Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country’ Category

My American Dream

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on June 20, 2012| 2 Comments »

“Not everything that glitters is gold.” That’s my Rocker on the acoustic to the right, doing some harmony. And yes, a certain hockey team licensed it – go TPM!!

And unless you were unconscious this week, you must have heard about President Obama’s Dream Act. Bypassing our do-nothing Congress, Obama finally proposed that we stop deporting children whose only crime was that they happened to arrive on our shores via their undocumented parents. If you are under 30 years old… – well here are the criteria:

Came to the United States under the age of 16.
Have continuously resided in the United States for at least five years preceding the date of the memorandum and are present in the United States on the date of the memorandum.
Are currently in school, have graduated from high school, have obtained a general education development certificate, or are an honorably discharged veteran of the Coast Guard or Armed Forces of the United States.
Have not been convicted of a felony offence, a significant misdemeanor offense, multiple misdemeanor offenses, or otherwise poses a threat to national security or public safety.
Are not above the age of 30.

“Now they will be able to request temporary relief from deportation proceedings; and will also be allowed to apply for authorization to work in this country.” http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/06/the-dream-order-is-another-reason-for-congress-to-act-on-immigration/258653/ I’ve always thought it was strange you could serve our country in the Armed Forces while being illegal, right? It’s like signing up the Irish off the boat to fight in the Civil War.

The day it happened I stopped at Whole Foods and told the cashier and a manager who were admiring my grocery tote with a picture of Michelle Obama on a swing. Quite often I feel as if I’ve entered an Anne Tyler novel whenever I enter Whole Foods. I said, “Did you hear what her husband did today?” And honest to God, they stopped what they were doing, got tears in their eyes, and goose bumps on their arms. We almost had a hootenanny moment together.

But hey, what if you happened to arrive in the good ole USA at 18? Or maybe you just turned 31…I’m not so sure this dream act is enough, but it’s a start. And here’s to our nation of immigrants. Where the son of a Kenyan, a mixed race man from Hawaii can become President, and the great-great-grandson of Miles and Elizabeth Romney, Mormon converts from England, can challenge him.

Mitt would rather trace his roots to Mexico, where his English ancestors were sheltered when polygamy became outlawed. Funny how we don’t hear about the dreams of his fathers. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18422949 Listen up Trump – here’s a birth certificate!

Keep dreamin

Read Full Post »

Father Knows Best

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , on June 18, 2012| 2 Comments »

Well, not necessarily. Sometimes the Mama knows better. Back in the day though, I loved watching Robert Young verbally duel it out with his TV family. Yes folks, it was black and white and we had maybe 3 stations?

Today we celebrated Father’s Day in Annapolis with 2 and a half fathers. The Groom is about to become a Dad since his Bride is now 29 weeks along. I watched him with his own father and saw the easy camaraderie, the funny asides. I wanted to tell him not to worry, this is how you raise a girl:

Dance with her on your feet
Hide tiny presents around the house
Play ball in the late spring afternoon
Put her hair in French braids
Tell her about the stars and the planets
Listen to her between the words
Let her paint your toenails
Give her butterfly kisses

I know you’ll be a great Dad!

20120617-233932.jpg

Read Full Post »

Wrongful Acts

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on June 14, 2012| 3 Comments »

Last night the humidity broke and I met three friends on the historic pedestrian mall for shrimp and grits, perfect almost summer evening. As we picked a little, we talked a little about the latest scandal in this university town. On Sunday the UVA Board of Visitors announced a parting of the ways with our beloved President, Teresa Sullivan. Less than 2 years into her 5 year contract, it came as a shock to faculty, students and the community at large. People were talking about how they waited for graduation, for people to disperse around the world on their summer programs, and that fact, that lack of transparency, is what is still setting our little city on simmer.

