Kathy Conner

Kathy Conner plays the oboe in the Lamplighters orchestra, which she has been doing for nearly 40 years. She also reads this journal from time to time, something she has NOT been doing for nearly 40 years. Whenever I see her, she asks if she will be in my next entry and adds that she wants to be famous. Here ya go, Kathy...

(Whew...thank goodness THAT's done!)

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This wasn't intended to be an entry about Kathy, but the day was centered around a Lamplighters performance.

We left here around noon for the 2 p.m. show in San Francisco. Fortunately, Walt chose to listen to the non-stop radio traffic report on the drive down because from everything we heard, the freeway into San Francisco, as well as the Bay Bridge, was a huge mess, so we wisely decided to go the other way and enter SF via the Golden Gate Bridge instead, which turned out to be a good idea. (Kathy said it had taken her 45 minutes to get across the bridge, when it normally takes her about 10-15).

Besides, if you go on the Bay Bridge, you don't see sights like this.

Walt dropped me off while he went to park the car (because we were late and I move more slowly than he does). It was such a gorgeous day, with birds chirping everywhere and people lying on the grass in the park, and blossoms are starting to come out everywhere.

(The church is St. Patrick's, which pre-dates the 1906 earthquake by over 50 years)

The show was Yeomen of the Guard, one of Gilbert & Sullivan's less well known works, but one which I love. It is also one of the more impressive looking shows. Put up a big impressive castle and then trot a whole bunch of these guys across the stage and you just want to go "oh wow!"

This one does not have a happy ending and the performances got the requisite tears from me, which means it was a good production!

And the oboe was FABulous!

Starving Children in Bangladesh

I gave my 35th blood donation at Blood Source today. I figured I wouldn't have any hemoglobin problems this time because I was a few weeks late with the donation--and I didn't.

I had decided that after the blood draw, I would go to the Arboretum at UCD and take a walk. I've been meaning to do this for a few months, ever since I bought a new camera to take to China with us. I felt I could kill two birds with one stone -- get out there and get some EXERCISE and learn about the new camera. But the camera had come during bad weather. Now spring is coming and I have no more excuses.

While I was driving around trying to find an appealing starting point for my walk, where I could park the car without fear of getting a ticket, I was listening to KGO radio and the host was talking with his guest about the Super Bowl. A ticket to the Super Bowl really costs about $500, but right now it's Scalper Time, so tickets are now selling for an average of $4,000-$5000 per ticket.

Some entrepreneur has even sold tickets for $200 each for people to come to the parking lot, pay to park, and then watch the game on a huge TV screen (I'm not sure if this still goes is the temps are still 16 degrees)

Earlier I had watched a program which had a segment on cooking all those goodies people at home will be eating during the Super Bowl.

I don't know which country had the starving kids when you were growing up. I think I grew up in the era when children would die in China if I didn't finish my broccoli (amazing how I never questioned that as a child). I think my kids grew up with starving children in Bangladesh, though I don't think I ever used that threat. By then I had realized that no child would die if they left some green beans on their plate.

In these days, I am reading more and more about poverty around the world, since it has become such a part of my life as a result of the children I sponsor through Compassion Int'l. My $32 a month will give one of my sponsored children a nutritious meal once a day for a month. For the cost of one SuperBowl ticket, more than 150 kids could have a nutritious meal for a month.

This morning I read a very powerful blog entry by a woman named Anna Voskamp, who is a Compassion sponsor. She paints the scene of herself standing in the towel section of WalMart, while her daughters are off looking for some leotards they wanted to buy. A month before she had traveled to Guatemala with other Compassion sponsors and she had met a little girl she sponsors. She talks about the yellow dish towels she had brought to the girl's mother as a gift, the same towels that now stood in stacks with other colorful towels in WalMart and in touching photos and prose she talks about the effect visiting this little girl "starving in a dump" (as she describes it) has had on her life.

I'm not going to condemn someone for having a big bowl of guacamole on Sunday...or, for that matter, paying $5,000 for a Super Bowl ticket, but I think in the middle of all of our extravagances, it would do us well to stop now and then and think about the starving children of Bangladesh or China or Uganda or Haiti or a host of other countries around the world. And if you're pleased that you can afford guacamole or a $5,000 SuperBowl ticket, maybe you might also send a little something to an organization (there are so many of them!) which can make life just a little easier for a child, even if only briefly.

Ironically, I wrote the other day about Erick Wainaina Kimani, the 14 year old boy in Kenya who had been waiting to find a sponsor. At the time I was sponsoring three children with Compassion and writing to three more. I had decided that four was my max for sponsoring and I was kind of half saving that fourth slot in case Fred's sponsor decided s/he could no longer sponsor. But here in front of me was a child who would have a difficult time finding a sponsor because of his age and gender and because sponsorship for children in AIDS-affected areas is a bit higher.

