Party Planning

Super Bowl Sunday is party day all over America.  If you aren't giving a party or going to a party for the Super Bowl, it's like you're not going to the Prom.  This year we've decided to have the party.  We were the party hosts for many large parties during our 20's and 30's.  Here I am, age 27 in the Gaymoor house actually at one of our parties.  I was growing my hair out for the one and only time, and I was also trying to wear contacts. Some of my readers WENT to this party.  Sigh....so young.

We bought two houses in Houston and one house in Hurst in part because they had great floor plans for parties.

Now, though, this is our first time to have a party in this tiny little doll house in Sun City.  We've been so nervous about not having enough chairs to sit in, we only invited six people - plus Drake and I for eight.  Hopefully, it's going to be a small, but fun party.  Fortunately, we don't have any die hard football fans coming who want to agonize over every football play.  Drake is moving the small TV into the Arizona room, so everyone can see every play if they are so inclined.  The best Super Bowl parties we ever went to were big parties hosted by what would now be called 'foodie' hosts.  They were some of our New Orleans friends, and boy, did they know how to cook.

I spent part of today figuring out what food I'm going to make for this party.  Of course, there will be too much, because I'm bad at determining exactly how much food I need.   90% of it is going to be made in advance.  We are only doing finger food because Drake doesn't want to eat anything that drips or needs a utensil.  He's making an exception for the pecan pie.  I'm making three kinds of deviled eggs.
 
When I went to the library today AFTER I WENT TO EXERCISE, I found the Southern Living Cookbook for 2014 - every recipe they published for the entire year.  Fortunately, they had a good index and a 'how to make deviled eggs section'.  I'm also making a Mexican layered dip - Jean Brandt's recipe out of the St. Paul Blue Cookbook - you can never go wrong with hers.  She understands terrible, unmotivated cooks, so her recipes use recognizable ingredients and not too many of them.  I'm also going to create my own cheese platter with salami and ham.  I found a lot of appetizer recipes that had 20 ingredients and took an hour and a half to make.  After I finished laughing, all I could internalize was, "I don't think so."  My answer to those recipes is my cream cheese, olive, pastrami spread.  Also, I wasn't too proud to ask the other three women to bring something.  We'll supply wine and beer and soft drinks.  This is a change - used to just buy a couple of cases of champagne - bubbly kicks a party off.

A staple of Superbowl Sunday is the squares game.  It's a grid game in which the participants purchase squares and the money is parceled out at the end of each quarter based on the score at that time.  You sign your name on your 'squares', then the numbers are drawn at random & filled into the squares.  It spices up the party.  With 8 people, I figured out that our squares will cost $.25 each, and everyone should buy 12 - that $3.00 per person plus each couple buys a 'couple' square.  That's all 100 squares covered at a cost of $6.25 per couple.  Shoot, that's cheaper than a cover charge.  Drake says you can't force people to play, but I say, "Why not?"

It's always hard to determine what time to start a Super Bowl party.  I'm figuring 30 minutes before kickoff.  If I refuse to turn on the television before then, I'll get all the hype I'll ever need.  The Super Bowl is at a weird time, don't you think?  That's what makes serving food so hard.  Yes, it's kind of over dinner time, and you can serve some kind of meal at halftime.  There are two problems with that approach:  Drake's edict of 'no utensils' and the people who really don't like football don't want to miss the halftime show to eat something.  I'm not a big half-time show person.  At least Katy whatshername won't be doing rap music this year.  Who knows?  Maybe there will be another boob flash.  The bottom line is if you're coming to our party, you'd better fill up on the finger food.  I guarantee there will be plenty.

We are having a 'green' party.  I'll be using real dishes and cutlery and real wine glasses.  I might buy a few plastic cups for the soft drink folks.  However, we won't be hauling out the big bag of plates, cups and cutlery to the trash can on Monday.  I started using my own real stuff to eat and drink from about 15 years ago.  After all, it all goes into the dishwasher.  I've also decided no cheesy decorations, centerpieces, or napkins imprinted with footballs.  That's just garage sale/goodwill fodder.    Think about it....kind of fun to use all that stuff that lives in your cupboards, and a table covered in food is the most attractive thing about any party.

Super Bowl party time here we come.  I can hardly wait to see the commercials.  Let's root for a close game.

         

Whew! A Close Call.

