Feast of St. Ann

One of my favorite days in the calendar, one that I anticipate is this day the Feast of St. Ann. In the traditional calendar, St. Ann was honored alone. In the modernized calendar, St. Joachim has been added. This is appropriate, I think, especially in a culture when fathers are all too often relegated to roles as sit-com dads or comedy movie bumblers. Fathers, and thus grandfathers are as important as mothers and grandmothers.

I have an especial love for the images of St. Ann with the little girl, her daughter, Mary at her knee, a book open. This is an image of a woman who is clearly literate, passing on her knowledge to her daughter. She would also have taught spinning and weaving and the other domestic arts to this daughter who was destined to play such a powerful role in "salvation history", a term I put in quotes because it was part of the catechism instruction that I received as a child (also at my mother's knee--and my father's) and that I have not heard used recently.

There was, I believe, a seamless integration of the activities, what I believe today we might call "roles"--of St Ann and St Joachim as they went about their daily lives. Today the closest that many of us come to physical labor is picking up and adjusting the keyboard and the mouse and then typing as we sit down to our computers. To exercise our bodies we go for a run or to the gym.

In an earlier, pre-industrial, pre-modern society, the muscles were used everyday for everyday tasks. Spinning, weaving, sweeping, carpentry. (This raises the question, that I don't believe I have ever heard an answer to--St Joseph was a carpenter, what did St Joachim do?)

I miss hearing the lovely chants for this feast and should go poking around on the internet to see if I can find them. I am grateful for the childhood spent learning these devotions and the traditions of Catholicism, and for the time, too brief in retrospect, that I spent singing in a chant choir when I was a young woman. Grateful, too that that chant choir is still well and singing in Palo Alto.

Today is a lovely day with cloud cover still at almost 9:30. I can remember so many times that we sang in a heat wave, an evening Mass. As the sun set the cooling ocean breeze would blow in the chapel windows and doors and by the time that the last note had been sung, the last candle blown out and the last program collected, we would shiver slightly as we walked across the lawn to the house were we would have refreshments to continue the celebration of the feast.

I am grateful for these memories too and wish you a happy and blessed St Ann's Day.

Catching Up

I've been using the hot days of the last week to do some catching up. Sorting and actually shredding paper is one of the most boring task sets in the universe. Be sure not to mix the-goes-in-the-shredder-pile up with the goes-in-the-recycle pile. There is a sense of accomplishment when it is done that almost makes up for the time.

I have chores in every room of the house--grateful that it isn't a bigger house! Oh yes, I am. Too much paper, too many books, too little time. Never thought I would reach the point of too many books, but I have. I am glad for the public library and the Special Outreach Services Program that brings books to me. Fewer books would have come into the house if I had known about this earlier.

The sewing room, newly painted in the summer of 2007, may emerge this summer. That would be wonderful. The living room might be visible again before my family comes to visit. it has been a default sorting space and knitting accumulation space, with its own accumulation of books. I should take before and after pictures. Then this could become a decluttering blog!

Some of this blends with Using What We Have. A storage bin was cleared to put my new store of herbal products and supplies away where they would not make me sneeze. I was very pleased to consolidate and use a bin I had rather than buy yet another bin to stack into the clutter. More of that to come.

Reading books that are old friends that I haven't read in a decade is another example of using what I have when the library books run out. Last week I unraveled a shoulder shawl that I had knit two years ago that had not worked out quite right. In the meantime I found two more skeins of the yarn, a deep, luxurious purple color of a somewhat bulky wool yarn. I got it from someone on the Internet and had it put away. It is now two skeins away from becoming a new, warm triangle shawl for me to use come cold weather. (As hot as it was last week, it is hard to believe that it will ever be cold again. Of course, it will!) There is already a hat made from this yarn, just have to sew up the side.

This is the summer for finishing lots of small projects and then finding space to store them properly so that they can be used. It is fun to put the things from one season away and take out those for the next season. Much for fun than just letting it all clutter in bags stuck around the place.

