WHY I LOVE CHRISTMAS

This year's Christmas card picture was probably our best ever.  We wore these costumes for Halloween, and then my wonderful friend Bill spent a few hours in Photoshop making it into this Corgi extravaganza. 

I decided to put in a few pictures from this Christmas season.  All of these are reasons why I like Christmas.  Friends, decorations, music, presents, food, and love. 

We have all of these wonderful blown glass balls, many of them made by our neighbor Tim

I love this little Christmas tree. 
Reminds me of a Christmas album I have

Gail's window framed Japanese maple

Last minute Christmas eve party

Christmas dinner at Gail and Bob's

Decorations, before I got carried away

More of the last minute Christmas Eve party

Tiffany window at Mare Island

Another Tiffany, I think this is an archangel
Zoe took me here for my birthday

Harp circle at the Capitol

I didn't manage to get pictures of playing with Charlotte at the Governor's mansion, or the Moneyworks party, or Christmas Eve at the Lutheran church, or the El Mundo Christmas concert, or my birthday dinner at Mike's, or the party we had here for the neighborhood association or playing in the waiting room at Kaiser, but they were all a part of a really wonderful Christmas.

FINALLY, THE LAST DAY OF THE WORLD- NOT

Well, here it is.   I've been building up to this all year, and it seems like its not going to happen after all.  But today is my birthday, so that kind of makes up for it.  Boy, am I sorry I didn't bother to do my christmas shopping.  Now I have to do it all in four days.  Yikes.
However, my birthday was a blast.  This morning Zoe took me to Vallejo to tour the Tiffany chapel at Mare Island.  What a treat.  This chapel has more Tiffany windows under one roof than any place west of the Mississippi. I think there are 27 Tiffany windows and about 5 that aren't from the Tiffany studios.  They are all beautiful.  I took pictures, but I can't upload pictures from my iPad, so they'll have to wait a few years before I get around to getting the other computer out and the pictures moved onto it.
After our tour we visited some art studios on this decommissioned base which weren't technically open, but there was one person there and he let us walk around.  There were some pretty interesting things in this space, but it was really cold.   After our tour, we went across the bay and had clam chowder and crab cakes for lunch, which was really delicious, and we got to sit looking out at the water.  And it was nice and warm in the restaurant.
When we got home I discovered that John had gotten me two things I really really wanted.  One was a folding table from Costco -- yes, I know it's not romantic, but I've been wanting one for two years; and the other was an electric wine opener, because in my advanced old age I can never get a bottle of wine open, and god knows I need to be able to do that.
Oh, and did I mention the beautiful red rose bouquet?  Guess I'll have to take a picture, even if just for that.  He was going to take me out to dinner, but after the aforementioned giant lunch (I didn't mention the breadsticks and ice cream) I wasn't up for a big dinner, too, so we went to see Life of Pi instead.
It's now 11:50 and if the worlds going to end today, it only has 10 more minutes here on the west coast.  We're ding our final birthday/end of the world celebration with Prosecco.

LAST REAL DAY IN NEW YORK

Billie and I went down to Trinity today to hear the St Thomas boy choir again.  It was a totally different program from last night's evensong which was mostly chant. Additionally, last night was the full choir but today was the treble choir of younger boys with more "modern" music like Handel, Bach , Britten, Faure, and Sullivan. They actually did a kind of nice arrangement of The Lost Chord arranged by their director John Scott.   I think the song is ridiculously schmaltzy, but it was the real crowd pleaser on the program.

I have no idea what this was about, but these women got plenty of attention walking down Wall Street in their red dresses.

We had lunch at a cute place John and I found last time called Hampton Chutney. I noticed they had a little play area for kids in the front window and while I was taking a picture of it I realized that Elvis really is still alive.
As we were finishing lunch, I thought I'd check to see if there was a free wifi signal anywhere. Check out the screen from my ipod.

