Ahhhh!

It is so good to be home. I didn't realize just how much I'd missed Bruce. And I forgot to mention last night that when we got homeI walked into the kitchen to discover a vase of pink alstromeria with a Welcome Home card from Bruce. Just how sweet is this man? Yup, about that sweet!

So I thought I'd let you know where my stepdaughter is now taking up residence. Here's the link to Oakhaven, a spectacular horse facility outside the city and half as long a commute for her as it had been to her ranch. Her apartment is in the smaller building on the left, a lovely 2-BR with 30' ceilings.


Here's the link to the Web site for the stables: http://oakhavenpartners.com/facility.html

My flights to and from were pretty uneventful except for the fact that JetBlue lost my luggage for awhile. I was paged at the baggage carousel when I arrived in Austin and told that my luggage had somehow missed the plane in Orlando that I had had to wait 3 hours for. I guess that time wasn't sufficient for my baggage handler to find it. But I refused to make Laura take me to the airport the next day to get the bag; it was supposed to arrive in the airport at 11:30 or so but I think it didn't get there till much later. So I was working working working in the clothes I'd flown in. Yuck. A very nice man delivered the bag at about 4:30 p.m. (I'd landed at about that time the day before.) So much for JetBlue being perfect!

But I've just taken a long break and planted things in my garden, picked out a million more oak leaves (curses on them!), tied up my clematis that grew from about 8" last week to about 30" today, and generally wandered around looking at all the things growing. We're having another real spring--maybe all global warming isn't so bad--and I'm loving it.

Back Home

I'm home from a week in Texas, where I helped to pack up the house of my step-daughter. Actually she sold her 63-acre ranch, the Dunbar Rose Ranch (I don't think that's its whole title but close).
It's a beautiful place with many roses ... and jasmine and spice bush and palms and philodendrons and ... And horses. She actually turned it into a working horse ranch where she kept her 8? 9? 10? polo ponies.
Because yes, she was a polo player. She says she's sworn it off and is moving to learning to jump. Oh good. From one dangerous sport to a perhaps more dangerous sport.

Here's an idea of what it looks like--I took these photos in 2007, just after she'd bought the place.



Meanwhile, the ranch was simply too much for one person to handle. Make that one woman who has a more-than-full-time job as an attorney expected to work 60-80 hour weeks. And who played polo as well as taking care of all those horses. Horses, I've learned, are like valuable, fragile and wrong-headed puppies who'll hurt themselves on a daily basis if left to their own devices for more than, oh, about 26 seconds. Luckily I'm far too old to be bitten by the horse bug now. I find them beautiful and sensitive and thoroughly someone else's responsibility!

I'm writing now because I'm just back and a little too wound up to sleep, but I'm starting to wind down so I'll sign off for tonight, but will try to be back very soon to talk about where said stepchild has moved to. It's amazing.

1-1/2 Martinis

I try to have no more than two martinis. I found a pkg. of cocktail napkins in an airport mall store that had this poem:

Martinis are my favorite drink
But always two at most.
Three, I'm under the table.
Four, I'm under the host.

I am so mad that I didn't buy the packet. Oh dumb.

Because the verse is supposedly by Dorothy Parker, one of my heroes. She was the only female member (I believe) of the famed "Algonquin Table" of writers who met frequently (daily? weekly?) for drinks, and more drinks, at the Algonquin Table in ... some famous hotel in NYC in the '30s. She's credited with "Men don't make passes at girls who wear glasses" and a few other witticisms but I read her biography and like many comics, Dorothy was chronically depressed. But she still helped to write, and maybe even shared credit for, the screenplays of several very witty 30s-40s movies. But I do love that martini poem best of all.

So I'm off to finish my 2nd martini. Bruce is in Massachusetts and I've done all my duties with our dog--cuddling before her bedtime, etc. It's much like having a neurotic child, believe me.

I'm hoping for rain tomorrow, whether or not it's warm. We've had high fire warning messages for the last couple of days and I'd like those to go away, especially since I've heard our town's fire siren going off more frequently than usual recently. (This may well be because of the moron North Country idjits who insist on burning off their ditch grass regardless of the fact all the snow has been gone for awhile and we've had no rain. Duh.)

I hope you're having (or have had--it's 11:40 my time) a great Friday night. Today has been a much better day for me.

Ciao.