So even though it is sometimes only one object at a time and it seems mortally slow, I am catching up. I am grateful for the return of the cool weather--it is in the 50's outside as I write this and 67 in my office. The pictures of the fog surging through the Golden Gate that are shown on the weather forecasts are some of the most beautiful that I ever see in summer. Sometimes, as I remember to take a deep breath, I am simply grateful to be alive.

Using What We Have

A friend emailed me recently that she was cleaning out her fridge and freezer prior to going on a long trip. She plans to disconnect the unit and leave it open while she is gone. She indicated that she was diligently working her way through the groceries that she had on hand rather than buying more and that this was a discipline, since what she had to eat wasn't necessarily what she wanted to eat.

This is a uniquely American dilemna, I think. (And is dilemna spelled with an n as I think that it is, or two m's as the Google spellchecker is telling me? I don't think I have ever seen the two m version and I can't find my old spelling dictionary anywhere around the computer.) I digress.

Americans are blessed with such an abundance of food as well as the refrigerators, cupboards and pantries to store it in, that we can easily overbuy from any reasonable or responsible supply.

My current refrigerator is smaller than my old one, but it still has far more food within it than I can expect to consume in a week. Perhaps more than I can consume in two weeks. The freezer is also full. I have not used all of the pesto that I made with so much love last Fall, and I must do so. It would be a shame to see that go to waste. There is no ice cream in the freezer--partly because I no longer eat anything with soy in it and partly because there simply isn't room for ice cream.

A round plate with fruit, very pretty, resides on the kitchen counter. What possessed me to order so much? Of course, when I order online, I don't see how many that will be. Still, one organic apricot went moldy and so did one lemon. It hasn't even been hot. Better to have bought less or shared more with a friend who visited for lunch on Friday.

I am considering using what I have as a challenge to clean out the kitchen. What can I have that is delicious and nutritious? What will be merely delicious? How unbalanced will my diet be if I try this experiment? I will run out of milk and definitely need to buy that.

Another challenge would then be to buy only what I need and will truly use within a defined period. The period should be defined by how long things will keep and the need should be based on a standard of nutrition that begins with protein grams, adds carbohydrates, adds calcium, adds fat and then includes fiber. (Vitamins and minerals will come primarily from supplements as they do now.)

If I were to devise this challenge and stick to it, how much money would I save? But that is probably not the whole point. The principal point is to cut down on waste and recognize that while so many people in the world go hungry, I am an American who can watch cooking shows, and be tempted to make food that is really beyond the necessary (I saw a segment this afternoon where someone put corn stuffing into meatloaf); an American who can eat anything at anytime from anywhere in the world and who can decide that I am bored with what I have on hand and order out from an array of restaurants that deliver the cuisine of the world to my door. (Limited by my budget, of course.)

All of that is good and I like it. Still, I am wondering how I will fare if I give myself this challenge. No ordering anything except milk until I have used up what I have. (I'll let you know.)

I am grateful for my kitchen and its pantry and a goodly array of supplies. For the pesto and one dozen lemon cupcakes in the freezer, I am also grateful. For the kale from a friend's garden, for the community of sharing that is my neighborhood with all of its gardens and fruit trees. For the community of sharing that is the Internet, too. (I wouldn't have the overstocked dilemna without the Internet.)

Oops, zucchini and onion correction

Sigh! I have done it again. The picture of the red onions in my last post seems to have lost the zucchinis.

Here is the correct picture.



The zucchinis were indeed the best that I have ever had.

Here is the link to the Pinconning Cheese company
http://pinconningcheese.com/
The website is a marvelous thing. So many kinds of cheese. So many kinds of sausage. I think this is probably the same shop Grandpa went to since it has been in business since 1948 and it is close to Bay City and Saginaw. I hope that when cooler weather comes in Fall I can check this one out.

