Maxwell for Starfoxy

Starfoxy, this is for you, this is why I find Nils so enchanting. Well, this is one reason. He reminds me of my precious Maxwell.

This is what Nils might look like next year!

Bill and Doug Miller

Bill always stays up late Saturday night to watch Doug Miller.

Last Saturday was the day after our sewer line had been clogged, though. He'd been up late working with the plumber to find the rock that had fallen into our line when the new neighbors accidentally hit it. There wasn't any sewage in our basement, but I'd been washing and the wash water really made a mess. That happened Friday.

Saturday we'd spent all day washing towels and cleaning up the mess from the day before, and we were both exhausted. I went to bed at 7:30 and told Bill not to watch Doug Miller just this once. His face was lined with fatigue, but he wanted to unwind in front of the TV for awhile.

I just collapsed. I woke up in the night and he hadn't come to bed yet. I looked at the clock and it said 3:15. 3:15! I figured he'd fallen asleep watching TV, but he was awake staring at the tube when I went in the front room.

"Bill! What are you doing? It's 3:15 in the morning! You are too old to stay up all night watching TV! What's on, James Bond?" (He will watch the same James Bond show over and over). He looked up at me with a confused look on his face.

I gestured toward the wall clock and said, "It's 3 in the morning, you big doofus! What are you thinking? This is crazy!"

He just said, "what?"

And I glanced out the front door. I could see daylight. Did the sun come up that early in the morning?

Then I looked back at the clock and focused. It was hard without my glasses, but I figured out it said 9:15. I had a twilight zone moment while I figured out what was going on, then I looked at Bill for a second and turned around and walked back to bed.

Well, it's hard to read those digital clocks sometimes.

That's all he said, "what?" I did all the other talking.

Fuzzy Red Bathrobe questions

Have you ever met a famous person?

Yes, I met Rulon Gardner last year on the plane to Salt Lake City. He was very sweet and shy.

I met Senator Kempthorne, oh, Governor Kempthorne, who is up for some government thing in the cabinet. He's good looking and quite nice.

What living famous person would you love to meet?

Hmmm. . . .he's not all that famous, but he's cute, that guy who plays Denny Doucet on Grey's Anatomy. Taylor, of course, but only if I could have him sing for an hour and pick the songs.

What is the greatest physical risk you have taken?

Honestly, having my tubal ligation reversed was the scariest thing I've ever done physically. Also the bravest, I was completely petrified. But I knew there was a Sarah out there.

What is the greates physical danger you've ever been in?

Well, when I was eleven, I was making fun of several boys from another poor family and they got mad and chased me. They meant to do me serious harm. I know what adrenaline can do because I've never run so fast in my life. I can't believe, looking back I was so mean.

Happy Memorial Day, everyone. Bill is going fishing and I am vegging.

Do I know how to pick 'em? Yes, I do!

Taylor was my man from the beginning. I only have one thing to say: What did Clay Aiken do to his hair?

Book Review: Cage of Stars vs. Mary & Martha & Me

Well, Mary and Martha wins hands down in terms of excellence in writing. But I'm not finished with it yet. This is the type of book I read slowly and meditate on and try to fix in my psyche. I'm not a Mary type or a Martha type, I'm a other type, the type that goes off and reads a book, I guess.

The book is well done, however, I think I read a good review on it from Wall Street Journal or something. What I remember about the review is that it mentioned, in passing, that the author was a Mormon. Well done, Camille Fronk Olsen. Not done yet, but still, well done.

Cage of Stars is yet another book from Jacqelyn Mitchard, who wrote The Deep End of the Ocean. I've read all her books--I call her a female John Grisham. She's an okay writer who comes up with interesting plots and mostly makes them work.

What's noteable about this book is that the main character is a devout Mormon girl. Ms. Mitchard thanked her Mormon friend for helping her with the book in her acknowledgements. She should have tempered her gratitude. I'm thinking her friend was one of those Mormons who doesn't know what she believes. The book is full of mistakes about our faith; for instance, she tells of a new father who "took me and the baby to the temple in Cedar City to seal Rafe to our family, for time and eternity. As a father and a priest, he had done the same for all of us."