We just escaped buying a travel trailer.  It only took a 350 mile drive, and an 8 hour investment of time to finally clarify our collective mind.  For those of you out of the 'loop', I came up with this dream scheme to buy a travel trailer, pull it up to Connecticut, watch Sarah graduate from Yale (Yea, Sarah!), then pull it all the way across Canada, east to west, and sell the travel trailer in the northwestern United States whenever we finished the trip. Then, we would return to Arizona with wonderful stories to tell about our RV'ing experience.  Sounds great, doesn't it...on paper.

Since I came up with this idea, Drake has been subconsciously dragging his feet while his mouth has been mostly agreeing with the dream scheme.  For several months, there were legitimate things we had to do before we could get serious about buying a trailer.  Drake claims he can only manage to do one major thing at a time in his straightforward, project management style.  This approach to issues leaves no time or energy to invest in multiple projects simultaneously.  Nevertheless, I checked out some library books, began monitoring RV/Campers For Sale in Craigslist, surfed the internet, and began to try and educate myself about trailer life.  

January was the date picked to start serious TRAILER SHOPPING.  There was still a lot of feet dragging on Drake's part.  I should have clued in there was a problem with the dream scheme since Drake and I were almost constantly arguing or agitating about buying a trailer.  Normally, we do not have arguments which last for days.  We did instantly agree we were not buying 'new'.  Talk about depreciation!  Trailers lose about two thirds of their value within five years.  Weight was a big issue. How much could the Aviator really pull?  Would we have to trade it for Navigator, a car which will not fit into our Arizona one car garage.   Lack of practical knowledge about trailering was making Drake very uneasy.   I was having trouble visualizing what we were actually looking for.  This went on, and on, and on as we tried to get up to speed in learning the minimum we absolutely had to know to be able to buy something intelligently.

Finally, by driving all the way to Kingman, Arizona to see a potential purchase, we were able to really understand what the RV life is really about.  We got to thoroughly look at and actually get a tutorial in setting up, breaking down, and hauling a travel trailer around.  As we sat in the 27' long trailer, for half an hour after having been given an hour's lesson in how many gizmos, gadgets, switches, toggles, levers, and hoses there are on trailers and what you have to do with them, we both realized how very uncomfortable spending any significant amount of time in a trailer actually is.

We are no strangers to living in small spaces.  The first eight months of our relationship we lived in a dormitory room.  At age 19 never even noticed how small that was.  The next year we lived together in one-half of a garage - not a garage apartment - a garage.  Mostly, we still only noticed one another and the freezing wind that billowed the curtains even with the windows shut in the winter. It's a wonder we didn't die of carbon monoxide poisoning at Crazy Betty's (my name for our digs) since the garage was heated with a space heater.  Our first accommodation after we married was eight feet wide by twenty-four feet long, and after one-half of a garage, this seemed like a palace.  In that place, there was actually a COUCH.  More recently, we spent the summer in Connecticut sub-leasing Sarah and Jay's Yale apartment which is only 545 square feet, and while small, had a great bed and two recliners.

As we sat in the potential trailer purchase, it came as a revelation there was no comfortable place to sit.  I realized the counter tops in the kitchen area were six inches lower than the standard counter top height and a prescription for backache.  There were darn few drawers and cabinets to store utensils much less food.  The only clothes closet was 18" wide.  There were no end tables or lamps.  The bathroom was a joke which would become more and more unfunny with use.  After a half an hour, it dawned on us we did not want to join the RVing life even for a few months.

So, the revised travel plan for 2015 is to go to Connecticut to see Sarah graduate, spend two months in Maine, and drive across Canada for about a month, then spend the rest of our time away from Arizona in Portland, Oregon drinking wine.  Since we settled on this plan, all our arguments have simply vanished confirming we do not wish to become trailer trash.  The RV life is one we will not be indulging in.  What a narrow escape!                    

Bookmarks for the Ages

I've been collecting bookmarks sporadically for many years.  I read a lot of books, and I often read several books at once stashed in various locations around the house thus necessitating several bookmarks in circulation at once.  As a kid, I also read stacks and stacks of books.  The Florence Park Branch of the Tulsa Library was one half block from the Warehouse Market, my mother's grocery store of choice.  Every time she went to the store, I went to the library lugging at least 10 books back and forth each time.

