The Circle of Life: Musings

This past week has presented a variety of opportunities for me to reflect on the circle of life, as the world spins on. Somethings are new, somethings pass away, somethings remain the same.

Yesterday the HMC community said our final good-bye to Joe Platt, the founding president of the school. Galileo Hall was filled with the HMC family and for two hours, people got up to speak about how special Joe and Jean have been to us all, in so many ways. Although we miss Joe very much, he lived a good, long life and it seems expected (though sad) that after 90-some years on this planet that his life has come to an end.

Unexpected death of people who should still be vibrant in their lives is much harder to take. On Friday we lost a friend to cancer. We last saw Steve in the middle of July, just over two months ago, and enjoyed spending the evening with him and his wife, Susan and other book club friends. Steve was not feeling up to speed that night, and he found out just 10 days after that dinner that he had colon cancer which had spread to his liver.

I did not find out about Steve's cancer until about 2 weeks ago, and I am especially heart-stricken over his death, not just because he was a friend and close to us in age (and that he leaves behind a wife and two sons in their 20s), but that his doctor had told him that he did not need to get a colonoscopy since there was no incidence of cancer in his family. So, his death may have been prevented, and the message here, folks, is that you need to get this life-saving screening done. Period.

Amid sad times, though, rise rays of joy and hope. On Friday, as Steve was leaving this earth, I had the chance to meet this little baby, 7 weeks old. Daisy is just as cute as she can be, wearing one of the tie-dyed garments we made at her baby shower at the beginning of July. Welcome to the world, baby Daisy!

Waiting for Fall

Because I think it is healthy for me (and anyone) to goof off and do things for fun, and because I was inspired by a these articles (this one on a poetry box and this one on a biking poet), I made this little video yesterday afternoon. We are waiting patiently and not so patiently for the days to start cooling down....

Random Friday Photo

As seen on the 101 just south of Santa Barbara in June. 

On the Path to Energy Efficiency

Our bungalow is referred to as a one-and-a-half story house. That means that the second story is smaller than half of the first story. We don't live upstairs, but we certainly love having all that storage space. Back in July we started planning to have our house retrofitted to be more energy efficient. It's a slow process for various reasons, but today we took one of the preliminary steps towards our goal. Our plan included creating a wall with a door at the head of our stairs so we could keep the upstairs completely separate from the rest of the house. The guys came today and built that wall and installed the door which will give our upstairs a very different kind of feeling.

before

after

before

after

Crocheted Coral Reefs

This year the HMC Nelson Speaker Series is called Art, Science and Technology: Between the Studio and the Lab. I was excited to go to the first talk in the series last night (Reefs, Rubbish and Reason: An Unlikely Yarn about Global Warming and the World's Biggest Art+Science Project) because I had a chance of understanding everything in the talk. I did!

Margaret Wertheim, the Co-founder and Director of The Institute for Figuring in LA spoke about the project she and her twin sister, Christine Wertheim, started when they began crocheting a coral reef. Since their first work with this medium, the project has exploded with more than 6,000 active participants and many different coral reefs in exhibition around the world. 

Wertheim wants the beauty of science to be enjoyed by anyone and everyone, and she believes that active creating of science models helps us all understand science and the beauty of science, no matter what our interests are. She is the author of three books and numerous articles in various publications. 

Netflix, Again

This is a copy of a letter I sent to Netflix via USPS. Apparently there is no easy way to find an email address for the company.

Musings on Data

From the NY Times - Sunday, Sept 23, 2012

I will often read newspaper articles about the internet and social media, and yesterday's NY Times front page offered this article about how much electrical power "the cloud" takes. (As with many very long articles, I read until I feel I've gotten the main point and then my eyes glaze over...)

Anyway, as I read this article I thought about how genealogists search and search for any kind of data they can find on their ancestors. A birth, marriage or death certificate, census records, etc. We are fortunate if we can find some more personal information about the person, especially a diary, letters or even a memoir.

Future genealogists will have a much different problem. How will they sort through the mountains of data on each person? I think about all the data I have for myself. I have all the letters that my mom wrote to my grandma during the 1960s, the letters I wrote to my parents when I went to college and in the early years of my marriage before I started using email as well as the letters I wrote to H during those periods where we were apart. I also have saved so many emails. I have this blog. I have scrapbooks and the journals I kept in college. It goes on and on.

