Friday, June 26, 2015

Sammi and Other Happy Stuff





Good Morning.  Today it is Katherine.          

It's 5:30 and my grand girl Sammi and I are hanging out watching a Disney sitcom about kids in a band.  We seem to be learning how to tell someone they sing like crap in case that comes up in everyday life.  I can tell you that lots of folks had no problems telling me I sang like crap when I was a kid.  The worst was when my 9th grade choir teacher told me to only move my mouth and not make noise during our Christmas concert.  I can also tell you that Sammi, who faces so much in her life, will never have to face being told she sings like crap.  Sammi has a beautiful voice.  It matches her beautiful spirit.

It is impossible to be around Sammi and sister Brooklyn without appreciating good stuff in your life.  They are joyous creatures.  Right now Sammi is singing along with the theme song of the next show up in the Disney line-up and sprinkling the den with musical magic.

Sammi is facing a hemispherectomy of the left side of her brain on July 20th in an effort to stop small seizures that constantly interrupt her thinking.  Medical marijuana has stopped the big, life-threatening seizures.  Yesterday she happily shared that she will be having brain surgery soon just before telling us that earlier a mean girl in her acting class bullied her and she cried.  Brooklyn and Sammi involved the teacher and all ended well at acting class, but some creepy girl made Sammi cry by telling her she didn't belong in the class.

Last night we watched Hairspray and played Uno and made drawings and colored and joy was everywhere and brain surgery and bullies vanished.  Brooklyn and Sammi laughed at all the right places in the movie (terribly important in the Starkey household) and Sammi won the first game of Uno and Brooklyn drew another self-portrait in her continuing series of Brooklyn crayon selfies.  Kids are a really good way to remind yourself that goodness and happiness are always right in front of you.

Even though I know making a list is a lazy girl's approach to writing,  this morning moment with Sammi (now munching on cold pizza and giggling over the new Disney show) makes me want to write a Happy List.  Sammi is happy.  She makes me happy and I'm wanting to remind myself of all the current happy things to ward off my worries.

Today's Happy List:
1.  Sammi and her spunk make me happy.
2.  Brooklyn's ability to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders and be a creative and driving force in her own right makes me happy.  She loves to sparkle and she does.  My only regret about heading to the Tetons these days is that I will miss a chance to hear her sing a song with her Mom's band (Soul X) on the 4th of July.  Brooklyn has an amazing voice for an eight year old kid.  Really.  Chris was like that as a kid.  You knew you had a singer.  Brooklyn is the next in the family.
3.  English muffins with real butter melting into the holes make me happy.
4.  Finally figuring out how to make authentic carnitas at home makes me happy.
5.  I adore my new gym bag.
6.  Finding Bronco stories in the newspaper makes me happy.  Football is coming.  I like football.
7.  I did more than say "Who's he?" after the Nuggets drafted Emmanual Mudiay.  That was pretty good.
8.  Willa playing school makes me happy.  She starts school in August and we are working on "sit and stay" and raising her hand and thinking of answers before her raising hand.  Willa loves it.  It works best if I ask questions that involve princesses.
9.  The shawls I created last year make me happy.
10.  Thanking about the trip to the Tetons makes me happy.
11.  The sausages at Butcher's Bistro make me happy.
12.  The Supreme Court's decision about Obamacare makes me happy.  Reason has prevailed.
13.  I like it when Christine and Soul X perform Blurred Lines.  I know all about the Marvin Gaye rip-off here.  I just love the song.  I love Christine's voice and the band.  This reminds me that I want to ask Christine to make me a CD of Soul X songs so I can listen to them while I work out at the gym.  That would make me extra happy.
14.  Watching Nate's verbal jousts with his friends on FaceBook make me happy.  He's a funny guy.
15.  Jaydee's crinkly eyes when she smiles and her unadulterated love for her Gramps and I make me happy.  We were at the zoo Wednesday and when I returned from the rest room, Jaydee spotted me and literally sprinted to me with her arms wide open and so full of love that I could have wept with joy.  A nearby lady was wowed out by Jaydee's show of affection as well, making the moment even more exaggerated in its bubble of love.  Such unsought after love is a gift of the gods.  All the grandkids offer this happiness to me.  All I do is hang out with them and they all offer showers of love.  It is a constant wonder to me that they like and love me.
16.  Jim peels an orange and shares sections with me every night.  I love this.  All the grand girls love this too.
17.  Knitting ladies make me happy.  I am the outlier in the group of knitting ladies I run with because they all go to Costco and have refrigerators with water spouts in the doors and freezers full of stuff from Trader Joe's.
18.  Chris just picked up the girls to take them to today's acting class.  He was wearing a grown up suit and a baseball cap that I didn't recognize.  I love how he is both an impressive business man, remarkable daddy and the same little boy he always was.
19.   My daughter makes me happy.  She is a busy lady and I haven't talked with just her in forever.  I miss her.  I miss Nate.  I miss Chris.  This is happy.  I am having happy memories of when the three of them were living in the house and they were such funny and busy and, hopefully, happy kids.  We were never a Leave It to Beaver family, but we did lots of pretending.  Our family extended in unusual waves because the boys had both our family and Mary's family (their mother has an extensive family with its own rich memories).  Sometimes I look at any one of them and the entire history of all of us explodes in something they say or do or how they look.  It's an old age thing I'm betting.  It is amazing how happy it makes me to see any of me in the kids.  I find it a bit miraculous in the boys because there's no genetic boost for a step mother.  All three kids have been my teachers as well.  I know more and do more and believe more because of them.  Makes a girl happy in her Medicare years.
20.  Jim just told me the Supreme Court overturned the bans certain states have placed on gay marriage.  More happiness floating.
21.  It's time to celebrate all this happy stuff with the happiest part of my life--my sweetie.  He makes me happy even if he's still trying to teach me how to fill an ice tray with water (I sometimes resist instruction).  The best thing in my life is that I get to go to bed with him each night and wake up in the same place each morning.