Tonight we went to a very funny and timely play that was written in 1978 but still valid. It's called We Won't Pay, We Won't Pay.  It easily translated from that period in Italy with big divides between rich and poor and government corruption, etc.  The play was done with sort of clown makeup, which the two more intelligent members of our group said was Commedia Dell'Arte, so it had a slapstick effect on a serious subject. 

I could have done without the final monologue of the play where the main character exhorted us to realize that society was unfair -- you had to be brain dead not to have gotten it by that point. 
Martha bought us some yummy dessert at the EuroPan after the performance.  This is a picture of the three of us after the play tonight.  Are we stunning or what? 


I bought two more pairs of those skinny pants.  I hope to hell they don't shrink when I wash them. 

TRIBES

We went to see the play Tribes tonight in the Village. It was a very interesting play which really made you think. This is a picture of the stage set.

It's a dysfunctional English family with a deaf son who has been forced all his life to lipread and never learn sign language. So the play is all about exclusion, but you realize that everybody in this family is quite excluded from everyone else. The son finally makes contact with the deaf community, but through a woman who is the child of deaf parents and is going deaf herself. She wants to leave the deaf community and can't deal with the fact that she's going deaf, and he has suddenly found a place where he is included and wants to be with these people all the time. The play has many layers and we don't know if it's because we're all sort of deaf that we couldn't understand a lot of the dialog, or if it's intentionally hard to understand to get you into the place where the son is. It made a good play to talk and think about.

We spent about two hours this morning with dueling cell phones as we tried to figure out what was going on with Martha's cell phone, land line, and answering machine. Nothing unusual, but it was pretty funny to see the three of us sitting around in the living room talking to each other on the cell phones. On another front, I had a good time in beadland this afternoon. Couldn't find everything I wanted, but got some good stuff I didn't know existed. I always find really cool stuff at York beads. My best find this time was some Czech glass copper lined beads.

And finally, here's a picture of the three old ladies having a gelato before the theater. I forgot to mention that the play was supposed to end at 9:30 and because of track construction the subway we wanted to take back was shutting down south of Penn Station at 10 p.m. We really had to haul ass to get to the station in time because the play ended at 9:40.

WHAT A HOOT

It must be near Halloween, because today was a real hoot. 

It started out with the three old ladies making a trek down Broadway to the big box electronics store to get Martha a new portable heater.  What a crew we are as we click down the street with canes and old lady baskets.  At one point (well at some points, but this one had a photo op) we sat down and I just couldn't resist taking our picture, because we really are the three old ladies you take a picture of when you go on a trip. 

Anyway, we got to the big box store where our combined ages surpassed the combined IQs of all six salesmen, but they were still condescending.   Martha had previously bought a heater at this store and returned it because it was defective and she couldn't program it.  It was a damn space heater for pity's sake, and you had to spend about as much time programming it as if it were a new computer.  And the programming device didn't work anyway.  I tried it, Billie tried it, and one of her clever computer-savvy students tried it. 

Okay, that was then, this was now and we're back in the store to buy another, simpler heater.  I kid you not, they had at least 12 models of space heaters in this place.  Some of them apparently do international monetary transactions, and some of them don't even turn off if they fall over on the floor.  In other words, there's a wide range.  The first salesman who helped us wasn't interested in us after we didn't want to take the first one we looked at and retreated back to a desk with other salesmen so he wouldn't have to waste any more time with us .  He thought it was crazy to ask if the thing turns off if it tips over.  I might point out that the fan in question oscillates, which probably makes it quite attractive to certain four-legged creatures who live in this apartment.   We finally picked one out after moving all the floor models all around so we could plug them in and see how warm they got.  And all the time we can see the "cool" salesmen all standing around a desk snickering at us.  By the way, we were the only customers in the store. 
After we finally decided on one, nothing would do but we had to have them open the box to prove that the one we were buying worked.  They really didn't like that, but they did it because three old ladies together definitelyachieve critical mass. 

