You’ve gotta watch this. I know, there are so many gotta-watches, but this one really is neat:
And here’s another If This Doesn’t Just Take the Cake contender. This one would make even the most spoiling parents feel better about themselves:
Oh, she feels sorry for those of us who aren’t gorgeous. What compassion!
Filed under lifestuff, Unbelievable
YogaMum tagged me back! Here’s a marriage meme for Valentine’s Day.
1. Where / how did you meet?
At a coffee shop. He sat down at my table. We talked. We went out for dinner. We saw each other again and again and again. (There’s a longer version, but this is the short, sweet one.)
2. How long have you known each other?
Twelve and a half years.
3. How long after you met did you start dating?
Immediately!
4. How long did you date before you were engaged?
Maybe a month. I knew within minutes of meeting him that we would be married—this sounds weird, but I had a vision of a wedding ring on his hand and I just knew it.
5. How long was your engagement?
Six months.
6. How long have you been married?
Twelve years.
7. When is your anniversary?
January 1.
8. How many people came to your wedding reception?
Hmmm, don’t remember. I think about fifty.
9. What kind of cake did you serve?
White?
10. Where was your wedding?
At a Divine Science church. The reception was at our house (which, until then, was my house).
11. What did you serve for the meal?
There wasn’t a formal meal. We served food buffet style after the wedding—people brought dishes to share (this was a very informal reception).
12. How many people were in your bridal party?
My daughter and a best man.
13. Are you still friends with them all?
No, the best man apparently didn’t like me very much (we ran into him downtown a couple of years ago and he said in a shocked voice, “You two are still together?”).
14. Did your spouse cry during the ceremony?
No. I didn’t either, but I shook like a leaf.
15. Most special moment of your wedding day?
My daughter playing her violin and reciting her letter to her new step-dad (she had just turned 10). The letter was about her hopes for their relationship and it was lovely.
16. Any funny moments?
During photo time after the ceremony, the best man made my grandfather laugh by clowning behind the camera (too bad he didn’t like me—he was funny!). As a result, we got the best photo of Grandpa ever (he didn’t usually smile for the camera—probably didn’t like his smile).
17. Any big disasters?
Other than shaking like a leaf—no.
18. Where did you go on your honeymoon?
To Jamaica. We stayed here. It was a beautiful, beautiful place to stay, but we were ready to leave by the time our honeymoon was over.
19. How long were you gone?
Ten days. It seemed a very long time to lounge in one place. I wonder if I would think that now, with the meditation and contemplative lifestyle I’ve gotten used to?
20. If you were to do your wedding over, what would you change?
I might change the weather. It was very cold and snowy.
21. What side of the bed do you sleep on?
The north side.
22. What size is your bed?
Queen.
23. Greatest strength as a couple?
We love to spend time together.
24. Greatest challenge as a couple?
Dealing with stuff like finances. We both like to hide our heads in the sand.
25. Who literally pays the bills?
I do.
26. What is your song?
We don’t have one, but he loves all romantic songs. I like some romantic songs, but I have to like the song itself, not just the words; he’ll go for sappy words! I’m not as romantic as he is.
27. What did you dance your first dance to?
I don’t remember.
28. Describe your wedding dress.
White. Lacy sleeves, lacy bodice. Pretty, but not very formal.
29. What kind of flowers did you have at your wedding?
I don’t remember exactly, but we had a lot.
30. Are your wedding bands engraved?
Yes, they say My love, my life, my world. Because the rings were made in, and shipped from, Germany, I was a little worried they’d mess up the English. Silly worry! I should’ve known Germans wouldn’t do something like that (I’m half German myself, and I know all about perfectionism).
Tagging . . . hmmm, I’m not sure who all is married and who is not. So I tag these three married folk: Jan, Diane, Fran.
Jan tagged me a few days ago, but I’ve been in the real world and out of the cyber world, so am just now getting around to it. This is similar to that ten facts about me meme I did recently, but I’ll try to think of new tidbits for this one.
The rules:
– Link to the person who tagged you.
– Post the rules on your blog.
– Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
– Tag six people and at the end of your post, link to their blogs.
– Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
1. I’m a piler. I have four piles on my desk right now (of course, several books and lots of paper in each pile). It’s a bad habit.
2. When I was a kid, my dad called me Big Bird (my sister was Little Bird).
3. I once called my daughter a stupid cow. It was a moment of incredible frustration in one of those back and forth arguments that never end and was said half-jokingly (I say half because part of me wanted to say something mean). Of course she’s not a stupid cow in any possible sense of the words, but sometimes the worst comes out. We still laugh about it.
