One year to the date, we sit in a restaurant, celebrating. Paying homage to the very day, exactly 365 prior to this one, when her mammogram revealed the cancer in her left breast. I’d brought balloons tonight, bearing messages appropriate to the occasion… CONGRATULATIONS! and WAY TO GO! We catch up over pints of Guinness, although there’s not much to catch up on, as we’d been together only a few weeks before.
Entries Tagged 'Randomness' ↓
Celebrating Light and Lightness
May 15th, 2013 — Randomness
Vodka is Good for My Brain
May 14th, 2013 — Randomness
I have long maintained that the level of my creativity is directly proportional to the number of cocktails I consume. Not that I intentionally drink to think (hey, that saying would make a great bumper sticker…), but my aptitude for solving a problem, my capacity for unleashing a keen idea, my wit in conjuring humorous rhetoric all dramatically increase with each libation I ingest. It’s amazing! I used to call this a superpower, but have recently learned that research confirms this as fact for many humans. And you sure can’t argue with science (unless, of course, they were drinking while having made this discovery…)
Saboteurs and Stuffing Waffles
January 8th, 2013 — Randomness
I had the telly tuned in to Guy Fierri’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives last night for some background noise while finishing up a deadline, when my ears caught hold of a recipe from a joint he was visiting called Funk-N-Waffles. I looked up to see the restaurant’s owner prepping a specialty of their house, a complete turkey dinner perched atop a ginormous waffle that’s made of stuffing. Yup. Everything that comprises holiday stuffing – breadcrumbs, celery, onion, eggs, savory – is blended and shoved into a waffle iron and, five minutes later, it’s the base for a massive feast of turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce that’s drowned in a ridiculous amount of gravy. No shit, I think I actually heard the sound of my own arteries hardening. But sinful and excessive as this spectacle was, I drooled the entire time I watched it.
Wearing My TO-BE List
December 29th, 2012 — Randomness
Umberto Eco once wrote, ‘we like to make lists because we don’t want to die.’ I don’t really know who Umberto Eco is, but I do believe he’s right. I love making lists. And like scores of other folks, I maintain several of them. A HOUSE list, a WORK list, a GARDEN list, a WRITING list… The process of creating a list fills me with purpose, and the act of crossing off each item delights me with a sense of accomplishment. I love hitting the pillow every night having seen proof of my achievements that day, and knowing what needs to be done when I awake. It makes me feel that I matter.
A Bad Route for Technology
November 27th, 2012 — Randomness
Last week, my husband did something so unthinkable, so mind-boggling, so utterly shocking and so unlike him that, initially, I wondered if it was one of those end-of-world signs like locusts and famines and dogs doing the naughty thing with cats: he purchased a GPS. (Insert scary da-duh-DUM! music here.)
Meg Ryan and the Aliens
November 25th, 2012 — Randomness
This past year when I turned 50, I started saving for a Lifestyle Lift. Not that I need one – not right now, at least… but somewhere down the road I just know I’ll want one. The first time I watched that infomercial, I was hooked. Those women look freaking fanTAStic! I’ll bet they have great AFTER stories, but since I always have my TV muted (I can’t tolerate the horrifying, paint-peeling, nails-across-a-chalkboard sound that is Debbie Boone singing You Light Up My Life), I’ve never heard them.
Thank You and Please
October 22nd, 2012 — Randomness
Last night, I dreamt an amazing dream. I was in a sparse, quiet room not unfamiliar to me, when someone I had never before met handed me two wooden boxes. Both simple in shape and bare of ornament, one was about the size of a clothes basket, while the other was no larger than a fingernail. In a gentle, kind voice, the stranger instructed me to fill the large box with a list of everything for which I was grateful. The small box was also to be filled, but with a list of all my prayers. His final instruction to me was to remain in the room until I’d completed this task. Then he left.
Not Getting It. At All.
September 29th, 2012 — Randomness
Not too long ago, Cottonelle offered a coupon for a decorative toilet paper holder inside specially marked packages of its (you guessed it) toilet paper. Now, I could completely derail this entire post before it even starts by ranting about how freaking absurd it is that toilet paper manufacturers choose to name their product clean care paper or personal wipes or even bathroom tissue and not what everyone else calls it: TOILET PAPER. But I won’t. Other than the previous sentence. And that one before it.
Better Off than Four Years Ago
September 24th, 2012 — Randomness
Every fourth Autumn, right about when the leaves turn rich shades of fall colors and there’s a delicious, crisp snap in the air that sends me running for my turtlenecks, a frenzied storm of presidential campaign ads, phone calls, speeches, emails and commentaries arrives that spews myriad promises, proclamations and propositions into that same air, making heads spin and stomachs turn. And inevitably lurking within the very eye of this storm is a simple question that’s posed and pondered time and again by pundits and pub goers alike, no matter the party or platform to which they pledge their allegiance:
“Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”
Using the Special Stuff
August 24th, 2012 — Randomness
Located along the far wall of a seldom used dining room, my mother-in-law’s china cabinet proudly displayed a vast assortment of serving pieces, glassware and a host of trinkets collected over a lifetime. When you stood at the entrance of the room – not venturing any further for fear of setting off a museum-like alarm that would loudly protest the intrusion – you could peer through the glass doors to make out countless items formally arranged in tidy rows, the smaller items positioned before a backdrop of standing plates. This perpetual exhibit was apparently intended only for display, since throughout the twenty years I knew Florence I never once saw any item in that cabinet – nor the room in which the cabinet was housed – ever used.