In the meantime a friend emailed me that she is going to the Milk Pail, a local (Mountain View) wonderful place for all things dairy, plus produce, tomorrow. So I will have cheese to go with my beer bread. Several years ago my sister discovered Iveta Gourmet Scone mixes at the Milk Pail when she visited and they have an interesting story. Another family owned business, Iveta began in Chicago and moved to Santa Cruz. All of their mixes are formulated so that only one ingredient is needed--heavy cream. Delicious and simple. (But it did lead to my keeping cream on hand for awhile and that isn't really in the diet now.) Here is their link

http://www.iveta.com/ They ship.

I don't see the pumpkin mix listed now. It would be too bad if they have discontinued it.

The lemon cupcakes turned out well and are even better made with sour cream than they are with yogurt. Half are now in the freezer so that I won't simply eat them all at once. (Nice for breakfast, though!)

I am grateful for all of these goodies and the kindness of friends which makes it all possible.

Summer's Bounty

Last night I was grateful to PBS for producing and airing A Capitol Fourth. The fireworks each year with the Capitol Mall are so splendid. I would have been happier with a bit more patriotic music and less of the pop culture glitz, but I suppose that is me. It is good to remember what the Fourth of July is really all about and I can't help wishing that they would give us a little more history and maybe even read the Declaration of Independence aloud.

The celebration of the Fourth is part of the bounty of summer. More is in the photos below.



The first picture is of red spring onions from a neighbor's garden with zucchini from Planet Organics. The second is apricots, peaches and plucots, again from Planet Organics. Planet Organics is a family owned grocery delivery business in the Bay Area. I have gotten some amazing things from them recently.

Last Thursday evening it was finally cool enough in the house and I found the time to make Whole Wheat Beer Batter Bread, one of the recipes that I posted about two or so Sundays ago. It is fabulous. So good, that delicious does not do it justice. Simply fabulous. It wants a slice of Havarti with Dill or of a good cheddar--extra sharp, preferably.

That reminds me of the cheese my Grandpa would send us each Christmas when we still lived in Toledo. The cheese came from Pinconning, Michigan. I must look for it again here on the Internet.

More lemon cupcakes are in my Sunday schedule. Gratitude for the Fourth of July and for the opportunities to cook and bake is also a part of my day, this beautiful day.

Trains

As I was washing dishes the other day and generally puttering around my kitchen, I heard the train go by. I live three blocks over from a major expressway bordered by train tracks on the far side. The sound of trains has been with me all of my life.

Commute trains, Amtrak trains and freight trains punctuate the day and night. Now with the windows open for the summer I hear the early and late trains more than I do during the colder months. The length of the trains suggest whether they are passenger or freight, with the longer trains that I assume are hauling freight going through at night.

In Toledo, when I was growing up, we lived a similar distance from trains and I remember all too well the pictures from Life magazine of Anne Frank and the concentration camps. For a brief time in my childhood, probably when I was nine or ten, the sounds of trains scared me. I lay in my bed at night fearful, imagining what it had been like to be pushed into a boxcar traveling in the dark without water or food or a place to go to the bathroom. I had a vivid imagination and for a time the trains were not comforting.

When we moved to California my parents again bought a house that was near trains. In the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school my family took the Vista Dome train to Chicago from Oakland. This was an elegant train with its dining car, private compartment and second story for viewing the country as it rolled by. I remember sitting in the dining car with a linen table cloth and heavy silver flatware waiting for our dinner with the train stopped blocking a crossing. People were backed up, probably wishing that darned train would get moving.

We pulled into Chicago on the Fourth of July, passing through miles of stock yards and slums such as I had never seen before. (I would see them again from the Dan Ryan expressway years later when I lived in that city.) It was sobering to see a city so different from the areas where I had lived. Then we made a mad dash across town to another train station where we had a long, long wait for the "milk train" that would take us to Toledo where we were visiting family and friends.

We sat it out in the station until eleven pm and finally boarded the next train. I remember taking an escalator in the second station, one of the few times in my life that I ever did that. Escalators are scary things to people on crutches, as I was then, and require some very precise co-ordination of person, crutches and moving stairs to get on and off. Getting off is definitely trickier than getting on if my memory serves me correctly. With Papa behind me, I felt confident to try it, but was not really happy with it.