I couldn't say no, so I agreed to become his sponsor, figuring that the possibility of Fred losing his sponsor was slight.

Today, five days after receiving Erick's information, I heard that Shallon, my second favorite correspondence child, was losing her sponsor. I have the option of taking over the sponsorship, or losing her as a corrsepondence child.

What to do...? What to do...? I'm not a religious person, but if there is one thing that being a part of Compassion has shown me, it is the power of prayer. I actually said a prayer asking God to show me the way.

Literally five minutes later, Walt brought the mail--a letter from one of my sponsored kids and a pay check from the Enterprise.

OK, God. I get it. Subtlty is definitely not your strong suit! I made the call and agreed to become Shallon's real sponsor. The sponsorship money comes out of my Social Security check, which has never been factored into the household expenses, fortunately. It goes for my frivolous purchases. My guacamole and SuperBowl tickets. The Verizon iPhone I was thinking of buying and now won't. I don't need a lot of stuff that I throw money away on and these kids need sponsors.

But this is IT, God--ok? Just keep Fred's sponsor paying for him and we'll see how things go.

Make Something New - February

I decided to get the "Whip Up Something New" for February done right away, though I know that I will make lots of "somethings new" over the month.

Tonight's dinner is Italian Wedding Soup.

the magazine picture

This recipe comes from a Better Homes and Garden magazine, Essential Slow Cooker, which I found at the supermarket the other day. It is loaded with onions, which means Walt will hate it (or that he'll spend half of the meal plucking thin slices of onion out of the soup)--but how can you cook Italian without the taste of onion (he doesn't mind the taste, he just hates the texture--Marta doesn't eat onions either, so they are "sisters in misfortune.")

Here's the recipe:

1 large onion
1 egg, lightly beaten
3 oil-packed dried tomatoes, drained and finely snipped
1/4 cup fine dry bread crumbs
2 tsp dried Italian seasoning, crushed
1 pound lean ground beef
2 tsp olive oil
1 large fennel bulb
2 14-oz cans reduced sodium chicken broth
3-1/2 cups water
6 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
1/2 tsp ground black pepper
1/4 cup dried orzo pasta
5 cups shredded fresh spinach

1. Finaly chop one-third of the onion, thinly slice the remaining onion. In a large bowl, combine chopped onion, egg, dried tomatoes, bread crumbs, and 1 tsp of the Italian seasoning. Add ground beef; mix well. Shape into 12 meatballs. In a large skillet,cook meatballs in oil over medium high heat until browned on all sides. Carefully drain off fat. Transfer meatballs to a 4-1/2 or 5 quart slow cooker.

2. Cut off and discard upper stalks of fennel. Remove any wilted outer layers. cutt off a thin slice from the base. Cut fennel into thin wedges; add to cooker. Add sliced onion, remaining 1 tsp Italian seasoning, broth, water, garlic and pepper.

3. Cover and cook on low heat setting for 8-10 hours, or on high heat setting for 4-5 hours.

4. If using low heat setting, turn to high heat setting. Gently stir in uncooked pasta. Cover and cook 20-30 minutes more until pasta is tender.

5. Stir in spinach. If desired, garnich each serving with the reserved fennel leaves.

Makes 6 servings.

(per serving: 283 cal, 10 g fat (3 g sat. fat), 83 mg chol., 515 mg sodium, 26g carbo, 3 g figer, 21 g pro)

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Report: Tastly little bugger! Good recipe.

H2O

Water. A substance essential to humans and other life forms. Without water, plants die. There would be no coffee or jello or Kool-aid. We could not live without water.

Yet, you are constantly hearing people say things like "I know I should drink more water, but I just never remember to do it." or "I try to drink water, but I just can't..."

I have a friend like that. For many, many years her "breakfast" was a super large cup (a quart size) of Pepsi that she picked up at 7-11, and a few cigarettes.

She still drinks lots of Pepsi, but she is happy to have found the 4 oz size bottle of water because if she works at it for several hours, she can finally finish it all. The 8 oz size bottle of water intimidated her and she would never start drinking it because she knew she couldn't finish it.

Drinking water has never, ever been a problem for me.

From a very early age, I loved going to visit my grandmother for one particular reason. She had an ice box built into the wall of her kitchen and in the ice box you could always find a half gallon bottle of water and a glass frosty with precipitation from the moisture in the ice box.

I loved getting water out of that bottle and would make many trips to the kitchen over the course of a visit to get ice water. The icy cold glass made it even more delicious.

I don't remember if we had water in our refrigerator at home and, to tell you the truth, I have no memories of drinking at lot of water in our house, but I loved that water from Nannie's kitchen.