Do I think that people will actually care about this in the future? I like to think I will go back through all this old stuff, but really, I probably will look at less than 1% of it all. Maybe it's just comforting to me to know that I can look at my past self should I ever feel the need.

However, I may want to go through it and purge the most embarrassing stuff on the off chance that someone will one day actually go through it.....

Juanita's

I do not remember the last time we went to Juanita's. We always pass it on the way to Mix Bowl, but it doesn't cross our minds before we head south on Indian Hill. Friday it DID cross our minds first, so we went for lunch. I had a carne asada burrito, and what I do remember about Juanita's is how much I like the tortillas there. The burrito was big enough to last me for two meals, too...

There has been a rumor around that Juanita and Patty (of Patty's) are sisters. Anyone know if this is true? Also, what is the relationship of Juanita's and Juanita's III?

The Sisters Brothers

The best book recommendations come from friends with similar reading tastes to your own. The book I just put down yesterday came to me by way of a recommendation by Neil Gaiman, an author whose books I have enjoyed. The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt is the second western (sort of a western - it takes place during the California Gold Rush) I've read this year (the first was The Last Cattle Drive), and the second Funny book I've read this year. It is not often that I find a book that is funny, so I enjoy them when I can.

Eli and Charlie Sisters are brothers, two guns-for-hire, who are being sent to Sacramento to put an end to the life of Hermann Kermit Warm. Eli is not terribly keen on this kind of life, but he is unsure what else he is going to do. This odyssey includes quite a cast of characters from horses and beavers to ladies of questionable repute and gold miner hopefuls. DeWitt knows how to turn a phrase to bring characters and setting to life.

Random Friday Photo

These photos say two things.

1) It's Ducks Football tomorrow!

2) Our car windshield is very dirty....

Further Adventures of the Little Free Libraries

My friend Judy and her blog have kept me apprised of the newest additions to Claremont's Little Free Libraries which seem to be popping up in various locales throughout town. When last I blogged about these little gems, I knew of two - the first one I saw on the corner of Cambridge and 9th St., the one near The Press.  The Claremont Courier also mentioned the one in front of the new Crepe restaurant in the Packing House (where we have not yet had a chance to eat, despite our one attempt).

Then I heard about one in front of my friend Marjorie's house on N. Mills. It's on the east side just north of Foothill.  This morning I drove by and took a picture of the box as well as the contents. 

Judy's blog post yesterday altered me to yet another Little Free Library, this one in the 400 block of W. Harrison on the north side of the street. In its previous life, this repository was a small refrigerator. I not only snapped photos of the contents and the outside of this library, but I also deposited my copy of Amy Tan's One Hundred Secret Senses and took out a John Irving novel, The Fourth Hand.

More on Succulents

Maybe these photos don't show carefully the work that H did on Saturday to our front yard, but he did pull out quite a few plants and replaced them and rearranged the rocks.  We have been wanting to redo the succulent/cactus garden for probably several years now. I guess he got tired of waiting for me to take the initiative. He knows me pretty well.

Lesson Learned?

As noted in my previous post, it was a busy weekend. I know how we all say how busy we are, and we are. However, this weekend was over the top for me, and I think that I have learned my lesson. Either I have to plan better about scheduling, or I just have to say no to something. Even when all the events are good and fun, I am getting too old to leave the house at 8 a.m. and not get back until 9:30 p.m. 

The bulk of my day was spent at a fabulous Orff-Schulwerk workshop about teaching improvisation to elementary school children. I blogged about that in my music blog this morning. That was well worth the time and effort since I can use that knowledge in the rest of my teaching life.

The easy part of the day was to attend a surprise birthday party for my dear friend, who, as you can see, was in the party mode. Since I did not have to plan this event, it did not require too much effort, and it was well worth the time since it was fun!

The third and final event from Saturday was working the silent auction at CUCC's annual fundraiser, Fiesta de la Luna. This is a great event which takes months of planning. The food, atmosphere and company are fabulous, even in the heat. You might guess that gathering donations from everywhere, organizing the set-up (with signs and bid sheets for each item with starting bids) is a huge undertaking, and it is. You might now know that getting the items grouped by buyer and added up is a huge undertaking that must happen in an hour. Fortunately, this year we had 8 people working behind the scenes on the day, and despite some mix-ups, it went pretty quickly. Well worth the effort since the church benefits.