By the time I was 11, I had read ALL (literally) of the books in the children's section.  Young Adult literature was in it's infancy in 1961, so my solution to having reading material was to jump to Adult Fiction.   Since I knew nothing about the authors, and there weren't book blurbs on those hard as iron book covers adorning the library shelves of my childhood, I can remember picking books by titles that caught my interest or even by the color of the spines!  In practicality, it meant I started and stopped several books at a time.  My solution was to leave them open lying all over the house.  This habit drove my mother insane.  (It was my inability to turn off electricity that made my father froth at the mouth.)  She was always closing my books with a spare scrap of paper to mark my place, none of which inspired me to use bookmarks.

I've actually collected fridge magnets longer than bookmarks.  These are bulky, and I like to display them.  Drake has made me two large black lacquer frames around a piece of sheet metal which are discreetly hung in the Sun City house.  As small as this house is, it's difficult to find a discreet place for a 3' by 4' frame.  The picture is a tiny section of one of these frames.  As you can see I have

LOTS of magnets.  The more I collected, the more repetitive they seemed.  Every National Park has the same type of panoramic picture of its famous view.  It has been getting harder and harder to find unique magnets, and my collecting has slowed.  Now to be a purchase, a magnet has to be quirky to get my attention.

The world of bookmarks has opened up to me gradually as I've rejected more and more magnets. Bookmarks come in lots of forms.  Sometimes I use a favorite card as a bookmark - like the one I have from Willie Dale, a friend who has passed from this life.  I have bookmarks Sarah bought me on some of the vacation trips we took when she was a child.  A friend of mine collects Gilbert and Sullivan memorabilia some of which comes with forms of advertising from the early 20th century.  These look like colorful and quaint business cards. He's given me his 'discards' as bookmarks.  My New Orleans bookmark is a slender piece of gold metal with a pelican on the end.  This was a gift for dancing with a crew member of a Mardi Gras social club at their annual Mardi Gras Ball in 1984.

My current favorite bookmark is the skyline of New York City I purchased at the Metropolitan Art Museum.  It's three inches of metal with a cord on the end to hang out of the book.  In the three inches are the outlines of every famous NYC landmark from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Statue of Liberty and every famous building in Manhattan.  I just got a postcard to use as a bookmark from Van Horn, Texas.  It's from Rodney's Coffee Cafe, "Where passing through meets here to stay!"  The postcard is a reproduction of an original painting by Winston McInnis - painted on the wall of the cafe.

I have two layers of bookmarks in the house - the favored ones currently in circulation, and the ones that are resting until I rediscover them.  It's like having a museum with personal archives.  Sometimes I buy bookmarks to remind me of a famous person we've encountered in our travels.  My Harriett Beecher Stowe bookmark says, "Women are the architects of their society."  I have a bookmark from Richmond of Phoebe Yates Levy Pember, a famous woman in her time who's unknown today.  She can be considered the Clara Barton of the Confederacy. Another current cool one not designed to be a bookmark is from Chocolatier Blue, a chocolate maker in Berkeley.  It's the card describing their various chocolates.  (My fave of the 25 concoctions on the card:  Chili:  "crushed red pepper flakes steeped in fresh-farm cream and blended with organic butter for a fiery dark chocolate creation".)  One of my new bookmarks is an original watercolor painting from an artist in Lake Tahoe.  I'm also a sucker for a bookmark with a tassel.  A swinging tassel hanging out of a book just means good times to me.

If all goes according to plan, we will have a travel trailer by this time next week, and since weight and space are going to be an issue next summer, bookmark collection as we traverse Maine and Canada is going to thrive.  

 

It's the New Year

One is supposed to write about New Year resolutions as the calendar year turns over.   The older I get the less I'm resolved.  This year is a milestone year for me:  I'm 65.  Of course, I changed my age as soon as the calendar turned Jan 1.  According to Drake and the rest of the world, I won't be 65 until September, late September at that.  One would think at least Drake would take into account my poor arithmetical skills.  Born in 1950, if it's 2015, then that's arithmetic I can do to calculate my age.
At 65, I qualify as old.

I always knew I would be old.  As a teenager, I looked at the family tree, and supposed that four grandparents who lived to 90+ made my longevity a foregone conclusion.  In my misbegotten youth cigarette smoking didn't seem that big of a risk - so knock 10 years off the end of my life; big deal. That calculation was the medical conclusion in 1970 when I took up the miserable habit.  Now in hindsight, we've all learned the medics lied to us about smoking for years and years, and now we all know smoking is a quick and ugly way to end your life.  Still....all the resolutions in the world didn't help me quit smoking.  Stopping smoking took divine help.

