Chip Out!!

OK....when in history has it been necessary for voters to follow up their votes with cash donations?  In the past few days, I've received three pleas from those representing progressive causes to "chip in" $80 so that others will contribute two matching dollars for every one of mine to fight against the massive infusion of Koch Brothers millions as they seek to whatever....just what are they after, these Koch Brothers?  Electing Republican Senators or Representatives?  (Are the Koch brothers all that dumb, for all their money?)  The Republicans have done NOTHING to earn their fat salaries.  Is this why they need money to put them in office??

Eighty bucks??  Excuse me, dear progressives, but right now I don't even have EIGHT to spare for anything.  The Republicans, if they had their way, would take even that away.  Bah humbug!!

Peace in the Middle East?

Juan Cole lists the various positive reactions to the recent U.S.-Iran agreement among virtually all the countries in the Middle East but Israel. Which Middle Eastern country actually has nuclear weapons?  Israel.  Let us pray. 

Remember Nevil Shute's novel On the Beach? (Or the resulting movie starring Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck?)  Amazon calls the book, "Nevil Shute’s most powerful novel—a bestseller for decades after its 1957 publication—is an unforgettable vision of a post-apocalyptic world." Post-apocalyptic, meaning after nuclear World War III.   The New York Times said it was “The most haunting evocation we have of a world dying of radiation after an atomic war.” 

Congratulations to all parties who contributed to the past week's agreement.  

Dream Board

UP:
Thought of personal commandment #2.  (In case you've mercifully forgotten, #1 was Keep on Learning.) #2 is Keep a Dream Board.  If eggplant (my first learning-about project) is gonna help me live longer, I want the rest of my days to be more fun.  So where does this start?  By visualizing what more fun will look like.  And keeping a record of things I see that feel supportive (oh, god....it's come to feeling and using words like supportive).  It's not about HAVING THINGS--see, this is where it starts....any time I think of something I'd like, my own personal Greek chorus sings "THAT'S NOT GOOD!  Fine.  I'll get around the Greek chorus by putting up pictures of things I'd like and enjoying those.

Aside:  One of the things my dad had when he died was one of those automatic smoker things--for
game and fish.  It looked like the automatic cooker my mother used to use on weekends at the lake.
But it not only cooked the items, it smoked them, too.  My dad's smoker looked unused--brand new, a gift from one of my brothers.  So she gave it to me when she was clearing out the cottage before she sold it.  I brought it home with great excitement:  we could use it to make smoked turkey!  My husband was enthusiastic about it, too.  Came the divorce,  however, and the smoker was still unused.  So I kept it.  Finally, the kids and I landed in Iowa in our own house, and I decided, egged on by some of my coworkers, to smoke a turkey one Thanksgiving (when turkeys were cheap).  So I did. Have you ever had smoked turkey?  You can buy slices of smoked turkey in some delis, and it costs more than slices of just plain cooked turkey.  For sandwiches, etc.  But a whole smoked turkey?  Nobody wanted to eat it, especially not me because I was so shocked that this big turkey had that smokey taste all the way through.  No stuffing, no gravy=fail!  Imagine....my tastes were formed at an early age when I could sneak down into the cellar at night and pick at the turkey carcass.  I didn't LIKE smoked turkey.  Ish.  I gave the smoker to the chief egger-on-er at work, and said, no, I don't want a smoked turkey in payment.  You keep it. You're welcome. 

Believe me, a dream board can avoid this very thing. If there's something my little heart thinks it wants, I can pin up a photo:  a house with a big garden?  a place by the shore?  Fine.  there are tons of
magazines and advertisements and emails arriving chez XE regularly, and I can clip/print out pictures of appealing items and put them on my dream board.  After a few months of this, we'll see what happens.  A dream board is a good way to move things into my life OR get them out of my system. 

DOWN: Not much down today.  Except a big load of laundry waiting to be done, and it's Sunday.  Don't want to run the washer and dryer on a Sunday and disturb the quiet.  (Maybe I can do it this morning while my neighbors are at church.  Ha.)

"He's makin' a list, checkin' it twice..."

Santa Claus had the right idea:  make a list!  Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project fame also counsels us to make lists--"Write Your Own Set of Personal Commandments." (Rubin comes up with 12!)  What?  the 10 big ones aren't enough?  The wacky nun/ex-nun Karol Jackowski came up with "seven more commandments" in her book Ten Fun Things to Do Before You Die:

Don't work too hard
Share
No hitting or hurting
Have a real good time
Always let conscience be your guide
Forgive and forget
Let it be

 So what's fun about that?  Well, you can take your own sweet time to find just the right personal commandments.  And nobody is gonna be standing over you until you do it or give advice on whether
it's worth your time.  Or keeping track of whether you keep your personal commandments or not.  Except you.  That would pass for fun here in chez XE.

