Shrove Tuesday

It's no secret that I am not a religious person.  I am spiritual in that I believe there is a something bigger than ourselves, but not an old bearded man in a golden chair watching over everything we do, giving conflicting orders to different religions.

However, that said, I grew up with traditions around religion.  So I celebrate Christmas, Easter and other religious holidays.  Maybe my favorite holiday is Shrove Tuesday, which is rooted in the Christian tradition of Lent, the 40 days before Easter when people are encouraged to give up certain luxuries as a penance for their sinful ways.

If you live in New Orleans, you do it in spectacular fashion during Mardi Gras ("fat Tuesday") celebrations.

I don't think much about my sinful ways when Shrove Tuesday rolls around.  I think about the fact that tradition says you eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday and I am all about pancakes.  The explanation for why you eat pancakes is that pancake recipes are thought to date back to the Pagan times as a way of using up eggs, flour and milk in one dish and you are thus able to rid your house of temptation before Lent starts.

Some Christians believe that the four ingredients in pancakes represent the four pillars of the Christian faith: flour for sustenance, eggs for creation, milk for purity and salt for wholesomeness.

The heck with that.  I just like pancakes, but I rarely make them. 

However, this year we received a gift from Walt's sister and her husband following their trip to the east coast....

...and Shrove Tuesday seems to be the best time to try it out, so we will be cracking out the cinnamon bun mix and real maple sugar and celebrating Shrove Tuesday this morning.

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We have a smoke detector that drives me absolutely nuts.  We have one downstairs and one upstairs.  It seems that all I have to do is turn on the stove and it goes off.

Any time I am cooking anything, the slightest bit of searing causes the damn detector to start blaring.  And 90% of the time it happens when I'm in the middle of doing something I can't stop doing to push the button that quiets it.

The button is in the middle of the detector, which is on the ceiling just inside the front door and can be reached by a pole that I use to push up on it, if I can center the pole around the tiny button.

 

As I get older, my balance isn't all that great (one reason I walk with a cane) and standing under the damn detector with my head tilted all the way back trying to get the pole centered over the little button has more often than not caused me to get dizzy and lose my balance.  Thank goodness there is a wall for me to hang onto, which means I'm working with only one hand to push the button.

Walt is almost always upstairs when the smoke detector goes off and has to come down, climb over the gate that blocks the stairs so that Polly doesn't go upstairs, and silence the detector.

If I'm alone in the house, I may let the detector go off for several minutes until I finish what I'm doing.  No neighbor has ever come to see if everything is all right!

Every night I end up cursing the damn smoke detector.

Last night I was getting ready to sear some shrimp and had put oil in the pan and was standing with my back to the stove, patting the shrimp dry, when the smoke detector went off.  I cursed, Walt yelled that he'd get it and then when I turned back to the stove, I saw that it was on fire.  A potholder I had left on the stove had caught on fire, as had a wooden spoon.

In an instant, my hatred of the smoke detector melted and I was glad we had it.

I just wish they made smoke detectors that were easier to turn off.

All in the Family

I'll tell you, the internet is a strange and wonderful place.

In yesterday's comments there was a note from a woman named Penelope West, who said she was the granddaughter of my grandfather's brother.  I emailed her and we have been having a lovely chat about family -- what I know and what she knows (far more than what I know!).  She also sent me a photo of my grandfather's brother, taken in 1898 -- he is the coxswain in this boat.

Obviously this doesn't give you much information at all!  All of the brothers in my grandfather's Irish family made names for themselves.  Tommy almost became champion bantam weight boxer, until he was blinded by someone who wanted to prevent that from happening.  My grandfather made his name in vaudeville, where he was a well known Irish tenor and nearly got a recording contact (until my grandmother put the kibosh on that), my godfather Fred was a famous six day bicycle racer, with lots of headline reports of his wins in the scrapbook I inherited after my father died, Roy ended his career as a bouncer at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, and apparently had a feud with SF Columnist Herb Caen.

Apparently Penny has a son living in Davis and she visits here occasionally, so we hope to get together some day.  We are second cousins after all!  A follow-up email from her shows that we have been kind of crossing paths in our lives for years. There is also a woman in Argentina who is a second cousin on my mother's side with whom I have been Facebook friends for a few years now.