I walked Martha back home with the heater and then Billie and I went to Chinatown.  As usual, we were looking for watches.  She found three that she was happy with after sorting through about 279 similar watches, and then we went off to Little Italy for dinner.  We ate at the place we ate at the first time we were in New York, but this time you didn't see us through the window on a Food Network show. 

As we were finishing dinner, Billie went to check the time and discovered she had an extra watch on.  Now, I gotta tell you, when you're looking at watches in Chinatown, they watch you like a hawk so you don't steal any, but Ms. Lightfingers managed to evade the watchful eyes of not one but two clerks in the store and make off with a free watch.  Being the honest soul that she is, she walked back down to the store and paid for it.  The man couldn't figure out what she was complaining about when we got there, assuming that one of these fine watches had stopped once it left the energy field of the shop, and that we were coming back to complain.  It took a few minutes to make him understand that she was coming back to pay for another watch.  She's paying for the watch and I'm standing there trying to figure out if we can make the same thing work at Tiffany's tomorrow.

Anyway, we came home because we were going to a concert tonight.  We thought this was a kind of a "throwaway" concert, because it was free and at the church right across Broadway from Martha's -- but it turned out to be this wonderful piano trio called the Claremont Trio.  They were wonderful.  I especially liked the pianist in the group, though Billie thought the piano was too loud.  They played a wonderful Beethoven which I think was early in his career, and then a modern piece by a composer I think might live in Berkeley which was very interesting and drew on her Peruvian heritage.  The final piece was a Mendelssohn with a real knock 'em dead first movement and a final movement which had a bit of the Doxology prominantly displayed. 

Right now Billie's asleep in the bedroom, so I'll have to wait til tomorrow to upload any
pictures.    No great loss today in the picture category.

 I've been lazy. I'm adding a little more old lady stuff this morning, because we are now all sitting around in the living room playing with our cell phones, computers and ipods. But once again, I think our ages overwhelm our IQs, so these are some pretty funny conversations. Much misinformation is being shared.   Also, I put on a sweater this morning and found it was preloaded with a Kleenex in the sleeve. 

I'm also adding, because I have some time, a picture of me with my new pants on. 

SUNDAY IN NEW YORK

There's a street fair going on right out on Broadway.  I love NY street fairs.  They are a mixture of artists, junk salesmen, street food, music and bunches of other stuff.  The quality ranges from crap to classic -- though tilted more towards crap. 

I basically went because I wanted a nutella crepe, which I didn't get until right before I came home.  There's a new wrinkle in the street fair today.  They're having a ramen competition, and apparently you buy a cup for $4 and you can sample and vote for the ramen from about 20 restaurants.  I may go back out and try that. 

I also happened upon a wonderful craft show at Lincoln center -- one I've actually been to before when we were here, that has a lot of high-end vendors, and of course I bought stuff there, too.  It was really nice stuff to look at, and at least two of the vendors were at the craft show in SF in August.

As I was walking into Lincoln center, this guy was on the sidewalk with a piano he's apparenly dragging around the US and playing on the street wherever he doesn't get arrested.  He was pretty good. 

I saw this pretty cool sweater at the street fair, too, but in the final analysis, the fact that is was cool and not warm kept me from buying it. By the way, yesterday it was quite cool, but today I was dressed way too warmly. I think this is because it was so warm in the apartment when I got up, I just assumed it was cold outside and it wasn't. So partially, I couldn't try on that sweater either, but I did rather assume it would hug all my lumps in an unattractive way. I also passed up buying a cover for the iphone I don't even have yet. I thought the cover was pretty funny. It looked like an old cassette tape.
By the way, the house at the top of the blog is just  a cute autumn house decoration. I think this is a house John and I saw during the summer which had pretty nice plants decorating the front steps. Maybe a florist or someone lives in it.

After my foray to the street fair etc., we went to St. Paul's Lutheran to listen to the evening jazz vespers.  I thought the group was pretty good, but I don't think I'll ever hear a group as good as that one that did the  Bach one year when we were here. 

