Throwback Thursday

Last Thursday's blog post about the Flowbee commercial reminded me of another set of ads we really liked (for their silliness) during our grad school days in Madison, Wisconsin. Youtube has one of the Pizza Pit ads that we liked in the winter which you can see here. The children singing are way out of tune, but I like the little car.

I wish that I could see the Pizza Pit ad which featured Barbie and Ken dolls where you could see people holding the dolls by their ankles, and where Ken dialed the phone by smashing his face into the numbers.

New Year's Workouts

Last week at the CMC Ducey gym where I work out, I counted 10 students starting off the new semester getting their sweat on. This week I see 4-5 students. 

When I worked out at the YMCA in Evanston, the New Year's rush lasted until March. I was glad when it was easier to get a parking spot and had more space in the locker room.

I am at the point in my life where working out is not an option. I might miss a day or sometimes a week, but then I crave it, so it's back to the gym or yoga or brisk walk I go.

Rocco Raccoon

Today Rocco Raccoon is sitting on top of the tea section at the Claremont Trader Joe's. I've seen signs in the store telling kids to look for Rocco and when they find him they will get something (a sticker?). I never paid much attention to it since I don't think they would consider me a child, but the other day I went into TJs with C and asked her just what the raccoon was, and she told me that it is a stuffed animal. 

Today I made sure to take my camera into the store and found him right away. No sticker, but I did get some blog fodder.....

Lessons from a Dog

I have a college friend who is also my Facebook friend. She has recently started a blog about what lessons she learns from her dog, Bob, and how she can be more like Bob. You can read her blog here. Maybe I can learn dog lessons from reading her blog rather than from actually owning such a pet.

3rd Annual Women's Retreat

Just a photo from the Glen Ivy Retreat Center this morning just before we left our Women's Retreat. The air was clear, the clouds beautiful, but we had to find the right place for a photo since so many trees block the view of the mountains.

Song of the Coyote

On Tuesday I wrote that I would be leading a poetry-writing session with women from my church. Today was that day, and I was immensely pleased and impressed with the variety of poetry that the women in the group wrote and shared. Using some Walt Whitman as a prompt, the "assignment" was to write a poem where you invite someone to come with you to and to share your secret power.

In the wee hours last night while out at the women's retreat at the Oak Glen Retreat Center I heard coyotes, and they were the inspiration for my poem. Here it is:

Song of the Coyote

Listen to the howls of the coyotes.
The song is in them,
  the song is in me.
You do not know it yet, but if you come with me,
If you come with the coyotes into
  the dark of the night
  you will know the song of the
  coyote in you.

We will run with the dark mist
  in our faces as we
  howl a duet
Our tails behind us, rising and dipping

And when we reach the place ...
  we reach that sacred place
where voices and songs of all time
  and before time and voices
  from time yet to come
our song will entwine within
  and throughout
  the communion of
  all breath

Flowbee Anyone?

The other night when my folks were here along with C and B, something triggered my memory of a product we used to see advertised during our grad school days in the 1980s. Knowing that so much is now on the internet, I looked on youtube for a Flowbee commercial and found one plus a number of parodies. I played this commercial for my family, and we had a good chuckle about "This revolutionary  home haircutting system [that] cuts your hair evenly into the recessed blades and trims it precisely. The results are a refreshing vacuum haircut." Yes. A Vacuum Haircut. Attach these blades to a vacuum cleaner, drag it over your head, and voila! 

Apparently you can still buy this item. Just go flowbee.com and you are on your way!

Local Door-to-Door Scam

In the past several weeks we've had two scam artists come to the door. Nicely dressed young men claim to be trying to better themselves in one way or the other, and they have to get points from people. Of course, this involves buying books or magazines. If you don't have children, you can just donate these books to the local hospital or somewhere.

They claim to have talked to our neighbors, etc. Or maybe they are the son of a neighbor you've never heard of.

Well, last night when one of them came to our door, H was listening to the long-winded pitch, and pretty soon a policeman drove down the street and called to the young man, thus ending the conversation. Thank you, real neighbor, for alerting the authorities and taking care of this particular scam-guy.

Cloud Nine

Soon I am going to be leading a poetry-writing workshop for a group of church women. I have done these types of activities with my daughters and their friends when they were in jr high and high school, so it will be interesting and fun to see what it's like with adults of all ages.

We will be writing our drafts on regular lined paper, but I wanted to have some nice paper for our final draft, and it occurred to me that Claremont has not only Stamp Your Heart Out for scrapbooking, but also this upscale paper store in the Village. I decided to look into Cloud Nine on 2nd Street, and I came away with exactly what I was looking for. Small pages of a variety of colors (I hope no one fights over what color they get!) from pastels to rich hues.

 This Queen of Hearts in the window display has kind of a scary look in her eyes...

Reflections on Inaugural Arts

Four years ago, I was enchanted by the quartet of Air and Simple Gifts performed at Obama's first inauguration. The small kerfuffle about the musicians air-playing to their own prerecorded performance did not bother me (how can one play instruments in such freezing cold weather?). It certainly didn't hurt that I already enjoy the music of Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma and John Williams, as well as the Shaker hymn on which this piece was arranged.

This year I was taken with the poem (only the fifth inaugural poem in history). I did not know the poet, Richard Blanco (aside from the NPR piece on him I heard earlier this month), but the poem reminded me of Walt Whitman, a poet whose work I've known most of my life. Hector Tobar (author of recently mentioned The Barbarian Nurseries) wrote his reflections on the poem and poet for the LA Times here.

Giving the arts a prominent role in such events heightens the importance of any such occasion, and helps justify what I already firmly believe - the arts are not fluffy extras in education, but are part of the core.