The official reason, as stated in letters to faculty (full disclosure, Bob got one) was that they were experiencing “philosophical differences.” However, in a bold reporting move our little freebie weekly http://www.readthehook.com/104213/cabal-hall-why-does-darden-trump-carrs-hill dug up some new Albemarle red clay dirt. Her departure was “… less a mutual agreement and more of a palace coup orchestrated by alumni and friends of the Darden School.” Now Darden is the Business School here in Mr Jefferson’s village; it is quite exclusive competitive and sits high on a hill overlooking the university. Needless to say, many of the strings the Board has to pull come from behind the Darden curtain where alums of the $50,000 a year program go on to become 1 percenters in big time financial fields where money and power collide.

What makes a good university president? My brother Mike, the former President and General Manager of an NFL team once told me it takes “ruthlessness.” I may have said this before, but I’ll always remember that. He had dropped out of college to start working in the sports field, and was now teaching a business course at the University of Minnesota. Unlike Mitt, my brother truly was a Horatio Alger story. I was visiting the Flapper who had been relocated to a beautiful lakeside condo nearby for her golden years. In true outlier fashion, Mike said that every great university president has to have the connections and bring in capital; ruthlessness is what it takes to make money. But a media scholar here asks, “What does she (the Board’s Rector) want? … a top flight scholar and administrator with a sterling reputation who’s able to gather support from every constituency in the university?…If she wants that, she just fired her.” So who’s right? And what was Sullivan’s crime? It’s only in the last decade we’ve seen women rise to the very pinnacles of ivy towers, and maybe the formula for educational excellence has to shift.

And in yet another local university news headline, lawyers for the Lacrosse player who beat Yeardley Love’s head against a wall are asking for a change of venue in the civil case her mother has brought against him. He was found guilty in the criminal case if you recall; this is a “Wrongful Death” suit claiming 30 Million in damages from her daughter’s ex-boyfriend’s reckless indifference in leaving Yeardley, after beating her, to die. Love’s mother has recently filed a second law suit for 30 Million naming the “…Commonwealth of Virginia, University of Virginia head men’s lacrosse coach Dom Starsia, associate coach Marc van Arsdale and UVa Athletics Director Craig Littlepage as defendants.” I don’t know, do you think the media frenzy the Lacrosse case has engendered means our fair citizens cannot come to a fair opinion? I think Cvillians want to know the facts. For instance, did the President mishandle this high profile case? I don’t think so. Were her sympathies with the student-led “Living Wage” campaign? And if so, good for her! Philosophical or financial, everyone is agreed, Mr Jefferson’s Academical Village has suffered some major blows. http://www.cavalierdaily.com/

Read Full Post »

New Directions

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , on June 12, 2012| 4 Comments »


A rainy, foggy good morning to you! Do you know that there’s been a feud going on for a long time between two rivals? No, not the Hatfield and McCoy one, although that took place in my neighboring state of West Virginia. I’m talking about a world domination battle, over directions. Apple and Google have been dueling it out over “Maps” from the Apps inception, and finally Apple has said, enough! http://www.macworld.co.uk/ipad-iphone/news/?newsid=3363364&pagtype=allchandate

Remember the good old days when you’d be driving along in a car with the hubby and you’d get lost? Inexplicably, unbearably lost. You’d be squinting down at a gas station paper map that made absolutely no sense. And you’d want to stop the nearest stranger and ask for directions. But no, that would never do. The male of our species can never show his belly, he must always look large and in charge especially while driving. Some of the best (and by that I mean worst) fights of my married life have occurred inside the confines of a 4 door sedan.

But then we saw the light. There, on a suction cup on our windshield, we feeble travelers could attach a GPS, and the world became our oyster, No more fights, no more he said/she said, even though we would print out a Google map just in case. ER docs, who happen to be pilots, are all about the emergency back-up plan. Now I have this lovely female voice (mine has an Australian accent thanks to the Rocker) guiding me on my travels to Nashville and beyond. And it was in Nashville, while trying to find the Full Moon Pickin Party with the Bride driving, that I first saw her pull out her phone; she handed it to me with instructions to follow the bouncing red ball!