I also remember stopping along the road on the way to visit my other grandmother in Inverness. This was long before highways and this stretch of narrow 2-lane road through Samuel P. Taylor park had a place where you could pull over under the canopy of trees and get a scoop of water running down the side of the mountain into a little basin that had been cut out of the rock. Fresh, clean water straight from the source. It was one of the parts of that long trip that we all looked forward to.

Over the years, I have continued to enjoy water. There was a period of a few years when we first moved to Davis when I almost stopped drinking water because Davis water has a unique taste that I just couldn't learn to like. (David, all the years he was alive, complained about water anywhere else, because he had grown up on "Davis water." Everything else for him tasted like "San Francisco water" and he hated San Francisco water. Which proves, I guess, that our best tastes are the ones we learn to enjoy in our early years.)

The reason Davis water tastes so bad is two-fold. For one thing, the water coming into Davis comes from the Vaca Mountains and has a high boron content. The mineral content is so high that you need to have a water softener to prevent corrosion of the pipes, so everything that comes out of the tap has been filtered through water softener salt and it just leaves a bad taste.

But when we moved here, I decided that if I was going to learn to live in this town, I would have to learn to like its water.

I never did. And I finally decided that the only solution for me was to buy one of those water coolers and drink bottled water.

There has been much discussion about bottled water and how it is ridiculously expensive--significantly more, per gallon, than the gasoline we all complain about. Yet supermarkets devote an entire aisle to types of bottled water. Which mountains they come from, which filters they have gone through, which has the prettiest picture on the bottle, etc.

In truth, I drink bottled water for one reason only: I like the taste. I don't care if it comes from France or the creek up the road apiece. If it tastes as good as the water that came out of the bottle in my grandmother's ice box, I'll drink it. Don't give it a fancy flavor or carbonation or some sort of weird ingredient that will give it extra zest. Just plain old ordinary water is what I want. I keep a big flat of our local supermarket's finest (and cheapest) water in the car, and replace it when it is gone. It's particular good on winter mornings when it is as cold as a bottle fresh out of the fridge.

My recent trip to France and Italy proved that money is no object if I'm thirsty. I don't know how much, total, I paid for bottled water on our trip, but I'm sure it was more than all souvenirs and gelato combined. Yet when you are dying of thirst, you don't stop to bargain with the guy who has water to sell.

At home I drink a lot of water. I drink water with my breakast, and then switch to coffee. I drink water throughout the day. I drink water with lunch and dinner. I take a bottle of water to put beside me to drink if I wake up in the middle of the night. Drinking the recommended 8 glasses of water is never a problem for me.

The glass of water I drink when I go to get a drink of water, is about 8 oz in size. Sometimes I drink two of them because they just taste so good and feel so good going down.

The nice thing about my addiction to water is that it's about the only thing edible to which I'm addicted which is not bad for my health. My doctor may warn me about carbohydrates or sweets, but she never has to remind me to drink more water.

Thursday Thirteen

Things I remember about the 1950s

1. “I Like Ike” buttons
2. Black and white TV
3. Mail delivery more than once a day at Christmas time
4. Montgomery Wards and Sears Roebuck catalogs.
5. Paying 15 cents to ride the cable car
6. Nobody I knew had an automatic transmission
7. Uncle Miltie
8. Roller skates with a skate key
9. Pope Pius XII
10. Pin curls
11. Bobby Socks
12. The Korean War
13. Buddy Holly and Sam Cooke

The Threatened Cloud Has Passed Away

Last week, I had to pospone an interview because of all the fog on the freeway which terrified me. We rescheduled it to today and the weather cooperated.

It was a weird ride down to San Francisco, though. We had clear, blue skies here in Davis but about 20 miles down the road, I ran into heavy fog--not ground-hugging fog like last time, but high fog which didn't really impede traffic, though I noticed that the highway patrol was out in force, perhaps because of the fog.

There was one spot where you go up into the hills, then down a steep hill and back up another one. I could see, starting up the hill, that it was sunny at the very top and when I got there and looked out, down into the valley, it was filled with billows of fog, interspersed with parts of the landscape that were higher and stood above the fog. I had, unfortunately, already passed the point where I could get out and take a photo, so was not able to capture it.

The only really heavy spot was crossing the Carquinez bridge, which practically disappeared in the fog, but once on the other side, it all began to turn from thick fog to just grey and I had no trouble whatsoever.

I met Alison at the BART station without a single screw up and we drove on over to San Francisco, which was sunny and lovely. We were half an hour early for our interview, so stopped at Starbucks to get some coffee and stragetize about the interview.

Baker and Ellen met in the Lamplighters, married, and now have two grown kids, one of whom plays the violin in the Lamplighters orchestra. Their daughter recently appeared as Katisha in a production of The Mikado in Sacramento.