We had studied geography freshman year and I remember being very excited and waking up my long-suffering younger sister with my excitement that we were passing through the Gary, Indiana, noted primarily for its smokestacks. She still remembers this and has full rights to give me a hard time about it even after all these years. (Nearly half a century.)

When we arrived in Toledo in the wee hours of the morning we were met by the very dear friend, a tall, handsome Irish American with a fine voice and wonderful sense of humor who had been Papa's work colleague before we moved. Some years later, Uncle Ed, as we called him, would become my sister's father-in-law and "boppa" to her son and daughter. I remember his intelligence, humor, kindness and friendship to our family as though he truly had been my uncle. Along with my parents and his own wife, he is sorely missed by our family.

Finally, as a graduate student in Chicago, I lived three blocks west of the El. The stairs up to it were so daunting to me that I never did ride that train. The city traffic noise in Chicago was so great that I don't remember a distinct sound of trains such I experience now or knew as a child in Toledo.

Sometimes I think that I would like to move away from trains, but it isn't likely to happen. Sometimes I think that taking the Vista Dome across the country again would be a fun adventure. Adventures are mostly in my mind though, now that I am definitely aging and I think that I will keep them vicarious through memory and film. (Great train scenes from film would be another post! One that I saw last night was in an old Sherlock Holmes with Holmes and Watson and Holmes older brother catching up with the bad guys on the "boat train.")

I am grateful for my memories of trains and grateful for the relatively cool part of this day that will become quite hot later.

It is hard to believe that the Fourth of July is right around the corner and that Christmas is now less than six months away! (Arggh!)

Summer is Here

After an almost heat wave that didn't quite materialize I am back to sitting with a blanket wrapped around me. It is officially the first day of summer (or will be in three hours).

I celebrated by baking a Garvey's Irish Brown Bread. This is a mix that requires the addition of just one ingredient--buttermilk. It is delicious and quick. I will make it a pantry staple from now on. The mix came to me from Planet Organics. They are delivering once a month on a Friday, because that is my delivery day. The produce is beautiful. I also cooked zucchini this afternoon. They were so beautiful that I should have grabbed my camera and taken their portrait, but the space in the kitchen is a little confined and too cluttered. They were actually delicious raw too.

A neighbor, who has a prolific garden, has been supplying me with kale and salad greens. It is one of those amazing facts of life to watch a pile of kale that has filled a large skillet to overflowing shrink to a small bunch in the cooking. I keep wanting to cook it with bacon and onions, but bacon isn't one of the things that I normally have on hand.

The kale would also be good with sausages, which reminds me of summer meals of potato salad and sausages brought from Wisconsin or Milwaukee by friends as each went home for a summer visit to his respective family and came back with a carry-on filled with sausages--enough to feed fifteen to twenty people gathered to feast after singing Vespers on a Sunday evening in Palo Alto thirty or so years ago. Beer, of course, was the beverage of choice to go with the sausages.

A six pack of Guinness resides in my kitchen at the moment. One bottle, along with 2 oz of water will combine with other ingredients to make a loaf of whole wheat beer bread, the recipe I cited two weeks ago. Some more of it will be used to make the chocolate beer cake that I also cited. Since that will require opening more than one bottle, and since I no longer drink alcohol, I want to time it so that the leftover can go into the pot of whatever I am cooking at the time. (I have no aversion to alcohol, but prefer not to drink alone. Anyway, sausages, kale and onions with beer would be good. (Maybe should go back to Planet Organics and peruse the sausage offerings.)

I am intrigued by the growth of a company such as Planet Organics, the farmers markets and the CSA movement. Community Supported Agriculture brings the farm to the urban dweller though subscription boxes of produce while providing capital to the cash strapped farm. I love this and I also love the Farmer's Markets.

I am grateful for the lovely cool weather this weekend and the chance to catch up cooking, which I do not do on hot days! I am also grateful for this lovely food in my pantry and fridge and for the Internet, which gives me a constant supply of new recipes and sources for a plethora of fine ingredients.