Now my brilliant daughter, the one who has just finished her Chief year in Emergency Medicine, the one with the bouncing blue dot on her phone, has married her North Star. But I can tell you that she could not find her way to the mall as a teenager. The road to the beach was a straight shot, so that was fine, but get her off the peninsula and all was lost. What is it about a sense of direction? Why do some of us have it, while some of us are forever back tracking. Her MOH made that the theme of her toast at the wedding, since she was the navigator on most of their exploits. They managed to travel all around France twice as teenagers, before GPS was invented. I know, hard to imagine.

Still, I think I will miss getting lost in the future. Not the fights, or the feeling of helplessness. But the amazing back roads, the new people, finding an old country store with handmade quilts, the adventure. All those bumps in the road help you slow down and appreciate your surroundings. And since I’m an Apple person now, I’ll just have to say so long to Google on my iPhone. It’s been fun even though I rarely use your bouncing red ball, there’s only so much technology I can swallow. Apple’s new App will have “…real-time traffic conditions, turn-by-turn navigation, Yelp integration, vector graphics, and 3D flyovers. The new Maps app, due out this fall with iOS 6, means the end of the Google Maps-powered app that iOS devices have used since 2007.”

Read Full Post »

Gossamer Wings

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , on June 9, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Have you ever tried to lose weight? And when you did, have you slowly watched the pounds pile back on? Yesterday, my recumbent bike reading at the gym included the latest installment of The Atlantic. It’s the June issue with a big ice cream cone on the cover that is crossed out by a black mark and titled, “The End of Temptation.” I thought it would be all about how Bloomberg is trying to demonize giant-sized Slurpees or something similar. Instead it was simple – it was about B F Skinner, behavior modification, and weight loss.

Did I mention I was a Psych major back in the day? I absolutely loved behavior modification, but unfortunately during the Cold War Skinner’s ideas came under attack for being too Fascist. It was perfectly OK to reward rats for a certain behavior, but manipulating people with psychological strategies was thought to be a no no. Study after study showed that his techniques worked well on annoying habits like nail biting. Then Skinner’s theory made headlines in the treatment of autism. Now in light of our current obesity epidemic, a leading researcher in weight loss, Jean Harvey-Berino, said it best in the Atlantic article; http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/06/the-perfected-self/8970/ by David Freedman, “The Perfected Self.”

“Willpower doesn’t work…What works heavily relies on Skinner – shaping behavior over time by giving feedback, and setting up environments where people aren’t stimulated to eat the wrong foods.”

Oy there it is again, “Wrong Foods.” So there’s right and wrong foods. I overheard a woman next to me at the gym on the same day say to her friend, “The kids love going to Denise’s house, she doesn’t lock her pantry.” Her little group laughed and I silently cried for her children with a locked pantry. They were a modern day Hansel and Gretel. Should we all turn Vegan and eat only raw food? Is it time for parents to become the food police? How do you think of food? If food = love, which is kinda how I think of it, then withholding certain foods would not be a good thing. I chose never to have candy in the house when the kids were growing up, so going out to the candy store became an event….and seeing Grandma Ada who always had a little candy tucked away somewhere was equally thrilling. Making candy forbidden may have caused problems, but it wasn’t absolutely forbidden.

Getting back to willpower and weight loss, Freedman writes poetically about the current apps and programs that actually work. He talks about scales that are wired to our computers, the “Lose It!” app, and the one affordable program that seems to work, Weight Watchers. He says it is very Skinnerian only with gossamer walls. Skinner’s subjects were kept in a glass cage, where everything they did was monitored, every behavior they wanted to reinforce was rewarded. Who would want to live in a glass cage? Well it seems we do, remotely at least! More and more people are using these computer programs to lose weight. Take a look at Shape Up RI http://www.shapeupri.org/ started by some Brown medical students. And even good ole Weight Watchers has joined the fold and has added a bar scanning app to their online program. Thank you Jennifer Hudson. Yes sir, we can “share” every pound lost, and every exercise point gained with everyone!