I've criticized a lot of LDS fiction writers for somehow missing the boat in interpreting Mormonism, but now I'm thinking nobody can do it. Mitchard makes the same mistakes devout Mormon writers do when she addresses our faith, she makes it too clean, too wholesome, not real. Her book is interesting and works in some ways, but not when it tries to describe life as a Mormon.

I am completely intrigued with how others perceive us, so I always pick up these kinds of books. So far, I haven't found anybody who knows what they're talking about. I think Mormons are wonderful when we write non-fiction and describe our faith and actual events, but the fiction makes us look laundered, bland, without personality. This author tried to avoid that, but failed.

For all my criticism of LDS fiction, they do better than this woman with their efforts. Someday, I hope somebody will hit the mark. I wouldn't recommend buying this book, it was okay, but not anywhere near great writing or anything realistically about Mormonism.

A great moment in baseball

I got started watching baseball in 1984, when I was pregnant and threatening to miscarry and had to stay down for months. I watched the world series and came to love the St. Louis Cardinals and Ozzie Smith.

I can't remember if it was in 1984, 85 or 86, but one of those years the San Diego Padres went against, oh, who was it, the Dodgers? They didn't have a chance.

I think the series went five games. San Diego won only one game. Steve Garvey played every second of every game and I respected him tremendously for that.

But in one game, don't recall whether it was the one game they won, or one they lost, sticks out in my mind and I bet Kurt Bevocoua (sorry about the spelling, it's pronounced Bevawkwa) will never forget it, either.

He wasn't a famous player and not much was expected of him. But he hit a home run, to his shock and everyone else's as well. He was on top of the world as he rounded the bases.

Then. . .later, in the SAME game, he hit another home run. That was simply transcendent, however you spell it. I floated for a few minutes with him and I'm sure he didn't come down for the rest of the game.

I stopped watching baseball when they went on strike a few years after that. I had no patience with that. But I will always remember that game.

Hideki Matsui could use your faith

My dad is a great man, one of the most spiritual men that I know. He works in the Manhattan Temple every Friday night. It's the highlight of his week. Every time I talk to him, he tells me about something he did in the temple the past week.

He's also a huge sports fan. Some of my best memories are of watching sports with him. Every time I talk to him, we chat a bit about what's going on in the sports world.

He and my mom came for a visit this weekend. Predictably, my dad started talking about the temple and baseball soon after he arrived.

"Did you see what happened to Hideki Matsui?" Matsui is a Japanese baseball player who plays left field for the New York Yankees. He broke his wrist diving to catch a ball, and expected to miss most of the season. Dad likes him because he plays for the Yankees (my parents live in New York) and because he's Japanese.

"I was sitting in the temple on Friday, and I was thinking about what happened to Matsui. So I put his name on the prayer roll." Dad smiles apologetically as he says this. "He certainly can use some healing prayers right now."

Fuzzy red bathrobe

My wonderful neighbor, Cathy, gave me this book for my birthday one year. It's by Carol Lynn Pearson and her daughter. It has questions in that mother and daughter can answer and hopefully be closer. That's assuming you don't have a mother who is an oldest child and a daughter who is a spoiled youngest child. It did help me and Sarah for awhile.

But Bill and I used it for a family home evening once and it was really fun. So use these questions for your husband or neighbor or anybody you'd like to know better. I'm using it for you guys.

So, here's my Friday questions:

What is your favorite all time movie comedy?

If you were required to spend an entire day doing nothing but "having fun" what would that day look like?

At what inappropriate place have you ever dissolved in laughter?

If you could vacation anywhere in the world, where would it be?

What game do you remember playing as a child?



My answers:

Tootsie, hands down. I thought Dustin Hoffman should win the academy award and have never forgiven Ben Kingsley. It would be easy to play Ghandi. I could play Ghandi! If I lost 50 lbs., I could look patient and long suffering.