100-Year-Old Driver Day

It's 100-Year-Old Driver Day here in the jewel of the North Country. While there's a Bad Driver Convention held frequently in Plattsburgh (begins on any Thursday with warm-up bad driving exercises, carries through Friday - Sunday, stragglers remain on Monday practicing the skills they learned, and early arrivers for the next convention begin arriving on Wednesdays), this was a "silver" opportunity. Pun intended. One geezer pulling out of a business onto the busiest street in town and he's basically walking his car into traffic. Brand new car, too. I guess he didn't want to get any sand or dirt on it.

No turn signals, driving well under the speed limit, turn signal on but not turning, oblivious to anyone else on the road, not turning right on red. All white-haired drivers. And I'm pretty close to that at this point, white-haired, I mean. It's still a lot of colors but the primary impression is: G R A Y. So I don't think it's the pot calling the kettle, if you know what I mean. I'm a very early retiree but being a retiree I believe I can say bad things about my cohort. Bad thing number one: Old people can't and shouldn't drive!

Okay, now that's done, let me give you what my menu was for Easter. It was such a nice meal, with friends over. I love to have guests for dinner and Bruce is finally adjusting to that idea. Anyway: Easter ham with real mashed potatoes, Roasted Butternet Squash with Balsamic Glaze, Shredded Brussels Sprouts with Bacon, butterhorn (homemade) rolls, and pastry tart shells filled with fresh fruit with vanilla yogurt. YUM. We just reran much of the meal and I'm stuffed again. But today was a trainer day so I feel about, ooh, that guilty.

But now I have to go drink an ocean. Working out requires water and the ham just sucked every drop of it somewhere!

Personal Trainer

I have a personal trainer. I've been to two, yes, two sessions at the college's Fitness Center and its director is my personal trainer. He's developed a series of exercises for strength training that combine use of the machines (I'm not a fan of doing nothing but) and free weights. So my quads are crying for mercy and my back is "stiff." Bruce would say that rather than "sore." Take your pick.

There are way too many mirrors in that place, IMHO. I realize that when you're 20 and in shape, it's fun to watch your lithe and lithic body (lithic doesn't fit here in meaning but it sounds so good--I stole the phrase from a poem by John Updike, I think) go through its paces. But when you're a 60 year old pudgy wuss, it's not nearly as much fun. My muffin top is at souffle proportions now so mirrors are definitely not my friends. But I have a very simple goal: to go three times per week, faithfully, until the end of the semester. That's about 5 weeks. Then I'll look at Summer Session. I have no physical goals other than to work at keeping osteoporosis at bay. I'll have a bone scan soon to see if my osteopenia has advanced or abated. Wanting to score particular measurements is so self-defeating I can't contemplate it. So I'll just go for strength. We all need more of that, right?

The cost for the training is unbelievable. I pay $80 per semester. Period. No extra for personal training time. My sister is sooo jealous! I'll probably have Matt for 1-2 more visits and then a student trainer. That's fine with me. I told Matt I need someone I'd have to call if I weren't coming, a sort of personal shamer.

So maybe someday I'll post a photo of me with Michelle-Obama arms. How patient are you?

Bittersweet

That's a nice word, bittersweet. It's the feeling I've had today, scanning old photo slides so that my kids can have the pictures Chuck & I took way back when. I'd started out feeling rather sad, as I have before when doing this, but I've decided to focus on the sweet part. We were a happy family, multiple-degreed spouses with two beautiful, truly gorgeous little girls. We were Yuppies with a capital Y. The girls are still lovely, the degrees are still there; we're just not that family anymore. But oh, my, were we pretty. (I'd put a photo of the four of us but I haven't scanned in all the pictures yet, so this one of the three of us will have to do.) Here we are in 1980, not too long after moving to Plattsburgh, and well before the coldest winter on record in this area (I'm pretty sure that record is still holding, too). Look how young I was, how small the girls.

I have loved being a mother more than anything. I liked being a librarian and it does suit my mild to moderate OCD rather well, but I probably should have opted to be a stay-at-home mom. Except for going crazy because I would have had no adults to talk to--and that lunacy would probably not have reached the involuntary-commitment level until the girls were high schoolers, when every mother is allowed certifiable madness--I actually was Martha Stewart. I just didn't have the modelling career that led to the connections. I guess, to be honest, what I really lacked was the level of gottawanna that it would have taken to build that empire. (The same could be said of my acting career, or lack thereof.) My daughters make me sooo proud, though, that not being Martha is acceptable. I was about as much Martha as anyone in my family could tolerate, I'm sure!