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What an absolutely wonderful afternoon I had yesterday.  I was invited to a luncheon to celebrate the year of the dog, which starts next week on the Chinese calendar.  Our hostess has two daughters-in-law who are Chinese and so she celebrates each year.  It was interesting to see a poster of many dogs hung up for the year, since she is also terrified of dogs!

There were four guests.  Two or three others had to cancel out for various reasons, but the five of us who were there just had a great time.

The table was loaded with tea leaf eggs like these

These are a typical Chinese savory food commonly sold as a snack, in which a boiled egg is cracked slightly and then boiled again in tea, sauce and/or spices.

There was also a lovely fruit salad and also several kinds of cookies (including fortune cookies--my fortune said I was going to do "something different" this weekend.  We are going to a show, which is not exactly "different" but Confucious got it half right.)

We just sat and ate and chatted for several hours and it was just wonderful.  After you chat long enough it starts to become cathartic and you realize how much you miss that sort of interaction.

We were sent home with mandarin oranges, and instructions to eat them at the end of the week because if you eat one at the start of the new year, you will have luck all year long, or so it goes.

Sunday Stealing

1. Do you prefer winter or summer? Why?
Winter.  I'm not a hot weather person and you can always put on warmer clothing, but there is a limit to how much you can take off when it's hot

2. What are your favorite winter activities?
No real "winter activities" but curling up with a good book and a warm quilt.
3. Can you tell me about a time you went skiing or skating?
When I was in college, a group of us decided to go skiing.  I had never been.  I rented all the equipment here before we went into the mountains.  A guy was going to teach me how to ski and we started on the bunny slope  I remember him yelling at me to "plough!"  I had a difficult time holding onto the rope toe because I have always had terrible grip strength.  The third attempt to get to the top of the bunny slope, the heel came off of my boot and since I'd rented it here, I couldn't get a replacement.  By that time I was pretty tired of skiing anyway.  I've never gone again.

4. Have you ever made a snow angel?
Sure.  Those are fun.

5. Is your house cold?
We are lucky that we have a 2 story house and it both keeps the warmth in winter and the cool in summer.

6. Do you have a fireplace in your house?
Yes, but it hasn't been used in years.  For one thing there is a burn ordinance here, for air quality control.

7. What do you usually do to keep warm in the winter?
I wear a lot of sweatshirts over my t-shirts, and quilt over all of that, when I sit down.

8. Have you ever gone hiking in the snow?
I don't think so.

9. Tell me about a snowball fight you had.
I can't remember, but I'm sure we must have had snowball fights with the kids when we took them to the mountains.

10. Have you ever looked at a snowflake carefully?
I have not but I was really intrigued by the Big Bang Theory when physicist Leonard trapped a snowflake in glass for his girlfriend.

11. Do you have a sled? Have you been sledding?
I think we had one when the kids were little.  I don't think it lasted more than a year.

12. What do you usually do after a big snowfall?
Watch about it on TV since it does not snow here.

13. What’s the best thing about winter?
Cooler weather!!!!

14. What’s the worst thing about winter?
Well, in California, where we have drought conditions, not enough rain.

15. Have you ever been in a blizzard?
No.

16. Can you describe ice for me?
The ice I'm familiar with comes in cubes, is cold and wet and crunchy and goes in a glass over some liquid.  Then there is the ICE that likes to tear people away from their homes and send them to countries they have never visited.
 
17. Have you ever slipped on ice and hurt yourself?
Yes.  I was crossing the road in front of our condo at Lake Tahoe, where I had taken a bunch of students from Chile.  I slipped and fell on my head.  The leader of the group happened to be a physician and got me to the local ER to stitch up the gash in my head.  (The doctor by the way, returned to Chile and at one time was the physician for Augusto Pinochet.  I watched him give updates to reporters on YouTube.)

18. Have you ever had to shovel snow?
No, but I have a daughter who lives in Boston and she has definitely had her share of shoveling!

(her truck is under all that snow.  This was 2015)

19. Will you be watching the Olympics?
Not religiously, but I will watch at some of the events.  Loved the opening ceremony, especially watching the two girls from N and S Korea jointly carrying the torch.  The true spirit of the Olympics.

