theaters in the country which Disney has licensed to do this show...and they certainly did the company proud!

Next Best Thing To...

People are always saying something or other is the "best thing since sliced bread."  But did you ever think about we came to have sliced bread?  I participate in a "Trivia a day" thing which asks various multiple choice questions.  Today's question was "who invented sliced bread."  I guessed wrong.  Here is the correct answer:

In 1927, a jeweler named Otto Frederick Rohwedder created the first automatic bread-slicing machine for commercial use. Rohwedder, the owner of three jewelry stores, used his work with watches and jewelry to invent new machines. Convinced he could develop a bread slicing machine, he sold his jewelry stores to fund the development effort and manufacture the machines. In 1927, Rohwedder successfully designed a machine that not only sliced the bread but wrapped it. The first loaf of sliced bread was sold commercially on July 7, 1928. Sales of the machine to bakeries increased and sliced bread became available across the country.

By 1930, only two years after the debut of sliced bread, Wonder Bread was building its own machines and distributing pre-sliced loaves of bread throughout the United States. This product is what put Wonder Bread’s name on the map.

I appreciate Mr. Rohwedder whenever I make my own bread and try to slice it.  Even with the help of an electric knife, I can never get the slices uniform...and thin enough.  So thank you, Otto Rohwedder.  Nothing is the best thing since sliced bread.

However, lunch with old friends may come close.  Our friend Grainne has been here from Ireland again and is about to return to the auld sod, so a group of eight of us gathered at the University Retirement Community to have lunch and tell her goodbye until she returns again (which she does about four times a year).  We spent about an hour and a half and discussed everything from death, dying and dementia to turkeys in Davis to Frederick's of Hollywood.  But what happens at these lunches stays at these lunches!  Suffice to say there were tears and lots of laughs.

I also got my first pocket letter finished and mailed off to my partner.

Reading more about this craft today (after sending this), some consider this a different type of letter, where you are sharing something of yourself as you type.  I didn't really do that, but I am happy about how this turned out.  It was a "yellow themed" pocket letter.  Six of the pockets were supposed to have gifty "stuff" in them.  So starting at top left behind that are a few tiny note papers, then behind the smiley face are a bunch of smiley face stickers.  The next pocket has tags in it and the tape across it is like packing tape which holds down two foreign coins. 

In row two, I had to use the yellow brick road, of course, and the pocket contains Wizard of Oz stickers, the middle pocket has a card of washi tape samples and I actually changed the pocket on the right I had used the book mark that you see (one of the magnetic ones) but then found one in a gold color with a nice quote on it and I substituted that because it was more in keeping with the yellow theme.  The pocket itself is empty.

Bottom left contains a personal letter from me and the next two pockets are empty, but just had a bit of a design on them.

As I said, I have never done this before and am not really very crafty but I found my craft genes were stimulated as I worked, so I've signed up to do a music-themed pocket letter and someone in Belgium is looking for someone to make a San Francisco themed pocket letter, which I thought would be a lot of fun, so I offered to make one for her. 

It's all more fun, at least, than sliced bread!

Wear Grey

Today is the day we're supposed to wear grey for World Elephant Day, to raise awareness of the plight of elephants worldwide.  I read about elephants a lot, but I was not aware that 90 elephants a day are killed for their ivory tusks.

If we don’t all get involved the time’s going to come when the elephants are gone
Dr Jane Goodall

There are only 40,000 Asian elephants and 400,000 African elephants now, and at a death rate of 90 per day, that number can be reduced significantly very quickly. I would hate to think that the elephant could become extinct in my lifetime.

So I wore grey today, though I'm not sure my shirt is exactly conducive to raising awareness of the plight of elephants.

My shirt is more a "save the pinatas" shirt!  But it is grey...and by telling you about it, I am helping you understand the scope of the problem.

I wore my grey shirt to another lunch today.  This was mostly the lunch group with Grainne last week, with a slightly different make-up.

What a delightful lunch.  We were eating at the Jade Garden.   I thought I had been to every Chinese restaurant in town, but had never been to this one.  It may have become my new favorite Chinese restaurant. For starters there was that fabulous honey walnut shrimp.

Grainne shared that she was overseeing an exam in Ireland awhile back and started dreaming about this honey walnut shrimp and had to text someone in Davis about it...it was one of the things she has to have while visiting Davis.