I say if it works, Bravo! Go ahead and manipulate your environment and your smart phone to lose weight. But I am reminded of that little girl, the Bride’s friend who didn’t see the need for going on a walk to nowhere. Remember her? Well, her mom (my friend) was a lifer at Weight Watchers, and she told me once that her problem eating started in college. It seems her mom doled out only 2 Oreos at a time; so, when she was on her own in college, she ate the whole bag! This made me happy I didn’t dole out candy from a locked pantry!

Our Bride loves yoga, and our Rocker loves the holy guitar. Unfortunately I love to cook and I hate tracking everything I put in my mouth…maybe I’ll just walk more to start! And put on my gossamer wings and dance, dance, dance!

Read Full Post »

Too Elitist?

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on June 7, 2012| 2 Comments »

Nesting season is in full swing. The Newlyweds just moved to a bigger house with more than one bathroom. She is preparing the nursery – notice the fancy modern crib they found at a yard sale
– and reveling in their new master bathroom with two sinks. It took me nearly 30 years to get a bathroom with two sinks! But like our current President when he and Michelle were first married, our young couple is busy paying off student loans and so for now, they are renting…and saving for a downpayment on a home some day. Note: yes, we payed for college but she insisted on paying her way through medical school.

Now what about Mitt’s nesting habits? Today’s NYTime’s “Home” section is all about his plans to expand the Romney’s 12 million dollar homestead in La Jolla, California http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/garden/mitt-romney-the-candidate-next-door.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all And it is only one of six homes in his real estate portfolio – this one near San Diego, two in the Boston area, a ski lodge in Utah and two lakeside residences in New Hampshire. Why did the Times do a back page feature on the Romney’s current building plans? Some of his Modern Family-like neighbors are annoyed with the influx of driveway-blocking trucks and secret service; there are “…six gay households within a three-block radius of his house.” And none of them would sign anything Mitt’s architect wanted them to sign about the plans to build another level thereby blocking their view of the ocean! No? And some neighbors are complaining that Mitt doesn’t like people smoking pot (or weed or whatever marijuana is called today) on the beach! Imagine? http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/06/neighbors-report-romney-is-a-total-narc.html

So what if he needs a car elevator? Doesn’t everybody want a car elevator in their dream home, isn’t that the first thing on your list? An elevator, at first blush, seemed like a great idea to us. We actually hired an architect after finding our mountain view. We thought he could help us plan our “not so big” house, and it turns out that when you hire an architect, you start building at a certain level. He was encouraging us to include at least the footprint and structure for an elevator shaft in our house, since we may one day be unable to walk up a flight of stairs. Well, that’s true. This is called an “aging-in-place” design. And the more you talk with an architect, the more everything seems quite reasonable, even elevators. But in the end, it turns out that if what you really want is to downsize, to take Sarah Susanka’s ideas and apply them http://www.notsobighouse.com/ to build as our builder said “A Chevy, not a Cadillac,” then you probably should not hire an architect. Sadly, we had to fire him and I found our home’s design online.

In March, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly asked Mitt what he thinks about how the Dems are trying to spin his rich guy image. His reply, “Guess what? I made a lot of money.” Well guess what Mitt? We all know you made a killing in the unregulated, financially wild western Gordon Gekko high times of private equity. We know you were never considered for McCain’s ticket in 2008 cause you owned 14 homes; look how you’ve pared down! Americans don’t begrudge you your hard-earned wealth, your business acumen. Or your private prep schools and Harvard Law degree, the privileged upbringing, your Daddy’s leadership of American Motors Corp; your Dad who was a three-time governor of Michigan and himself a presidential candidate in the 1960s. But don’t visit West Philly and pretend you care about public schools. Don’t send out pictures of yourself doing laundry like the rest of us. Don’t tell us you are a self-made man. And please, don’t piss off your neighbors by building ocean-view blocking car elevators…don’t throw it in our collective face.