Today is that day. Bill is gone fishing till tomorrow. I will read and lay around and watch TV and BLOG! I am so far behind, I haven't read Times and Seasons in days. Plus I bought 2--TWO pounds of crab yesterday. Eat your hearts out.

My sisters and I burst into uncontrollable giggles during the trial where the state took us away from our mother and the judge got mad, but we didn't care. My sister, Dessie's laugh should have a vaccination against it, its' so catching.

I would love to go to New Zealand. But assuming money is no object, I want to go to Sedona Arizona for that girl's weekend, with the massage and psychic reading and the limo. I'm going, too.

Me and my sister, Chris, and my best friend, Jennabelle played cowboys. But we would fight because they wanted to be horses and I wanted to be the cowboy riding the horse, it was more fun. There was a type of gallop I particularly enjoyed doing. But I didn't like to pretend to be an animal. So I would get mad and go home and they would go off and be horses in the hills of Tonopah.

Tim spits in his coke

My sister, Chris, is my very best friend and my hero. She knows everything about me and I can be totally myself with her. She is one of the people I respect most in life. She graduated from college a few years ago and has held her family together despite monumental problems. Her energy level is tremendous.

She's raising her grandson, now age seven, and does all the young mother things with him. She goes to his ball games, drives him to swimming, takes him hiking, and supports him in scouting and school. He is happy and secure in her home.

Chris and I are very germ phobic. We do not eat from anybody else's plate and if somebody wants a bite from our brownie, we just give it to them. Nobody drinks from our coke and we don't take drinks from anybody' else's. We could crawl across the Sahara and die because we didn't want to drink from a well somebody else had drunk from.

She bought Timothy a coke, then they drove over to her daughter-in-law's home. She got thirsty and ordered Tim, "Tim, give grandma a drink before you take a drink. Take off the lid and I'll drink from the cup and you can drink from the straw, okay?"

Tim's not too worried about germs, but he didn't want to share. He took the lid off and spit into his coke. "AAAh!" Chris gasped. Everyone else in the room stared in horror at Tim. He stared back defiantly.

Chris burst out laughing and Tim got a lecture from his aunt. Guess Chris will buy herself a coke, too, next time. Tim is so my relative.

Book Review: James Frey, Teri Hatcher, and other authors I have loved

I've always thought Teri Hatcher seemed like a nice person. I love her smile. I picked up her book in Wal-Mart and couldn't put it down, so I bought it. Now I'm going to study it every night along with my Book of Mormon and Old Testament and mark it up with a red pencil. It's a good book.

There are parts that seem embarrassingly revealing, her choices are not ones I would always make, but it's a warm and kind and fun book. Also extremely wise. She's a smart woman.

Here are a few things she says--to pique your interest:

(speaking of a cake baking debacle) "The thing is, sometimes you just have to wait. There isn't anything you can do to accomplish something faster than it actually can be done. For me, embracing that fact has been a hard-won battle, but ultimately a freeing recognition."

"All mothers exceed their limits. Sometimes I think divorced moms have more guilt and fear of failure, but even a married mom tends to give herself away to her kids and her husband and to put herself last. When you push too far, there are real consequences. . .You need to find a way to preserve yourself. You have to take care of yourself at the same time you take care of others. . .If you don't, you'll always be eating the burnt toast." (her book is based on the premise that moms always eat the burnt pieces of toast, STOP IT!)

I haven't finished it yet, maybe I'll share more later.

Here are a few other quotes that caught my eye at one time or another:

"How on earth do you love someone without either smothering them or constantly letting them down?" This is a quote from Oprah's magazine, from a book review of It Hit Me Like a Ton of Bricks: A Memoir of Mother and Daughter, by Catherine Lloyd Burns.

Despite the fact that Martha Beck works for Oprah, and Oprah bothers me endlessly these days with her pontificating, I enjoy her magazine and have saved several which are chalk full of wisdom.

Elizabeth Berg's Pull of the Moon is a treasure trove of insights and gentle humor. In it, her main character goes on a road trip by herself and meets a lot of people. One is an old woman that she visits with as they rock on her front porch: "So, what's it like, being eighty-six?"

