Monthly Archives: March 2013

day 130 – We are unique

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I could have been a tall blond woman born in an ice cold weathered country like Greenland.  I could have trudged thru snow and ice to get to school.

I could have been a black woman born into a tribe before the discovery of the Americas.

I could have been an Aztec princess before the Spanish arrival and slaughter of ancient civilizations in Tenochtitlan.

I could have been born, second in line to a fortune or a pauper.

I could have been born a man.

Or I could have been born in a different era or time or place.

But instead, I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and lead the life I do in this body with this face, and with the culture and dynamics in my family that I was brought up in.

And you have your story too.

 

day 127 – Lists

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Every once in awhile I like to re-evaluate myself, honestly.  And no holding back!

What words describe what is unique about you?  You can do an ABC list or number from 1 – 25 and pick the top words that come to you!  Ex: Argentine, Bi-lingual, Crazy about my husband, etc.

What top ten words describe your mood right now? Your personality?

Recognize and identify all the emotions you have been through in the last 24 hours.  This may be anywhere from three – ?

What would you do if money, age or your present life situation were not limiting you?   What top 10 things would you rather be doing or would like to try doing?

List at least fifty things you love.

List at least fifty things you are grateful for.

And here’s a truth serum:  List at least 25 things you are most proud of that you have accomplished.  Right now, I have sixty-six things to date.

Writing it all down in black and white on paper somehow makes it real, important and downright – reflective.

If you do this periodically – it’s a good way to check-up on your growth, personal journey and inward temperature.

Save today’s lists and add on in a few months or years and watch yourself unfold and expand.

 

day 126 – Happy St. Patrick’s Day

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To all my Irish friends!

Back in 2000, my friend L and I walked everyday and we shared the love of reading.  She lent me Angela’s Ashes and ‘Tis by Frank McCourt and I lent her Are You Somebody? and My Dream of You (a novel) by Nuala O’Faolain.  Both are Irish memoirists and incredible writers.  I love Nuala for her prose and feminine view.  If you get a chance, read her.   I pulled both her books back off the shelf to re-read.  She has since published other books (one or two posthumously) and a sequel memoir, but I think I should begin again, here.  

There’s a richness in Irish literature as lavish as the emerald countryside!

day 125 – Book and Restaurant of the Month

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My friend JC (yup, that’s her initials), vouched for reading Drop Dead Healthy – One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection by A.J. Jacobs.  She said it was witty, hilarious and informative.  I agree.  It’s also an easy read, not one of those heavy-duty health diatribes.  Jacobs is self-effacing, accurate and adventuresome.  His journey is memoir at its funniest.  I actually snickered out loud today in my chiropractor’s office.  He also includes humorous pictures of himself in comical predicaments as he experiments on himself.  A clever and lighthearted view on what is sometimes an obsession with our health.

Canyon in Anaheim Hills –A restaurant my husband and I enjoy sans the kids, mostly. Both our daughters are home and we celebrated my mom’s birthday today there.  It’s also a bon voyage as she flies out to Argentina in four days.  All of Chef Mead’s menus are planned around locally sourced produce and is distinctly fresh, many times organic and always interesting.  Last time, I had the special – ostrich.  They have an open kitchen and their own organic garden.  Their ahi tuna, tempura battered green beans and blue crab cakes are delectable for starters.  You can order a personal pizza any way you want. The veteran wait staff is knowledgeable.  Desserts are insane!  In November we had their seasonal pumpkin mousse parfait layered with ginger cookies and cinnamon cream.  Chocolate always appears in some decadent form.

Barimundi Catch of the Day with Risotto – What the Birthday Lady had!

Dessert trio – Warm Chocolate Cake with Merlot Sauce, Bread Pudding with Ice Cream and Carrot Cake with Walnuts swirled with Caramel Sauce