Read Full Post »

“The Sea Is So Wide…

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on June 5, 2012| 2 Comments »

One of the very first internships the Bride had in college was working for the Children’s Defense Fund, http://www.childrensdefense.org/ Marion Wright Edelman’s bipartisan DC watchdog advocacy group. This was a coup, landing a summer job in our nation’s Capital with such a stellar company. Well, it’s graduation time again and I’m thinking of my BFF’s daughter, Natalie, a Georgetown grad who just received her MBA from the S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. An ex-Peace Corps worker in Mali, she was studying at the Johnson’s Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise and we’re expecting great things from her! Major congrats to Natalie on winning this fellowship and mazels to her parents, Lee and Al Bear: http://www.johnson.cornell.edu/About/News-Publications/Article-Detail/ArticleId/2671/Natalie-Grillon-Samuel-Curtis-Johnson-Graduate-School-of-Management-MBA-2012-Named-Acumen-Global-Fel.aspx

Here is one of her recent tweets (from Facebook, I’m not on Twitter, yet) – “not too late for tribal ties to detach MNLA separatists and Ansar Dine Tuaregs from Islamists for negotiations?” I could barely follow this, since like most Americans I am too provincial and not thinking globally enough. But her tweet came on the heels of watching this TED lecture my business psychologist brother, Dr Jim, sent me about Tribal Leadership: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/david_logan_on_tribal_leadership.html

If you’ve ever wondered how we could actually change the world, this is the video to watch. “Three doctors walk into a bar,” sounds like a joke but more importantly it is a meeting of a Stage 3 Tribe. How do we go from a Stage 2 “Life Sucks” world view to Stage 5, with a “Life is Great” world view? David Logan talks about doing world polls, he argues that leaders must be fluent in all five Tribal stages, to build world-changing tribes as Desmond Tutu has done in South Africa. The true leaders in every country must be able to network and connect people from different tribes.

Now let’s zoom in like a Google map on the US of A. It looks to me like our political leaders are still in Stage 3, boasting about who has done a better job, what failed policies the others have initiated. Nobody is getting 60 votes to pass any kind of meaningful legislation, like say equal pay for equal work…it is the most rigid, intransigent group of leaders legislators I’ve ever witnessed. And then this morning I heard that President Clinton gently tried to persuade the DNC to stop attacking Mitt on his ‘stellar’ business record, and instead follow through with the GOP’s likely outcome should their guy get elected: “The alternative would be, in my opinion, calamitous for our country and the world.” Do you see what he did, he zoomed out! Yes, he was saying that not tackling some hard issues like education, entitlements and yes, taxes, will lead our great country down the rabbit hole that Europe seems to be in. And Clinton is someone who knows about economics, his presidency reigned over one of the most prosperous economic times in our country’s recent history. And let’s not forget, he was the last president to balance the federal budget.

We are sitting on a precipice. 2001 Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz just published a book titled The Price of Inequality. I feel as if he is like a prophet, warning us about the plagues to come should we continue wearing blinders.”There are good reasons why plutocrats should care about inequality anyway—even if they’re thinking only about themselves. The rich do not exist in a vacuum. They need a functioning society around them to sustain their position. Widely unequal societies do not function efficiently and their economies are neither stable nor sustainable. The evidence from history and from around the modern world is unequivocal: there comes a point when inequality spirals into economic dysfunction for the whole society, and when it does, even the rich pay a steep price.” http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/05/joseph-stiglitz-the-price-on-inequality

…and My Boat Is So Small.” The 99% are beginning to realize that while CEOs prosper, their shareholders do not. Income levels are at an all-time low and the recent jobs statistics look grim. “…while the rich have been growing richer, most Americans (and not just those at the bottom) have been unable to maintain their standard of living, let alone to keep pace. A typical full-time male worker receives the same income today he did a third of a century ago.” Ha, I wonder what the female worker is receiving?

Congrats to all the graduates out there, and good luck on your job search. And Major kudos to the Dr Bride who just found out that she passed her oral boards! Yippee!! She is now a full-fledged, board certified ABEM member and fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP). We are so very proud. Here are my two fellows at my niece’s wedding a few years ago!

