tongue and groove

tea party

when i was young, my mother didn't drink coffee. she was a tea drinker, so i grew up drinking lots and lots of tea. i had my own tea cups and saucers...a turquoise set and a lime green set. (and i suspect that's one reason those are still two of my favorite colors.) we'd sit across from each other at our 1950's  kitchen table (which looked exactly like the one in the photo)...a teapot in the center of the table between us. Mom had lots of china cups and saucers. they were beautiful and delicate-looking. we'd pour our tea and add sugar (i probably added way too much) and then sit sipping our tea while looking at the backyard through the large pitcutre window next to the table. i have lots of sad memories of my childhood (my parents had a very unhappy marriage until my mother left when i was 14), but i have very fond memories of all things tea.

when we got new living room furniture, the old sofa, armchair, coffee table and end tables were stored in the garage. (they were all classic 50's pieces. oh, how i wish i had them! my father took them to the dump!  can you imagine?!)  i used to spend hours in the garage, having rearranged the old furniture into a pleasing sitting area. i'd received a couple of very large stuffed bunnies for Easter. i'd prop the bunnies up on the sofa and chair and proceed to have a tea party.

i went through a phase where i had a blanket fort in my bedroom. it was just a thin, white wool blanket with pink roses and satin trim...but sitting inside that fort, i felt like i'd entered a magical queendom. i had all of my favorite dolls and stuffed animals with me in there...all of my favorite talismans. i loved nothing more than to sit there for hours and have pretend tea parties. my mother would sometimes make me little sandwiches and slip them to me in the fort.

for my birthday last year i invited a handful of family members and friends to meet me at a Starbucks for tea and poetry. i'm meeting my older niece for tea this evening. in the summertime, i make sun tea. when the weather turns chilly, i routinely have a cup in the evenings after dinner. it's such a winter ritual that often Jeffrey joins me in having a nightly tea.

tea has been a touchstone in my life. i love tea...all sorts of tea. although i love really good teas, i'm not remotely a tea snob and can get just as much pleasure from a large, sweaty glass of iced tea in a coffee shop as i can from a steaming mug of artisanal tea.

that's why it saddens me to see that the words Tea Party have been co-opted by those who seem to be advocating all that i find repulsive. some in my country have taken those words and stuck their cause under its banner to promote racism and intolerance and anger and hatred. i'm doing my best to ignore the Tea Party...but i'll never stop cherishing tea parties.

bounty

i read an article online this morning about how Wal-Mart is offering a 'Thanksgiving dinner to go' containing the ingredients needed to make dinner for eight.  the vegetables are canned, as is the cranberry sauce...and the stuffing is a boxed mix.  total price?  about $20.  the author was saying how he likes to make his Thanksgiving dishes from scratch, but that it's so much more expensive to go that route. i know this is true, because when funds get low, i find my diet getting proportionally unhealthier. cheap food = filling food. yet yesterday afternoon, J and i ate Fuji apples as an afternoon snack and they were delicious...so much so, that he said so after he finished his.  which leads me to wonder (and, yes, of course it's obvious given our national obesity epidemic)...when did our sense of 'full' get so out of whack? when did bounty go from being an abundance of healthy, fresh food...to being a glut of processed, high-fat, high-sugar junk?  isn't it remarkable that we consider fresh food straight out of the ground to be a luxury sometimes?  wouldn't it be great if classes on how to grow our own food and eat healthily and locally were a natural part of a public school curriculum? 

Still Bill

"I would like to know how it feels for my desperation to get louder." Man, this looks good...Still Bill...

Classic black...yes, please!

How to bake cheeseburger cupcakes...

