Yesterday was the 49th anniversary of our wedding. Gary and I were married under the pagoda tree in my parents’ backyard. We wrote our vows, a friends officiated, I made the wedding cake, a fruit cake, from a 100-year-old recipe, Joyce brought lasagna, The Chieftains sang on a record, and my dad toasted us from Shakespeare as his “warrior children”.
Our anniversary rings, more about goldsmithing, the Hood to Coast relay, and my preferred running conditions.
Continue readingOn being scared and eventually… working again in a metal shop. I ran two miles this morning and my first four-miler this year the day before yesterday, building toward the 10k Bridge Crossing in October. Sometimes life is like running: you just have to keep doing it.
Temperatures rose well over 100° in Portland yesterday (105-107°) but we are at the coast, and I am reminded of why my mother’s childhood was spent at the beach in her great aunts’ home. Portland is hotter in summer and colder in winter, and now the heat is higher. Temperatures here are stabilized by proximity to ocean. During the past forty-four years we have gone entire winters without frost, enjoyed summers with temperatures that never rose over 70° (that has changed). There was no electricity or running water during my mother’s childhood at the shore in the 1920s and 1930s, and the house was surrounded by mature spruce. Now we are surrounded by rental home.
Last night we were fussing about a daytime high in the eighties and the internet being slow.
Times change.
Other weather has changed, but ordinary standards of behavior are changed. Bragging to someone about violation, bragging that we could commit an act of violence without altering voter loyalty, threatening violence—these are the acts of schoolyard bullies writ large. In my mother’s lifetime, such behavior on the part of a public person in America was unthinkable. In my own youth, even accusations of such behavior was enough to force resignation and shame.
Times change.
Rocks, cougars, the Tortilla Race, ordering online, and typos.
Continue readingI began running in 1994, nearly thirty years ago. I was not a runner before. (Every time I have to figure out the year I started. My older son went along with his faster buddies as an eight grader running with the high school cross country team in fall of 1993. I was so impressed by the camaraderie that the following spring I started running myself. That fall I ran with my son’s team.)
It’s been a long time and because I spent six years coaching that same cross country team, I am judgmental about runners I see on the beach even now. I want to coach them. I want to share my hard won wisdom, such as it is.
Seventy is not dead. Not yet. But it is old as this underlit and unretouched photo makes clear.
As of a couple of hours ago, Margaret and Helen is back. I agree with a recent comment: “Welcome back. So sorry you need to be here.”
What the hell is wrong with the Republican Party? I mean, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me for three indictments and 78 felony counts… and we haven’t even heard from the Georgia DA yet. Surely I am not the only fat lady dying to sing.
—MargaretandHelen.com
Helen Philpot is a determined old lady who won’t stand for nonsense. She’s funny, smart, and right. Today she explains why “Trump is a hemorrhoid.”
Thank you, Helen. I missed you like crazy!
Today is the 70th anniversary of the end of the 1950-1953 Korean War, one of the first international conflicts of the Cold War era.
—CNN’s 5 Things
Right there: “Korean War.” It was studiously called a “police action” when I was a girl. No war was declared and we were corrected if we slipped and referred to it as a war.
Continue readingI can’t be the only one sick of hearing about Barbie. I could write about my Barbie doll—the original gifted by my mother; I do not remember asking for one—and how much I disliked her hair and makeup. Instead: weather, birds, writing, and a mountain lion.
It’s been hot in Portland, cool on the coast. The house south of us at the coast sold for 3.3 million and the new owners seem nice. They are the first to actually put a car in the garage in at least twenty years!
In Portland, the new couple on our floor are nice, too. Gary took over from a real estate agent when they were viewing the unit, pitched it hard, and is pleased he made that sale! [No commission.]
Gary has gone to the store to get chocolate chips so that I will make cookies. Otherwise, I am sitting with knitting, staring at the ocean, and fussing. (I have completed two gifts and begun knitting a third.) I am going to whine in a way only a spoiled person would so you might not want to read further.
In grade school, I wanted desperately to have a best friend. I knew girls who had piano lessons, dance, modeling, swim classes. I did none of those things. My best First Grade friend moved away and for a long time I had friends, but no one “best.”