20. If yes, what are your favorite events?
I particularly like the downhill skiing (slalom and jumping) and snowboard events but also enjoy the skating events and any competition where the talking heads have spotlighted a specific athlete that I can cheer for.

Saturday 9

Saturday 9: My Funny Valentine (1991)
 
Unfamiliar with this week's tune? Hear it here.

1) In this song, Ms. Kitt sings that her lover is her favorite work of art. Tell us about a piece of artwork you can see from where you're sitting now.

 

 

 This is a painting by one of the gyn doctors I worked for, supposedly of me, when I left the office (notice it says "The Word Goddess").  I had no idea she painted.

2) She asks him to not change his hair. When will you next find yourself in the stylist's chair?

"Stylist" never.  Cutter soon.  I go to SuperCuts and I am due for a haircut.

3) Ms. Kitt always wanted to be a performer and attended the New York School of Performing Arts (aka the "Fame" school). Think back to your high school self. In what ways would you be surprised by how your life turned out? Well, at the time I graduated from high school, I planned to enter the convent 3 months later.  Obviously I didn't.

4) Ms. Kitt took over the role of Catwoman on TV's Batman. Name another Batman villain.
Is The Joker from Batman?

5) Ms. Kitt enjoyed tremendous success performing in Parisian nightclubs. Have you ever been to Paris? 
Yes.  Twice.  I need to give Paris a third try.  I had always dreamed of being in Paris but missed the special feeling I always felt I would have.  Nice city and some nice memories but unpleasant memories too.  It was not the "magical" city I expected it to be.

  
This is the last Saturday  9 before Valentine's Day and so this morning we shall focus on the upcoming holiday. 

6) The holiday is also known as The Feast of St. Valentine. Do you have a special meal planned for next Wednesday? No.

7) The phrase "wear your heart on your sleeve" began in medieval times. On Valentine's Day, men would celebrate the holiday by displaying their lady love's name on their sleeves. If you were going to adopt this custom, whose name would you wear?
Walt's, of course.
 

8) Women buy and send more Valentines than men do. What's the last greeting card you received? My birthday is next week and today I received a birthday card from the volunteers at the local hospital

  
9) Men buy and send more roses at Valentine's Day than women do. What's your favorite flower? I used to always say yellow roses, but lately Walt has bought me red roses and I loved them.

We Got It Done

There was paperwork to be signed.  Probably the last bit of paperwork my mother will have to sign in her life, but she did have to sign it and her signature needed to be witnessed so we met at Atria today with Ed, her stepson, and a notary.

Her latest obsession seems to be bits of microscopic "stuff" on the floor.  Every time I see her, she is bent over at a 90⁰ angle trying to pick up a thread or a bit of dust.  They guesstimate that's how she fell and broke her wrist.  Her balance is getting bad and bending over that far is possibly how she lost it and fell.  When she sits in a chair, she is always looking at the newly vacuumed floor and finding tiny bits that most people wouldn't even notice and picking it up.

Today she was also very bothered that there was no quilt on her bed.  They had obviously stripped it to wash but she couldn't process that.  All she knew was that there should be something blue on the bed and it wasn't there.

And her glasses were gone again, but based on how I found them last time, I looked on the floor next to her chair and there they were, barely visible behind the bed, but at least I found them.

So Walt and I sat there and visited with her until Ed arrived.  My mother has always needed a man in her life to dote on, the be flirtatious with.  She never has with Walt, for some reason, but she gets coquettish when Ed is around.

 

We talked with him about the notary and I proudly produced her (expired) driver's license, which we hoped would suffice as a piece of identification.  He gave us a sheaf of papers to look over and then realized that he had left the one piece of paper she was supposed to sign at home.  Needless to say he was  quite distraught that he had this notary coming from Sacramento and he would have to send her back and reschedule.

He went out to the front desk to meet her and break the bad news and while he was gone, Walt went through the paperwork again.

 

Ed was gone a very long time and when he came back, it was with the notary.  Turns out, he said, that he realized there were computers at Atria for use by the residents and he was able to go on line download the form that he needed, and print it off so all was saved.