My personal commandment #1 is Keep on Learning!  There is so much I don't know, and with bloggers supreme Cop Car, Ole Phat Stu, Hattie, & Little Red Hen as my inspirations, I'm gonna dig
into topics I don't know much about.  #1 is eggplant.  What the hell good is eggplant for but soaking up calories when you fry it?  We all know that kale is a fountain of good health & vitamins, but eggplant?  Well.  You get my drift.  Cop Car and Stu are the engineers/physicists/pilots--there's hardly
anything they don't know about math (urk). Hattie stays ahead of the game from her far outpost, and LRH provides a feast of information, often about baking bread, weird crafts, and other topics relating to Home Ec.

Anyway, following nun other than Jackowski's "other seven," I won't work too hard on this, and I'll share my findings (ha--fancy word for results?). 

Sunday, 11/17

UP:

1)  Going to see the Van Gogh Repetitions exhibit at the Phillips Gallery today, then have dinner
with pals.  No formal event today for the VG--just the pictures hanging in the galleries.  VG has two famous repetitions:  the road builders and the plane trees.  First time they've been exhibited together.
Always love to visit the Phillips gift shop, too.  I always get good ideas, if not gifts.

2)  Cleaned--vacuumed, washed the cushion covers, aired the cushions on the porch) and reassembled Cathy's former sofa (many thanks, Cherie).  Got rid of all evidence of the hound (hair, dust/dirt, odor) who had captured it for his napping place.  Perfect size for human napping, too.  Adds another place to accommodate visitors overnight. 

3)  Just saw a very interesting video clip: Visualize with Cynthia--about a woman who won $112 million in a lottery, and she says her secret to success was to VISUALIZE it!  Well, I can do that.  I think.  Hard to imagine having 112 million bucks in the old exchequer, but why not?  One thing she did was to write that figure down and leave it around her house in various places where she could SEE it and accept its place in her life.  We all can do that, too.   Why the heck not?

DOWN:

1)  With all the opening and shutting of the porch door yesterday (see above), another big fat house cricket got in.  I know they are outside bugs, but this variety is the brown & grey HOUSE cricket, not the shiny black FIELD cricket.  This a.m. at 4, when I got up, there was a VERY big cricket on the bathroom rug.  When I stepped across it (not on it, I don't like to kill bugs), it vanished into thin air.  Have not seen it since, and I have been checking my pjs frequently to make sure it didn't hop onto me!  Brrr.

2)  Gonna visualize seeing that big cricket out in the open (not in my pjs or in my bed!!) where I can invite her to the dustpan and give her a ride to the outdoors!!

pasta bolognese!!

OK, having seen the prize-winning French movie, "Blue Is the Warmest Color," I, like many others, am craving the pasta featured in this movie.  Which turns out to be plain old Pasta Bolognese.  I'm making some right now.  Wot th hell, This is something I've made all my life, but now I'm using the Barefoot Contessa's recipe, as this has been recommended by others who have sought to make this glorious family-type dish.  Mine never had any nutmeg in it, and from the looks of it in the movie, the recommended recipe has no saffron in it (doesn't it look as if it has saffron in it??)  it does to me.  It's very YELLOW in the movie, but not so much in real life. 

I did LOVE this movie--it portrays the loneliness of love better than anything else.  and I guess I'm getting old, the 7-minutes of heavy breathing did not seem erotic to me.  It was a wonderful movie, though, and I look forward to tonight's pasta bolognese!!  All it lacks now is a bit of cream and parmesan cheese!!  wow.

Bob Would Appreciate This....

UP:

"The email of the species is deadlier than the mail."--Steven Fry 

My brother Bob always preferred what he called "Dmail":  handwritten communiques that circulate via the USPS.  The "D" is for his last name.  He refused to own a computer or participate in email, which often irked the rest of us.  His longtime friends used to thank him for never moving house--same address, same phone number since the early 1950s.  Every year on Valentine's day, he'd send out those little grade school valentines, signed "love, Bob."  Now he's gone, and those little cards with him.  For my birthday, I'd get a long letter telling all his news--of his children, grandchildren, and so far, one glorious great-grandchild, the neighbors, his old friends whom I knew, and the Minneapolis weather, which involved, usually by my birthday, lots of snow shoveling (which he did himself with a shovel, not a blower).  Even in his 80s, he loved to ride his bike over to St. Paul to visit his daughters there.
Dmail, indeed!  He lived a Dlife!!--his own and under his own power until the very end.

Feliz Lunes-y

Thoughts of the Day So Far:

DOWN:  There will be a special place in hell for whoever invented those incessantly whining leaf blowers!*  Lazy guy outside  blowing leaves from one side of the driveway to the other.  Then where do they go?  I think he blows 'em into the street for the city to pick up.  Grrr.  Better than stuffing them in plastic bags, I guess, but a lot of them wind up in the Anacostia River, which doesn't need our debris.  How about mowing over them so they make mulch?  Then you can just let it stay on the grass over the winter.  With the right kind of grass, it'll work just fine, don'tcha think?

*Ditto for whoever invented spraying lawns.  Boo.  When I was a kid, "perfect" grass lawns were not sacred.  Every lawn had its own bald patches, ant hills, and wild flowers. 

UP:  Got a great recipe for mushroom-barley soup from Sally via email today.  I think I'm going to change the broth from chicken to beef.  Why?  I have drippings from last night's steak that I hate to throw away.

