- Bamboo shoots – labong
- Banana – saging
- Bottle gourd – upo
- Cabbage – repolyo
- Calamansi – calamansi
- Cashew nuts – Kasuy
- Cauliflower – koliflor
- Chickpeas – garbansos
- Chico – chico
- Chinese cabbage – pechay Baguio
- “Chinese” peas – chicharo (one of self’s faaaavorite vegetables, growing up in Manila)
- Coconut – niyog
- Corn – mais
- Cucumber – pipino
- Custard apple – atis
- Eggplant – talong
- Fern leaves – pako
- Ginger – luya
- Green snap beans – habichuelas
- Guava – bayabas
- Lanzones – lansones
- Lima bean – patani
- Long cow pea – sitaw
- Mango – mango
- Mangosteen – mangostan
- Melon – melon
- Mung bean – mongo
- Mustard – mustasa
- Papaya – papaya
- Peanut – mani
- Pineapple – piña
- Pomelo – suha
- Potato – patatas
- Santol – santol
- Squash – kalabasa
- Strawberry – stroberi (lol)
- Swamp cabbage – kangkong
- Sweet peppers – sili
- Sweet potato – kamote
- Taro – gabi
- Tomato – kamatis
- Turmeric – luyang dilaw
- Watermelon – pakwan (Dear Departed Sister loved chewing pakwan seeds)
- Yam – ubi (Ubi ice cream is the best!)
Month: May 2020
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There were a few Galvin children who did not develop schizophrenia, Michael being one of them. When his mother was in her 80s, he agreed to assume some of the responsibility for her day-to-day care.
Hidden Valley Road, p. 288:
He soon learned that however frail she might have been, Mimi was still in charge. He would offer her Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner, knowing how much she loved it, and she would refuse, saying she’d had it the night before. He’d make spaghetti instead, and she’d say there was too much of it.
“It got a little confounding,” Michael said. “I almost dumped it on her head.”
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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Let’s nose around in our archives or sniff out new photos that are related to the sense of Smelling. Be creative and have fun.
Self found this Foto Challenge more than usually, er, challenging. She’s trying to keep her mind off food — for the first six weeks of the shelter-in-place, that was all she thought about, with disastrous consequences. And her roses don’t give off scent — mebbe it’s the type of soil? Even her Sheila’s Perfume rose has no perfume!
Anyhoo, after some determined hunting, she managed to come up with three photos:
- Fried chorizo for breakfast in the island of Negros, central Philippines:
- A fresh-cut Christmas tree makes all the difference. Self got hers from Wegman’s, a local nursery:
- Just before shelter-in-place, self had her front door and front porch painted. The smell of fresh paint is the memory of singular happiness:
Stay safe, dear blog readers.
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Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family is an extraordinary book. And she didn’t even pick it up because it was an Oprah Book Club selection. She was just working off a list. In between tearing through science fiction, she decided to read nonfiction.
She’s on Chapter 20, in which Margaret, the older Galvin girl, is whisked off, at just shy of 14, to live with a family she barely knows, a family of enormous wealth, who started off on the same economic plane as the Galvins but found luck, such enormous luck.
Sam Gary was “a natural risk-taker. For years, he had been known around Denver as Dry Hole Sam … In the mid-1960s, when everyone in the oil exploration business was drilling in Wyoming, Sam started drilling just north of the state line in the southeastern corner of Montana. Sam drilled thirty-five dry holes.” — p. 158
- On June 29, 1967, one of the new wells — Sam’s thirty-sixth try — struck oil in Bell Creek Field in Montana. Sam set up four-hundred new wells, hanging on to 30 percent ownership.
Sam Gary was “about the same age as” Margaret’s father. By the time Margaret moves in with the Garys, they have a house in Denver with a housekeeper, a cook, and various other servants. They own a condo in the main drag of Vail and spend every weekend on their hundred-acre ranch in Montana, just up against Flathead Lake.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Read more books.
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As her sons start to come apart (inexorably, with no let-up), the father, who internalizes everything, and never talks about the disintegration of the family, suffers a stroke and is hospitalized for six months. At this time, the mother has her youngest son, Peter, committed. He was in hockey camp and started to act out. He was sent to Brady Hospital, “a private psychiatric hospital in Colorado Springs.” (How long, self wonders, did it take for Robert Kolker to collect these masses of material? Because the research is incredible, the kind of thing that she can easily see someone spending 20 years compiling.)
- In early September, Mimi finally visited and saw Peter wearing only underpants, strapped to a bed with no sheets on it. The whole room reeked of urine …
The mother pulled him out immediately (During all this travail, her husband was still in the hospital: he was “paralyzed on the right side of his body”). She puts Peter in the University of Colorado Hospital in Denver. Doctor’s note: when patient became “more provocative” (whatever that means), his “family thought that was his normal level of functioning.”
p. 134: When boy # 6, Joe, visits boy # 10, Peter, he was “able to tell the patient’s therapist that at times in the past he has had symptomatology similar to Peter’s.”