We moved to the library where there is a desk and the notary, who could not accept her driver's license as identification, asked me to get two people to confirm that she is, in fact, who she says she is.  It was the absolute worst time to get an aid to help.  They had just started serving dinner and everyone was in the kitchen fixing plates, but two girls were nice enough to come down and they got the identification made.

Paperwork was presented and she signed the papers.

 

Thank goodness that's over.  It should have been done long before this, but nobody thought about it.  It may be that soon she will forget how to write her name, so we got it just in the nick of time, and thank goodness for Atria computers.

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I had to laugh when I looked back on "this day in my history" today.  I read the entry for this date last year, where I mention that the night before I had made short ribs and Red Lobster biscuits for dinner.  Guess what I made for dinner last night...?  I live my life in circles...

Least Prejudiced Person

It's rare that anybody in the Trump family makes me laugh, but Donald, Jr. actually caused me to audibly chuckle yesterday.

Good son that he is, he was (again) defending his father and among many things he said was to state that he didn't understand all the comments about his father being a bigot because he was the least prejudiced person you'd want to meet.  "Just look around the walls of his house," he said, saying that there were all sorts of pictures of his father with African American people.  They showed some of them and they all looked like they were taken at social gatherings, where Senior has his arm around this or that famous African American and both are smiling.

Surely that proves it!

I suspect my father would have thought of himself as non-prejudiced, but that claim was put to the test when my sister became friendly with a guy who worked on the cable cars and he asked her to go to the movies with him.  My father went to the cable car museum, found the guy, and told him he was sure that he was a very nice guy, but he felt that the races weren't meant to mix and that he could not take his daughter out.

It was some time later when he encountered a member of the Black Panthers and apparently they had an argument about race.  My father apparently insisted to this guy that he wasn't prejudiced at all, and to prove his point he invited him to come home with him and he would show him his Art Tatum records.

 

Tatum was a god to my father and he had all of his records.  But I suspect if Tatum wanted to take Karen to the movies my father would not have let him.

Hearing him tell this story later, Walt and I decided that the only reason the angry Black Panther guy didn't beat him up was because he was laughing so hard at this old white guy trying to prove he was not prejudiced by showing him records of African American jazz musicians!

(I often wondered how my father felt about that date with the African American cable car guy when my sister brought home her girlfriend and announced she was a lesbian.)

There were times when I wished I could talk to Karen about our upbringing.  Watching the Trump faithful and hearing the terrible things they say about any non-white person, watching their children repeat those words, it makes me wonder how Karen and I didn't grow up with a predisposition to hate non-white people.

Though she worked with an African American man whom she considered a friend and whom she obviously loved, I always shuddered watching football games with my mother because she was sure to point out many, many times how many black men were on the team.  She seemed to pay more attention to the color of the players than the actual game itself.

It was worse when she married again.  Fred was a nice man who treated her like a queen and she loved him so much so I never said anything, but he and I crossed paths many times.  He was prejudiced about everybody.  One day when we were alone and my mother was at the store, he had terrible things to say about the gay community until I finally stormed out of the house saying "You know you're talking about my sister."

He and my mother had a big RV and they loved to go on trips.  How she loved those trips!  They invited me to come along once when we were headed to a quasi family reunion in Oregon.  It would be 3-4 days in the RV and it sounded like fun.  By the time we got home, I just wanted to get away from him.  He talked about every ethnic group in the world and always used the pejorative term for talking about everyone.  What was worse is that my mother echoed what he said and laughed at his offensive jokes.  I didn't really forgive him, but I didn't want to confront him because of how my mother felt about him and how happy I was that she finally had someone who loved her.  I just avoided him whenever possible after that.

She doesn't watch football any more and most of her caregivers are of some darker skinned ethnicity and she loves them, so while she might not be "the least prejudiced person you'd ever want to meet" at least she doesn't think about race or ethnicity any more.  The perks of Alzheimer's are few, but this may be one of them.

Getting ready for Robbers

James Spader was on Seth Meyers tonight, reminiscing about his childhood.  He talked particularly about a game he and his buddy played when they had sleepovers.  It was called "Getting Ready for Robbers" and involved gathering all of the "fire power" they had (everything from sling shots to BB guns) and gather them around, in, and under their beds so they would be ready if any robbers should come into the house.

