My Life

Stitch, stitch, stitch. But look at what that does. I just have one of the guy's legs to blacken and, OK, a strip on his knee. The bottom has been found and has grown remarkably in just a few days. That long strip on the right is the cone of blackness that lives there. The pink on the left (how appropriate) is just a ruse. That long outlined rectangle is filled with black. Fortunately, I have reflections of light that are half-cross stitches and don't take as long to grow. 


Between stitching I have visited a fun multi-cultural grocery store in Altadena. Not just Mexican, but lots of middle-east. My friend, Joyce (soon to be 85), was amazed at how I threw things into my basket just because I was intrigued. What do you do with sour plums? We'll find out. Raw garbanzos that I have to cook tomorrow. I also bought Tuaca. Look it up. We had it with lunch with a salad Nicoise. Henry, her significant other, and I thought it was great. Good to know there is another drinker in the house. It's a little sweet for me, so I mix it with bourbon. Good.


The brand new car got water splotched in a light rain, so I took it to a car washer. We are now (as of today) dusting the car so water splotches won't be so ugly. Other than that, the car is running great. Gas mileage is still low because we spend a lot of time sitting at railroad tracks. Give me the open road!


Books: just finished Merchants of Doubt. Great topic. Dry listening. Did I mention the gang of scientists who helped develop bombs moved on to Star Wars, Acid Rain, Hole in the Ozone Layer and Global Warming. Argh. The Audible reader is just not outraged enough. He needs to be dripping sarcasm when he mentions how these things connect. It deserves verbal underlining.


Secret pleasure? Nora Roberts. Well read pulp fiction. Well written. The Witness is good. In fact, I've read a lot of good mysteries or mystery light (like The Witness) lately while stitching away - V is for Vengeance by you know who (that was good),  The Chalk Girl (did I already write about this?), Hell is Empty (OK, but just OK+, not great), and Live Wire (too New York for me, but OK.) Thank goodness for Audible sales. I also got discounted credits. 4 credits in waiting. 16 books yet to be read. I better wait. 


Good podcast? Slate's Lexicon Valley. Told me why I start so many sentences with So. So, what else is up? Breakfast on Saturday with Tom, John, and Donna. If you have fun, keep doing it until it breaks. Dinner with Joyce and Henry sometime soon. We are also cooking a Greek dinner for lots of friends at the end of June. (lots = 6 of us all together.) I cook just for people in this house. Flap meat and beef cheeks from that market mentioned above. Zucchini and tomato gratin ala Jaques Pepin. Strawberry ice cream. Actually, there is a lot of cream. Maybe I'll make chocolate ice cream tonight. Or sour plum.

I Am Here

Honest, I'm not stitching it crooked. It's just gotten to be so wide! You can see the left edge at the top of the picture and the right edge at the bottom. I'm trying to decide if I want to roll it up or down to find another edge. I know you completists think I should finish the middle that I started, but I'm a person who wants to find out where the outer limits are. On canvas. No Dora the Explora here. 


My iPod touch is  no longer accepting head phones. I still listen while I stitch, so does Adrian. I've found a very ingenious way of draping the charger cable around my neck so the ipod's speaker is close to my ear. At least Adrian can't hear it in his room. Of course, when I'm walking around it goes into my bra. What a handy holder. I'm going to the Apple store tomorrow to see if they will give me a new one. Sigh. 


Adrian has had to hear a mystery that was very silly, Live Wire by Harlan Corben, and for non-fiction, Merchants of Doubt.  PALAC discussed the Doubt book. I think that would have been interesting. Seems like a lot of the same PR guys and scientist cum political hacks were involved with some of our worst cover-ups or media campaigns to obfuscate the truth about scientific facts. You know, like, smoking being harmful, second-hand smoke being harmful, Star Wars as produced by Ronald Reagan, holes in the ozone layer, acid rain. And I'm only half way through the book. You know where this is heading - global warming. The characters have changed a bit over time because they were getting old. Some started with the government during WWII.  But the principle remains the same.


Another PALAC group that I'm sorry I missed was Thinking, Fast and Slow. One of my friends said it was so hard to keep some of the attendees on track. There must be a different kind of thinking where you are constantly following the wrong thread. 

Good Friends

 Tom, John, Per and I used to have lunch together. First in the great executive dining room, then  in the cafeteria. We replaced Per with John's wife Donna for a breakfast last Sunday. So much fun. I usually get to see Donna when she is worrying about John's banjos and other musical equipment. On Saturday, we just got to talk and enjoy each other. Great company. We will do this again soon.

I am learning that I can do all sorts of fun things with the photo App on my iPod. This is Ansel (black and white) with an old-fashioned frame. I think it's pretty, without all that color. My dancers have legs. You can see the right edge now. I'm trying to move on to the left side,but whenever I pull out a color, I think about where it can go in in the middle and right. Much fun.


Done with LBJ. Looking forward to the next installment in 5 or 10 years. I've also read a mystery, The Chalk Girl. A better follow-up to LBJ than Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took the Dog. Man that's a draggy book. The Chalk Girl was never boring. Audible just had a book sale, so I am totally stocked with mysteries. That's a good thing because I'm also finding the Ivan Doig book Dancing at the Rascal Fair to be kinda draggy too. He is supposed to be the new Stegner. I can see why. He writes about Montana. Novel writers about Montana will always be compared to Stegner, I guess. Even though it's draggy, this is a good book to stitch by. My dancers seem to be never ending as does the book.

Wahoo!

We just got a new Hyundai Elantra 2013! It is very nice, doesn't have too many bells and whistles, just a few dials and buttons that I have to learn. It was North America's car of the year for 2012. How can that be? It was made in Korea. Great mileage, great safety according to those who rate greatness (other than Hyundai.)  It is roomier than our Altima was. Even ACN has to pull up the driver's seat when he's driving. I rode in the back seat on our test drive, just to check it out.  It I had a lot of leg room behind the passenger and I could get out without too much grunting (thank goodness.)  Finally, I found a piece of a torn up check I wrote for the Altima back on 9/1/00. That car cost $1000 more, 12 years ago! Very nice, indeed.

 ACN got a new parking permit for the car. "No, ma'am,

 it has no outstanding tickets, we just drove it off the lot." So much fun to say.

Wow, even her torso is almost filled in. It grows by leaps AND bounds, one little stitch at a time.


Almost done with LBJ. Poor Adrian, he has to listen to my going on about the book on a regular basis. This is what I know to be true, both LBJ and RFK were complex characters. They both had goodness so good that it stuns you. Bobby's love and care of his own family and Jack's and his extreme levelheadedness that got us through the Cuban Missile Crises; Lyndon's true concern for poor people and people of color and his ability to get legislation through Congress (God, we need that now.)  But they both had huge, mean devils inside them. Bobby never forgave what he thought was an insult, Lyndon was duplicitous, lying, underhanded, etc. for no damn good reason at all (to hide deficiencies, wrong-doing, illegal money-making schemes.) OK, maybe there was a reason, but there shouldn't have been. And he was wheedling to those in power and rude to those he had power over. 


When we were getting the car today, there was a lot of time to look at magazines. One had an article about "strange bedfellows" which included DDE and LBJ after the JFK assassination. "I need you more now than I have ever needed you before."  Sweet. So sweet he said it to everyone, especially everyone who could, indeed, be better for him if they were being helpful rather than confrontational. But still. What a piece of work of God is man. More true of him than anyone I've ever read about. Oh, except Steve Jobs.