At this point, five boys have shown signs of personality disturbance. Self knows from the reviews that there’s one more boy who gets diagnosed schizophrenic. Which one? This shell game is agonizing for self, imagine the feelings of the parents (well, the feelings of the mother, because the father was pretty much out of it after his stroke).
So, drugs. There were a lot of drugs around. Four boys “into LSD” and one “into black beauties and other uppers.” The youngest child “smoked pot at age five.” The mother was deeply, observantly Catholic. She cared. Nevertheless, this is what happened to her. And on p. 135, a panel of doctors sat down and told Mimi that in their findings, she was the cause of her son’s disintegration. (Maybe she was, who knows. The jury’s still out. But she was cut off from her own parents, and her grandparents, though concerned, felt helpless)
Stay safe, dear blog readers.
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Kolker’s a very good writer. He has to be, to get the reader through this story. Self has been reading with a sense of growing horror.
Peter, the tenth son, was born on November 15, 1960. This time, Mimi had a long stay in the hospital afterward with a severe prolapse, along with a blood clot in her left leg. Now there were fewer jokes about how Mimi ought to wear garlic to bed to fend off her husband at night. Her doctor gravely told her that her childbearing years were behind her. Fifteen years of more or less continuous pregnancy, labor, and delivery would seem to be enough for anyone. But Mimi did not seem interested in listening, even when others pleaded with her.
“Really, dear, you should give poor ‘Major Galvin’ a turn at the hospital,” Mimi’s paternal grandfather, Lindsey Blayney, wrote to her. “But, seriously, I am concerned about you.”
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In 1961, mere months after giving birth to Peter, Mimi became pregnant for the eleventh time.
Seriously, she was hospitalized for a long time, and almost the first thing she does after getting home is get pregnant again? So they were Catholic, didn’t believe in birth control etc., but — seriously? Apart from the health problems, who was going to be financially responsible for all these children?
When Mimi’s grandfather received a Christmas card from Mimi showing her 10 children arrayed along a winding staircase, she and her husband at the head, she carrying her eleventh, he said he found the photo “startling.” I’d say!
What is wrong with the husband also? It’s not just his wife’s responsibility!
Stay safe, dear blog readers. And read more books.
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Chapter II: Discovery and Early Colonization (1565 – 1600)
Captain Martin de Goiti and one-hundred Spanish soldiers arrived in Negros because they had been told by other natives that “rice abounded” on the island:
However, they found the towns deserted and with hardly any provisions since the natives had fled to the hills … They stayed in Tanjay, meaning to make friends …
They found another abandoned town … the Spanish went there and found the natives ready to fight. A skirmish occurred and a native was killed and another captured while three Spaniards were wounded. The inhabitants took advantage of the fight to cross a river and escape. In the meantime, the Spaniards would not cross the river.
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Though Caliban’s War opens slow, and there is some angst-y stuff that feels like filler, when the action moves to Jim Holden and his rag-tag crew, the narrative gets thrilling. The big battle comes, and self ends up marveling at the authors’ ability to put us right there.
Avasarala and Bobbie Draper are such interesting characters, and the absence of Miller is a good thing because otherwise he’d just be going on endlessly about Julie Mao. One book with a lovesick detective is okay, two would have driven self permanently away from the series.
p. 528:
- Avasarala opened her eyes again. She tried to feel something besides great, oceanic sorrow. There had to be hope in there somwhere. Even Pandora got that much.
Though Caliban’s War doesn’t have the Grade A pacing of Leviathan’s Wake, its characters are so deeply human and flawed and vulnerable that you can’t help rooting for them. Also, there is an organism.
Stay safe and read more books.
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The Prize was announced by the L. A. Times on April 17.
Read about other prizes in the full article here.
What the judges had to say about Emily Bernard’s book:
- In 12 connected essays, Bernard captured her experience with race in Black Is the Body: Stories From My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time and Mine. The panel of judges that awarded Bernard the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose said: “With deceptively simple and luminous prose, Emily Bernard invites us to inhabit her life as she poses perilous questions seemingly as simple as ‘when is a doll just a doll,’ and pushes ever deeper refusing easy solutions. This is a beautiful, important collection of essays.”
Kudos to this beautiful writer, as well as to the other nominees and winners, including the great Walter Mosley, winner of the Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement. Mosley, who now resides in New York City, is the “author of more than 43 books.” He is best known “for his mystery series featuring detective Easy Rawlins, a private detective in south-central Los Angeles.”
Stay safe, dear blog readers. And buy books.
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- The topic for this week’s CFFC is Sense of Tasting. This is all about things you can taste, be it sweet, sour, bitter, comforting, fulfilling, addictions, etc. If you can drink or eat it, you can usually taste it. — Cee Neuner’s Fun Foto Challenge
These days, self has been searching for comfort food. But, first: NOSTALGIC MEMORIES of her last picnic at Cal Shakes, Orinda:
Picnic Before Macbeth, Cal Shakes, Orinda, October 2019
Second, comfort food during a pandemic: Maggi on Roasted Chicken is the best! And her favorite cookies from childhood, available at Pacific Market in South San Francisco:
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Kanlaon 