Salvage the Bones

Here is yet another award-winning book (National Book Award) that I could have been happy never having read.  When I first heard that it was about Hurricane Katrina, I was intrigued.  I've been to New Orleans pre- and post-hurricane, and I'm a big fan of the TV show Treme which takes place in post-Katrina NO with heart and music as big as what-all.

The first 3/4 of this book leads up to Katrina in Mississippi and hardly seems to have any momentum, story arc, or interest.  Katrina comes with a fury, then leaves, and one would think that kind of disaster might require some kind of soul-searching, or at least some kind of contemplation.

Obviously I am missing something big here that many people see, but I didn't feel as though I wanted to take the effort with this book.

The Sopranos

Better late than never.  Having become fans of a variety of HBO series in the past few years, we had never watched The Sopranos. With the discovery that the LA County Library system has these on DVD and can be ordered to arrive within a few days (especially since these date back over a decade), we took the splurge, and now we have watched the first two seasons.

Well, it's pretty violent at times, but we enjoy the comedy parts, the foibles of family life for these three-dimensional characters, the great writing and acting.

Save the Trees! Save the Paper Storm!

It has occurred to me that in the 30-some years that I have been doing my own taxes that I rarely looked at old receipts.  Of course, some receipts are important for tax deductions, and some are important if the item I purchased has a warranty.  But, really.  Am I going to need to revisit the receipt for a tank of gas, a cup of coffee or some miscellaneous items from Target?  It used to be helpful when tracking expenses, but now everything is online and can be looked up, when necessary.

Today I started collecting the information for the 2011 tax year, and I see that my pile of documents has shrunk.  This can only be good since a few years ago I went through old boxes of tax information to shred, and each year took me longer than I thought it needed to.  When I put gas in the car yesterday and the machine asked me if I wanted a receipt, for the first time I pressed no.

Liberation from the white blizzard!  Well, it's now down to a light sprinkling of snow...

Lime Marmalade

My friend, Denise, announced on Facebook that she had just made lime marmalade and was giving it away.  I took this as an opportunity to not only try out lime marmalade, but to find a happy home for some of my summer peach and plum chutney as an exchange.  (To be clear, there were two small jars of chutney, one of peach, one of plum.)  The swap was made, and now I have this large jar of sweetness ready to open and give it a try.

Moroccan Lentil Stew

A few days ago when we had a bit of winter weather, I made this Moroccan Lentil Stew.  I used the Trader Joe's canned lentil soup as the base and I did add the greek yogurt as a topping. This was really tasty!  Now it's summer weather around here, so I'll have to wait until it cools down to make this again.

Police Investigate Death in Claremont

Yesterday morning on my way to yoga, I saw a police car by City Hall near the Occupy tents.  It seemed a little strange that several officers were talking to each other, but not the people occupying the tents.  After yoga I saw the coroner's van, and it occurred to me that perhaps something else was up, and this notice on the Courier's website confirmed it.

More on Squirrels

This morning my friend emailed me this video link about another way to get rid of squirrels...

The Squirrelinator

At the Oak Glen Retreat Center, I found this squirrelinator hidden in the garden.  I could really use one of those at my house.  See the second photo for the mess the little buggers are making of my tangerines.  The question is, then, how to dispose of the varmints once they are in the trap?  I've heard that one can drown them in a trash can of water.  I wouldn't be able to do that, but maybe someone at my house could.....

Renewal - Again

Last year on this weekend, I joined a group of church women at Glen Ivy Retreat Center for a time of renewal.  It was such a good time that we immediately decided to make it an annual tradition.  Many of the same women made the return this time - a few couldn't come back and a few new ones joined us.

One of the things that surprised us (in the sense that we weren't sure we would enjoy it) was how much fun we had making collages by cutting out pictures and words from magazines to describe ourselves.  Even more fun than creating these was sharing them with each other.  Stories surfaced that had us laughing so hard.  Here is a picture of all the collages after we taped them to the wall (before they started falling down).

The Art of Fielding

Any book with heaps of praise and baseball player at the center will have me from the get-go.  I started this 500-page book last weekend and found myself laughing and turning pages, happy to have found a novel to relish.  Then, about 300 pages in, it started to slog, and by the end, it was only a two-hour waiting room stint (for nothing of consequence) that propelled me to finish the book.  Well, I would have finished it, because even though I wished for about 150 fewer pages, I did like the book.  I just didn't love it the way that I had hoped to.