 Some businesses make their nut on New Year's Resolutions.  Just ask the health clubs.  Most of those clubs would be in bankruptcy by March except for those deluded souls who RESOLVE to get into shape each January 1st.  They blissfully sign contracts, pay enrollment fees, and never see the inside of the place after February 1st.  I can surely identify with those souls; Lordy, how I hate to exercise.  Those resolutions last for me only as long as Drake's willpower.  Drake's willpower tends to last the entire damn year.

It was interesting to see how the only magazine I read in paper form handled the New Year.  Each issue of Real Simple has a 'theme', and the theme for the January issue is "Letting Go".  Interestingly,  it's less about specific resolutions to lose weight, quit smoking, give up internet porn, watch less TV, or read more books than it is about learning to live in the moment.  The point of the issue was all about micromanagement.  The editors did concede their target audience (women who are 'having it all') must use time and resource management skills to just make their lives and the people they are responsible for function, but micromanagement turns into helicopter parenting, as well as constantly striving for some definition of perfection, and sleep deprivation.  The magazine is divided into sections, and the 'food' section always has five ordinary nutritious meals you can cook - they will even send you a weekly grocery list.  The January issue had five meals you didn't have to cook.  All in all, a different twist on the New Year.

As I've aged, I've discovered a certain satisfaction in being here to start a New Year.  It still feels like being poised for another great adventure as the New Year kicks in.  So....while vowing not to make idiotic resolutions, I am going to try and blog more consistently in the coming year.  My writer's block is still sort of with me, but it's waning and I don't feel quite so paralyzed.  Must be the starting of a New Year that's invigorating me.  Happy New Year!    

          

Driving, Driving, Driving

We've driven about 1200 miles mostly at 80 mph. from Sun City to Houston, Texas.  We weren't even speeding; 80 mph is the speed limit on western Interstate 10 AKA 'the southern route'.  We are on our way to Austin for a Texas Christmas, and this is a familiar trip. (No, we didn't 'overshoot'; we came to Houston to visit a couple of friends.)

On this journey you see the pretty desert and the ugly desert.  Part of the drive between Phoenix and Globe is an Arizona Scenic Highway Drive; that's the pretty desert part.  It lasts for about 30 minutes.  The other zillion desert driving hours have a landscape of sparse cactus, mainly prickly pear and jumping cholla growing out of dead brown dirt, littered with small rocks.  It's heaven for rattlesnakes, scorpions and termites.  This landscape is punctuated by dried up, paint peeling, boarded up, dilapidated small towns.  The most interesting topographical event is driving up onto the Edwards Plateau.

We learned even if you are driving 80 mph, 522 miles is just too many car hours for us.  That's the distance from Las Cruces, New Mexico (home of Andele!, my second favorite Mexican restaurant) to Fredericksburg, Texas (arguably the cutest tourist town in Texas).  The next day the additional four hours into Houston flashed by, but the population density just kept building making actual driving more problematic.  It's been roughly 30 years since we lived in Houston.  This town was mega exciting, constantly changing, and roaring forward when we were Houstonians.  We lived here in the era of,   "Will the last person leaving Michigan for Houston please turn out the lights?"  Really.  It was a popular bumper sticker.  Now, Houston, is in the big time.  Coming here is like coming to New York, L.A., or Chicago - the three cities in front of it in the population count.  And, of course, due to backward Texas politics, there is no mass transit to speak of.  There are free/toll/ways.

There are no freeways like the Houston freeways.  Everyone driving insanely whipping around one another in narrowed lanes at least 10 mph over the speed limit.  Houston freeways are ALWAYS in a constant state of rebuilding.  Being a roadway worker in Houston is to have permanent job security. The prevailing rebuilding strategy is not to take a lane away, but rather to make all the lanes more narrow so as to give the highway workers their space.  The only times lanes are closed for construction are in the dead of night which effectively means you can have a traffic jam at 3am, no problem.  I've always maintained if you can drive in Houston, you can drive anywhere.  Believe me, California is no harder, nor is I-95 on the East Coast.  One good thing about the Houston freeways, at least they are intelligibly marked, unlike California freeway markings which epitomize whimsy.

We've been shedding bottles of wine on this trip....now we are down to 13.  Oh, dear, I guess we should drink one to bring back our luck.  Of course, I believe that any road day is a lucky day even if one is driving across a zillion miles of ugly desert.        

Is it Hard to Write?