Hopefully next year some of these events will be spread out over a few weeks!

Drowsy Maggie

I don't remember a weekend being as busy as this one is turning out to be, in quite a long time. Playing catch-up - here is a shot of Lynn and me playing our Celtic Music in front of City Hall on Friday night as part of Friday Nights Live (music in the Village). This is the second time we've busked, and I think we should do it more often now that we have some tunes worked up. The only thing I would do differently is to play for less than three hours, because at the end of three hours, we felt a little wrung out.

Photo courtesy of my lovely daughter and her Instagram feed....

Random Friday Photos

Are you excited about the CUCC Riches and Rummage Sale coming up?

What's in a Name?

What is the sweetest thing to a child's ear? Their own name. When my daughter was in nursery school, the school director once told the parents that we should make deposits into the children's "good feelings bank" on a daily basis. Obviously that is a fundamentally important idea since I have carted it around in my head now for over 20 years. How sweet it is to have someone say hi to you by name.

I have many students. Many. At Vista our whole school population is just over 300. In October I will add students from other schools in our string program, so I will have another 40-50 names to learn (or relearn!). I want to make a concerted effort to learn everyone's name and use it - look them in the eye, smile and make a connection.

In my music blog today, I posted about one way in which I am starting to work towards my goal, incorporating names into the curriculum. I know I may not get to 100%, but I am going to strive towards that.

Parks Then and Now

Remember when parks were fun? When you could get splinters from the cool firetruck or train, or get a great burn from the metal slide that sat in the sun? Perhaps you could fall from the big cactus and hit the sand and break your arm. Neither of my girls actually ever got hurt at any of the Claremont parks, back before the cool metal and wood equipment was replaced with plastic.  I take that back. Once one of the girls fell on the rocks at the Train Park and got scraped up. We loved the Train Park (Higgenbotham), nevertheless.  We also loved the Firetruck Park (Wheeler), the Frog and Bee Park (Larkin). 

I don't go to those parks much anymore, but the other day I was at Higgenbotham (and I still remembered how to get there). The cool wooden train that looked like a real train is history, and now we have a plastic facsimile. 

I wish I had a picture of Larkin and Wheeler from the good old days. If you have one, let me know!

Higgenbotham Park, c. 1987

Higgenbotham Park, 2012

Church Website

After a long haul, Claremont UCC has now set loose our newly revamped website onto the internet. What a great improvement! Visit it here.

Chicken in Mole Sauce

I have just arrived home from my first day of teaching general music for the school year. It went very well, but, when you are not used to being "on stage" for 2 hours, it's a little tiring! Thankfully, I know what is for dinner tonight - leftovers!

These leftovers are particularly yummy. Our friends, Jack and Susan, bid on and won a trip to the Homegirl Cafe at last year's Fiesta de la Luna to learn how to make food. At least I know that they made mole. I mentioned to Jack that it would be oh, so lovely for him to share some of that mole, and though I was kidding, Jack decided that we did need some of his stock, so he brought over a container that will probably make about three meals worth of sauce.

I took chicken thighs and browned them in butter, covered them in the mole and put them in a 400 degree oven for 45 minutes. It was not only delicious, but enough for several meals.

I think when I have some time, I would like to learn how to make this, although I know it is very labor-intensive. Perhaps an easy version would be pretty good, too.

Saturday Night in Claremont

When it cooled down a bit last night, we made a quick decision to take a walk through the colleges. The sky was beautiful (even if my little camera couldn't capture all of the subtleties). 

As we wandered through the various parties on CMC's campus we heard the sounds of football, so we headed over to the stadium and watched some of the CMS v Lewis and Clark game. After sitting in the stands with screaming college students and then walking home via various other loud parties, we decided that we would not want to have to go back to college....

End of the Summer Garden

While listening to the garden sprinkler go off this morning, I thought that we were at the end of the summer growing season. We've gotten very little produce lately, so, in order to save water, I thought "we"(and by "we" I mean "H") should pull what was left and we will plant fall veggies in a week or two when the temps cool a bit more. We now have a small pile of green onions, a handful of tomatoes and one butternut squash. I think we actually had about 4 squash this year, and they have been delicious. I will miss the tomatoes, especially, though. Time to get them from the Farmer's Market.