Happy Father's Day tomorrow to you all. (And again if I could just learn to proofread before I post, what I write might make more sense! Sorry to anyone who read the uncorrected version.)

Remembering

I have been thinking of my father a great deal this week. It has been a busy week, so I have not posted as I had planned. Monday was the tenth anniversary of Papa's death. (That is the official date, although he actually died on June 6; he was kept breathing on life support.) Yesterday, the eleventh of June was the corresponding tenth anniversary of his funeral, a Gregorian Requiem, as he had always wished it would be, sung by the St. Ann Choir at St. Athanasius Church, the Church where he and Mama were among the forty or fifty founding couples who built the parish from its beginnng in 1959.

Ironically, yesterday the Senate of the United States passed a much belated law giving the FDA authority to regulate tobacco. It is ironic to me because my father died from emphysema, a smoker's disease. Up to 1985, when he quit smoking, every picture of Papa that we have showed him with a cigarette in his hand. He smoked his last cigarette on June 6, (D-Day), 1985 and made a mark on his bathroom wall (now painted over.) Fourteen years later he collapsed and was revived by the paramedics only to have a massive heart attack in the emergency room from which he was again resuscitated, but never regained consciousness. I found it ironic then that he died on the anniversary of D-Day and of the day when he had quit smoking.

He called emphysema, "an old man's disease, an old veteran's disease", and told me about how his becoming hooked on cigarettes was linked to his service in the war. After one incident of combat, he said, someone offered him a cigarette and the combined adrenaline rush from combat and the nicotine caused him to become addicted as he had not been before.

I remember in my childhood in Toledo once when I was ten or eleven years old coming upon his cigarette in the ashtray on a table in the living room where he had left it while we ate lunch in the kitchen. It was nearly burned down and I could not resist taking a puff. The hot smoke and disgusting taste of the thing made me cough and I had to go into the bathroom and close the door so that I could cough and recover and not admit to stealing a drag on the cigarette. I couldn't comprehend why he smoked. It was just so yucky. (Years later I would become a smoker myself and I quite some months before Papa did.)

So I am very glad that the FDA will finally regulate tobacco. I have often wondered if he had quit sooner, would we have enjoyed his company, his intellect, his wit, his grace and charm and his joy and pride in us longer? He would, I am sure, take great pride in his grandchildren who in the past decade have become accomplished adults. He would be charmed and chuckle over the antics of his first great-grandchild, my grand-nephew whose first haircut pictures arrived in my inbox this week and made me laugh.

Often when I load new pictures from my digital camera unto the computer, I think of my father, wistfully for he was a skilled photographer himself and also a computer programmer. He did not live long enough to see the advent of the scanner, printers or digital camera into this house, but I am sure that he would so enjoy them. The prints I have made from old family photos adorn my shelves. I made them within the first year after he died as my own grief gave way to mourning and the mourning was turned into remembrance through the work of documenting our family history and printing out these pictures. He would have been amazed by the quality of the prints and enjoyed having his family around him again, as I do.

I wish the technology could have come sooner, that the Internet could have come sooner. I know he would be so pleased to see me re-inventing the little business that he helped me with and watched over in the eighties as I learned to garden and make potpourri. (Although he would be glad to know that I am no longer growing what seemed to be bizillions of seedlings all over the dining room.)

Tonight I watched an episode of NCSI, a program that he never saw, but that I think he would enjoy. I miss sharing these things with him. The books that I read, the television programs that I watch have less savor without someone, Papa in particular, to share them with.

Cooking is harder too, now than when he was alive ten years ago. Part of that, of course, is that I am ten years older now and physical tasks are not so easy as they were then. (That is relative, too, of course.) Lacking someone to share my "creations" with makes the task harder too and scaling back from cooking for two to cooking for one is a challenge as well.

Papa rarely talked about his time in the Navy or the war as my sister and I were growing up, but it was a seminal part of his life, if for no other reasons than that it took him away for three years and it solidified his occasional social practice of smoking an occasional cigarette into an addiction that ultimately took his life. Before it did that, it also robbed him of robust vigor that would have been his.

