Thanks to Journeys with Jonbo for hosting the Cellpic Sunday challenge.
A few days ago, self met a friend for lunch at Mademoiselle Colette, a local patisserie. They offer salads and soup of the day, plus croissants and brioches. Not to mention the most delicious cakes!
Love the little Christmas trees. She just had to take a picture.
Joining Travel with Intent’s Six-Word Saturday today. Always such fun to come up with six-word titles.
Self was in Dublin for the start of holiday festivities. The Shelbourne Hotel, across from St. Stephen’s Green, had a fantastic tree!
Self arrived in Dublin yesterday. Just in time for the last day of Walking Squares!
Heartfelt thanks to Life of B for hosting and sharing the Squares Challenge, which made November 2022 so much fun.
Here’s a shot of the Grand Staircase at the venerable Shelbourne, 27 St. Stephen’s Green, hotel of kings and queens and John F. Kennedy (his visage is everywhere) and Charlie Chaplin and Bono.
Self took this picture last night, near Grafton Street, Dublin.
Christmas decorations are up in Dublin — so festive and pretty!
Thanks to Clare’s Cosmos for hosting the Share Your Desktop Challenge.
If anyone anywhere ever forgets the title of this story in the John Weir collection Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me, it is “Katherine Mansfield”:
“And your Mom ingeniously seated me next to your twelve-year-old cousin, who’s blonde and sulky as the kid in Death in Venice.”
— “”katherine mansfield”, story # 6 in Your nostalgia is killing me
Phil, who has a girlfriend, brings the narrator, who has a boyfriend, back to his family’s for Christmas Day (Is it weird that self has not spent Christmas with anyone, not even when son was living in the Bay Area, not since maybe 2014? She can’t even remember what she did last year. Most every year, she manages to be abroad on Thanksgiving and/or Christmas. So probably that’s what she should keep doing, for her sanity). Anyhoo, this part of the story is very funny:
Let me just tell ya, passages like the above had self rolling on the floor.
Stay tuned.
Memories! Self spent last Christmas in Mendocino Hotel. What a special time. There was weather — storms and the like. It rained on Christmas Eve, but there were carolers, and the bookshop pictured here (only a few steps from the hotel) is one of her favorite bookshops in the entire world.
Posting for Monday Windows.
Ha! Self found where the prompts were going. She has now rescued her #bloganuary (She missed yesterday; wonder where THAT prompt went)
She will henceforth make a sincere attempt to post daily through January.
Self spent Christmas in Mendocino. This is actually not that much of a stretch (though driving around up there, during a storm, is a flat-out EXPERIENCE). She turned down invitations to be with people, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day (scared of omicron), then the day after Christmas, drove back to the Bay Area, found a walk-up testing site close to her, and the very next day lined up, in bitter cold, for three hours. Now, THAT WAS A STRETCH. She can’t remember ever lining up for that long a time, in winter cold (not even for TKTS, that year she lived in New York.)
The tests ran out, but not until mid-afternoon. By then, there were only about five people ahead of her in line. Then she had two days of anxiety, waiting for the test results. And they came back NEGATIVE.
Hooray!
So, the storm, the lining up for three hours in the cold for the test, all took her out of her comfort zone. But she was happy with the results.
11 p.m., by the light of an oil lamp in the basement, my notebook on my knees. Around 10 p.m. there was a series of three or four bombs. The air raid siren started screaming. Apparently it has to be worked manually now. No light. Running downstairs in the dark, the way we’ve been doing ever since Tuesday. We slip and stumble. Somewhere a small, hand-operated dynamo is whirring away; it casts giant shadows on the walls of the stairwell. Wind is blowing through the broken panes, rattling the blackout blinds. No one pulls them down anymore — what’s the point?
A Woman in Berlin, p. 6
Self wonders who the translator is? Because this reads very smoothly, I almost forget it was originally written in German.
The translator’s name is Philip Boehm.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
How the narrator reacts to food:
The gas is running on a tiny, dying flicker. The potatoes have been cooking for hours. The most miserable potatoes in the country, good only for distilling into liquor, they turn to mush and taste like cardboard. I swallowed one half-raw. I’ve been stuffing myself since early this morning. Went to Bolle’s to use up the pale-blue milk coupons Gerd sent me for Christmas. Not a moment too soon — I got the last drops. The saleswoman had to tilt the can; she said there’d be no more milk coming into Berlin. That means children are going to die.
I drank a little of the milk right there on the street. Then, back at home, I wolfed down some porridge and chased it with a crust of bread.
A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, pp. 3 – 4
Kanlaon 