4. I bite my nails. I started when I was a kid because my older brother did it and I’m still doing it!
5. Because my father was so strict, I ended up lying to him all the time as a teenager. Now I almost can’t tell a lie—even when doing it as a joke, I’m terrible at it. (I say almost because, of course I can if forced to, but I’d feel incredibly uncomfortable.)
6. Okay, this isn’t about me, but it came to mind, so here it is. My mom was working on the campaign to pass the Equal Rights Amendment* when I was a kid (this was around 1970/71) and she’d have my sister and I help her stuff envelopes or whatever. My parents had been divorced for several years and my dad was (is) extremely conservative, completely against the ERA and everything it stood for (women as equals? no way.). Anyway, on one of our weekend visits to our dad’s house, my sister, who was about six years old, made a bumper sticker and taped it to my dad’s car. It said, All the way with the ERA. She didn’t realize she was doing anything “wrong,” of course. I don’t remember his reaction, but I imagine he was very unhappy. I wonder if this is one of the reasons he was so unyielding in indoctrinating his children in conservative ideology—he felt he had to counter my mom’s influence. It worked, until I went to college and read books like Richard Barnet’s The Roots of War (yeah, it must’ve been assigned by one of those liberal professors, but all I can say is the facts opened my eyes to a reality that I had been ignorant to before that; it’s better to know the truth and then make up your mind than to be blindly stick to what you’ve been taught).
I know that many of you have been tagged with similar memes already, so feel free to decline if you want (feel free to decline even if you haven’t done one!). That in mind, I tag: YogaMum, Kirsten, Scout, GypsyGirl, Moonymaid, CrankyHausfrau.
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*The Equal Rights Amendment is very threatening:
Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.
Photographer Peter Menzel and writer Faith D’Aluisio traveled the world, dining with thirty families in twenty-four countries. According to NPR, “they wanted to see how globalization, migration and rising affluence are affecting the diets of communities around the globe.” These photos come from their book Hungry Planet: What The World Eats.
Each family is surrounded by a week’s worth of groceries.
Germany : The Melander family of Bargteheide, Germany
Food expenditure for one week: 375.39 Euros or $500.07
United States : The Revis family of North Carolina
Food expenditure for one week : $341.98
Japan : The Ukita family of Kodaira City
Food expenditure for one week: 37,699 Yen or $317.25
Italy : The Manzo family of Sicily
Food expenditure for one week: 214.36 Euros or $260.11
Great Britain : The Bainton family of Cllingbourne Ducis
Food expenditure for one week : 155.54 British Pounds or $253.15
Kuwait : The Al Haggan family of Kuwait City
Food expenditure for one week : 63.63 dinar or $221.45
Mexico : The Casales family of Cuernavaca
Food expenditure for one week: 1,862.78 Mexican Pesos or $189.09
China : The Dong family of Beijing
Food expenditure for one week: 1,233.76 Yuan or $155.06
Poland : The Sobczynscy family of Konstancin-Jeziorna
Food expenditure for one week : 582.48 Zlotys or $151.27
Egypt : The Ahmed family of Cairo
Food expenditure for one week : 387.85 Egyptian Pounds or $68.53
Mongolia : The Batsuuri family of Ulaanbaatar
Food expenditure for one week: 41,985.85 togrogs or $40.02
Ecuador : The Ayme family of Tingo
Food expenditure for one week : $31.55
Bhutan : The Namgay family of Shingkhey Village
Food expenditure for one week: 224.93 ngultrum or $5.03
Chad : The Aboubakar family of Breidjing Camp
Food expenditure for one week : 685 CFA Francs or $1.23
Filed under Eyes Wide Open, food, lifestuff
Merry Christmas! And may our celebrations be about family and friends and love. May we be mindful of the true spirit of the season.
Filed under lifestuff
for the whole weekend and, as a consequence, failed to notice that I was a taggee. Good ‘ol YogaMum got me (back)! [and I don’t mean that she is old, I mean good-‘ol—because she’s younger than me!]
So . . .
What is your least favorite holiday task? (e.g. shopping, cooking, wrapping)
Shopping, especially for my husband—it’s so darn painful. Every year I try to talk him into not buying gifts for one another, and every year he nixes the idea. He loves to buy clothes for me. My daughter’s boyfriend is also painful to buy for. These men!
What was the worst gift you ever received?