"She laughed, then rocked her feet for a minute, thinking. I watched her feet, she was wearing blue keds and the think white socks that little girls wear. Finally, she said, 'Well, it's painfu, your joints hollering about something all the time. . .'" and later in the same conversation, the old woman says, ". . .but the meat of the thing was this: you accept change in your life or you might as well be dead."

I loved James Frey's book "A Million Little Pieces." I'm not bothered in the least by all the hoopla about whether he was in jail for three months or three days. The book stands alone, whether it's truth or fiction. I wouldn't recommend it to just anybody, it's gut wrenching and painful, the introspection is on a level I haven't found very often and speaks to my own personal Gethsemanes. He quotes a lot from the Tao: "Knowing other people is intelligence, knowing yourself is wisdom. Mastering other people is strength, mastering yourself is power."

Frey rejects God, the Higher Power of AA, and the 12 steps. I don't agree with him, but I applaud his courage in taking this politically incorrect stance. His descriptions of his inner battles, the things that people deal with while trying to get clear of meth, I don't think he could have made those up. (I found his descriptions helpful in realizing that my stepdaughter was dealing a meth addiction, he was right on there).

Cheiko Okazaki is one of my heroes. I have all her books and I love her kindness, her patience, her gentleness with herself and the rest of the world. In her book "Being Enough" she says, "He loves who are. He loves you unconditionally. He loves the whole you, all of you, not just the good parts or the disciplined parts or the parts that serve. He loves your history, even if your past has been sorrowful and painful, not jus tthe present of service and the future of righteousness that we all long for. He is with you. He wants you to feel Him with you, to trust Him enough to acknowledge His presence , not just in your moments of strength or joy or private meditation but also in your hours of pain or selfishness and times of despair and sel-loathing."

When I was a little girl, and living a life of extreme poverty and degradation, I watched my mother read. I had learned the alphabet and had the extreme good fortune of being taught to read phonetically. So, as a seven year old, who'd already been to four different schools, I picked up one of my mother's True Story magazines (does anybody remember those). I sounded out each word and by the end of that year, was reading at an adult level. Reading saved my life in so many ways and provided an escape from the life my mother chose.

Everywhere we moved, I would wander, barefoot and ragged, till I found the library. The librarians were always wonderful, I always returned my books. My life has been a love affair with the thoughts, words, and stories of others. I honor them, the mediocre (Danielle Steele was all I could read after my son's suicide), the depressing (Thomas Hardy), the outrageous (James Frey :)), the eloquent and soul elevating (Wilfried) and will be grateful until the day I die that my mother had that trash laying around.

Mama

The top picture is my mother when she lived in Casper, Wyoming. Annie, my baby sister, took her there when Mom decided to get sober, oh, back in 1985? Annie has always been closest to Mom, she was Mom's special baby, although Mom didn't care for her any better than she did anyone else.

When we were put into foster care, Annie was only 10 and she lost her bearings to a large degree. The people were abusive (I still intend to find them and kill their cat slowly and leave its dead body and a tape of the torture on their doorstep with a note telling them they are next so they can live the rest of their lives in fear) and poor little Annie just flailed. We stayed close, though, although we're not speaking at the moment.

She took good care of Mom, though. Mom drove her nearly crazy with her antics and constant demands for attention and people would call Annie telling her that they'd very nearly ran over her mother when she walked in front of her car. Annie's the one who got called when Mom got 86'd from the hospital for being a nuisance, she thought she had every right to go into the baby nursery and the pharmacy.

Annie helped Mom get all set up in Casper and she had a nice apartment, but she spent most of her days wandering the streets. The people of Casper and Annie's friends and family all watched out for this crazy little old lady and mostly Annie laughed at her antics. She didn't get into garbage cans or stuff like that, but she did do some crazy things. Annie tried to put her in a care center once, realizing Mom was totally losing it, but some lawyer got her out and she went on another few years until she was broken and near death and Annie called me and I flew up and we put her in a home. It was harder on Annie than on me. She stayed there for a year until they threw her out because she was beating people up.