Two months ago when friends cleaned out my garage they found the following artifacts that were part of Papa's Navy Service tucked away in a drawer.




The first I call an insignia, but I am truly not sure what it is. The second is a pocket Morse code "cheater". I assume that this is from the time that he spent in Navy Officer Training at Princeton in the Fall of 1943. The last is the emblem from his cap.

Finally, here is his official portrait in his uniform, which I have also posted on the Squidoo lens that I have done about him--Fred is Peace, that is in the links to the right.



I am grateful for the life of my father, for my memories of him and I hope that the time will come when fewer people smoke and no one any longer dies from smoking related illnesses.

Blogs I Have Found Recently

While searching cyberspace for the perfect lemon cupcake recipe, I found a number of interesting blogs and recipes. The most interesting--I was looking for a blueberry frosting recipe that I had found when I first began the cupcake search--is this one
http://shazaminthekitchen.blogspot.com/2008/05/lavender-cocoa-cupcakes-with-blueberry.html .

This is definitely on my list of must try recipes. (I will probably use either Dagoba or Ghirardelli cocoa because that is what I have on hand.) I will order my food grade lavender flowers (along with tomato powder, chocolate extract and at least two kinds of pepper, white and black, from the Spice House in Chicago. The Spice House has wonderful, wonderful spices and recipes on their site).

After my friend shared her lemon recipe find, I went looking for a beer bread recipe. This was inspired by a mystery novel that had a recipe at the end for a beer bread with three ingredients--beer, self-rising flour and sugar. I didn't want to add self-rising flour to my flour collection. (Whole wheat, white whole wheat, all-purpose, corn, spelt, buckwheat and probably some other flour take up space in my refrigerator. There is a box of cake flour on the pantry shelf too, but it's been there for so long that I can only guess at what it was used for. (I think it was either the lemon Madelaines or the Julia Child chocolate ginger cake that my sister made when she visited. Two different visits.)

King Arthur Flour gives the formula for converting self-rising flour to regular ingredients and they also have an absolutely spectacular looking recipe for a Chocolate Stout Cake--which I have had on my list for some time, actually. (I think since St. Patrick's Day.)
http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/chocolate-stout-cake-recipe I think they blog about this too.

Finally, searching for the beer bread led me to this wonderful blog and wonderful sounding very simple recipe that I will definitely make soon. (Unless we get a Truly Horrible Heatwave, and then it will be postponed to later.)

http://foodiefarmgirl.blogspot.com/2005/11/beer-bread-update-whole-wheat-version.html

Then a friend who is on Facebook with me pointed to a tea group that she had joined and followed to a link to this blog post on making homemade tea bags. (Kind of fits with the cupcakes, I think.)
http://lillyella.blogspot.com/2009/05/crafting-tea-bag-gifts-and-favors.html

I hope that all of the links work. Wish you could come join me as I experiment with these goodies. I am grateful for the friends who share what they are finding and for the blogs. I can hardly wait to try more of these goodies.

Happy Sunday. (And to those who get this twice, I heartily apologize. If I could just learn to proofread in preview instead of hitting post and then looking at it. Well, I always did cook and bake better than I type!)

Baking again

Sunday I baked these delicious lemon cupcakes with lemon glaze. A friend, who is an expert baker, recommended the recipe from About.com. I am thinking about substituting a small orange for the lemon and making a variation.



The recipe can be found here. http://southernfood.about.com/od/lemoncakes/r/bl1102f.htm

I substituted plain yogurt for the sour cream, added lemon juice and 1tsp of vanilla extract. Added 1/2 tsp vanilla to the glaze as well and made about half. Obviously I baked the recipe as cupcakes instead of a cake. Twenty-five minutes were a perfect time and I had 18 cupcakes, although I think that if I had filled the tins more evenly I could have made 24. (And would have needed more glaze.) I am a life long choc-a-holic ; these were so good, I am not sure I did not prefer them to chocolate.

Two of my favorite new tools are depicted below.