I have lots of late that's made me worry and then circumstances sent Sammi and Brooklyn here last night.  Thanks to the gods for all such gifts.

Friday, June 19, 2015

Favorite Thing #5

Teton Road Trip

Driving up to Jenny Lake Lodge is favorite thing number five in my continuing series started five years ago when I wrote about mornings in front of the fireplace at Jenny.  In sixteen days we will make our nineteenth drive to Jackson Hole and I'm looking forward to it just like I did the first time.

We always leave on the Fourth of July.  I don't know if that was an intentional choice, but we soon discovered that whenever we weren't on an I-25 or I-80, we had the roads to ourselves.  It is a different story when we drive back on the eighteenth.

We have already started piling stuff up--bug coils, bug spray, rain gear, back packs--in the living room.  Soon we will be adding piles of shorts and hiking boots and water shoes for kayaking to the growing stacks.  We will eventually put everything in bags and stuff it all in the back of the car the day before we leave.

Whenever we travel somewhere, we wake up ridiculously early, raring to go.  That is especially true the morning of the trip to Jenny.  By five everything is somehow crammed into the car and the kayak is strapped in place on top.  A quick check of the house.  Windows closed.  Coffee pot turned off after filling our Disney World travel cups.  Computer shut down.

We are on the road--C-470--traveling by Red Rocks and on our way to Fort Collins on I-25 by six and at our first stop three quarters of an hour later.  We try as much as possible to avoid eating in fast food joints, particularly McDonalds, so we always stop for breakfast at Johnson's Corner outside Loveland.  I think we started stopping there the year after we entered a McDonalds parking lot in Laramie the same time two busloads worth of a high school marching band spilled their cargo.  The next year we started breakfasting on over easy eggs and German sausage so good my mouth is watering as I write this and all served by bustling middle-aged ladies who call you "Honey."

After breakfast, I check the straps holding down the kayak and we head for Fort Collins where we mercifully get off the interstate and take 287 cross country to Laramie.  Kathie's dad always insisted that it was better to stay on the interstate all the way to Cheyenne and then take I-80 to Laramie.  He was as wrong as he could be.  287 triangulates its way to Laramie and at speeds fast enough to keep you from getting bored.  It's beautiful country with rolling hills and cool snow fences lining the way.  I like driving through little places called things like Virginia Dale with one steepled building nestled next to the road and nothing else to indicate a village worthy of its own highway sign.

