Thoughts on Birthday Week

I really like the idea of celebrating my birthday for a week.  Not a straight week of party with cake and balloons, but doing things that I truly enjoy.  This is how my birthday week has played out this year.

Monday - got a massage.  Oh, yes.
Tuesday - played duets with Lynn.  Always enjoyable.
Wednesday - enjoyed sitting under the Turrell at Pomona College at the end of a lovely walk
Thursday - yoga
Friday - BIRTHDAY Day: hanging with my daughter for a few hours, going to a party (a dear friend's retirement party), going out to Bangkok Blue for dinner with my honey.

So, yes, many of these things I do on a regular or occasional basis, but when I think about it as doing something special each day to celebrate another trip around the sun, it makes these events a little more special.

Transit of Venus

I was so excited to find out that I would actually get to see the Transit of Venus yesterday.  I knew that I did not have the correct stuff to view the rare event, but, of course, Harvey Mudd College was right on it.

The college had a little party set up with a tent and refreshments, solar viewing glasses, telescopes and plenty of science nerds.  Someone was taking time lapse photos, and I believe they will appear on the HMC website in the near future.  Here is a link to some cool photos.

The easiest way to watch the transit

The transit inspired a smooch

Viewers

The telescope and camera section

My pathetic attempt at photography with a point-and-shoot

Voting Venue

On this June gloom morning, I voted in a new location - Sonja Stump Photography on First Street (between Harvard and College).  We usually vote at Sycamore Elementary School, but Sonja reported that the school said there were too many things happening there today, so when they asked Sonja (who usually runs our precinct elections) where they could hold the election, she thought about her business.  It's not in the correct precinct, but apparently you can hold your polling place in an immediately adjacent precinct.

Sonja is not only very active in all things Claremont, but she is a great photographer and all-around-great person.  She has taken the high school senior portraits of my daughters as well as a family portrait which sits in our living room.

The Buddha in the Attic

I hardly needed a bookmark to read this book in its entirety. Two years ago when I read When the Emperor Was Divine by the same author I noted the same thing about that novel.

Julie Otsuka's narrator in The Buddha in the Attic comprises a whole people, spoken as "we," and it tells the story, the stories, of Japanese immigrants to the U.S. in the early 1900s.  More specifically, "we" are the Japanese women who came to California as "picture brides."  They have pictures of the men they are to marry, but, as you can imagine, it is not the life they dream about as they cross the ocean.

I found this review of the novel at the NY Times to be particularly insightful.  Becker says that Otsuka's prose is more like poetry, and as I was reading I thought that it WAS like a long, lyrical list poem.

Phở Century

When you can't decide where to go out for dinner, you browse through yelp and see what pops up.  Tonight we gave Phở Century in Upland a try.  This Vietnamese restaurant is on the south side of Foothill, just west of Mountain in the Big Lots and Stater Bros. strip mall.

The soups we had were very fresh, and I liked the broccoli and cabbage in mine.  The coconut curry soup was actually fairly sweet - quite tasty.

If you like Phở, then you may just like this little place.

Chicken Coconut Curry Soup

Vegetarian Phở 

Imagine

This photo is an attempt to creatively display the book I finished yesterday.  I had heard about Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer, I think on NPR, or perhaps in the NYTimes. Probably both.

If you enjoy Malcolm Gladwell books, you will probably enjoy this one.  Lehrer begins by talking about various ways in which individuals come up with new ideas and then how they work like crazy to develop those ideas.

The middle section focuses on how organizations /companies foster creativity in how people gain insights from other people.

The third section delves into the importance of big cities in the fostering of creativity.

The final section was the one that spoke to me the most, and it was about education and creating a society that fosters certain characteristics that lead to creative growth.

I am recommending this book to just about anyone who has a brain.

Hidden Claremont: Tiny Lending Library

Check out this little gem in Clare-mont on the corner of 9th and Cambridge.  Swap your old book for one from the little mailbox.  This week I saw the second Girl With the Dragon Tattoo book in the mix.....

Sacred and Profane

Last week we finished the last of all 86 episodes of The Sopranos.  The final episode caused a great deal of discussion at our house and included some web searches for the meaning of the ending.  It was great. We will miss Tony and the gang (although, by the end, there weren't so many of them left....).

To fill the void, we have now started the most popular Downton Abbey, the PBS series which has just finished its second season. I'm afraid that we are going to run through this one pretty quickly since there are only 7 episodes per season.   Those Brits.  They only had 6 episodes total (3 each season) of the fabulous Masterpiece Mystery Sherlock series.  We want more!

Multicultural Day

Here it is again, the annual Multicultural Day at Vista.  You can read more about it at my post from last year, the year before that, and 2009.  Here is one shot of many flags raised in the air and waved about while we were singing today.  This year I thought I would post some links to the songs we sing as a group.  There is a lot of power in group singing, and when we can get the whole school united in one song, it is my very favorite part of the whole school year.  This year we sang Bandera del Sol (here is a youtube video of Tish Hinojosa - the singer/songwriter - singing this song for a school), This Pretty Planet, and The World is a Rainbow (this youtube video is of the singer/songwriter).

Near Repeat Conundrum

Remember back last month when we had a little incident at Lowe's?  Grill too big to fit in the back of our Camry?

You'd think we'd have learned our lesson, but perhaps not.

Without much of a plan yesterday, Memorial Day holiday, we set off to do a few things, and while out and about thought we would stop by Lowe's to look at patio chairs.  The ones we bought at Target last year, made out of plastic, seem to crack at will.

Let's just look and see what they have, we told ourselves.

While looking at some chairs, Leila and her husband just happened to walk by and casually say, "Sorry we didn't bring the pickup today (ha, ha!)."  No problem, I replied.  We are sure to be able to fit a few chairs in the back seat of our car.

Moments later, another set of friends walk in and we told them that we were about to put these six chairs into our car.  They looked dubious and said that they had brought their truck, and they would be happy to help us out.  No worries, I said.

We wheeled the chairs out to the parking lot, and soon we thought, worries...  Better go get the O'Neills!

Since this blog post is getting way longer than it has any right to be, the short ending to the story is that although I went back in to find the O'Neills, the chairs managed to fit into the back seat of the Camry, and now they are happily sitting on our patio.

Should our next car be bigger?