We are a very funny group walking the streets.  I remember when we went to Russia about 20 years ago that we used to laugh because you would often see three old ladies or old men sitting on a bench, and it always seemed to be three. 

And we'd take pictures, because they were so cute looking.  And now I'M ONE OF THEM.  Billie and Martha are both using canes but I have the obviously fake old-lady red hair so we are a pretty hilarious group shambling down the street or sitting at the bus stop.  Billie, by the way, is the consummate New Yorker. She gets on the bus and starts looking at her ipod right away and therefore looks like every other person in NYC who has their nose in an electronic device. We had dinner in again tonight. I slaved hours in the kitchen and made biryani. I'm going to try to upload a video which is a little tiny bit of the music from the church. It doesn't sound very good on my camera, so I don't know how it will be here, and the picture is pretty bad, too.

FIRST DAY

We arrived on time, got our luggage and our car was waiting for us and we were at Martha's before she was up, like maybe about 8 :30. After we chatted for awhile Billie took a nap and I went to Sak's to see if Melodie's art was still there, but they were taking the window down today, so I missed it. I went from there to the Trader Joe's on 23rd and got some groceries and, most importantly, some wine. I was back at the apartment by 1:30, but everybody was still sleeping so I went out again to get some fruit and stuff and had a piece of pizza for lunch. Too much food. But I ate it all so no children in AFrica will starve. So we are here and ready to rock and roll. Oh, right, we don't rock and roll. We do early music. We started out last night (Friday) by going to a fabulous concert. It was put on by a group called Artek and was music by Monteverde, set to be Vespers. The singers were amazing, they had three viols at one point and everything was so beautifully in tune that it almost made you cry. By the end of the concert I felt that I could have become a believer if I could listen to something that good every week. It passed, though. You can't imagine what it's like to have three stubborn old ladies trying to decide to saomething. We went to dinner at a restaurant Martha likes which serves Japanese food. The menu was kind of different and it took us forever to decide what we wanted. So we had some strsange combination of things. I had shrimp dumplings and seaweed. My dinner was good. After we'd been there for awhile Billie decided she'd like some udon noodles, which seems to be the longest prep time of anything in the restaurant, but you have to realize, we couldn't get our act together enough to order things all at once. And then Billie was on a little dropping kick, first she dropped her chopsticks, then she dropped her spoon. When we left, we were going to either walk down to the concert (from 93rd to 87th,) or take the bus, or go back to Martha's and rest and then walk, or some other combination. Martha couldn't understand that Billie has a hard time walking, but Martha also wanted only to use her own bathroom as opposed to the one at the restaurant or perhaps the one at the church. I did overestimate the time it would take to eat and stroll, so when everything was said and done and we actually walked the whole distance and didn't stop at Martha's for a pit stop, we were there almost an hour early. So then we did more walking and went for coffee. But the concert was so totally worth it. On the way home, we walked up West End Avenue, and found this really great Halloween-decorated place. These are pictures with flash. Makes me realize how far we have to go to keep up.

