It's About Time

I know, I've been a Bad Blogger all summer. Bad Blogger! Bad, Bad Blogger!!

Sit! Sit, now.

Post!

That's a Goood Girl.

What can I tell you? It's been a bizzzy summer and will go on that way into Fall.

Thanks to those who sent a mail to see where the heck I was. So thoughtful and I didn't even get back to you. Too bizzy for that, too. But I hereby send apologies and hugs back at ya'.

~~~

I'm going to get back in the saddle the easy way, with pictures of the Corn Tiger and family.

They came here to California and then I went to Brooklyn to visit them. We'll do the same in September, in reverse. I'll go to Brooklyn first and then the Dear Daughter and the Boy will come to stay with me for awhile.

Nana is excited! (CT never did say Grandma. I wanted to be Nana anyway, and Dee said, "Well we'd better start calling you Nana then." And he heard that and said "Nana", and so it was.)

Dee said the boy asked to call me today and they left a message on my machine. He said "Hi Nana." 16 months old. What a smarty! When he was here he played back the messages on my machine from the handset, something I didn't know how to do. Three times. So it wasn't only by mistake. He liked listening to the two old messages on there all the way through. Funny Boy!

At first he just wanted to try on my reading glasses, because I have them on most the time and he wanted to see how they felt. Once he caught sight of the floor through the lenses, he would walk around with them on looking down to get this closer view of the floor as if through a magnifying glass.




Such a baby still sometimes and yet already such a Boy!

It was wonderful fun to get up early and have breakfast

outside in the sunshine while he explored my backyard.

And I am usually not a morning person!

We went early, June instead of August, for our weekend vacation on the Eel River.

Had a lot of fun with family and friends and Baby June came up for her first visit with us there.

We love swimming in that river! And the new owners of the lodge created access to a new beach this year which was perfect for the little ones.

A few weeks later, I went to Brooklyn on my way to a big re-union of my Father's family in Boston (140 people! More in a later post...).



The Dear Daughter and I took the Boy into the Village for a little children's street fair and stopped for lunch in a pocket park along the way.

He liked the bunch of balloons tied to the railing.

Ball! Anything round is a ball.

Reach. Pinch. Pop!

We hung around the apartment, wearing as little clothing as possible. It was NY in the summer: Hot and Humid! I never was good at that kind of heat, but we managed, at first with one little fan, then I had to buy an air conditioner for the window.

CT had no problem keepin' bizzy, throwing the ball for the dogs and, you know, movin' furniture and such. He's a real city boy, he makes that truck noise when he backs up "Beep, beep, beep!"

As opposed to "Brrrooom!"

Comin' through!

We went out in the mornings there, too, to the park down by the East River to enjoy the breeze with our iced coffee and almond croissant, and then to the playground for some slidin' and water play with Poppa.

Then home to crash for a good, long nap. You notice how he's nearly filling that crib already?!!!

My how fast they grow! And we see it all the more from the relative leisure of the Nana side.

Thankfully, we got a little time with Uncle George, just back from a friend's wedding in Italy. CT and I took a car over to his new apartment on the edge of the Clinton Hill neighborhood. The Momma met us there after her shift at the co-op food store.

Every day was a good day to be with my Loves, even in That Heat.

More soon.

Light Summer kisses for now.

xO,

N2

Christmas & New Year. Passed.

Started this post some time ago and, though time has moved on, I didn't want to leave this one in the Draft bin. So here's a flash back to the season just past.

The California swag.

The festive window 'o' teddy bears, round the corner in San Francisco.

Decorating at the library for the children's Christmas story.

My mom's madonna, out of storage for Christmas.

Table and prezzies

at the ready.

Friends, charades, finger food, bubbly and a fire -- a great way to welcome in the New Year!

It looks like 2011 will bring transformation and completion that will be the result of an unusual perspective and require some sacrifice which I will have the courage to make given the support of my community. It will be interesting to see how this new year, and the new decade which it begins, unfolds.

Wishing you Health and Happiness as we move into 2011.

Bisous,

N2

Possibilities

From Free Will Astrology by Rob Brezsny

Leo astrology reading for this last week

for all Leo birthday celebrants out there

in which good company I also count myself.

According to Hawaiian mythology, the soul leaves the body during the night to seek the adventures known as dreams. The place of departure and re-entry is the "soul pit" (lua’uhane), which is located in the tear duct of the eye. During the next few nights, I'd love for you to send your soul flying out though your soul pit for some daring exploits that will revitalize your lust for life. Take your backlog of stored-up tears along with you, and pour them down like rain on the secret garden you've been neglecting. The garden will respond to the downpour with a big growth spurt.

The garden seems to be responding.

How are your dream and real life gardens growing?

Keesses!

N2

Blue Sunday

It was such a solitary and quiet Sunday after the busyness of the last holiday weekend.

But the flowers kept me company.

Big blue kisses.

x0

N2

Silver Moon

Coming back from LC's last night after a mighty fine dinner and a little rockin' to the Friday Night Live dance band, I took River Road and came across the one lane summer bridge with the full moon high in the sky. I had to go back and stop at the side of the road in the No Parking zone (with flashers on!) and get out to try to capture the silver light on the water using my little camera.

These were the best ones I could pull out of the darkness.

Hope you are doin' some spoonin' by the light of this silvery moon!

x0

N2

Feelin' Blue