Drake sent me an interview with a travel writer today.  I think he meant for me to read the answer to the question, "Is writing hard."  The paraphrased answer was, "No, it's a blank piece of paper to put words on.  Fighting a war, trying to beat a possibly fatal disease, etc, etc. is hard."  Of course, he's right.  I've been fighting the problem of not feeling like writing.  There are lots of reasons.  Some I've realized are I've been in more pain lately, we've been physically and mentally occupied with helping Drake's mom, the holiday craze (which, if I'm truthful, is just mild neuroses in my case), and being intimidated by more than 30,000 hits and 280 plus posts.  That last one is real reason.  I keep asking myself if I have more to say, or if anyone would care if I stopped writing.  Ideally, I have to get back to the place inside my head where I don't care who reads.  Also, it's a good sign that I should be packing to leave tomorrow for Texas, and I'm sitting here typing.

This is my favorite time of the year, and I wanted to share that feeling even if you're a bah, humbug type person during the holidays.  (I feel those people are necessary to keep the utter craziness this time of the year can engender in check.)  As a Christian I love the idea of the new beginning that Christmas symbolizes for me.  The music also does it for me in a way none other does.  I can not only hum all the music, but I can actually sing most of it.  It's thrilling to have an SIL (Jay) who can play carols as I sing them badly.  Jay and I had a few minutes of that in Connecticut.  I was so strongly reminded of the evening another pianist played hymns as I sang along.  He's passed to the next life, so singing along with a piano player is a sweet memory for me.

I've been teasing Sarah about her Christmas tree.  I posted a couple of pix on FB of the afternoon we decorated the gigantic tree in the tiny apartment.  This tree is eight feet of firry magnificence, and it is big enough to hold all her very special ornaments.  Each are little diamonds of  wonderful Christmas memories.  My mother started the tradition of giving Sarah Christmas ornaments each year, and recruited friends and family to do the same.  So, thanks to Grandma Jo's thoughtfulness, Sarah has a wonderful collection.  Her favorite ornament is the one my mother gave her when she was three, and it is ALWAYS placed first on the tree.  This year's ornament from Drake and me is "Yale", of course.  Sarah and Jay are now building their joint memories with ornaments they have acquired in their travels.  Decorating the tree is the start of Christmas for Sarah, Drake and I plus Jay, now.  What a joy it was for us to share that time with her this year.

Jackson, the family cat, was not quite as thrilled with the proceedings, but Drake was.

To close this impossibly sentimental posting, I'm sitting here with my coffee enjoying the electronic fireplace from Netflix as I listen to the Christmas carols accompanying it.  Even better....Drake is starting the laundry while I'm still being a slug.  Looking forward to being on the road tomorrow.  Merry Christmas to all my faithful readers, known and unknown.  I'm feeling thrilled I was able to write this, so maybe my frustration is passing and my writing will roar back in 2015.

 

Writer's Block!

If you haven't guessed by now, I have writer's block.  Since I've never experienced this, I'm assuming it's like the flu, only there's no vaccine for it.  The symptoms are baffling.  How this 'write a post' thing normally works is simple.   Something pops up that piques my interest, or we go someplace cool, and I immediately think, "Oh, this would be a fun blog."  The words then tumble out, and I have to edit and prune.

 Well......

I just got back from New York City where we saw James Earl Jones in one of my favorite plays, "You Can't Take It With You" - a screwball play from the 1930's, and after saying that, I'm done.

We went to the Yale Gallery in New Haven where we saw this excellent exhibit of sculpture in the Victorian Age, and other than understanding why there was so much Victorian bric a brac, I can't work up any interest, so I'm assuming no one else would be too interested either.

We spent an entire day at the Metropolitan Art Museum, and I took a bunch of pictures including some breathtaking jewels from India - whoopee.


We helped Sarah and Jay decorate an enormous Christmas tree in their tiny New Haven apartment as well as fooled around with the cat in his holiday finery.  It was quite funny at the time, but trying to write humor just seems beyond me right now.  (That tree fills a full ONE-THIRD of their living room, incidentally.)  And, yes, the cat was as pissed off about the holiday bandanna as he looks.  Fortunately, after the picture taking, he got to take it off, so we don't have to indict Sarah for cat abuse.  

 That's it.  I've finished my minuscule Christmas shopping,
but who cares?  I can't even work up a good vent about the commercialization of Christmas.  This is just pathetic.  So, I'm signing off until January.  Maybe, if I just stop for the next month, the block will have evaporated.  That's my story, and I'm sticking with it.  Goodbye until 2015.