Off to Seattle for the weekend to see my beloved stepmother Susan and hear my friend Jim Fergus read from his terrific new book, The Wild Girl : The Notebooks of Ned Giles, 1932 I am thoroughly looking forward to a few days in a real city — I haven’ been to Seattle since the summer of 1994, when I worked my first high-tech job there. Just think — reliable shellfish, raw oysters, actual Asian food, Elliott Bay Books, and I get to see Susan’s new house. If you’re a vegan planning a vacation, you may visit the best USA…
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All day long. Some hail in mid-afternoon, but for the most part it’s been one of those days characterized by low-hanging clouds in the mountains, and nice cool, slow spring rain. I planted some potatoes this morning (dark of the moon is the time to plant root crops) and the rain this afternoon is exactly what my garden needed.
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The doorstep Buddha and the daffodils were buried this morning under several inches of new, wet snow. It snowed all day — big fat wet flakes covering everything in the garden. I love this time of year. One day it’s seventy and sunny and I’m outside checking buds on the roses, looking to see which perennials are up (trying to remember what I planted where), and then a day later, everything is covered in a nice wet blanket of not-very-cold snow. Luckily, the apple trees have only just started budding out. I didn’t get any apples last year, and it…
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Okay, I’m an official dog-geek now. Look, it’s Odin, Prince Rainier’s faithful, six-and-one-half year old dog following his coffin through the streets of Monaco. The news wire said that Odin followed along "limping slightly." Make me cry already.
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Yesterday it was 75 degrees and sunny. Today it’s snowing.
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Sometimes a person just needs a weekend where you really don’t do anything. This is a concept I came to late in life — until I moved to California and got my job at the Big Corporation, I’d always worked at least two jobs, and one of them was usually retail. Which means I didn’t have weekends — I’d have a day off somewhere in the middle of the week, and after a while I managed to get out of working Sundays, and so it was something of an adjustment when Patrick and I moved in together, and those weekends…
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Although it looks like the job issues are starting to settle down for the short term, I’m still not sure that this isn’t the beginning of the end for me at the Big Corporation where I’ve been working for the past few years. I never thought I’d ever have a corporate job in the first place — I mean, I was a writer and an academic and in general, ever since I gave up on New York City in my twenties, had been someone who’d chosen quality-of-life over making a living. But when I finished my PhD and was so…
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It’s funny, the things you don’t notice until you’ve left a place for a while. I’ve lived in the Bay Area twice, when I was getting my Master’s Degree, and then again when I left academia and decided to get a “real job”. I liked it okay. I never really felt at home there, but it always had its charms. There were good restaurants and fabulous produce in the Farmer’s Markets, and the landscape itself was lovely. There were evenings I’d be driving home from the South Bay, and I’d come over the hill from Pleasanton, and there would be…
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I woke up this morning thinking about a comment that Leah, over at Struggle in a Bungalow Kitchen posted on her website. Apparently, by blogging about domestic life, and in particular, blogging about cooking a nice dinner for her husband and young son on Valentine’s Day, she called down the Voice of the Disapproving Feminists upon her head. Apparently, choosing to love one’s family, and to think about the ways one cares for them, and to blog about this “does next to nothing to promote woman as a healthy, vitally aware, culturally meaningful being in the world.” Clearly, something about…
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How did I live to be this old before realizing what fabulous television this is? I dropped the dogs off this morning to be cleaned up — it’s been a long winter and they were shaggy and dirty — and Barb, the dog groomer, mentioned that tonight was the sporting dog division (as my boys were, uncharacteristically, sitting and being attentive). So this afternoon, I checked out the USA network, and last night’s dog show was on during the afternoon. Who knew? I LOVE the dog show. The dogs are so fabulous (although the handlers, as a group, need a…