CATCH UP

Haven't posted anything since August. Here's a quick update: Competitive gardening worked out well. The garden looks wonderful and everything was great for the home tour. The day before the tour Kim came over and edged the whole yard by hand, Lynda trimmed every twig and leaf that wasn't perfect and planted four new plants. By this time, John and I were off to Modesto to go to my high school reunion and see how many people I could try to pretend to remember. Back in Sacramento, it was nearing dark, and Lynda and Kim didn't think things were yet perfect enough. Kim got out her leaf blower, and there was apparently some kin of duel between her and the guy in the kiddy corner house with his leaf blower. I think he may have one, because Kim may or may not have put the wrong mix of fuel in hers and it made a giant bang and quit. By the time we got home the next day, the thing was in full swing and everything looked fabulous. And obviously they did a good job, because John was standing near the gate and a woman walked out and noticed that a piece of turf had been kicked up, and said: "Oh, there really is a blade of grass out of place." So literally the minute that was owner I really had to get to work on the neighborhood art walk in two weeks. Well, of course it was too late, to do as much as needed to be done, but we did spend a number of hours putting up posters, and we got some new plants in the traffic circle, and a bunch of other stuff that doesn't seem like much looking back at it but seems to have taken up most of two weeks. A week before, Lynda talked John into putting some art work into the show, and he had to frame all these things he already had done. Also, kind of late in the game we got a chance to use the firehouse for one of our venues, so we spent two days cleaning that up. Since there were a bunch of us on that project, it turned out to be a pretty fun project. Anyway, the event was more or less of a success. Not that much for sales by the vendors, but a great opportunity for people to wander the neighborhood, meet people and see how much talent there is. And I sold some jewelry. Tomorrow we have a River City Renaissance Band gig in the morning and have a chance to see a friend I haven't seen all summer. Then it's off to New York with Billie, where I hope it's not too cold. Sorry there are no pictures.

COMPETITIVE GARDENING

Home from New York and really getting down to working in the yard. While we were gone Lynda really added value to the corner garden and it now looks really uptown.  She and John also moved some plants around on the backyard , some of them we just planted before we left, but we're getting too much sun.  Many things that can stand a lot of sun are still stressed in our yard because it gets like an oven back there    I spent three hours, or did it just seem like it, moving bricks and arranging them like a crazy quilt underneath the back porch.  I'm so tired you could put my picture in the dictionary under exhausted.  

How those pioneer women workedin the fields, came home and gave birth and then cooked dinner for seven people, from scratch, is totally beyond me.   We went out for dinner. 

I wrote this day before yesterday, but today we took a girl's trip to High Hand Nursery in Rocklin. I'd never been there before, and it's really a treat. This foursome is all working on our garden to make it absolutely wonderful for the home tour. It takes a village. And of course, we're all into making it the best garden in the neighborhood. Among other things, we are going to take the fountain out, which will leave us with several useful pots, one of them enormous, and a small brick pedestal in the back yard that should be taken out, but might not be. The following pictures are of various glass, ceramic, and real plants that might be used if we have to leave this giant pot where it is. Anna found a really neat plant and got her wings as well. So many plants, so little space to plant them. We discovered our neighbor had bought a really nice Japanese maple. She has her house on the tour, too. The competition increases.

Now, the other thing that's available at High Hand Nursery is that it's a great place to have lunch. The food is good enough, though not spectacular, but the ambiance is wonderful, and dessert is to die for. We had a coconut cake with hibiscus sauce and hibiscus flower, and a cream cheese brownie with ice cream and chocolate sauce. If you've enjoyed the competitive gardening story, you might like M.C. Beaton's book Agatha Raisin and the Potted Gardener.

LAST FULL DAY

Today is our last full day in NY, and we just wandered, shopped, and ate. Yes, I know, that's pretty much all we've done since we've been here. So, here are some pictures: Capitalist pig. This is a thing the union often brings to a disputed job site. There's also a huge rat at some job sites. Wanted to be sure we got our money's worth on our metro pass, so took the bus somewhere where we might ordinarily have walked. Looked at shoes, as always: These were on sale. Don't know how I passed them up. Had a nice lunch at a place called Hampton Chutney. Gotta go there again. Bought a cool sweater that can be worn a thousand ways at an Italian shop on Broadway. I probably won't remember how to do any of them. But they're really cute. Not unlike French scarf tying.

ONE MAN TWO GUV'NORS

We went to one of the funniest plays ever today. We had decided, based only on the fact that the lead actor James Corben, got a Tony, that we would try to get tickets for One Man, Two Guv'nors. Then, as we were standing in line for tickets, I saw that it was an English farce and I started to have my usual reservations about it, because sometimes I think they are really strained, and I often can't tell the players apart. Because of that, we decided to take the sort of crappy half price tickets they offered us. This was funny in itself, because the half price tix turned out to be box seats and were quite good.