The garden at rest

Random Friday Photo

My toes are ready for the school year to begin!

The Warmth of Other Suns

It's been awhile since I posted about a book, but I have been reading. This one, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson is pretty thick. By that, I mean that there are many pages - over 500. It is not dense to read, though.

Wilkerson follows the stories of three black Americans who move from the South to 1) Los Angeles 2) Chicago 3) NY during the 20th C. She interweaves their stories with general information about this mass migration which has changed the face of the nation.

By telling the story this way, Wilkerson puts faces on the kinds of stories that statistics never can. Although this book is full of detail, I did not find myself skimming along, as I do in *ahem* some books. The life stories are compelling, full of rich detail, sad as many of them are. Even though the stories start before I was born, they are still continuing either because the people in them are still alive, or because their family members are still shaped by the decisions these people made to leave their homes in the South.

As I finished up this book and looked over the books I've read so far in 2012, I put a little star by it, meaning that it is one of my favorite books of the year. I usually have about 3-5 stars a year. I kept putting it off because of its heft, but with the slowdown of book clubs in the summer, I was ready to tackle it.

How to Fold a Fitted Sheet

As my friend, Kim, was preparing to send her daughter off to college last week, she remarked on Facebook that Lily was ready to go since she had learned how to fold a fitted sheet. If you are like me and saw the title of this blog post, you would have said, "Fold a fitted sheet? You mean, how to wad one up?" Of course, Kim's remark created a flurry of replies, which prompted me to look this video on youtube (there are many). Today I gave it a whirl, and though this does not look perfect, it is WAY better than my usual efforts, and I know with time, it will get better.

Gray Bell

Two years ago, HMC physics professor Gray Bell passed on. This morning, he reached his final resting place in Oak Park Cemetery in south Claremont. I am under the impression that he had donated his body for scientific research, and now it was time to retire permanently to his spot underneath an old live oak tree. As this was the first day of classes at HMC, the gathered group was small in number, but large in spirit as we reflected upon Gray's wonderful life, his kind and gentle spirit, and his great contributions to HMC as well as his wider community of church, friends, and family.

Labor Day

Twenty seven years ago, I was in labor. How fitting. Happy birthday to my firstborn, L! Since we were unable to help her celebrate in Oregon this year (having recently celebrated her marriage there), we decided to celebrate her here at home. This is what we did.

After getting breakfast burritos at Alberto's and coffee, we took off down the 57 towards Costa Mesa with bikes on the rack. See how light the traffic was on this holiday morning?

Knowing a bit about where we had biked last June, we could make better plans for our trip. First we parked in a little park near Estancia High School and rode our bikes over to the Santa Ana River toward the ocean and Huntington Beach. The good thing about this plan is that the parking is free. The other good thing about this plan (and this is the really good thing) is that the first part of the ride is against the ocean breezes, and the return trip is with the breeze.  Again, we rode 22 miles, and this way was much better.

We stopped for a bit and watched the waves, the surfers and the beautiful blue sky.

Here are two kites that look like parasailers.

Part of the bike ride involved trying to find this park that has a big cement dome made to look moon-like. We could not get to the park on bikes because I was way too tired at that point, and my little tushy was complaining. However, we did manage to find the park with the GPS after we got back to the car so that I could see the wonder of the moon. Here it is, in all its glory. It's something, huh?

All in all, it was a great way to celebrate the day I first became a mom.

Peanut Butter Pretzel Truffles

When it's too hot to turn on the oven and you want to make a dessert to take to someone's house, you can make Peanut Butter Pretzel Truffles. You can read the recipe and description here, at my daughter's baking blog. I used the natural kind of peanut butter, and I'll have to say that it was rather difficult to keep it frozen. After sitting in the freezer overnight, I took out the little balls to roll in the melted chocolate (so, no oven, but you do have to turn on a stove burner), and they were squishy within a few minutes. Also, the pretzels I used did not have salt on the outside, just sesame seeds. 

I also doubled the recipe. ...

So next time, I will try Jif or some other kind of pb, salty pretzels, and perhaps some dark chocolate chips. That being said, we had no trouble consuming them all. I would still double the recipe.