But of course any meal is only as good as the group of people attending, and if I were to put together a group of people for an interesting meal, I couldn't choose better than this.  One of the people was someone I hadn't seen in a couple of years, who recently moved and has become somewhat of a recluse.  Another was a guy I may or may not have met 30 years ago.  It seems likely our paths have crossed, but I didn't recognize his name...or him.  And of course we are both 30 years older and while I haven't changed any in the past 30 years, it's possible he may have.

..

It is always so refreshing to be able to discuss current events with like-minded people and release some of that frustration that builds up inside the more one watches the news each evening, including the shocking and appalling rise in hatred in this country.  The "them vs. us" mentality and what it is doing to our country. And this was part of what went on at lunch, along with lots of good-natured taunts and lots and lots of laughs.

Grainne was pleased to hear that I had gone to Central Park to find her bench, sitting in front of the city carousel.

(The insert is what is written on the placque attached to the bench.)

I was sitting next to my friend Joan, whose daughter was the very first person I knew to die after we moved to Davis.  She was very young, in grammar school, and was killed in an auto accident on an icy street (one of the 2 or 3 days when it has snowed in Davis over the past 40 years).  In the "getting caught up" part of our lunch, someone asked Joan about her children.  She said "I have three girls...well, actually four girls, but Katie is deceased" and then went on to give an update on the remaining girls.

After I commented to her that the most difficult question I ever have to answer is "how many children do you have?" we agreed and shared how we handle that seemingly simple, innocent question. 

Grainne leaves in a couple of days to return to Ireland, so this was our last chance to see her.  But she will be back in December, so we will have a chance to do it all over again around Christmas time. 

Day 43:  Happiness is another lunch with long-time friends

Grainne

Well, I was unhappy today because I left the house with neither camera nor cell phone, so was unable to take a picture of our little lunch group...and we had such a good time sitting there for nearly two hours at the University Retirement Community deli.

The reason for the lunch was to get together with Grainne Wilson, who is from Ireland. Grainne made friends with a couple from Davis back in the 1970s, when they were spending a year in Dublin. They invited her to come and visit them, and that has evolved into her coming at least twice a year to Davis, where she house sits, dog sits and does...I don't know what all...for friends she has made here.

The photo on the right is a photo I took when we had lunch a couple of years ago. She is here with my friend Joan, who was also at the lunch today, along with three other Davis women I have known for decades -- another Joan (whose kids are good friends of ours), Pat (who, with her husband was a member of the Davis Comic Opera Co.) and Judy (whose kids also went to school with ours).

For her 60 birthday, last year, a group of some 80 "Friends of Grainne" (FOGs) held a big party for her and some of her relatives even traveled from Ireland to be here for the event--and to see what the lure to Davis sometimes three times a year was.

Grainne reported today that when they left here they said they understood ... and she told them not to come back again, because she didn't want them taking the attention that she had been getting.

The picture below was from an article that ran in the Davis Enterprise about her 60th birthday.  I think this was the birthday where a bunch of FOGGIEs bought a bench in Central Park, dedicated to her ("See?  You don't have to be dead to have a bench!" she says, with delight).  She got to choose the quote that went on the bench and she picked the last line of a poem by Yeats at the end of his life, contemplating portraits of his friends at the Municipal gallery: 

Think where man's glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends. 

In truth, I came late to friendship with Grainne, and I'm not really a official FOGGIE, though I have met her at several parties, enjoyed chatting with her, and have had lunch with her a couple of times on her recent trips here.  Demands on her time when she is here are great and I felt privileged to be a part of this lunch group today. I always enjoy her, especially because, as an Irish woman, she tells a great story.   And she had lots of them today.

 

Joan S. asked her what she had been doing while here this time and she recounted a trip she had taken to Santa Cruz where she discovered that every Saturday a group of some 30 or more ukelele players gather and just sit around and play for awhile.   She loved the experience and told us about a famous British ukelele player, George Formby, and his most famous song, "When I'm Cleaning Windows," which Joan C immediately called up on her iPad so we could all hear it.  Now I want to go to Santa Cruz some Saturday and sit in on the jam session by all those ukelele players.

She also regaled us with tales of the various troubles which have befallen pets she is caring for this time (including one dog apparently so intent on chasing a squirrel that he didn't see a tree and ran smack into it).  The thing about seanachais (Irish story tellers) is that they can make the most mundane stories delightful. 

I'm sorry that I had no camera today, because it was such a fun group.  But in place of a group photo, I can now forever remember George Formby and the deightful Irish woman who introduced me to his music.