day 124 – Recommendations part 2 – Highly regarded

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LUSH is a place I adore.  I first entered the doors of this homemade bath, body and beauty goods shop more than a decade ago when it was just launching in the USA.  It was their first CA store in Pasadena.  We were staying there with the kids for a weekend to visit the Huntington Gardens and the city of Pasadena.  It was just a short, family trip.  After a delicious meal (Pasadena is home to a CIA), we strolled the sidewalks and window shopped in the pleasantly warm spring evening.  The allure of the scents coming out of LUSH hypnotized me.  They only carried a few items then; soaps, one perfume named Karma (which they still sell and I still buy), some creams, a few bath bombs, some body gels and not much else.  They now sell an enormous amount of items, too many to list here (in fact, they have a gigantic catalog that reads like a newspaper called LUSH Times in color).  They opened a place at Universal Walk in LA, The Garden Walk in Anaheim, by Disneyland and I recently ran into one at Fashion Island in Newport Beach.   When we visited Vancouver, my daughters tried to distract me but I got a whiff from the sidewalk and realized, here was another location.  I couldn’t resist the ambiance and simplicity; I spent at least an hour and a few Canadian dollars there.  I highly promote and use certain products daily.  They are ecologically and vegan friendly. They give their products the cutest names.  My latest find (because they are always inventing and creating more stuff – YES!!) and passion is Happy Happy Joy Joy Hair Conditioner. The orange blossom fragrance lingers for two days; I sniff and tell my husband to smell my hair!  They went from selling one interesting, hippie perfume to over a dozen exotic, complex or sensual scents, now.  Their packaging has changed at least three times.  But they always include a face, a name and the date of creation and expiration.  For a birthday gift, J and M bought me a special decorated box with bath bombs, creams and soap.  Everyone knows I am cuckoo for LUSH.  I totally should have bought stocks in that company or gotten in on the franchise.

 

And speaking of stocks, today is the last day Mr. Stox in Anaheim will be open for business.  Mr. Stox was a treasured, traditional and celebratory restaurant that our family and friends and many people in OC have dined at with pizzazz.  We had a Mother’s Day Brunch there a few years ago in their private room and a barbershop quartet sang for us.  We used their banquet to go menu to cater one Christmas when I wasn’t up to cooking.   I took my BFF and her new son there when my oldest daughter turned three – right by the fireplace.  I enjoyed a lovely Christmastime dinner there with two friends, one since passed on.  The place was decked in evergreen and twinkly lights and red bows.  Carolers came to all the tables. I remember having a romantic lunch with my husband there, midweek, when I was pregnant with our first child.  We made merry there plenty of occasions; leaving with a Polaroid they would give us of our visit.  Most recently, six of us sat around a round table, our two daughters and their beaus by the piano player.  And a romantic dinner about a month ago, in the bar area, pictures taken by the outdoor patio in front of the fountain.  And last night, the place was packed; loyal customers looking a little older (ok, a lot older) but we were all dressed up and our cars were all valeted like always.

The end of an era.

day 123 – Recommendations for March

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So glad to see a review in the Register newspaper that also lauded Amadeus at the Maverick Theatre – go see it – check out my blog on it – there’s still time.  It closes on the 23rd.

Less time but maybe still some tickets left for Wicked showing at Segerstrom Hall till the 17th.  We went to see Wicked last weekend, and you still have 2 days left!!  Winnie Holzman bases her enchanting playbook on the not so engaging (boring) novel by Gregory Maguire.  Come to think of it, I liked The Wizard of Oz movie much better than the book by Frank L Baum.  Stephen Schwartz makes the play come to life with spirited music and lyrics. I have seen this magical show several times, and every time I attend, I am bewitched and catch some new nuance or meaning.

Purchase tickets for April 16-28 and go see Billy Elliot at the same venue.  I remember when my BFF took me to see Billy Elliot on Broadway and she had a backstage tour arranged. It was super special. So is the show.   It’s a tale based on a motherless boy who trades in his boxing gloves for ballet slippers and it entwines the politics of Northeast UK during the Miner’s strike in 1984.  Will say no more.  Perhaps you have seen the 2000 non-musical movie. The movie had some great T.Rex and Iggy Pop tracks.  For the musical the score is written by the one and only Sir Elton John and lyrics and playbook by Lee Hall.

Speaking of music, my husband merrily came in two days ago from work and posed me a riddle. “It’s a gift.  It’s a gift I have given you before, but it’s different and I haven’t given this gift to you for a long time.  But I think you will like it because you have liked it before.”

“Is it diamonds?” I always reply.

“Nope. It’s Bowie’s new album – The Next Day. “

It’s true, he has gifted me every one of my Bowie albums and he was the one who turned me on to Bowie in the first place with the powerful and even more revealing and true today, song, Changes.  But that is a whole other story.