Some time ago (can it be fifteen years already?!) I opened a little place in this Burg of ours called The Blue Rose Cafe. It was in a converted CA bungalow, one of the first coffee houses here in town and designed to be comfortable for all ages. We served coffee, really good black and herbal teas with herbs picked from our garden, italian sodas, grilled focaccia sandwiches, salads with my coveted herbal salad dressing, soups, desserts and beer and wine.

It had a "living room" area off the main room, board games to play, books and magazines to read and a back yard with tables where you could eat outside in good weather. We featured local bands on Friday and Saturday nights, mostly jazz and blues, and special events from time to time like Flamenco Sunday, a Belly Dancing night and a Mardi Gras party. My "kids" both worked there, as well as many of their friends.

Sounds idyllic, doesn't it? Well, it certainly had many of those moments. We opened it with such joy and hope. But it was ahead of its time for this town and two other similar businesses opened in that same year. The town just wasn't ready to support all of them. And that winter, three months after we opened, was very stormy and there was flooding in the center of town for the first time in some 20 years which filled the cafe's back yard and under the house with water.

I was capitalizing the business and supporting my family by myself and, after a year and a half, I had to go back to my regular day job to make more money. It just got too hard to work in the city and then come back and fill in and/or do clean up at the cafe week in and week out.

Some people came along who wanted to put a full blown restaurant in the place, so I leased it out to them. They lasted a couple of years, then passed their lease on to another home grown restaurant here in town that needed a bigger space, the Ravenous Cafe. They are still there, after 10+ years, and doing just fine.

The Blue Rose sign was made by a local craftsman, Neon Bob. I did the lettering in my handwriting and Bob copied it in fluorescent light. We hung it on the front of the building and used to turn it on at night before we even opened for business. People would walk down to that end of town just to look at its glorious blue glow.

When we closed the cafe, I had Bob build a box to hold the sign in which to mount it on the back of my house. We turn it on for special gatherings and we had one such get together this last weekend when my Son and Dear Daughter in Law got back from their two months of sabbatical wanderings on the other side of the world.

It made us feel kinda blue, in a good way.

Chloe and Lulu

Dancing in the Dark

Big Blue Kisses!

x0

N2

Memorial of Peace

There is a long history of commemorating Memorial Day in my family, on my mother's side, at least. Not in the sense that we celebrate it these days in the US, as the holiday weekend that bookends the beginning of the summer season, as Labor Day bookends the ending of that season. More in the old sense of Memorial Day from when it was called Decoration Day.

My mother used to tell us stories about how Grandpa B, who was a wonderful gardner, would get up early on May 30, the morning of Memorial Day, to gather flowers from his yard, long strands of honeysuckle from the large hedge along the side yard and roses from his many bushes and climbers, and fill the large trunk of his 50's era car.

Grandmother would pack a lunch and the whole family, the grandparents and my mom and her three brothers, would drive out to the Sinking Creek cemetery, where many members of the family were buried, to decorate the graves. First the honeysuckle vines were laid out across the length of the grave, then roses were distributed on top of this field of yellow, white and green. Once each of the family graves got this adornment, the family would sit on a blanket at the edge of the graveyard to have a quiet picnic near their dear departed. My cousin Bill still tells a similar story as related by his father, Uncle Bill, to him.

Flash forward to yesterday in my little Burg here in California where the Memorial Day weekend is synonymous with the Future Farmers Fair and Twilight Parade. This year was the 61st year that this event has been held.

I've lived in this town 25 years. When my kids were little, it was a big event for them. They loved the fair and the fact that it all happened in our neighborhood -- the parade went by one block away and the fair grounds were one block in the other direction. They liked to go down to the fair grounds to see the animals -- pigs, sheep, goats, cows, rabbits and chickens raised by the kids in 4H that are shown and then auctioned. (We avoided pointing out to my soft-hearted daughter that these animals were meant for slaughter.)

There's a"midway" at the little fair grounds at Rec Park where the local service organizations sell hot dogs and hamburgers, drinks, cotton candy and such as fund raisers. They have activities for kids, I remember an "ugliest pet contest" back in the day, and even now the schedule includes "a pet parade, diaper derby, egg toss, sack race and bubble gum blowing contest". They have a DJ in the evening to try to capture the interest of the teens.

I love the fact that, even though this town has had an influx of outlanders who are coming from a decidedly un-4H kind of place, the Future Farmers Fair and parade still happens faithfully every year, rain or shine.

Since my "kids" have flown the coop, my participation consists of marching as an "irregular" member of the local Peace Project -- a group of folks who, among other things, have stood in vigil against the war in Iraq on the plaza in the center of town every Thursday night since that war began.

This year I convinced my neighbor, Miss C here on the right, to join me.

We always have the best band in the parade, which makes the time fly. This was the second year that we had the pleasure of the company of the Hubbub Club marching band. They are snappy dressers as well as good musicians.

This mother and daughter duo on horseback were marching just in front of us, so we had to be on our toes watching out for horse pucks.

I like to think of it as carrying on the family tradition in a different sort of peaceful way.

Hope you have a good weekend with friends and/or family, however you choose to memorialize.

x0

N2