She's 4'9" 90 lbs., but she's an onery gut when life isn't going properly for her. Bill and I flew her down here and put her in the rest home in Parowan, where her grandmother had lived until her death.

Mom's happy there, they let her come and go, she wanders and visits everyone. She's sweet and loves everyone. I had her ears pierced and bought her a pearl (not real) necklace to wear and make her wear cute clothes. I do her makeup and paint her nails hot pink. Sometimes she knows who I am, sometimes not.

When we were little girls, we called her Mama. Usually when I was crying as she left me yet again with somebody, whoever it was that time. She couldn't cook to save her life, she didn't have any maternal skills, but she's all I have to work with, so it's all good.

I am like her mother now, I roll up her boob and stick it in the bra. Sometimes if falls back out, I roll it up again. I guess that's what the nurses do when I'm not there, which is most of the time.

This isn't big tribute to motherhood. It's just a small exploration of my weird mother. I'm grateful for this quiet time when I can care for her in a small way and accept the love she has to give, with no resentment. Nothing profound. Just life.

Hometown

I don't really have a home town. I will say Elko, Nevada, sometimes Tonopah, Nevada. I loved Elko, and was sometimes happy in Tonopah.

But we moved constantly due to my parent's alcoholic, low life ways (think run out of town on a rail), so there is no place where I "grew up."

Ely, Nevada, though, figures prominently in my life. I believe there is a sort of fate involved in all our lives, in the people we meet and the places we go, the things we do.

I was born in Ely, my parents were living on a ranch about 150 miles south of there. I never lived there, never even visited there until October 1970, when I married my first husband. I met him in Elko, fell in love, and we got drunk and were married in his mother's front room, by a kindly old Episcopal priest, with his nieces and nephews running in and out playing tag.

I gave birth to my two oldest children there, lived there until the death of my husband and son in August 1973. I immediately moved away.

Nine years later, I met another man from Ely, this time in Cedar City. We've been married for going on 25 years now.

Two of my husbands (there were three, but number 2 really doesn't count) were born in the same hospital as I was, delivered by the same doctor, in the same small Nevada town. Both men were born and raised there and graduated from the same high school. I moved all over the country and ran into them in separate towns.

That strikes me as strange.

Another coincidental relationship in my life is that of my first best friend. Jennabelle. I am the only person to still call her that, her mom used to, but she passed away. We were best friends in grade school, I wrote to her as we moved. We always kept in touch. When I was a young widow, I went to visit her. We had the exact same towels!

These weren't ordinary towels, either, they were patterned. Not a huge deal, but it was striking to me.

Many years later, she moved to Seattle and went to nursing school, made a life. And my son went to a submarine base outside of Seattle, where he died. Jennabelle and I had never lost touch, but it was almost eerie that she was right there. I leaned on her as I traveled back and forth, navigating the mysteries and heartache of that time of my life.

We're still in touch, not best friends, but we keep in touch. Who knows what life has in store for us?



My Friday quiz questions are:

Where were you born?

Did you grow up there?

What are your memories of that place?

Who was your first best friend?

Are you still friends?


This weekend I'm going to slog over and get my mother for the day on Mother's Day--I asked my family to leave me alone for the day. Maybe I won't go get Mom, maybe I'll have my kids go visit her as their gift to me. Hmmmm.......sounds tempting. I will forego the cheesy talks and dying pansies in aluminum foil and watch Brokeback Mountain while Bill goes to church.

Stanley the Younger

Annegb added me in so I could do a little site maintenance, and suggested I post something.

We've been discouraged by how our family scripture study has been going, so we decided to pick some familiar stories and talk about them. I chose the conversion of Alma the Younger. I explained to the kids that Alma and the sons of Mosiah went around trying to destroy the church.