I am listening to it and loving it.  I would recommend it to any Bowie lover for refreshment and maybe some young people so they can listen to a true handsome voice without auto tune. His voice is still strong and full of range as ever.  His lyrics still haunt.  My favorite track so far is Love is Lost.  “You refuse to talk but you think like mad – you’ve cut out your soul and the face of thought – oh, what have you done?”  Classic.  Vintage Bowie.

And I might have mentioned this before, but Live from Daryl’s House is a close up look at legends that drop by Daryl Hall’s renovated circa 1700’s house in upstate New York.  Amazing artists jam and dine at his table.  Snippets of conversation are edited in as if you’re eavesdropping.  Check out Palladia on TV or stream it.

More tomorrow on a funny book my friend recommended and I am enjoying, a revisit of a fine nearby but overlooked restaurant and some tidbits on one of my favorite shops!

Hope your birthday was out of this world – you know who – more to come and may my daughter land at LAX safely home tonight!

day 122 – Prof. Brown, conclusion

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Professeur Giselle Kapucinski taught in a lively, participatory style and I fell fast and deeply in love with French again. I wasted no time signing up for the class. Her teaching style intrigued and inspired us.  We enacted storylines with Barbie dolls and later in other more advanced classes, we wrote dialogues, newscasts, advertisements, and menus in order to practice, develop and use the French language in a real life and creative way.  My BFF and I always tried to work in pairs together, in and out of class.  Years later, we would play Scrabble in Spanish, French and English by the pool during summer vacation.  She always won.  Always.

This modern approach was a new way of learning a language back in 1981 after the Audio Lingual Method (remember the non-stop dictation and dialogue repetition in labs with headphones?) – La plume de ma tante est sur le table.   We still had to memorize all the conjugations and tenses but we did that on our own time and took weekly quizzes to get it out of the way.  We spoke and wrote French and we immersed ourselves having lively interchanges.  When I began to dream in French, I knew I was on my way to becoming fluent.  Petite Prof. Kapucinski became my ideal vision of a Language Instructor.  My BFF and I both patterned our theme-inspired classes, and our lesson plans on her adopted theories of language acquisition.

Eventually I had to enroll in French 3 again with Prof. Brown.  I grinned and beared it.  I took it pass/fail and passed with tutoring help.

We enrolled in every class Prof. Kapucinski had to offer and I eventually was only nine credits or three courses away from a French Teaching Certification to complement my Spanish Diploma in the same.

However, my time and money had run out.  My only hope was to take the required advanced courses offered all at once in Avignon, France that summer.  The cost was $2000 for room, board and class credits, $4500 today according to the inflation calculator online.  I had to begin teaching summer school instead in order to subsist.

Alas, my only regret in life.

So whenever one of my children aims high and they earn an opportunity and I balk because of the hefty price tag, my BFF reminds me, “Don’t let this be their Avignon”.

May my children soar and their wings not be clipped.

At least not by moi.

And never let a lousy, insensitive or ‘just not a good fit’ teacher or fellow student ever keep you away from the rooms of knowledge, the thrill of learning or a required course.

Let nothing get in your way, let no one ebb your passion and put all of your energy into following your bliss, whatever that is today.

And don’t let a Professor Brown in your life, get you down!

 

day 121- Prof. Brown, part two

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I didn’t take French again, didn’t even want to hear it, until a chance meeting with my BFF who was in the same Linguistics 101 class I had signed up for on a lark.  I was considering going into teaching Spanish and this was a requirement for the Secondary Education Language Certificate.  I just wanted to see if I liked it.

I LOVED Linguistics and etymology.  If there had been a career in researching the origin of words, I would have furthered that line of work.

Students were going off to the Peace Corps to teach English and it was a requirement for them.  Later, both my BFF and I ended up teaching English as a Second Language too as the schools on both coasts became heavily impacted with refugees and immigrants in the 1980’s.   She was taking Linguistics for her Certificate to teach Italian, having studied in Italy and adoring it.

First day of class, my BFF and I hit it off.  I know now it was fate and the attraction for me came from her cheery, rosy-cheeked demeanor and her lavish fashion and design sense of how to adorn herself with color, flair and aplomb.  Her disposition, I soon observed, was equally enthusiastic, uplifting and notoriously positive.  A fun loving, bubbly woman, laced deep as an ocean and warm hearted as a fire in a hearth,  I learned over time.   She invited me to take French 101 with her which she encouraged was still available and delightful, and I told her I was a bit gun shy and why.  My BFF is uber persuasive and a determined person, especially if she feels strongly.  She had me meet her at the next appointed session.