I remember when both Baker and Ellen joined the company, and when Ellen moved out of the chorus and into principal roles. I also remembered when she substituted for Montserrat Caballé at the San Francisco Opera when the diva was unable to appear in a scheduled performance of Roberto Devereux.

As reported by Critic Robert Commanday, The work was so infrequently performed, there could hardly have been more than a few sopranos worldwide who knew the role of Elisabetta.

Ellen Kerrigan, a young Affiliate Artist who had sung an aria and duet from Devereux for a James Schwabacher lecture-demonstration, had been asked by the Devereux director, Jacques Karpo to stand in for Caballé during rehearsals, as a physical presence. That way she became familiar with the rest of the score. A week before the performance, when the conductor and/or Adler sensed something might happen, Kerrigan was asked to learn it (at no additional fee, of course). So in stepped the lovely slip of a company debutante in place of the large diva, and she did a very commendable job in the five remaining performances.

It was our one chance to go backstage at the SF opera. I remember rushing to the theatre to buy tickets, standing in line behind all the opera faithful who were returning their tickets because Caballé would not be singing.

Ellen was not an overnight sensation, but she did a damn good job and we were so proud of her and all crowded into the star dressing room after the performance to congratulate her.

So I have a long history with these people and the interview was fun, reminiscing about a lot of things.

When it was over, Alison and I found a nice outdoor cafe where we sat and had lunch and talked over the interview and the book.

I dropped Alison off at a BART station and continued on my way home, stopping at the Jelly Belly factory to buy socks, of all things. I can't eat Jelly Bellies any more (though I love them) because one of them made me lose a crown off my tooth a few years ago and Cindy suggested I give them up. But the company makes GREAT socks, which are the most comfortable I've ever worn, and seem to last forever, unless puppies get to them.

The weather all the way home was sunny and clear without a trace of the morning fog.

All in all a good day.

Something's Wrong

There was something wrong with the buffet table at our friend Concetta's 70th birthday party.

It was the usual groaning board, filled with crackers, cheese, meat balls, stuffed eggs, veggies, fruit, dips, etc., etc., etc. What was missing? CLAM DIP !!! Nobody had brought clam dip. I thought of doing it, but decided that surely Char or one of her kids would bring the clam dip, but they didn't. I brought a few cheeses and some crackers. Oh, it was all delicious, but I can't remember the last party we've had where there was no clam dip.

There was something else even more seriously wrong with the party. I went to get my camera to start taking pictures and discovered that the battery was dead. I usually have a spare battery with me, but for some reason I didn't. I was there with no camera!

I did borrow Char's camera, switch disks and take a few pictures, just so I didn't go into withdrawal. Like this one, with Concetta surrounded by her best friend Phoebe, her daughter Lara, and Kevin, who is the son of Jeri's godmother, Jeri (who, being in Arizona, was unable to attend the party).

This was a remarkable party for many reasons, but the biggest was that--whoever thought Concetta would be here to celebrate it? I remember her reporting what turned out to be the first sign of her MS--double vision. This was before we moved to Davis in 1973. Then we watched her progress from cane to walker to wheelchair and watched her paralysis grow until all the movement she has left is in her head, and the volume of her lungs has decreased to where she is all but inaudible when she speaks, even if your ear is right near her mouth.

But by golly, she is like the energizer bunny. She keeps on ticking. She survived the fire in the Berkeley hills. She still lives in that house perched atop the hill, when all houses around her burned, but hers stayed standing. She continues to travel, until recently to Australia to visit her daughter, but then Lara and her family moved back to California. She has caretakers and friends who get her around, and she continues to enjoy probably more social events than I do. She is an amazing person.

(She is able to maneuver her wheelchair around by moving the control in front of her with her chin--that's half a tennis ball attached to the controls)

This being a Pinata group party, we had a pinata and all of the children of our children lined up to knock it down, youngest to oldest, as their parents had done, Kevin in charge of manipulating the pinata, as his late father did for so many years.

Char, her son Cam and I were talking about the pinata and I joked that when we all start dying, we'll probably have a pinata at our funerals (actually that has already happened, as we had a pinata at Kevin's father's funeral). Cam joked that we could put the ashes in the pinata. Char added that we'd also add wrapped candy. What a novel way to literally scatter ashes.

As we always do at these events, we took photos of all generations. I don't remember the last time we had all of any of the 3 generations at an event--and we didn't have it today, but we certainly had a good representation.

Generation 2 & spouses

Generation 3

I wonder if we'll ever have a generation 4 picture!

There were two birthday cakes that threatened to start a bonfire.

Since she has so little lung capacity, she relied on the grandchildren to blow out the candles

They had bought the candles that keep reigniting so the kids blew for a long time. Then we all ate cake that had been spat upon by children for 5 minutes. Yum!

But it was a great party, a great tribute to an amazing woman. Happy Birthday, Concetta!