Me: Do you think Alma and the sons of Mosiah were being good?
Jaymie (8) and Julia (5): No.
Me: What were they doing?
Jaymie: Trying to destroy the church.
Me: Julia, is that good?
Julia: No.
Stanley (3) (in a matter of fact tone): I want to destroy the church.
Me: You want to destroy the church?
Stanley: I want to destroy the church. I hate the gospel.
Kristen: Don't you like primary?
Stanley: No, I hate primary. I want to destroy the church.
Me: Are you sure?
Stanley: No, I love the church.

Yeah, I like annegb's posts better too.

Bill's advice to young people

Bill and I were driving home from the store the other day, the very epitome of middle age, in our big club cab pickup. He's driving, I'm sitting there thinking. I said, "you're a smart old guy, do you have any advice I could put on my blog?"

His reply, "Learn to love life, respect old women, and join the church."

I just stared at him for a minute, sighed, and said, "No, I mean real advice. Advice they can use. Practical advice, like don't smart off to your waiter. Never be rude to anybody who has anything to do with food you might eat. Like that."

He thought for awhile, and said, "Plant a garden."

Me: "Bill! Real advice, not stuff they already know. Stuff that will help them."

So he thought longer, we're now driving past the fields before we get home, and then he said, "Always pull the radiator cap and stick your finger in it before you buy a car. There shouldn't be any gunk on your finger. Then warm the car up drive it and then stop and check the transmission fluid. It shouldn't smell burnt. Also put your finger in the exhaust pipe, it shouldn't come out black."

He's a car salesman and he appraises a lot of cars. Now that's advice. Also, never buy a new car, buy used. A low mileage car is a better bargain than a new one. Smart rich people never buy new cars.

And I've said this before, but you should put some cigarettes in your food storage and 72 hour kits. The cheap ones, without the filters. They will be worth a lot if you get stuck in the Superdome.

Bill doesn't feel good about that, but he will, trust me.

You're cuter than you think you are

I'm trying again to post this. The snarker re-sized it for me and hopefully things will go well.

I love this picture of me now. The long silky tendrils, the right smile, not too phony. I am young and pretty.

But. When I was that age, I thought I was fat and ugly. I would look in the mirror at that girl and think, "ugh, that is just sad."

I could feel the rolls of flab and fat. I could see every imperfection on my face. I totally took my legs for granted.

I can look back five years and see how cute I was, compared to now.

So what I've been doing and suggest every woman do, is don't look back, look ahead. Pretend you're an old woman looking at the young you and realize how pretty you really are, right now.

My thanks to the snarker, who is neither Kaimi nor DKL (I know because I asked and they said no, they are not), and who very nicely helped me fix this picture to fit.

I love Taylor Hicks

Well, I taped American Idol Tuesday and watched it yesterday and when Taylor got up and started singing "Play That Funky Music" I got up and shut the front door so no one could see me (the neighbors were out in their yards) and got down. I've decided to save it and use it for exercise which everyone is telling me to do and gag a maggot, I hate exercise. But I love to dance.

Then he sang "Something in the way she moves" which I don't think is the title and I just melted. Bill walked in and I said, "honey, if that guy ever comes to get me, I will have to follow him."

I don't think Taylor will win, but he's won my heart.

*************************************

Different subject, but not. Do you guys iron any more? I iron. I enjoy it. My grandma used to take in ironing, usually white shirts for the casino workers in Tonopah. I would help her, we would shake water on them (I'm thinking it was a coke bottle with a baby bottle nipple on it) and roll them up and place them in a basket.

Then take out the damp shirts and iron them. My grandma and my mom were good ironers and they taught me. I iron sitting on a stool (now that I'm old) watching TV that I taped the day before. I love the smell of the steam that rises from the shirts. Mostly shirts, they're Bill's. He has to look nice for his job.

Such a good feeling.

*************************************

Donna Bouchet has a wonderful, serene, gentle blog, called The Quiet Life. Every Friday she puts a "meme" out. I'm not sure what that is, but I'm going to to do it.

I want to know about my friends and I thought this was fun to do on Donna's. I look forward to Fridays.

What is your favorite song?

Why?

Do you have a sense of rhythm?

Is there any household chore that brings you joy?

What was the last thing that you watched on TV? Did you enjoy it?

