Self is always happy when she can participate in Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge!
Rose Bowl Parade, 1 January 2019
Straw Angels, December 2018
Reading, December 2018
Stay tuned, dear blog reader. Stay tuned.
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: PAIRS
January 15, 2019 at 2:34 pm (Books, Flowers, Holidays, Links, Personal Bookshelf, television, Women Writers)
Tags: Cee Neuner, Christmas, exhibits, history, reading lists, Redwood City, Russian writers
On This Day, One Year Ago
December 23, 2018 at 4:08 pm (destinations, Filipino Writers, Holidays, Places, Sundays, Traveling)
Tags: nostalgia, Paris
Self happened to be in the City of Light. This is what she did.
Last Sunday in London
December 2, 2018 at 5:42 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, destinations, Family, Food and Drink, Holidays, Lists, Places, plans, Recommended, Sundays, Surprises, Traveling)
Tags: Christmas, complaints, exhibits, history, Holidays, indulgences, London, museums, shopping, travel books
Self is in her room, reading a copy of The Guardian.
The trial of the “man who drove his car into a crowd of activists who had been protesting against a white nationalist rally, leaving one woman dead and several injured,” has begun in Charlottesville, Virginia.
This morning, self returned to the Royal Academy of Art for a repeat viewing of the Oceania Exhibit.
Royal Academy of Art: Sunday, 2 December 2018
She liked it even more, the second time around. She stayed watching the video for nearly an hour.
The little handout that accompanies the exhibit starts with:
Two-hundred and fifty years ago, in August 1768, four months before George III founded the Royal Academy of Arts, Lieutenant (later Captain) James Cook left Plymouth in command of the HMS Endeavour.
She remembers reading a book by Tony Horwitz: Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before and, well, that book must have made quite an impression because it fixed Captain Cook’s voyage forever in her memory and now, 15 years later, here she is, in London, having seen the Oceania exhibit twice!
As she left the Royal Academy (still in a daze of cultural overload), she happened to notice that there was a store across the street called FORTNUM & MASON. And the display windows were so Christmas-y! She decided to check it out:
Fortnum & Mason: Sunday, 2 December 2018
Self entered through a revolving door and promptly found herself in the middle of a mob scene the like of which she has never experienced in London. What she means: people were grabbing blue boxes of chocolates off shelves directly in front of her, and pushing them into shopping carts. Yes, dear blog readers. English people were pushing shopping carts around a store, the contents consisting entirely of chocolate. There were boxes of dark chocolate, boxes of milk chocolate, boxes of assorted chocolate, boxes of chocolate with nuts, boxes of chocolate with creamy centers — you name it.
Self decided then and there that she would not leave the store without sampling some of this delightful chocolate. A shopgirl told her to take a number. She was # 19. She then asked the shopgirl what were the most popular chocolate purchases, and the girl replied, without any hesitation: TRUFFLES. Caramel Salt.
OMGGGGGGG
Chocolate Counter, Fortnum & Mason: Sunday, 2 December 2018
She wanted to buy a box of chocolates for son and daughter-in-law, but didn’t know what kind they liked: milk chocolate or not? And this is when self bitterly regretted that her Verizon phone does not work. Has not worked for two months. In fact, Verizon just e-mailed self that she would not be able to avail of their international services. Thank you, Verizon, FOR TELLING SELF WHAT SHE ALREADY KNOWS.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Dystopia In Progress
October 14, 2018 at 9:22 am (Artists and Writers, Filipino Writers, Food and Drink, Holidays, short story collections, Sundays, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, artists residency, Bluestem, dystopia, inspiration, Ireland, science fiction, short story, Tyrone Guthrie Centre
Self is going to try, while she’s at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, pulling all her science fiction together into one collection.
What to call it?
She’s toying with the idea of making this the first story:
THE FREEZE (published in Bluestem)
Redwood, Oak, Laurel, Manzanita, Pine
Redwood, Oak, Laurel, Manzanita, Pine
Redwood, Oak, Laurel, Manzanita, Pine
Thanksgiving was just a week ago. I served brined turkey with oatmeal rolls and my special fig-and-rice stuffing.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Things People Play With
October 13, 2018 at 2:36 pm (destinations, Holidays, Links, Traveling)
Tags: California, Cee Neuner, London, parades, Redwood City, Stanford
It’s been several weeks since self participated in Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge, so she’s more than happy to participate today.
The prompt is: THINGS PEOPLE PLAY WITH
- The London Eye seen from Waterloo Bridge, 7 October 2018:
- The Leland Stanford, Jr. University Marching Band in the Annual 4th of July Parade, Downtown Redwood City: The band’s known for its goofiness.
- The Stanford Tree Leading the Leland Stanford, Jr. University Marching Band in the Annual 4th of July Parade in Downtown Redwood City. The Tree is an enduring emblem:
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Vibrant Colors
September 19, 2018 at 3:38 pm (Flowers, Holidays)
Tags: Cee Neuner, Garden, nostalgia, Redwood City, summer
Colors. How self loves them.
To make it even better, Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge this week is VIBRANT Colors.
Here are a few pictures self took this past summer:
One of self’s earliest rose purchases was this Fourth of July.
From Redwood City’s Annual Fourth of July Parade:
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Geometry, Windows
July 10, 2018 at 6:52 pm (Holidays, Links)
Tags: Cee Neuner, Redwood City, summer
Every year, around the Fourth of July, we do our civic duty and put up a flag.
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge asks us to riff off this picture.
So here ya go: self’s living room picture window, six days after Fourth of July.
Picture Window: Tuesday, 10 July 2018
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Saturday, Weekend After Fourth of July 2018
July 7, 2018 at 3:25 pm (Holidays, television)
Tags: Events, FIFA, humor, Redwood City, Saturday, Twitter, weekends
The goalkeeper Pickford just made a grrreat save.
England up 2 – 0.
According to this theory self saw on Twitter (lol), England will win because it has seven letters in its name, and the game’s being played on the seventh.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Happy Fourth of July 2018 from Redwood City, California
July 4, 2018 at 11:51 pm (Holidays)
Tags: California, parades, Redwood City, Stanford
The parade is always fun. Afterwards, the Leland Stanford, Jr. University Marching Band and the UC Davis Marching Band hung around in Courthouse Square and gave a real show. Didn’t leave until the Stanford band played “All Right Now.”
Recommended Reading: The New Yorker, “Battle Scars,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells (4 December 2017)
May 28, 2018 at 8:12 pm (Holidays, Recommended)
Tags: essay, history, memorials, Mondays, politics, The New Yorker
Self hangs on to New Yorker issues she intends to re-read. Today, she’s re-reading Benjamin Wallace-Wells’ piece on Confederate monuments in Virginia.
This article is about crucial history:
- In 1890, the city of Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, installed a sixty-two-foot statue of Lee, the first of five statues that anchor Monument Avenue. When the statue to Lee was delivered, more than ten thousand citizens lined the streets to help pull it into place.
And also has this harrowing sentence:
- In June, 2015, Dylann Roof, a twenty-one-year-old who had immersed himself in white-supremacist ideology, joined a Bible-study group in the basement of Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina and, in the midst of the discussion, rose from his chair and massacred nine black congregants.
And this about General Lee:
- In 1866, a man named Wesley Norris had described Lee’s reaction to an attempted escape: “Not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine.”
And all this bitter history culminates in Charlottesville:
- The liberal faction that had coalesced at the hearings of the monuments commission had, in a sense, been proved right: it had said that the monuments were symbols of white supremacy, and now white supremacists were coming to town to defend them.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