Once into Wyoming--I mean the instant you cross the state line--the first thing you see after the big welcome sign is a good sized fireworks stand already with cars, mostly from Colorado, filling its parking lot.  Other than that, Wyoming is pretty much like Colorado.  I have noticed that Wyoming tends to have better roads and rest stops than we do, but maybe I've just traveled in the best part of the state.

I've always managed to resist the temptation to check out Wyoming U's campus.  Instead, we take the I-80 exit and head west toward Rawlings.  Even though I hate the truck traffic on I-80, I like this leg of the journey for two reasons.  The first is the wind farm which fills the horizon with its giant white whirring blades.  I suppose I'm supposed to be aghast at the blight those scores of windmills have placed on nature and the noise pollution they create to anyone unfortunate enough to be living close by (of course, no one is living nearby which is probably one of the contributing factors to placing the wind farm in that desolate and wind blown section of the state).  But when I first see them spinning away in the distance, I feel a kind of a thrill at the juxtaposition of man and nature.  It's the same way I feel when I drive through Glenwood Canyon.  Sure, the canyon in its pristine state was a testament to the power of nature, but that same canyon with the swath of concrete carving its way along the Colorado River is just a marvel that can't help but thrill you.

Anyway, I like the windmills.  The second reason is Sinclair.  By any objective standard, Sinclair is a smelly eyesore.  It is a town developed around an oil field and you can smell the place before your first glimpse of sooty smokestacks belching dark clouds that settle over the dreary little community.  I find the whole place--the fact that anyone would choose to live there no matter the remuneration from the Sinclair Corporation--fascinating.  It reaffirms my cynical world view.

We get off the interstate at Rawlings and fill up the tank at a Shell station there we've been going to for years.  The most remarkable thing about this particular stop is that we have made it all the way from Johnson's Corner to Rawlings without either one of us needing a bathroom.  Of course, in Rawlings the need is urgent.  We take our time, buy a  big bottle of cold water, and reconnect with 287 for the rest of the trip.  I like the idea that 287 goes all the way from somewhere south of Denver through Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and Glacier National Parks.

We drive up and out of Rawlings, past a multiplex movie house (Rawlings' biggest) and a relatively recent softball/baseball complex and head toward Muddy Gap.  There's nothing at Muddy Gap--not even a muddy gap--except a gas station and a road sign letting you know that going straight will lead you to Casper, while a left turn will take you to Lander.

If I had to live in Wyoming and couldn't afford Jackson Hole, I would live in Lander. It's a mid-sized high plains town with a killer hamburger joint on the southern end of mainstreet and a Fourth of July Parade that draws folks from as far away as Riverton and Washakie to line the street and watch floats on flatbed trucks, a marching band--30 strong--from the local high school, shiny new tractors from the John Deere dealership, and horses, lots of horses, pooping in unison every third block.  By the time we roll into town, it is close to noon and the parade is wrapping up.  We take the detour through a small neighborhood and reconnect with 287 on the northern end of town right where that John Deere dealership I was talking about takes up the entire block.

The road from Lander to Dubois is called The Chief Washakie Trail and runs through the Wind River Reservation.  It is a beautiful drive of mostly three lane highway swooping up and down rolling green hills with only a few smallish casinos littering the way.  There probably isn't enough traffic through this area to support the kind of casinos that trash the countryside through Arizona and the traffic there is--people carrying kayaks and pulling campers to Yellowstone--is unlikely to stop off at a casino anyway.  But there is the little town of Washakie sitting by a river bed with FORT WASHAKIE  spelled out in giant boulders on the side of the mountains above the town.  Even better than Fort Washakie is Sacajawea's grave and you begin to fully realize that you are tracing the steps of at least part of the Lewis and Clark expedition.  It makes me happy I read Ambrose's UNDAUNTED COURAGE.

We hit Dubois an hour later just as their parade is finishing.  We stop and fill up the car again in an attempt to avoid the prices in the park and to give us another pit stop before the final leg.  Kathie usually likes to drive at this point and I happily sit in the passenger seat.  This section of the road is called Togwatee Pass and as it curls down the mountain into Jackson Hole it offers tantalizing little glimpses of the Tetons until the whole range opens up around a right hand curve.  Even after nineteen years, the view still takes our breath away.

From here it is an easy jog down to Moran Junction where I flash my lifetime senior parks pass (one of my favorite possessions) and drive immediately to Jackson Lake Lodge for drinks and bar snacks.  It is usually only about half past one by this time.  Still too early to get to Jenny.  Besides, the bar at Jackson Lake is a great place to sit by massive windows and look at Mount Moran.  Sometimes there will even be a moose or two in the willow flats below the lodge.

But enough about that.  It's time to head to Jenny.  The mountains are everywhere and getting closer by the minute on this final stretch.  When I hit the sign that points to String Lake and Jenny Lake Lodge, I'm home.  I like making this turn.  It makes me feel like I belong.  And I especially like making the final turn into the lodge.  I want the people riding in other cars to know that we aren't just there for some touristy reason.  No.  We Are Staying At Jenny Lake Lodge.  It is the one time of the year that I can pretend I'm wealthy.

When we walk into the lodge, it is like a family reunion.  The people at the desk either already know us, or have been told of our arrival.  If the chef is around, he'll come out and say hi.  Same with any waiters who happen to be in the main building.  It is all so familiar and so wonderful.

We order a bottle of Veuve Cliquot and enough champagne glasses to cover any other guests--old friends-- who might be stopping by.  Kathie deals with the paperwork stuff and I drive the car over to Bluebell.  She joins me there shortly and by the time we get the kayak down and the car unpacked, our champagne has arrived and our two utterly joyful weeks have begun.




Monday, June 15, 2015

Stamps Aren't Worth Shit Anymore


Again, don't be confused.  Today it is Katherine.

Friday I took my father's stamp collection to be appraised by one of the three certified stamp evaluators in Colorado.  I learned that stamp collecting is a dead art.  It is hard to get stamps to light up or beep and there doesn't seem to be a cool phone app that has anything to do with stamps.  People just don't care about stamps anymore.  My dad thought stamps would be eternal.  He thought they would grow in value.  My dad thought he was sitting on a bundle of money in his stamp collection.  My dad thought a lot of stuff.

When Dad died in 2007, his stamps were passed onto me.  He and I had mildly looked at stamps together when I was 12.  They've been in a closet ever since Mom gave them to me.  I got them out and looked at them a few months ago.  They were old.  There were a lot of them.   I decided I'd get an appraisal.  Couldn't hurt.

Dad was the first 12 year old Eagle Scout in America back in the late 1930's and the collection was part of his manic drive to get merit badges so he could earn his Eagle ranking before anyone else in the country.  It is a story all members of my family know well because Dad told it over and over and over again.

Dad's troop leader, Karl Meininger (the clinic one), was a lifelong inspiration to Dad.  When Dad was in hospice care, he talked to Mr. Meininger and other scouts as though they were there and I felt he was busy earning some sort of spiritual merit badge as I watched him speak and gesture to the invisible troop that seemed near him through the last weeks.  I like to think they were wonderful guides and Dad's now busy filling up some sort of celestial sash with badges.  He'd like that.

Dad, however, left a lot out of his Eagle Scout story.  He always talked about how poor his family was and how he had to kill rats at a drugstore to help make ends meet and how the Boy Scouts taught him to be a man (his father died when he was four).  He talked about camp outs and eating nothing but peaches and peas for a week when the troop was working on swimming badges by some river.  Dad never told the part of the story where he was a cruddy student and didn't do things meticulously because he was trying to get so many badges so quickly.  Basically, he could have done a lot better job on the Stamp Collecting Badge and he probably knew it.

I told Jim I thought there was no interest in the family for the stamps and I was going to get them appraised.  Maybe a stamp or two would be worth what my dad thought they were worth and he thought they were worth a bundle.  He said there were about a dozen really valuable stamps.  I had doubts.  I had seen other examples of Dad's childhood efforts.  Not really thorough or well developed.

Jim thought the appraisal was a great idea and he began having visions of Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade discovering that  $250,000 of stolen money was actually invested in a rare stamp attached to a letter Audrey carted around through the film.  Unlike Jim, I had no visions of rare and wonderful stamps that would catapult us into any significant money at all.  I knew my dad.

Dad had his own code when it came to valuing possessions.  If he had spent time on something or paid his hard earned money for something, then that thing was very valuable.  If something belonged to someone else and that someone else had spent time and money on that something, Dad thought it was worthless.  My favorite example is the 17 year old awful Oldsmobile that Dad could no longer drive.  It remained immobile and in the garage until his death because no one would give him the $4000 for the car he wanted (It blue booked for $700 at the time).  If someone had offered him that same Oldsmobile for $4000, he would have called the seller a thief.  Dad thought his stuff was great--everybody else's stuff sucked.

Dad also felt his opinions outweighed most facts.  My favorite story is abut Vail.  My family drove up to Basalt often in the summer so Dad could fish on the Frying Pan and Roaring Fork rivers.  Almost everything we did in my family was because Dad wanted to do it.  We lived in a very Fisher King kind of place where keeping Dad happy was kind of the constant goal and fishing was his constant goal when I was a kid.  Every time we went on one of Dad's fishing expeditions, we drove by Vail twice.  Each time Dad would go off on what an idiotic idea it was to put a ski village there.  It wouldn't snow.  No one would drive that far.  No one would want a wanna-be European style village.  We all knew Vail would fail before they chopped a tree down for a ski run or laid a cobblestone for the streets.  Dad said so.

Because Dad was in construction, a friend offered Dad a chance to buy a condo right at the Crossroads where Pepe's is now.  My memory is that it would have cost Dad around $5,000 and he had the money, but he thought it was the stupidest investment ever.  He never let the facts get in the way of his opinions and so he turned down the offer.  He ended up liking the golf course in Vail, but that was it.  He thought Vail was a failed place even as he teed off in a golf tournament I once played with him.  He was pretty stubborn.

Last Friday we went for the stamp appraisal.  I didn't expect much and Jim was still holding out some glimmer of hope that Dad had at least one hidden treasure in the collection.

The stamp appraiser was a wonderful fellow, age 70, who lives in the Polo Club down by Cherry Creek.  The building had an inner courtyard that made me dizzy walking to his condo, but his condo was full of art and antique furniture with stamp collection books stacked everywhere.  A very cool living space.  I felt badly for the guy though.  My email about the age of the collection and my dad's connection to Karl Meininger probably had him thinking there could be a real find somewhere in Dad's collection.

This guy knew his stamps.  He went through the albums and identified three stamps that were worth about $500 put together, but that would be it.  Several problems though.  They were bad copies and not in very good shape and that's a problem.   Also--try to find anyone who really wants to buy an old stamp.  He explained that stamp collecting is dying.

He explained that none of the collectors can find young folks to take on their collections and keep things going.   Also the postal departments around the world have killed collecting.  Postal departments discovered they could make pretty stamps and people would buy them and then not use the stamps so they made more and more and more stamps.   This makes them less valuable.   The US Postal Department even went as far as to make "forever" stamps so even the year is meaningless.  Stuff like that can drive a stamp collector crazy.  Stamps aren't worth shit anymore.  They are worth what you pay for them and that is all they will ever be worth.

The man was kind and directed me to the Colorado Stamp Library to donate the stamps.  We drove to the two small buildings housing Colorado's Philately Library filled with a whole ton of little old men who identify and file stamps and maps.  They were happy to take the stamps.

Discovering the map room at the library was our happy ending.  Jim has started his fourth book.  He needs some road maps from the 1950's for some research and he knows a place to go study real live maps now.  That was good.

I learned that stamp collecting, like lots of entertainments and hobbies of the past, is going to die and those who are keeping it alive are few and far between and they are desperate to find some young caretakers for the stamps they love so much.  I don't see much hope here myself.  They don't either.

Mostly I learned that my daddy is forever my daddy and his treasure of stamps was like all of his treasures--important to both him and me because the treasure belonged to him.  Without my daddy, there is no treasure at all and I kissed the stamps good-bye.


Sunday, June 7, 2015

Boobless and Pissed

Good Morning.  It is Katherine today.  Don't be confused.

It's just after five in the morning and I've been up for a while.  I've scanned some documents for a meeting I have tomorrow.  I've put in a load of laundry.  I've looked for the rain/wind jackets we've lost for a bit.  A minute ago I heard the coffee maker ding its "I am done" noise so I got a cup of coffee, sat down and turned on the TV.  There was Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot and her boobs were everywhere.  That was it.  Time to get some shit off my chest.

I've had a mastectomy and no reconstruction.  The only approach would have been to remove the lat muscles and turn them into boobs.  I would have to forgo tennis, kayaking, and anything that really relied on back muscles though.  I didn't do the surgery and when naked I'm a pretty gnarly looking girl.  

I got the fake boobs right after the surgery, but they are heavy and itch and I've only worn them a couple of times when I first got them.  The whole thought of going to a drawer and pulling out boobs to wear was tough.  I toyed with getting multiple sizes and C. Fite even knit me some various sizes (one of the coolest gifts I think I have ever received--I still have them).  I thought it would be fun to confuse people and show up with different boobs for different occasions.  The thought was easier than the reality.

In general, my boobless life is just like most flat-chested girls if any are left who haven't had surgery to get bigger and better boobs.  Most folks who don't know me would have no clue what scars and lack of symmetry lie beneath my wardrobe.  Jim adores me and how I look with and without coverage and my friends put up with my occasional boob melancholy.  Mostly I am just a normal flat-chested girl.

There are times, however, when the world's focus on boobs does me in and I just get pissed.  This is one of those times.

This particular boob mood started because there are three weddings coming up and I wanted something new to wear to them.  Seemed reasonable.  I wanted a pretty new dress.

I haven't bought a dress since December of 2007.  I'd bought the closest thing to a movie star dress I have ever owned.   It was rose colored and long, the back was bare and the front was low cut.  I loved how I looked in it.  It was for Franny's wedding.   Two weeks later I was diagnosed with breast cancer, the mastectomy decision was made, the dress returned, and I wore a dress from my past to Franny's beautiful wedding.  Though I've purchased a number of sun dresses for summer treks to the grocery store, I haven't bought a real live pretty dress since the rose dress I couldn't keep for the wedding.  

I started looking for my new dress (online and in stores) in early May.  I hadn't shopped for a dress since the boobs were gone and hadn't realized what a challenge it could be.  I started looking at dresses--on TV, on the streets, wherever.  I noticed a couple of things.  One--real women that I see in the real world hardly ever wear dresses at all.  Maybe there just aren't enough weddings.  Two--dresses seem to be designed for the sole purpose of boob awareness.    

I started analyzing dresses on the women I saw on TV.  Try looking at the NFL Network female personalities.  Try looking at the local CBS weather lady.  Try looking at the Fox News women.  TV women are all about boobs.  Boobs are pointing at me all the time.  

Trying on dresses was awful.  I don't think I even told Jim about it.  I stopped at Nordstrom's on my way home from a meeting and tried on three dresses I thought might work.  I forgot about darts.  I've learned never to buy a shirt or sweater with darts.  Darts make the fabric point outward and without anything inside the dress to fill in the pointy part, the dress doesn't work.  Because of my overall size, the empty points can get pretty big and look ridiculous.  I also foolishly forgot that boobs hold up strapless dresses--even strapless dresses without sequins.  I forgot that shirtwaist dresses look nifty because the belt in the middle is creating the hourglass image between hips and boobs and without the boobs on top, I just looked like an eleven year old anticipating puberty.  Nothing pretty about it.

I gave up on the store approach.  There was just too much disappointment.  I went online and looked at Eileen Fisher dresses.  I buy only Eileen Fisher sweaters.  They work with my chest.  That's the only reason I buy them.   I got lucky and found a dress I really liked and thought would work and was so excited that I bought it in two colors.  

When the dresses arrived, I had my usual glee at the package and then disappointment when I realized that there was just too much dress at the top.  Rather than returning them, I decided to have them altered.  When I went in for the fitting, the lovely Asian seamstress told me I would ruin some of the symmetry of the dress by trimming it down and it would be better if I wore "artificial breasts."  I told her to fix my dresses.  Symmetry is no more.

My dresses are "fixed" and I like them.  It cost about $50 a dress for the alterations.  If I had "breast pockets" put into them, the cost would be tax deductible.  The tax people are good about alterations that accommodate new and/or fake boobs.  If you don't go that route though, and you need an alteration for lack of boobs, it is not deductible.  I learned that when I had swim suits altered a couple of years ago.  Funny how the world works sometimes.  

It was the dress business that brought on this recent boob irritation, but small things have kept my fire lit.  I have no problems with Caitlyn Jenner.  It is the media's fascination with her figure, her boobs,  and her looks that drive me crazy.  When she was Bruce, she had a brain and an athletic history of note.  Now she is only about her looks.  Jon Stewart said this better on The Daily Show.  

I sat down with my coffee this morning to think about my day.  Could it be dry enough to get my last plants in the ground and some more weeds out of the ground?  Could the Rockies manage to win again?  Could I attack the mess in the office I've created with finishing my Metro paperwork?  Could I pick up a pen and try to draw a bit again?  Then I turned on the TV and there was Marilyn singing and cooing at me.

Marilyn was sewn into a transparent dress with appropriate sequin patches to cover nipples and such and then Marilyn bent over and sang and cooed, "I want to be loved by you, just you, and nobody else but you," and her boobs said a big hello to the camera and me.  That was it.

Marilyn Monroe is dead and a lot of folks think she is dead because she wanted to be more than her boobs.  I understand the feeling.  












Monday, June 1, 2015

Trying New Things and Organ Meats




Today it is Katherine writing.  A rare appearance of late.

I have been consciously and with effort trying and doing new things for about six months.  Watching Mom retreat into the things she already knew because she could remember them sparked this decision.   Mom spends most of her time in her apartment watching Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald movies.  I try to stop by close to meal times to avoid being trapped into a full viewing of one of her gems (she forgets I have seen them).   Naughty Marietta is her dream and my nightmare.

It seemed like a pretty little resolution--"I will try harder to do new stuff."  Seems easy.  Seems like that's what people do all the time.   It surprises me daily that I have to will myself into something new and that there are days where it just doesn't happen.  Doing new things is really hard.

Sometimes the new thing is only semi-new.  Sometimes I count that and sometimes I don't.  The rules are hard to pin down as well.  What really is new?  I mean, my spaghetti sauce tastes new each time I make it.  Kind of.

Seeing the movie version of INTO THE WOODS fell into this semi-new category.  I've spent enough time discussing the movie version with folks that I've decided it works.  Trying new things at old restaurants fits in this category too, but beyond deciding whether I will eat the new item again, there isn't much brain work here and it just isn't really new enough for my current approach to the resolution.

Sometimes a new thing takes away from an old thing.  We watched VALKYRIES the other night.  Not bad, but it got in the way of my knitting.  I had to pay attention.  Whoa.

 Sometimes new stuff is just really awful--the organ meat street tacos in PV hit me like that and I'm pretty darn sure I am not going down that road again.  For the record, Jim loved them and can't understand my complaints about odor and texture.

Sometimes new stuff is breathtaking or healing or really tasty.  There is a lot of risk here and a lot of aging is about learning to avoid risk and it is counter-intuitive to try out new things when you only have so much time to enjoy what you know you really enjoy.  Somewhere in all this is how grumpy old men become grumpy old men, but I need more caffeine than I have had in order to figure it out.

Before I get carried away and try to think about this too much, I think I'll just list some of my efforts to experience new things in recent history.

1.  I have tried multiple oysters of late.  Slithery oysters and fried oysters.  They are growing on me.  Jim keeps saying they taste like the sea.  Chefs say things like that too.  The sea tastes like salt and nothing else.  Oysters taste like oysters and they feel weird and slippery and feeling them slither down my throat is odd, but they don't taste like the ocean or the sea or even a Great Salt Lake.  Oysters might smell like the sea.  That's as far as I go.  I liked the fried ones in Puerto Vallarta best.

2.  I have started beading certain knitted work.  Thank you C. Fite.  I am more and more seeing myself as someone who paints with yarn and the beads add a medium.  I tried to "paint" the Santa Fe opera house into a shawl. The shawl combines the shape of the opera house and the colors of the sunset.  I am proud of it.  The photo I attached is the shawl.  Even Nate seemed impressed.  It is very hard to impress Nate.

3.  I had an acupuncture treatment.  It's kind of a fun story.  We've become friends with folks who run VALLARTA EATS in Puerto Vallarta because the tours and guides are incredible and I seem to make friends wherever I go because I listen to people as all real teachers do.  We went to their office to deliver a novel to a guide working on her English.

As we chatted, I melted--really.  Because of cancer drugs and my age, I melt now and then.  It's like a waterfall starts on my forehead and goes for a while and then stops.  It's embarrassing and damp on my end and most people try to pretend they aren't seeing it on their side.  Jim and friends have told me to just ignore it.  Can't happen.   Eric, the company owner, didn't pretend this wasn't happening and jumped in and told me his partner was an acupuncturist who specialized in treating women my age for these kind of things.  Eric gifted me the treatment.

I loved the treatment and the results.  I went close to three months without melting down and the night sweats were gone and for the first week after the treatment I felt like I walked around in a teflon bubble.  Yet another item on my To Do list is to find a local acupuncturist who could help me.  We can't afford monthly trips to PV for treatments.  That sucks, but I suspect I will lower my standards and try a new acupuncturist and decide if that counts as trying something new.   Just deciding if something is new or not is a task in of and itself sometimes.

4.  I have started drawing.  C. Fite introduced Zen Tangles at a knitting class.  It looked cool.  I bought a couple of books (I have never started much of anything without buying some books on the subject) and started drawing with the "required" pens.  The artsy pens clogged constantly and were expensive so I chucked them and started drawing with my favorite ballpoint pens.

I just did little drawing exercises at first.  Then I started getting ideas.  I started doing my own little drawings based on my own little life.  I gave myself narrow little assignments and by drawing 20-30 minutes a day, I got better.

I love this.  I am not doing this.  Life got busy and this slipped away.  Writing slipped away.  Knitting did for a bit.   Part of writing this is trying to find my way back to the things I love to do and the effort for that is hard as well.

5.  I have suggested some new restaurants and we have gone to them.  This is really hard.  Jim and I love food and we have found places that curl our toes.  If we find a new place we love, it's hard to work it into the rotation because we need to keep going to our favorite spots.  If we try a new place and we don't like it, we feel badly because we could have gone to an old standby.

There are two new places that have become part of our regular rotation.  The first is BUTCHER'S BISTRO in the Ballpark neighborhood downtown.  It's across the street from the Ballpark SNOOZE which is our go-to breakfast spot.  We've done lunch three times.  They make their own sausages and pates and mustards and you can buy them at the counter up front.  We like to sit at the bar and nibble appetizers or go for the burger and fries.  This is a really good place.

The other new place is SALT & GRINDER.  It is Frank Bonanno's new deli.  Sometimes after Jim drops Franny's kids back at their house, he will stop for a drink and burrata appetizer at S & G and bring sandwiches home for dinner.  I really like that.

6.  At the risk of ending on a downer,  I am pretty much done with organ meats.   The taco on the food tour did not win me over.  Even the chef's tasting menu we did at Mizuna where all food is wonderful didn't win me over when two dishes were based on organ meats and the textures bothered me.  I just don't see me getting there.  I tried.

At some point this list was very balanced and there was as much new stuff on it that I didn't like as the new stuff I did like.  There is more I like here now though.  I can only remember the name of one restaurant we won't go back to and couldn't tell you a single movie that I've turned off because it wasn't worth finishing.  I guess I needed more than a post title on my To Do list.

If there is a lesson here, and I'm not sure at all there is one, it's that we remember what we like.  Organ meats may be the exception.