To look at those photos is to push myself back into a life that hardly seems real anymore. (I'm determined to find a 4-List photo. There'll be one here before the end of this post.

NO! The photo here is my youngest sister and her husband trying to claim parenthood of MY daughters. It won't work now anymore than it did back then!)

Being a grandmother, something I couldn't comprehend in those early years, I get to watch myself doing it again. I'm not saying that my daughter parents like I did. Good grief, we had NO money and I was a real make-do mom. But to watch her and her husband worry and love and care for their girls is more like watching myself than I imagined. I like it. And because I have few regrets about how I mothered, I'm fine with Emily picking and choosing the parts of mine that she uses. And whether she knows it or not, there are some that I see! But they're probably mothering styles that everyone uses so who's to say it's me she learned 'em from.

So I look at the pictures of young Carla and young Chuck and those baby girls. I remember the incidents that have been memorialized in stories that we've told throughout their lives. What else? Emily's girls brought back the smells of mothering and some (!) of those are nice. And the baby/toddler voices are a thrill to hear, to try to hear my own tiny voices again. But the photos are still awfully good to remind me how much fun it was to have kids.

Okay, okay. So here are not one, but two photos of the whole List family taken in 1979. The first was taken in spring--maybe around Easter? And I don't want to hear anything about my glasses! They were in style back then!


For more viewing pleasure, the photo here was taken on Mother's Day, 1979. The family was complete: Chuck 28, Emily 23 months, Carla 30, Jenny 3-1/2 months.


I'll do more photos in the near future. Check Facebook too, because I may post a few there.

Easter Fun for Mimi

I was sewing this weekend, one of the activities I most enjoy. I made a dress for Kyrin. Actually it started out as a dress but I think it might actually wind up as a top, especially if I'm not able to get a bit more of the fabric to make the matching panties. The pattern was for a long dress but I'm not a big fan of long dresses on very little girls unless they're attending a wedding reception at the Plaza (wherever--there are Plazas everywhere I'd bet). I also didn't have enough fabric for that, so I cut it shorter. But I should have NOT figured in the 1-1/4" hem--should have left that allowance there and then I would have a dress. Ah well, 20/20 hindsight, as usual. Here's the completed piece (I still have to do the neckline hook-and-eye.)

The fabric is really very pretty. It's a color-on-color print, weave, actually, with waffle-weave squares alternating with squares in which a color-on-color Pooh Bear appears. Very Pooh--it's the perfect Pooh soft gold, and very subtle. Gorgeous. I'm not sure that a 2-year-old will appreciate it but adults who see her in it will (I hope!). I'll send this piece down and then if Jane is able to get me a bit more of the fabric and mail it to me, I can make the panties and send them as soon as they're finished. Talk about poor planning.

Making this piece was a surprising amount of work. There was far more handstitching than I like: the armholes, the entire bodice lining edges. It looks lovely but sheesh! And the pattern was labeled "Easy." If any inexperienced sewer were to try this she'd use her scissors to slit her throat! Adding a gathered flounce is not "easy." The concept is a snap, sure, but the execution of it isn't. Not if you have fairly high standards about the evenness of the gathers across the full breadth of the hem. I did remember my mom telling me years and years ago that the trick in making gathers even was to do it by quarters. Boy was that good advice. And if a novice sewer didn't have my mom's voice in her ears, it could be a nightmare and then a disaster. Note to self: check pattern directions before purchase next time!

Realizing how much I do enjoy sewing makes me kick myself into getting to the closest JoAnn's. Because that's an hour's drive from here--and that's not like an hour's drive in a metro area, all you metro readers out there; this is from city to city with mountains and little mountain hamlets in between--it's not something I just do without thinking. I like to have an idea of what I'm looking for before I go. So: I think I'll get fabric to make myself a summer shirt and maybe I'll try a pair of shorts, too (pants are not my strong suit but that could very well be for lack of practice), and then some fabric for Emily's girls, and maybe something for a summer robe (or a new winter one if fleece is available) for Bruce and maybe for me.

So anyway, I get to show off the results of my labors here. I hope you enjoy it. (I really should have taken some shots of the handstitching that my hands are still aching from!)