Tied:
1) The gifts my dad “gave” when I was a teenager that, he said, “belong to the house,”meaning they were “mine” until I moved out. A stereo, a t.v., an electronic keyboard (that he actually borrowed money from my bank account to buy—he did pay it back, but still). Gee thanks.
2) All the gifts (I don’t remember exactly what they were now, but they were numerous and they were lovely) that a boyfriend gave me one Christmas when I knew I was about to break up with him (maybe he knew, too, eh?) That made it even harder to do the deed.
Who is the hardest person in your family to shop for?
My husband. He buys what he really wants which is mostly computer stuff. Sweaters and scarves are getting old . . .
What holiday tradition would you eliminate if you could?
Hmmm, can’t think of one . . .
What do you swear, every holiday season, that you’ll never do again, only to find yourself doing it again the next year?
Wait till the last minute to send packages, thereby standing in line in the post office line for an hour to do it (which I did today, thank you).
What relative do you dread seeing at the holidays? Or, when you were a child, what relative did you dread seeing?
The only relative that I don’t want to see would not come to see me, either, so I don’t have to worry about that. There are a couple of people I don’t see most years, anyway, that are at the level of mini-dread (mosquito bites). The family I see at Christmas time, I love to see!
Taggees, if you’re up for it, are: Jan, Kirsten, Fran (when you return from CA—get to work!)
Tagged by Jan!
What are your three favorite Christmas songs and who sings them?
Of course, I have to start right out cheating. There are so many great Christmas songs that I decided instead to list favorite Christmas albums.
Christmas Portrait by the Carpenters (The Carpenters may have been 70s corny, but she had the most gorgeous voice and this is a classic Christmas album—if only they didn’t overplay it in stores at Christmas time)
Songs for Christmas by Sufjan Stevens (Cranky turned me on to this one; I’m lovin’ it)
A Marian Christmas (especially Biebl’s Ave Maria—heavenly!) by the Choir of Trinity College
What are your three favorite Christmas foods?
Fudge with nuts
Grandma’s popcorn balls (which I have never managed to make without them falling to pieces, even with her recipe)
Candy cane cookies (my mother’s recipe, almond flavor—yum!)
Can I also say pumpkin pie, please? (it’s not like we get to eat it all year ’round)
What are three Christmas Secrets?
I’m afraid I can’t think of three. This one is probably similar to everybody else’s. When I was around ten years old, my mother remarried and they went out and spent what must have been oodles and oodles of money on gifts for my sister and I. Well, Mom “hid” them under a sheet in her room and told us not to look. Yeah right. My favorite was “Charlie,” a ventriloquist doll. Honestly, I can’t remember what the other gifts were, just that there were a lot of them (shows that spending a lot doesn’t necessarily make it memorable).
What are your three favorite Christmas movies?
The Bishop’s Wife (Cary Grant plays an angel—it’s great)
It’s a Wonderful Life (Jimmy Stewart)
A Christmas Carol (George C. Scott)
Little Women (Susan Sarandon, Winona Rider)—cheating again; I have to add one more, though it’s schmaltzy, it’s still a lovely holiday movie.
Now, taggees, if you’re game, are:
Heather, Charlotte, Moonmaid (and YogaMum, if you’re not too bogged down—I hesitate to do this, in case it’s like the straw on the camel’s back, so feel free to say no). I’ve picked people with a lot going on (why did I do that? I dunno. Maybe you need to take a break and think about silly little things for a bit.)
Yesterday was J’s 22nd birthday.
Happy Birthday to you!!
This is the first time my cake did not collapse in the middle. Yahoo! Celebration! Ring the bells! Okay, in the interest of full disclosure, it was a little lopsided, but it looked pretty good. Unfortunately, I did not think of taking a picture before it was devoured. I only make a cake once a year and every year the layers come out of the oven looking like meteorite crash sites (how did meteorites get in my oven?).
It’s the altitude, of course. For a long time, I thought it was me, that I was born with a cake baking deficiency. Mais non! It does help to adjust for the havoc altitude wreaks on a cake. Less sugar and leavening agent, more flour, more liquid, big eggs, higher oven temp, shorter baking time. Maybe I’ll bake a cake every once in a while, now that it doesn’t seem a foregone disaster. (I still have to figure out how to thicken up my frosting).
Bringing out the camera encourages J’s penchant for making faces. Here is her birthday picture (click for a bigger view of her lovely BIG eyes).
Do you know how many pictures I have of her with eyes crossed or some other clever facial bizarrity*? Actually very few, because they’ve been trashed. There are worse behaviors than hamming for the camera, of course, but mothers like to have pictures of their kids looking normal, especially on special occasions.