Read Full Post »

Success

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on June 2, 2012| 4 Comments »

“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” Sir Winston Churchill

Just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. I’m not much of a non-fiction type, but this book was required Ivy Farm Book Club reading and I’m glad I tackled it. Book Club will be at my house next week and I can’t wait to dish! Published a few years ago, by the same author of Blink and Tipping Point, I remember Bob reading it on vacation. And I vaguely remember bits and pieces of a conversation he had with the Rocker about the Beatles. Gladwell was asking the question, ‘what makes someone a success’ in their chosen field – and it turns out he wasn’t looking at the individual tall oaks – the Bill Gates of the world – but rather the forest in which we find them. Trying not to give too much away, the argument he makes for the meteoric rise of the boys from Liverpool is that they went to Hamburg, Germany and played very, very long sets.

Naturally the book got me thinking. What is it that makes one guy plug away at a prehistoric version of a PC, and then later drop out of Harvard to start up his own company? Gates happened to be born at just the right time, to have parents and teachers who nurtured his early interest in programming, and to become a young adult in 1975, right before the birth of the personal computer. IBM released their first PC in 1981 with an open architecture for a a mere $1,568. My first published piece ran in the Berkshire Eagle about the same time. It was titled “Guns in the Woods,” and it came about because I was struck by the paradox of our simple new life as parents, on a mountain, heating by wood stove, and Bob carting the components of a PC upstairs. It was pre-IBM, very “open architecture,” purchased piecemeal at Radio Shack! Back to nature and back to the future all at once. Gates was born October 28, 1955. If only Bob, a very early computer geek, had been born just a bit later…

Last night we drove by a magnificent double rainbow in a storm shattered sky. It was unusual in that you could see the whole thing, from one end to the other. We were after some frozen yogurt and had to stop to take pictures. And then, Bob went into lecture mode about the Transit of Venus, coming up in just a few days and we’ll need #14 welding glasses to see it, and Venus won’t do this again for 150 years so everyone on earth right now will never see it again…http://www.transitofvenus.org/

Our wedding anniversary is tomorrow. And I thought to myself that yes, I will still need this outlier husband of mine when he’s 64. What makes for a successful marriage?He says it’s because he gets me. I say it’s because I love him despite getting him. He keeps me on my toes and looking up!

Read Full Post »

Corgilicious

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on May 31, 2012| 2 Comments »


While doing a little research on the Queen’s Jubilee this week, I’ve stumbled upon article after article about her favorite breed of dog – the refined, somewhat height-challenged Welsh Corgi. Over the years, our family has been privileged to share our territory with many breeds (and mutts of mixed breeds too), but the one that stole my heart, the one that was part of the Rocker and Bride’s childhood, the one that would run into the ocean and be swept away if we weren’t careful, was the magnificent and hilarious Corgi.

“Corgi sales are soaring, spurred on by the Jubilee. Liz Hoggard explains how the royal pet has become the subject of artworks, topiary and blogs.” http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/dog-save-the-queen-corgis-surge-in-popularity-7799955.html Yes, I even found a place to buy Corgi shaped cookie cutters!

For us, it all began with a visit to a Corgi breeder in NJ after we’d moved back among family. Was it my way of coping with the guilt of moving my 7 year old daughter away from her sweet, nursery and elementary school friends? Probably. I was expecting to pick out a cute little teddy bear puppy, golden colored without so much as a hint of a tail. But the Bride was very “hands on hips” in those days, and declared that a dog “must” have a tail. So Tootsie Roll came home with us; a Cardigan Welsh Corgi (the kind with tails, not the Queen’s choice) who was a tri-color and looked just like her name, black and white with red on her ends. My sister Kay immortalized her in a needlepoint pillow. Her moniker was, “Lightening Legs” since she coaxed everyone into ball games with a tactic I call the “Corgi Dance.”