This is a first novel for Harbach, and though it took him 9 years to write, I will probably read his next novel, whenever it appears.

Identity Shuffle

This morning one of the kindergarten students greeted me as I came on campus, calling me the name of the librarian.  This happens several times a week.  I used to think that it was mostly because I used to run the library, but I haven't done that for 5 years now, so most students don't even associate me with that.  Actually, our librarian and I must look alike to kids, and that usually brings us a chuckle.

More from Universal Studios

Here are a few shots from the driving tour we took at Universal Studios on Monday.

This is Boo Radley's house from To Kill a Mockingbird

Here is the Bates Motel from Psycho - the tall, crazy buildings in the back are from How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

The house from Psycho 

A 747 Plane Crash from War of the Worlds 

You can see a video of the whole site here

Wisteria Lane

While other people chose to celebrate with reverence yesterday, we took the opportunity to take a private tour of Wisteria Lane (the outdoor set of Desperate Housewives) as well as the sound studios at Universal Studios.  One of our college classmates has been a writer for the show since season three, and along with some other classmates in LA, we had a mini-reunion at the studios.  First we took a van tour and saw many of the streets from other movies and tv shows (including the Bates Motel from Psycho and the town square from Back to the Future).   Then we got to wander throughout Wisteria Lane and take photos and go into the houses which actually have rooms inside (many are just facades).

After lunch we popped into the sound studios and watched the filming of part of one scene with Bree Van de Kamp (you won't hear a spoiler from me....) and then met her along with Orson Hodge.  (Yes, I know that their real names are Marcia Cross and Kyle MacLachlan.)  They film about 5 minutes a day for each episode, so it takes 8 days of filming to get their 42 minutes and 20 seconds of episode.  

Quickly wisked away to the hospital set next, we watched while Vanessa Williams rehearsed a scene, then left the room while a stand-in sat in her place to get the lighting correct.

Because our friend is one of the writers, we also went to the room where he spends most of his time and saw the board with the plot lines pinned up, color-coded and edited.  We asked if he knew what would happen in the final episode (this is the last season), and yes, he does; we don't.

The final part of the tour was visiting one of the 5 trailers where they keep the wardrobes for the cast.  Wow!  It takes 10 people to take care of all the parts of outfitting the actors, including the shopping (I hear you can get great deals at Target!), cleaning, maintaining, and keeping track of who wears what for each episode in case there will be a flashback.... I was exhausted just thinking about it all, and I had a great appreciation for all 250 names that come up at the end of an episode.

To learn more about the houses of Wisteria Lane, click on the Wiki page link and see what other shows have been filmed on this street.

Gaby and Carlos Solis House

Susan's Kitchen

Also the Leave it to Beaver house

Pilgrim Place

We were guests for lunch yesterday at Pilgrim Place - the community for those retiring from religious or charitable organizations.  One of the Pilgrims we know from church invited us as his guest.  This dining hall was filled for the noon meal with energetic chatter.  I've always known the Pilgrims here to be an active bunch, and after the meal we took a tour of the Arts and Crafts Building which has a variety of rooms dedicated to various crafts from woodworking (with a state-of-the-art saw which turns off immediately if your finger touches it) to ceramics to painting and drawing to knitting, etc.   Apparently this building leads a busy schedule during the week.  No moss grows under these people's feet!

No Foolin'

Hot and Sour Soup

One of my students told me about one of her favorite restaurants, FuLin, in Montclair. When she said Chinese/Korean fusion, I wanted to go.  She told me the names of some of her favorites, none of which I remembered since my Korean is very, very rusty (i.e. nonexistent).  In preparation for our visit, I yelped the place and found the names of some of the black bean curd stuff that I think my student had mentioned: cha-jang myun (black bean paste & vegetable noodles), tangsuyuk (sweet & sour beef or pork) and jampong.

I had always noticed this restaurant when driving down Central south of the 10 Freeway, so now it was time to check it out.  We got our menus and looked through them carefully, but we found nothing that looked like the recommendations, and since I had not bothered to write down the particular food, we went with what we thought might be close.  I don't think we were close, but this is what we had.  Hot and Sour Soup (very spicy and quite tasty).  I don't even remember the name of the two vegetarian dishes we ended up with - but they were both full of tofu.

I will need to ask my student, once again, to tell me more about this place before we go back since it seemed like all the food on the menu was traditional Chinese without any Korean or fusion dishes.

Peter in Paris

So, last year I blogged about finding these books and records on eBay that I had had as a child with which my father tried to teach me French.  I sent the records off to be made into mp3s and yesterday I made a little movie with the soundtrack and the pictures from the book.  Actually I made two of them.  The book is one that you can read from both ends.  One end starts in English, one in French.  They tell kind of the same story.  I tried to upload them to youtube, but I don't see where they have appeared, so I am embedding one of them right here in my blog.  If you have a spare 6 minutes, you can enjoy the excitement of Peter in Paris.

Calvin Trillin

I have been meaning to read something by Calvin Trillin.  I must have heard about him on NPR, and I know that he writes for the New Yorker.  The question was, "What shall I start with?"  I decided, upon perusal of the Honnold stacks that I would get a slim, recent volume Trillin wrote about his wife, Alice, who passed on in 2001.

I thought the tribute and remembrance of his love was charming, funny, well-written and a great introduction to Trillin's work.

I did also pick up his novel, Floater, and though the writing is also funny, it doesn't rely heavily on plot, and I put it down after 50 pages.  I will go back and chose more of his other non-fiction, though.

I found this video of both Trillins on Charlie Rose.

Vista's Science Fair - 2012

I am so glad that we are well past the days of elementary science fair projects (although I was never the parent in charge of them...)  Here is a small sampling of the projects from last night's extravaganza.

On Netflix

I used to sing the praises of Netflix.  We started getting DVDs about 5 years ago, and it was great to have them arrive in the mail.  Then it was occasionally frustrating when something I wanted to watch was continually listed as "Very Long Wait,"  or when a disk arrived unplayable and we had to wait a few more days for a replacement.  BUT THEN, they added this really cool feature called Instant Streaming.  And we rejoiced.  We could hook up our laptop to the TV with a bunch of spaghetti, and away we went.

Then the mucky mucks at Netflix thought it would be cool to up the price by 60% in one fell swoop, and, well, you know about all the trouble the company was in after that fiasco, what with their trying to split it into two companies, etc.

We took a three-month hiatus from Netflix and kept ourselves entertained with hulu and MLB and the new season of Modern Family and some lame show called Terra Nova, and then college football and some NFL.

Around the holidays, we decided that most of the movies in our DVD queue weren't all that enticing to us any more.  I wondered, sometimes, why I put them there.  It was clear that we ought to just go with the streaming option since that queue was sizable.  There seem to be plenty of tv shows (which last way longer than movies).

Turns out they need THREE DAYS to change your account over from one service to another.  THEN, if you only get DVDs, you can't see what streams.  If you only stream, your DVD queue vanishes in cyberspace.  Well, I've heard that it is still there, but I can't see it.

Also, there is no SAVE feature with a streaming service.  I have to keep checking every week or day or fortnight to see if something that I want to see is now streaming. In addition, I cannot rate movies unless they are available for streaming.  Blah.

Seems to me that if Netflix wanted to drag me back into DVDs AND streaming, they would make it easier for me.  Do they really want me to feel irritated when I see their logo on my computer?

The Tortilla Curtain

 The New Year starts with Book Club this week, and on tap for discussion is T. C. Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain.  I'm sure there will be plenty of discussion about the hot topic of illegal immigration.  Though this book was published sixteen years ago, it doesn't feel dated.  Border crossing issues are still complex with no simple solutions.  Neither couple in this novel (the privileged white couple, the poor Mexican couple) is happy, although set in direct contrast with each other in alternating chapters it is easy to discredit the concerns of the privileged when they have such plush living quarters and plenty of food.  If I edited this book, I would want to see the rich couple more conflicted about their views of  immigration issues.

Wheels When You Want Them

Our second car is a Zipcar.  On occasion when we need to have two cars, one of us will rent one by the hour.  On Saturday I had a meeting in Redlands when H had to be in Placentia for an umpire meeting.  Here is a pic of my fun ride - a blue Ford Focus.

One thing about this car, when you hit about 76 mph, the dashboard makes a little sound and flashes a warning that the vehicle is reaching its maximum speed.  Gee, I wonder how I found that out?

Claremont Loving Hut Redux

Spicy Tender Gardein Burger

Taco Diego

Time to revisit Claremont's Loving Hut since the soft opening.  Before we went, I perused the online menu and decided that I wanted the Avocado and Crispy Seitan Club Sandwich.  Our waitress told us that they were out of several items, but when I ordered the Club, she said, "Oh, we just sold the last one of those."  I wonder, then, if they are premade?  Good thing I had a second choice lined up.  I ordered the Spicy Tender Gardein Burger.  H, on my recommendation from last time, ordered the Taco Diego.  

I have to say that I was unimpressed with the taste of the burger.  Actually, the lack of taste.  However, the spicy sauce on the burger had a kick and some flavor, but the Gardein was not very warm and had nothing special to recommend it.  H said the same of his tacos which apparently weren't as good as the first ones I had.  

Also, although the decor is pleasant enough, and it's very quiet inside (3-4 tables of people), since it is a little upscale, they could have some quiet music playing or something to create an ambiance to match the pricey menu.  I'm not sure we'll be back.  I will continue to go to the Upland restaurant or to Santa Monica for RFD when I need a vegan meal.

Super King Market

When we moved to California 25 years ago, we lived in Baja Claremont and did the bulk of our grocery shopping at Lucky south of the 10 Freeway.  Then Lucky merged with Albertson's, and then later that store closed and the site sat vacant for a number of years.  Recently Super King Markets opened in that location, and I had to go check it out.  I had heard that it was 1) big and 2) very busy.  Both reports were accurate.  First of all I had a hard time finding a parking spot, and the young men working there were busy corralling shopping carts.  Inside it felt as though people were stocking up for Thanksgiving.  

I didn't buy anything today, but I will keep the deli, produce section and bakery in mind for the future....

Weather Report

This morning I read The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats to the Kinders, but before I began, we needed to clarify what season it is.  Usually we have snow on the mountains at this time of year, but not now.  It's been unusually warm (after having a chilly December) and sunny.

My garden is in winter swing with snap peas and lettuce doing well, and surprisingly, we still have green peppers.  Peppers usually thrive in summer heat, but they made it through December and still give us a few a week.

I'm back to riding my bike to school on Thursdays, too.

Methodist Church Nativity

The Claremont United Methodist Church has a history of creating unusual nativity scenes which carry social messages. This year's depiction of three couples, one heterosexual, one gay, one lesbian, prompted someone to vandalize the scene on Christmas Eve.  This hate crime has been covered by the LA Times, CBS News and even The View on ABC (among others).

Before

After

New Year's No. 2

Yesterday's bonus holiday, New Year's Day Again, was filled with food and football.  For the first time since we've been Ducks fans, we can celebrate a bowl win!  Even though Wisconsin is one of our other favorite teams, Oregon is our current #1 NCAA team. (Too bad that Stanford couldn't make their win, though.)



C and B helped in the celebration by bearing all kinds of good food.  We provided the homemade guacamole, they brought homemade tamales, rice and beans, and cupcakes.  The salad came from our garden.  I am happy that I still have today to get ready to start the new year of teaching!

Hawai'ian Historical Sites

Along with beautiful scenery and good food, we enjoy learning a bit of history when we travel.  The Big Island has several beautiful National Historic Sites on the Kona side.  The first one we saw is Pu'uhonua o Honaunau (also called The City of Refuge).  Ages ago if you broke a law (say your shadow crossed over the land of the chiefs), you were sentenced to death.  You had an out, though.  If you could swim or somehow get to one of these places of refuge and become cleansed, your trespass was forgiven and you could return home a free person.

This place is quite beautiful and we enjoyed our several hours here, from strolling through the lush grounds, looking out over the ocean, to the most entertaining and informative ranger talk.

The other Historic Site we visited bordered the campground at Spencer Beach, so we could just walk over to visit it.  Pu'ukhola Heiau is the temple of the great King Kamehameha who united all Hawai'ian islands under one rule in 1810.  

In contrast with the City of Refuge, this temple (heiau) sits in a starker landscape overlooking a small bay that is often filled with sharks (which we did not see).  However, we did see the spout of a humpback whale just off the shore while visiting this site.