Stayed overnight at pal's house so I could watch "Downton Abbey"--except, ha.  DA doesn't start a new season till January!  "Paradise" didn't do much for me.  Oh well.  I watched "Foyle's War" and enjoyed it.  Especially the relationship between Foyle and Sam, his driver.  

MEH:  Wot would the Britcoms do if there were no such thing as war?  Lionel and Jean would have been long married, and Foyle would have been a private eye, spying on or for the royals.  Your turn.....

photo albums, continued.....

Well, XE seems to have bitten off a lot more than she can chew with this photo thing.  The biggest challenge has become finding photos of previous ancestors.  That will involve contacting lots of people with whom I've NEVER been in contact before.  And people with whom I once lived but who now are far away.

We have no photos to speak of of my grandsons Ian's & Sean's father.  We took a few photos of him in Iowa when his oldest was born, then they all went back home to California, then Missouri.  And now he's gone, may he r.i.p.  But he was grandfather to two of the cutest little guys on the planet, and he deserves to have his image in the family album.  The little guys deserve it.  It's possible that the V.A. might have a photo of him, as he was in the army (marines??).  There has to be more of a photographic record of him than we have.

I have despaired of finding any photos of my maternal grandparents.  I didn't even see their pictures until my mother's funeral.  We had none at home.  Fractured families, wars, they all take their toll on keeping records.  

Photo Album of Your Own Life.....

Who was it?  Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, who wrote in Positively Positive the other day about, among other things, taking tourist photos of your own life.  Why?  Because the places and people will change, and when they've done so, you will have pictures of them, and it will help you stay connected with your past.  So Rubin has taken photos of the bench on the Yale campus where she was sitting when her future husband first passed by and attracted her eye.  Things like that.

And I thought it was a splendid idea.  My background has been photo-challenged from the beginning.
Although my parents had lots of pictures of my brothers when they were growing up in Nebraska and visiting my dad's parents in Michigan, but I am not in the crowd, usually.  I came along about 7 years after the pack, and there are a few pictures of me with Mom or Dad, but hardly any of the five of us kids.

When I was in elementary school, the camera was no longer functioning, and with WWII upon us, there was little money for things like camera repair or film.  The day I got out of the hospital after having polio, however, Mom did take a picture of me and my brother Bob, second oldest and in his AAF uniform, waiting for the bus back to his base.  He had been home on leave to visit our brother Gene, the youngest of the boys, who was still in the hospital recovering from the surgery necessitated by the paralysis.

I'm thinking of the vast contrast between then and now, when every day I get new photos--often video clips--of my new great-grandsons (see "new boyz on the block" on the right-hand side of the page).  I can't quite keep up with them in terms of posting, but they are all saved.  I also am becoming fonder of still photographs, which are easier to nail down than the little videos.  It's given me a whole new perspective on all the photos I do have in my "files."  They need better organizing, for one thing.   Time to get with it!!

Grammar and all of that.....

This morning, Herr Savory (aka Stu) emailed me two cartoons about the rules of grammar, apparently found in facebook's Grammarly page.  Here's my favorite:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfsPt3yoVEk6paVZXJnkt93BAMXZcRXJNU0Ql7F9jSGJb_M25TNCsSu3VQK1_bnGhRu4i6GPPr6to3r9rAnAoq4OR-zHs6y3l6IvB-2vzz5WIK39MjM3brRmdyhrOmNyTlhsjfVw/s1600/1ancient+gramam+p;olice.jpg

Here's the other:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj42OI9IYvMCA7_ODvoT_F5XBBEvW-itr4E6gWPOYecBoOf_X7nYexIMzdE_o42XZgCQP64IFzKxrn3WMMLO9rKnptsP93o5bIEOz7IMo6owm5BR9UQxRi1xbp4YrDxzJudaTh-BQ/s1600/1wit+to+whom.jpg

I also found, when looking into the Pali language (in which many Buddhist texts are written), that the word quiddities struck me on a number of charts, "Quiddities of Laoti/an/Cambodian Pali."  Quiddity is one of those words I THINK I know, but can't describe in 25 words or less.  As luck would have it, my OED compact, volume II, P-Z, is right on the table here instead of in the case, ditto a magnifying glass.  The Qs take up very little  room in this volume, and the Qui words hardly any at all.  Quiddity means "the real nature or essence of a thing; that which makes a thing what it is." And quiddity represents all the things our German scholar's blog comprises.  I think.  Right, Stu??  

And not to worry, Stu.  I'm not getting all academic on you.  I was looking up the Pali language because it was a clue in the impossibly quirky City Paper crossword that comes out here every Thursday.  A four-letter word beginning with "P" for the language in which many Buddhist texts are written??  Hindu is 5 letters and no p, and Sanskrit is eight letters and no p.  That's all I could think of, so I googled it. 

More on Walking & Pedestrianship....

Here's a good one: 

I've also added "Where the Sidewalk Starts" in my Blogs I Love.  Scary bidness!  And yes, I'm going out for my daily 30 minute walk right now.