I'm never quite sure if I'm supposed to answer these when I've seen them on other blogs, but I want you readers to answer. Like I said, I think it's fun to hear about other peoples' lives.

Have a good weekend! I'm going to spend mine taking hot baths with my new VERY EXPENSIVE rose soap and continuing my eating. Yup, still eating away :).

Christopher Columbus was an illegal alien

I think Americans of today are hypocritical. Not individually, not you and me, say, but as a country, we are becoming pretty preachy. Also cowardly. For instance, we invaded Iraq on the possibility of weapons of mass destruction.

We have weapons of mass destruction. Are we the only ones allowed? We're the only ones who've ever used them (an act I approve, but nevertheless). Hence the hypocrisy.
Korea and China and Russia and Israel and France have weapons of mass destruction. Korea's leader is a fruitcake who might use them any day. I don't see us invading any of those guys. Hence, the cowardice. North Korea and China would kick our butts were we to invade them.

I see the same type of hypocrisy in the illegal alien thing. I don't understand the legalities, I don't understand why these people don't get visas and come here legally and work. I don't understand what's the holdup with that. I'm thinking that "Greek-to-me" guest worker debate has something to do with possible solutions.

But who died and made us God?

Like I said, I don't understand much of the problem or argument surrounding the issue, but I don't have the problem many people do with illegals. We have a lot working here on farms and they're good people. They shop at Wal-Mart and pay taxes. Their kids go to school, I guess some could construe that as leaching, but I see it as progress. Any education anywhere makes my world better.

If we really want to get honest, we'd better turn all our land back to the Native Americans and line up outside their state department begging for green cards, visas, and work permits. There is an air of racism in the protests that really bothers me.

I suppose if I lived in California, or Arizona, I might feel invaded. But California has lots more problems than that. I hope the strike Monday struck fear into Californians. I'm on the side of the illegals in this one.

Good food and good sex

I gained ten pounds on my cruise to Mexico with my daughter. I tried all kinds of new food, like snails (not bad), caramel flan, (to die for), and I can't remember what else. I didn't have one pound to play with, so I'm not fitting into any of my clothes, except a mu-mu sort of thing I bought in Ensenada. I have rolls of fat. Well, big ones now. They were medium size before.

In that distant past that was the first of March.

I'm a strange eater, I get on food kicks like a little kid. I will eat sliced tomatoes, with salt & pepper 24/7. In December, even, when tomatoes are pretty awful. Then I'll switch to butterfinger candy bars. I can go days without eating at all, to speak of. And suddenly be starving.

Which is sad for Bill, because when I don't feel like eating, I don't feel like cooking and he loves to eat. My cooking is awful at those times, we eat a lot of frozen pizza.

But lately, food looks good to me. The past week, especially, I've been eating myself out of house and home. Fat sandwiches with sliced ham, swiss cheese, lettuce, tomato, red onion and avocado, crackers and brie (which I don't know how to prepare, really), vanilla ice cream with caramel sauce and lots of nuts. I'm an eating fool.

So I thought I'd share this new recipe that I tried yesterday, it was quite wonderful really.

3 boneless skinless chicken breasts (not the whole breasts, the halves)
Beaten egg
Italian bread crumbs
Ragu pasta sauce (or any brand, really, I think)
Shredded mozzarella cheese, however much you like

I cut up the chicken pieces into about 3" x 3" squares, dipped them in the egg, then the Italian bread crumbs and placed them in a dish. I baked them at 350 degrees for an hour, but I think that was too long. I'd say no more than 40 minutes, but you can judge for yourself.

Then I took the pan out and poured the sauce over the chicken and sprinkled the cheese on top and cooked it for about 10 minutes longer.

I took small red potatoes and cut them in half and put them in a dish. I sprinkled them with parsley and onion powder and a little salt and cut up chunks of margarine. Then I covered them and baked them with the chicken.

And cooked some perfect asparagus.

You guys, great meal. Unless you're a vegetarian or on a diet, which I will be shortly.

The sex, you figure out that recipe yourself.