moving up and growing up

On Thursday afternoon we had a visit from Ciara. I asked my brother to please bring her bike, so we could go for a ride. J was headed out of town for a gig, so we promptly biked over to the food co-op to get ingredients to make Shelagh's 5-minute chocolate mug cake. It works! :) I agree with Shelagh that it would be even better served warm with ice cream. We didn't even bother to tip ours out on plates--we ate them warm right out of our mugs. It's not the cake-iest cake you'll ever eat, but, hey, 5 minutes for a personal chocolate cake! It's a great idea and Ciara enjoyed making them. Then we were off on our bike ride. (And, yes, even though she's not wearing it in the photo above she of course wore a bike helmet.) I took her through the UC Davis campus, by the plant nursery and stables near the vet hospital to the gazebo in the white garden. We sat on a bench in the gazebo for awhile to talk. Ciara starts 7th grade on Wednesday and will be switching schools for the first time (moving up to middle school). We talked about all that she's excited and anxious and curious about in this transition. What a gift to be able to have that conversation with her having spent the past four years working at junior highs, since I'm pretty familiar with a lot of the questiosn she had. It's so hard to believe that she's old enough for middle school already (even though she'll be one of the youngest in her class--doesn't turn 12 until November). She was in 2nd grade when we returned from the tropics! We biked back through UCD's arboretum, a place I've taken her to many times. In years past, we'd walk there from my house because she liked to take a bag of bread to feed the ducks. She asked if we could stop at a pond-like area of the creek where there were a lot of ducks. This time we didn't feed them--she wanted to photograph them. As someone who fell in love with photography when she was 8, it made me really happy to see her get totally lost in that process. She figured out how to use the zoom and critiqued her shots, deleting the ones she didn't like. I asked if she still has her digital camera. She said she does, but "I want a good camera--like this one." (The camera I own was a gift from her family a couple of birthdays ago.) How far we've come in what feels like a very short time...from a little girl squealing in delight while feeding the ducks...to a pre-teen talking to me about school and friends and boys (gulp!) while manning the camera herself. Here are a few images from past visits...feeding the ducks...teaching her to sew...browsing in bookstores...having ice cream...hanging out with her bear Maddie... I hope that no matter where life finds us, Ciara and I will always have a chance to keep our connection. She's a truly great girl...and I'd say that even if she wasn't my niece. ;) This is my last weekend before returning full-time on Wednesday to the library job I was filling last Spring. I've loved having a long summer break. I honestly have no idea what's down the road on the job front--or in any area of my life actually--but with J busy with gigs all weekend, I plan to have sort of a retreat weekend. Hope however you're spending yours, it's a lovely one. xo

Julie and Julia

Julie and Julia opens today.  This film makes me feel hopeful.  What's hopeful about it?  You mean other than that it's based on TWO true stories...one of a tall, not overly attractive woman who became a television star after teaching herself to cook...and the other stuck in a dead-end job who used the first woman as inspiration to embark on a self-proclaimed project that turned her into a full-time writer with a movie about her life?  Oh, nothing.  ;)  (Is there any character La Streep cannot transform herself into?  She's a goddess in my book.)

Here's a nice Nightline segment featuring Julie Powell talking not just about the film and her cooking project, but also about the message she took from Julia Child's life...check it out.

downtown Napa

On a whim, I drove to downtown Napa today.  I'm not even sure what prompted me to go.  I think I was standing in the shower and thought it might be nice to get out of town for a few hours.  Sometimes it's nice to go some place you can get to in an hour or less.  Napa's about 45 miles from us, but with traffic, it's about an hour away.  

Before leaving town, I hit the library for a guidebook and an audiobook to listen to during the drive.  I chose Jonathan Franzen's memoir, The Discomfort Zone, for the latter.  I'm enjoying it.  There are six CD's and the third one ended just as I returned home.  (Now I just have to think of some place else to drive to so I can finish listening to it.)  :)  I packed water and iced tea in a small cooler and grabbed my camera, sunscreen, a book to read (in case I wanted to sit somewhere and read) and a bag of quarters in case I needed them for parking meters.

I first started going to Napa in the mid-70's.  The Napa Valley is truly one of my favorite places on earth.  The whole wine tasting thing is lost on me since I don't drink.  (But, trust me, I've tasted plenty of wines in my time.)  ;)  I just enjoy the scenery--I think it's one of the most beautiful parts of our state.  I got a bit of a late start, so I didn't want to head all the way into the Valley.  A walk around downtown Napa sounded just right.

The city has done a beautiful job redeveloping the Napa River waterfront downtown.  I turned out not to need the quarters--there are several free public parking lots.  I had no plan other than to just take a stroll and shoot some pictures. 

There's a large "Riverfront" complex that's still under construction.  Just past that is the Napa River Inn complex where the old Napa Mill used to be.  I want to stay here some day.  :)  Lovely!  

I crossed the river on the First Street Bridge to walk to the Oxbow District (which I'd never been to and had read about in the guidebook).  When I spotted Taylor's Automatic Refresher, I knew I had to grab lunch there--I'm a sucker for those kinds of places.  I had a hamburger and an espresso bean milkshake.  It was good, but even though they don't offer coffee milkshakes, I can get basically the same meal (plus fries!) at In-N-Out for less than half the price.  :)  I will say this though:  they're very eco-friendly.  They appear to compost and recycle a lot of their products.

After lunch I walked next door to the Oxbow Public Market.  I didn't know that Copia had filed for bankruptcy.  (I'd never been inside.)  I walked back across the river and walked around a bit more of downtown.  Did you know that Napa is the birthplace of the loudspeaker and Magnavox Corp.?  Yeah, me neither.  I grabbed the car and drove through some of the old neighborhoods downtown.  There are some lovely B&B's.  Then I hit the road, listening to more of Franzen's memoir, hoping to beat the majority of the afternoon commute traffic heading back home on I-80.  All in all, it was a lovely way to spend five hours on a summer day.  The entire Flickr set is here.  (And, yes, it's heavy on the rooftops/old buildings thing...can't help myself.)  ;)