Of course, she’s had to put up with a parent with an abnormal penchant for picture taking, so maybe she’s actually been incredibly patient and I’m the one who’s weird. I mean she’s had a camera stuck in her face from the instant she was born. Hmmm. . . .
Happy Birthday to you!!
I am so blessed. So so so so incredibly blessed. Words can’t even get close. Blessed blessed blessed.
Love Love Love Love Love
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* I like making up words and I can do it if I want, ’cause it’s my blog and I’m the decider (and I get to be the decider for ever and ever, ’cause once you’re the decider, you’re always the decider).
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Guinness tastes very good with vegetarian goulash. Very very scrumptiously good (I also don’t have to use commas if I don’t want).
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Coming soon . . . a Salt of the Earth post.
Tagged three times recently and what a sluggard, I haven’t managed any of them—busy, actually—working on that interbeing post at gartenfische and finding all kinds of cool, cool images and articles on the Internet (plus the usual life stuff). My mind is whirling. I apologize, friends, for my uncooperativity/invisibility. I’m writing up the most recent meme, that came from Jan, because it’s freshest in my mind and it’s short and I’ll never catch up with all the reading I have to do (your blogs!) if I write all three.
First let me say that memes like this are difficult for me because I seem to have the memory of a goldfish. But I’ll do my best. . . .
Name five of your favorite all time gifts, either given or gotten.
First of all, there was the beautiful meal-gift that I wrote about recently at gartenfische. That was such a beautiful gift because it was unexpected and he got nothing in return, not even a thank you. But I decided I want this meme to be about family, so I want to mention that one, but it’s not one of the five (well, actually . . . sigh. . . six).
1. 
For P’s last birthday (a month ago). Truly a gift that I was able to give this gift. She has touched our lives so deeply, and turned out to be a gift as much for me as for him. Click on the photo for a bigger view—if she’s not the cutest thing you’ve ever seen, you’re not allowed to say it (and yes, she needs a haircut, we haven’t found a groomer yet).
2. The gorgeous homemade cards and jewelry that my daughter has given me over the years. I can’t express how much they mean to me (and no, I am NOT saying that because you’re reading this, J). Besides the fact that they really are beautiful, how great is it that she, who is busy, busy, busy, takes the time to hand make gifts?
3. Blue, the German Shepherd my mom got me when I was around seven or eight, who I trained and loved with all my heart (but this beautiful gift was also taken from me when my mom decided to move into an apartment and gave her away—this was the first time my heart was truly broken).
4. My dad’s stopwatch, from his days of high school athletics, that he gave me when I was a teenager. My dad used to do this thing where he’d give a gift and then say it belonged to the house (bizarre?)—which meant that it wasn’t really mine to keep (he did this with a stereo, a t.v., an electric piano). It turns out that these weren’t really great gifts, anyway—the best one was something that was meaningful to him and came out of his personal history.
5. The gifts that P buys me, because it makes me feel incredibly loved that he spends the time and energy to find things that he knows I’ll love. He may wait ’til the last minute, but he doesn’t run out and pick up just anything. Always thougthful, always from the heart, always beautiful.
6. Okay, I’m cheating again, but I can’t leave out my grandfather, who gave me so many gifts. He was the most generous person I’ve ever met. About seven years ago, he paid for me to have laser surgery on my extremely, extremely near-sighted eyes. This photo was taken at his surprise 80th birthday party. He died two years later.
This post made me cry! Didn’t expect that. It also brought home how most gifts really aren’t memorable—when we run out and pluck something off a shelf, it’s not often a heart-gift, it’s just a thing. It also makes me realize that I can’t think of any really worthwhile gifts that I have given, other than number 1. That’s sad.
In our family, some of us don’t buy Christmas gifts for one another anymore, we donate to an organization that we know that person will find meaningful. I like this.
I’m not tagging, but if any of you want to do this, please do, I think it’s a lovely meme (it’s a gratefulness meme!).
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I’ve been enjoying Sufjan Stevens Chrismas music thanks to the cranky hooker—I mean cranky hausfrau. (Husband likes it, too—especially Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing—which surprised me, because I thought he was just tolerating it.)
When I was a kid I often dreamt of flying. The dreams tapered off over time—the last one was at least fifteen years ago and it was probably the most spectacular of all. Even now I can almost feel the exultation of swooping and soaring. For something that took place in the mind, the sheer physicality of the experience was amazing. It was body.