The bowl is a soft plastic one with a "grabber" ring on the bottom. No skid. The black tool is from Pampered Chef. I think they call it an avocado masher. It does a great job of creaming sugar and butter and of beating and mixing. I love it. I could not handle an electric mixer, so do not miss having one. This tool makes baking possible again. Serious plug.

I am looking at two recipes for blueberry frosting and also looking at a cocoa lavender cupcake recipe. Too many ideas, too little time. (Too many calories, not enough people to share them with!)

I am grateful for the interlude of cool weather--it actually rained for about six minutes last night--and the time I spent baking.

Back to Blogging

Allergies have been keeping me feeling unwell and it seems that when my head is stuffy I don't write much. The time has gotten away from me.

Today is Pentecost, the day the Holy Spirit filled the Apostles and they went out and began their preaching ministry. It is a good day to reflect on the Spirit and on new beginnings. A new season is underway, too with summer almost upon us.

Pentecost can be a hot, hot day. I remember melting in the heat and singing the Mass in Polyphony, grateful for the cool chapel and the even cooler Adobe house with its tile roof that was then the Newman Center for Stanford University where the choir sang. In particular, I remember slaving through a heat wave to make a duck pate and a cake and other goodies for the baptism of one of my god-children, now a young man in his twenties. Time has flown far too quickly.

As I wrote about the Apostles beginning their preaching ministries, I wondered what they would make of our new technologies? Babelfish and Google translator, would be the modern day tools to get the word out in multi-languages and Facebook and Twitter would carry the message to the whole world. They would use them all, I am sure.

A Blessed Pentecost. I am grateful for the Spirit even though at this point in my life I am weary, too and even my faith is weary. Renewal is a necessity!

Back to Bay Area "Air Conditioning"

I have lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for the better part of my life. One of the things that spoils us who live in the area is the "natural air-conditioning" of sea breezes and fog coming off the ocean and down the bay. Every so often the winds, shift, we swelter and some succumb to installing air-conditioning, which puts a greater load on the power grid that we all depend upon. So far, budet constraints have kept me from meeting the temptation head on and giving in to modernity in this technological form.

Last weekend was such a heat wave and I did not come to the computer very much. Without the computer, I have a harder time keeping myself occupied. Fortunately, friends came to my aid by bringing meals and fellowship so that the time went by quickly.

Sears also delivered a fan that I ordered on Wednesday on Friday. This is the fastest service that I think I have ever had for anything purchased on-line. The fan is an 18" pedestal fan and it means business. Industrial strength, it moves air. I have dubbed it the "wind turbine'. Wonderful!

While I was cowering inside, escaping the heat, one of my Amaryllis bulbs bloomed. Here it is.



It is so delicate, almost ethereal, that it was hard to believe it bloomed in the heat. It took my mind off the heat with its cool beauty.

The big Cecil Brunner rose bush in the far corner of my backyard is also blooming beautifully. It has a cool look to it as well, even in the heat.

I am grateful for these flowers. Looking at the Amaryllis this morning in its beauty reminded me of the beauty of God and that I ought to take time to think about that beauty more frequently.

Mother's Day

Wishing all the moms I know a happy Mother's Day and remembering my own mother.

Her middle name was Rose and she loved roses so. I look out as I write this on a half-century old rose bush in the far corner of the back yard. Identified a few years ago by my friend G. (a mother herself) as Cecil Brunner, it is coverd in pale pink blossoms and buds.

In the far corner of the front yard is the "cornflake" rose, the one that Mama planted. We ate whatever cereal it was that had the offer. Three boxtops were sent in and the bare-roots plant arrived. Papa planted it in the far corner. At one time, it filled that corner with a huge bush. The bush is struggling to survive against the poisonous oleander planted on the other side of the fence. Sigh.





I would love to identify this rose so that I could find another. At one time it was so fragrant that all I had to do was open the front door and the fragrance filled the house. Over the years, it has lost its fragrance.