And the play was so funny that I had tears running down my face. Partly because it blended asides of talking to the audience (like in a play) but then the audience really got into it and the exchange between the actor and the audience was hysterically funny. And then there was a part where they dragged two men onto the stage and did a really funny bit, which turned out to be a setup for later when they apparently dragged another audience member up on the stage, and who I "bought" as an embarrassed audience member for a good ten minutes until they doused her with a fire extinguisher, and only then did I realize she was an actress. And they had a four piece band that started out as real rubes and ended up sounding like the Beatles by the end.

That's mostly all we did today, though unfortunately we got caught in the rain and had to seek refuge in a bead store --poor me. We did take a little stop at Times Square where a bunch of people were waving at a camera so we joined them. There's a little white circle around us, but it's kind of hard to see. We fixed dinner at home tonight, and Martha has a group that is working on reading early notation tonight. They invited me to join, but I wisely declined, since Martha always sings my praises about how wonderful I am at things, and it's much better to allow that fantasy to stand than participate and make Martha look bad for her mistaken opinion. So we're in the basement doing some laundry. Not sure what we will try to do tomorrow, but it will be very low key because John is already in going home mode for Friday.

SEPTEMBER 11 MEMORIAL

I'm not going to wax on about this because everybody knows more about 911 than I do, due to the fact that everybody in the US watched it on TV for days on end, and I was in France at the time with no TV and didn't even know about it until a day later.

The memorial is really beautiful.  I had seen pictures of it, but I had no idea how large it actually is.  It has the water spilling down the side into a pool and in the middle of the pool there is a large square that the water then falls into, which is deep enough that you can't see into the bottom of it, no matter how tall you are or where you get on the grounds.  Around the edges of the pools (there are two identical pools) there is a railing about 3 feet wide or so that has the names of all the victims engraved on it.   There is even a special section for the victims who were killed in the earlier 1993(?) attempt to blow up the World Trade Center. 

You have to have tickets, which are free, to be admitted to the site, but this is just to organize the crowd control.  Security is about as tight as getting on an airplane, except you don't have to remove your shoes.   They say that once all the construction around the memorial is finished, people will be able to wander in and out at will. 

In no particular order, I'm adding a few pictures from the memorial.  I tried getting some on line, because mine really aren't all that good, but the available ones, which were beautiful, didn't give you an idea of the scale, because there were no people in them.   

This picture of a pear tree is a kind of miracle tree. After all the destruction, it was stripped bare, but still standing and someone rescued it. It was planted in a park somewhere in NYC and nursed back to health. When they finished the memorial, they dug the poor thing up again and carted it back here and replanted it (under a bunch of bricks and with what looks like hardly any area for its roots to grow) and yet it has survived and actually looks pretty healthy. I think when it dies it will just quietly disappear, since it's there as such a symbol of life and hope. We were supposed to meet our friend Laura at the Memorial at 4:30, but we had a mixup and she was waiting for us at the ticket office to the memorial, so we both waited for an hour. We were planning on going to a free evening concert at the World Financial Center, so eventually we decided we'd just go on to the concert anyway.

She was there, and it was a really fun concert, though -- need I say it -- way too loud for comfort as far as I was concerned. Maria de Barros was the headliner, and she had a wonderful mix of Caribbean and African sounds, also a bit jazzy. It was a very high energy show. After the show we took a little walk around the general area which has had massive funding since 9-11. There are tons of luxury apartments there, although Laura says they are mostly empty. Laura works in an old building across West Highway (I'm not sure that's the right name) and probably for the rest of her working life will be working in a giant, tourist-infested construction zone.

The land on the west side of the highway is all landfill from the original excavation to build the twin towers. This is another picture I downloaded from the internet of a fabulous lobby (colloqually called the Crystal Palace or the Palm Court) These are real palm trees, not those fake ones like we saw out at Governor's Island. Here's a picture of Laura and me as we're ready to get on the 2 Train (but in different directions).