I’ve never been afraid of airplanes; when I was a kid, I enjoyed flying—especially take-offs and landings, because the rest is mostly coasting along (except, of course, when weather determines otherwise). When I was around thirty, I read Richard Bach’s book, Illusions. His love of flying is contagious. I was still infected when I met my husband, and he bought me a calendar of women in flight, with lots of (well, about twelve) historic photos. I must still have it . . . somewhere.
This video, posted by Jan on her blog, reminds me of my dreams:
(I love the music—I wish I knew what it was—if you do, tell me!)
Looking at the photo of the Wright glider (1902!) and the video, I marvel at how these very mortal human bodies sometimes do amazing things. Flying! Flying with bodies unarmored, exposed to weather, to injury, to the real possibility of death. Oh, to do something awesome, in spite of fear—how I wish I could, but alas, I am too protective of this one body.
When I first came to Christianity, I found an art print of a woman flying; it was titled Coming Home. The image sparked me to realize that that was exactly how I felt: I was coming home, and I wasn’t just walking, I was flying.
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Do you, or did you, have flying dreams? How can we—land-bound without the help of some apparatus or other—dream of flying so gloriously? I wish I’d have another. . . I don’t have the nerve to try a windsuit.
I’ve been thinking about this topic for quite a while.
I watched my mother go from a woman who seemed self confident and generally satisfied with life, to a woman who—in my opinion—has crawled inside of herself, has lost her self esteem and looks at the world through gray-tinted glasses. This is a view from the outside, so I can only think my impression of her when she was younger was exaggerated, because how can a person do a 180 quite like that?
My perception is that her self confidence was not based on a sense of value that came from within, but from others’ reactions to her and feelings about her.
Let me ‘splain.
She was very attractive when she was younger. She loved male attention; thrived on it, I think. And she always looked young for her age and loved it when people told her she didn’t look old enough to have a daughter my age (of course, she also became a mother at nineteen, so when I was nineteen, she was only thirty-eight).
One day I was talking with her on the phone—this was probably ten years ago now—and she was upset about something that had happened in the little health food store she clerked at. A man came in—I think she said he was fiftyish—anyway, she asked if she could help him and he ignored her, turning instead to her younger female counterpart. Then the guy proceeded to flirt with “the other woman.”
My mother has brought this up in conversation several times, and I mark it one of the incidents that precipitated her “slide.”
The store episode happened not long after her partner of at least ten years left her for his previous wife. So it was like a body slam and then a kick.
I have watched my mother’s fall with a lot of sadness and a bit of apprehension. There go I?
My daughter and I saw a new dentist yesterday. We walked in and the dentist and his wife were standing at the counter and asked if people often mistook the two of us for sisters. It’s nice, I’m not saying it isn’t, but I think of my mother and I know I’ve got to wean myself from this stuff because it will end.
Our sense of value has got to come from within, not from others. For a female, appearance-approval is touted as the greatest thing we could ever hope for. Women pay a lot of money for this.
You are the princess. The beautiful princess.
I want to be a worthy example for my daughter; I want her to feel good about herself, not because of her looks, but because of who she is inside. She is an absolutely gorgeous young woman, both inside and out. Thankfully, she isn’t all that smitten with male attention, but our society hammers away at women: This is what’s important about you—your hair, your cheekbones, your body. I heard over and over and over when she was a teenager: She could be a model. Other parents couldn’t understand why I wasn’t trying to get her into modeling. I was watching my mother, I was noticing other middle aged and older women who seemed uncomfortable with themselves, I was watching myself. I was well aware of society’s over-emphasis on girls’ and women’s looks. Why in hell would I want to lead my daughter down that path? She could be a model. So?
I watch women. Of course I do, because I naturally watch people. But lately, I especially watch women. I watch younger women who are in love with being noticed. I watch middle aged women trying to hold on to that notice. I love to see women who look like they’re over fifty and feel good about themselves.
I think a woman’s mother’s attitude to appearance and admiration has a lot to do with how that woman sees herself and where she seeks approval—from within or without. But I also think that, if necessary, we can consciously work at over-riding her example and become whole from inside.
What do you think about this subject?
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What do you think of this theme? I like it, but I’m concerned that the font is too small and I can’t edit the css. Let me know. . . .
Filed under lifestuff
So it’s good to start a new blog. It’s like a mini new life.
Why do it? Why a mini new life? Because I prefer to keep my other blog spiritualish and this will give me a space to write about other topics that interest me.
That’s the idea. We’ll see how it goes.
Please stay tuned. . . .
Filed under lifestuff
Wyrdbyrd's Wyrld 