When we lived in Toledo, Mama also grew beefsteak tomatoes in the summer. Very best tomatoes I ever ate. My memories of her are of a woman always busy with her hands. Laundry, cooking, washing dishes, ironing and finally at the end of the day a few minutes to herself to play her beloved piano.

Sometimes, looking back, I wish my parents could have home schooled us. Music and literature, French and cooking, history and domestic science could have come from Mama. Math and science from Papa. It would have been much more fun than school. Of course, it wasn't done then and I am sure she never thought of herself as a teacher. When we came to California, she became one, teaching in the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine program at St. Athanasius, our local parish church. She would have been a wonderful piano teacher too.

Sunday mornings bring back memories of Mass, followed by brunch. Ah the smells of bacon and eggs and cinnamon toast! The Sunday comics were followed by homework in the afternoon and more cooking for Sunday dinner. Bike rides around the neighborhood on Sunday afternoons, especially in the Fall, finished with coming home to those good food smells. Finally, in the evening we would all watch Maverick.

Mama loved life and her laughter, love and music filled our lives. We were so blessed and are so grateful.

Where Did Spring Go?

The roses are blooming along with the calendula. The lavender is in bud and will soon be blooming. The rosemary is flowering and doing it's usual thing of trying to grow enough to take over the county or at least the yard. The cold weather has returned.

The sky is grey and darkly overcast. Drizzle is trying to turn into rain and I wish it would pour. On the other hand, I can be grateful that it isn't thundering and lightning. This house was not built for those kinds of storms, the real flash bang boom storms of the mid-West. I would not be sitting at the computer in that kind of storm. (I would probably be cowering over my knitting or trying to read a book.)

The roses like cooler weather. I have noticed over the years that the colors are always deeper and the flowers last longer on the bush when it is cold to cool. So loving the roses as I do, I will try not to complain. Just hunker under polar fleece in front of the electric heater and give thanks for my technological and electronic blessings. (Even the polarfleece is hi-tech, made, as it is from recycled plastic bottles! I have always thought this is a real hoot.)

It is a good day for domesticity, since the laundry needs doing and for "zazzling"--learning my way around Zazzle and figuring out how to do things there. I've been there for two years, just never developed it and I know that the items are lovely and they do a good job of printing. I just am overwhelmed by the amount of time it will take to develop this and not very good at self-promotion. Oh to have wings and to fly. (Or even just be as mobile as I was a while ago and get out of my house more.)

Cabin fever is showing in this post, so I will be grateful that at least I have not needed to contend with snow and have been outside in the fresh air from time to time. I wish everyone a lovely Sunday in the Easter season that is all too quickly going away. Soon it will be back to "ordinary time". Is there such a thing, really?

Garage Again

Yesterday four friends gathered for a massive re-organization of my garage. I think the garage is bigger than any room in the house. All that space! All that stuff! What is it? My dear friend, K, has filled her van twice with recyclable oddments. More to go.

Some of it has just been sitting there for a long, long time. I am finally ready to let go of much of it.

A few treasures emerged. The insignia from my father's Navy uniform cap. The course notes for an Algebra course he taught as a graduate student at Ohio State. (Along with some Ohio State notebooks from the 1940's that are near pristine condition with the unused paper in better shape than some modern tablets inside the house.

My friends worked their way to the far-back upper corner and a voice called out, "Peggy, what on earth is this? It's a table with a hole to put the kid into it". I thought for a second and hollered, "oh my Gosh! You've found it! It's the baby Tenda." Features in pictures of my sister when she was little. Papa said that he had looked for it and never found it. My sister, the same one in the pictures, ditto. It just had been so carefully tucked, so long ago that it had been in hiding. Now I will have to figure out what to do with it! Is it an antique, a treasure or something that no one will want?

Wow! The garage will not yield a whole lot more. There is a stove that needs to go. A cedar chest. A cedar armoire full of what are now very probably antique clothes. And all of Papa's tools.

Now if I could just diminish my library.

I am very tired, since I sat outside in the wind and supervised all day yesterday. I am also deeply grateful to everybody who helped. Thank you.