I was born in 1943  We bombed Hiroshima in 1945 and the Soviet Union tested its first atom bomb in 1949, so I grew up a kid of the nuclear age.  These were the years when schools held "duck and cover drills"

Training kids to assume this position in the event of a threat of a bomb headed our way was supposed to protect us from the effects.  (Anybody ever see photos from Hiroshima or Nagasaki?)

Some folks built bomb shelters in their back yards, supplying them with supplies to last them for XX weeks/months.  I remember seeing TV dramas about the problems of panicked, unprepared neighbors trying to get into someone else's bomb shelter, which had only enough room and enough food for one family.

So at all ages we were thinking about the threat of an atomic bomb from Russia.

Somehow I got it into my head that if the Russians attacked, they would torture me.  I didn't know why people were tortured, or if they tortured kids, but I was going to be ready.  For some reason I decided that what they would do was to dunk me in scalding water and then freezing water.  So whenever I took a bath (we did not have a shower), I got the water as hot as I could stand it and then let it out and followed with cold water.

The Russians never bombed us (yet) and so my prepared body never had to deal with Russian scalding.  I suspect there are lots of bomb shelters that were turned into wine cellars and I don't think any kids today have heard of duck-and-cover.

I wonder how long before things get so hot with N. Korea that we have to start thinking in those terms again...

Speaking of the Provocateur-in-Chief, whaddya think of this glorious military parade he wants to have for himself "like the one in France."  We have a national debt of nearly $20 trillion, people can't afford health care, he has shut school lunch programs, meals on wheels, and other food programs for those who can't afford good food but we can afford a big military parade, which will cost millions of dollars and tear up Pennsylvania Avenue, which will have to be re-paved, just to assuage his emperor complex.

Can no one rein in this megalomaniac?  Apparently not...and those who might possibly be in a position to do so are just fired.  Where does it stop?

I was doing some organizing of my files today, trying to delete a lot of files that were saved in the early 2000s.  I came across this one about "nostalgia" and things to be nostalgic about and I thought I would comment on a few of them.

Slide Rules and Adding Machines. -- The slide rule makes as much sense to me as the computer does to my other.  Thank god computers came along and I can add 2 and 2 on my calculator app.  As for adding machines, I could use one, but rarely did.  Again, thank goodness for computers.

Mimeograph machines, Carbon Paper in Typewriters, and Hand-written Letters. -- there was a time when I was queen of the Mimeograph (and also the ditto--remember ditto machines?)  I knew all the quirks and could fix a machine most of the time.  Lord, I'm glad that we are beyond carbon paper.  Correcting 5 copies of something was a  real pain!  We have it SO much easier today!

As for hand-written letters, while I prefer typing, I have been known to, from time to time, hand write a letter, so that art is not completely dead here.

Cars with No Seat Belts. -- In these days when Walt won't even back out of the driveway until everyone is buckled in, it seems difficult to remember when we had no seatbelts and often had seven or more kids rolling around loose in the back of our car.  I look at our grandkids' child seats and remember when we drove to Colorado with all five kids, David just a few months old and lying in an open basket.  He was so bored on that trip that he learned to stand up by the time we got home, months before he would have otherwise.

Telephone dials -- We still seem to make dialing gestures in the air when telling someone we'll call them, but do today's kids even know what the telephones we grew up with look like?  And how about party lines?  I still remember that we had one when I was in grammar school and I got caught listening in on someone else's phone call.

Prices.   There is no way to even begin to compare prices when I was growing up to prices today.  Movies were 25 cents and you got a double feature, plus cartoons, and popcorn was 10 cents.  Candy was 5 cents unless you wanted on of the "fancy" candies, which were 10 cents.  Even as short a time ago as when our kids were babies (50+ years ago), if I spent $20 in a week for groceries, that was a HUGE amount and Walt would take exception to my extravagance.  Now I pay over $100 for just the two of us.

Silver Dollars.  I don't know if they are still in circulation outside of Reno, but I found a whole bunch of them when cleaning out my mother's things.  I still have them and haven't figured out what to do with them.