Later, Her Hinnyness Toots had puppies, and then it was the Rocker’s turn to pick one to keep. Tootsie had been bred to a champion (well, aren’t they all) who was a most beautiful Sable color.
All the puppies looked like daddy, and my son chose the alpha male in the group; the biggest, first born with the most beautiful shock of white on his forehead, Blaze (see pup at right in above picture with daughter). This mama/son team would sprint out of the house in formation like the Blue Angels, zig zagging their way around the yard, chasing squirrels and herons and sniffing out rabbit holes in the swamp tributary behind us. Depending on the tide, many a day their little legs were covered up to the belly with organic/smelling/black, swamp mud. My vet was the one who told me to look into getting a Corgi. We had an older German Shepherd at home, and he said it would be like going from the “…sublime to the ridiculous.” He smiled as he said that, we had become friends and his daughter was our pet sitter. I knew he loved Corgis, and he knew I would too!

Ms Bean is here because I thought I saw a Corgi on a local news show about a bunch of rescued puppies from a puppy mill. When I got to the vet in another county to take this poor creature home, it turned out it was a Papillon (easily mistaken with those big, foxy ears) and someone else had gotten there first. On my way home, I stopped at the Charlottesville Albemarle SPCA and came home with Beaner, my heart just had to be filled.

Read Full Post »

Triple Dare You

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , on May 29, 2012| Leave a Comment »

What does the city of Charlottesville, VA and Sir John Montagu, First Lord of the Admiralty, Great Britain have in common? They are both celebrating a momentous anniversary, 250 years! http://celebrate250.com/Would it help if I gave you a hint? The Earl is from the town of Kent in Sandwich…and he was a bit of louche, playing cards until all hours of the night. Legend has it that just when the Brit’s table manners were becoming more refined, The Earl asked to be served a piece of meat between two slices of bread. According to food critic Sam Bompus, “What you have with the sandwich is the shock of informality. He was a daring man to eat in such a way coming from his social background.” Little did he know that in his haste, he was ushering in our fast food generation.

Cut to today, and of course the blow out Diamond Jubilee celebrations for HRH Queen Elizabeth II, I had to ask myself, what is her favorite sandwich? An ex-Royal Chef enlightened me this morning on BBC. It seems Her Majesty was ahead of her time, only requesting local foods that were in season; in fact, Chef McGrady said that if he were to serve strawberries in January she’d probably have his head! Well I’m not sure I could belly up to one of these, but here is the Celebration Sandwich – venison, pate of guinea fowl with sour cream and flora (lettuce?), Stilton cheese, gin and Dubonnet (Her Majesty’s favorite cocktail, not quite sure how it is incorporated into the sandwich – http://cocktails.about.com/od/atozcocktailrecipes/r/dbunt_cktl.htm), beet root and apple juice from Sandringham. YUM! God save our Cupcake Queen.

From a daring Earl, to a beloved Queen, and back to our little Dominion; I was catching up on my beach reading the other day, sans beach, and imagine my surprise. There in the midst of May’s O magazine, in an article titled “How to Change Your Life at Any Age,” was my new friend’s daughter-in-law’s name, Kath Younger. I’d mentioned Kath Eats Real Food (KERF) before as a favorite local blogger,http://www.katheats.com/ but little did I know how truly famous she is! The feature was about two young girls, teens from Oregon, who ran out of peanut butter one day and decided to make their own, thereby launching Wild Squirrel Nut Butter. Jiffy this is not, it comes in tantalizing flavors like curious cocoa-nut and pretzel pizazz. Well, they credit sending a sample to Kath for sparking their business breakthrough. Her review – “SO blew my socks off!” And this is how business models and marketing are changing.

I’d call it daring to think you can improve on a lunchtime sandwich staple. I’d call it even more daring to believe you could make a living blogging about food. And I’d call an 18 year old future Queen of England, who insisted on becoming a truck driver and auto mechanic during World War II in part because she feared “…carrying about an inferiority complex for life,” very daring indeed! Happy Diamond Jubilee Your Majesty!

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »