Day After Thanksgiving 2008

Self’s been on her computer since 6:30 a.m. Today, she googled the author of one of her gardening books, landed on his website and learned that he is offering a 40-acre property in Tehachapi for sale (He is retiring and moving to the Seattle area from southern California). Self followed his links around to Larner Seeds, where she ended up ordering seed packets of California Asters, Douglas Iris, Coast Lotus, and Bee Plants. She’s never grown anything from seed before, so this is going to be an experiment.

Son didn’t bring his car up, which told self he didn’t plan to do much socializing. He has papers to write, exams to prepare for. Yesterday, he was home the whole day. He and his dad walked the dogs, and then self cooked the turkey breast roast she’d bought from Costco some weeks ago (basted in honey and lemon juice and crushed pineapple, results: outstanding!). After it got dark, hubby started a fire, while self started doing son’s laundry (In fairness, a much smaller pile than she’s used to seeing from previous visits).

There was a James Bond marathon on TV: all the Pierce Brosnan James Bond movies were showing, one after the other. Self got to see Judi Dench’s first appearance as “M.” She saw the best Bond girl of the Brosnan era, Sophie Marceau (What ever happened to her?) She also saw Michelle Yeoh, whippet-thin and kick-ass. The one Bond girl that self absolutely cannot abide, whose acting is so bad that every time self catches a glimpse of it, she wants to barf, is Halle Berry.

By night-time, son and hubby had had enough of Brosnan and decided to order “Casino Royale,” the 2006 re-make, from pay-per-view. Then he and son got to watch Daniel Craig’s excellent first outing in the Bond role, while self fell asleep, right out there on the couch in the living room (Why is self so amazingly tired these days? Yesterday was a vacation from her usual Thursday teaching schedule, but she did not feel particularly rested) Self woke up just in time to see the Vesper Lynd death scene. Self thinks Eva Green was a great Bond girl, almost right up there with Kim Basinger, Sophie Marceau, and Michelle Yeoh.

Son is hitching a ride back to San Luis Obispo on Sunday, with old Sacred Heart Prep classmate Finnesey. Finnesey started college on the East Coast, at his Dad’s alma mater. He didn’t like it and began wending his way back West, trying out a college in New Orleans before ending up in Cal Poly. Finnesey runs cross-country and plays the guitar. Self hasn’t laid eyes on him since son’s senior year in high school, and when he walked in with son on Tuesday night she was surprised to see that he now has a beard and long, shoulder-length hair and a leather bracelet; he would not look out of place in a movie set in the 60s.

Another of son’s high school friends, a boy who loved acting and who has gone with us twice to see Cal Shakes performances in the Bruins amphitheatre in Orinda, fell in love with a girl who dumped him, and then went crazy and stalked her and actually confronted her when he caught her with a new boyfriend and is now facing an eight-month jail sentence.

Yet another of son’s high school friends, Alex, is teaching in Addis Ababa.

Another high school friend, Phil, graduated in engineering from UC Irvine and is working at what sounds like a very boring job in Long Beach.

Son still doesn’t know what he will do after he graduates, next June. He talks of bringing some friends to Asia. They want to stay in brother’s fabulous Hong Kong apartment, but go to Bangkok and Australia as well. Self doesn’t know if she can go back home with him, and hubby is scheduled to go, but in October, for his mother’s 80th birthday. Self sincerely hopes Dearest Mum will not give son too much grief. In the meantime, self has this trip to Manila in January, and then two more trips: both to Chicago. And then who knows what 2009 will bring? Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

This Would Have Been the XXX Most Gorgeous Day

Self had such a wonderful afternoon.  She spent most of it outside, planting Galactic Star daffodil bulbs in the backyard.  It took her quite a long time, for aside from fluffing up the soil with gypsum and organic amendments, she had to construct a kind of wire barrier over each planting, to forestall crafty Gracie, whose diet du jour lately consists of chewing up the bulbs self has so lovingly planted —  as she did last week with a whole bunch of fritillaria bulbs that self had just purchased from Costco.

If self had just stayed out in the backyard, enjoying the last rays of this gorgeous fall afternoon, instead of coming inside to wash her grimy hands, she wouldn’t have had to listen to the four messages from Bank of America telling her that someone had been charging massive amounts again on Dearest Mum’s Bank of America debit card.

Self stood there, receiver pressed to her ear, waves of shifting emotion washing over her as she listened to each of the bank’s messages.  But, first and foremost, self was mighty confused.  First of all, Dearest Mum had assured her that she had closed the account.  Or, at any rate, had cut up the card.  And

“W” the Movie

It was a gorgeous day, dear blog readers.  Hubby’s starting to water.  Earlier, we walked the dogs.  Funny, we noticed that if Bella lags too far behind, as lately she does more and more, her arthritic legs becoming less and less able to carry her, Gracie waits until Bella and hubby come within sight before she will proceed.  So the walks become longer and longer.  But that’s all right, because self loves October, and it is so much fun to see the neighbors’ Halloween decorations:  the headstones on the lawn, the scarecrows, the pumpkins, the cobwebs draped across fences and porches.

Self planted a thunbergia gregorii.  She said a prayer:  Grow.

Hubby’s younger brother returned to New York.  Dearest Mum comes on Tuesday.  Aunt e-mailed Dear Bro:  “I’m sorry for your loss.  But you are a survivor.  Could you send me Ying’s death certificate so I can get a free airline ticket for your mom?”

That is the kind of e-mail that is only possible in Filipino families.  Ying would not have minded, self is sure of it.  She would be happy to know that she could still do something to help Dearest Mum, or any member of the family.

Dearest Ying!  Sometimes self will remember the time, four years ago, when we visited Angkor Wat.  She remembers their faithful driver, who they hired for four days.  If self were to return now, by herself, and looked him up, how shocked he would be to learn that the beautiful girl who he drove around four years ago has died.  And so would the people who own the little guest house where self and Ying stayed, sharing rooms and meals with a couple from Paris.

Hubby and self watched “W” in the downtown Redwood City cinema.  It was long:  We caught the 1:30 showing and were out a little past 4.  The day was starting to fade.  The movie kept self riveted for almost its entire length.  There was only one portion where self started to nod off, and that was when the key planners of the Iraq War were holding a strategy session.

Thandie Newton/Condoleeza did not have much to do in this movie except nod and deliver demurely downcast and yet strange grimaces.  She was such a hoot!  Self could not take her eyes off her, whenever she was on-screen.  How did this normally beautiful woman achieve such a transformation?

Rob Corddry played Ari Fleischer.  It was a very small role, mostly involving flitting in and out of rooms or trailing worriedly after W as he left a press conference.  The actor who played Paul Wolfowitz did in fact look like Paul Wolfowitz, but self doesn’t know the actor’s name.  And, hey, what an accolade for Tony Blair:  he got to be played by Welsh hottie Ioan Gruffudd.

Jeffrey Wright played Colin Powell and was very good.  Toby Jones played Karl Rove!

The whole movie, in fact, was such a hoot.  And afterwards, you did see W as a human being, albeit a tragically flawed one.  If self closed her eyes and just listened to Josh Brolin’s voice, she could have sworn she was listening to the genuine article, so well did Brolin capture Bush II’s every inflection, his Texas home-boy twang.  And, too, it was so nice to see Ellen Burstyn again, playing a very pretty version of Barbara Bush.  And that actor who played the farmer in “Babe”, James Cromwell, who’s parlayed that movie into a very long career playing (usually) bad guys, here plays Bush I as the epitome of the disappointed father.

Self thinks it is Oliver Stone’s best movie in over a decade.  The theatre was almost full, which self hadn’t seen since watching “Blood Diamond”, almost two years ago, and that had Leo.  The audience rarely laughed, but when self looked around, everyone was riveted, absolutely riveted.  A young woman to self’s left sat on the edge of her seat the whole time.  Presumably she, and the rest of the audience, were Democrats.

A very old couple created quite a stir because they could barely walk, and were hard of hearing besides, and kept stumbling on their way up the steps.  People helped them find seats and get seated.  Afterwards, they held up everyone because they could barely walk.  Self thought about how badly they must have wanted to see this movie.

Self also saw previews for “Milk” (Sean Penn absolutely riveting, in every frame of the preview, and there’s Josh Brolin again in his latest transformation, this time playing Dan White, and convincingly too), and Ron Howard’s latest, “Frost/Nixon”, which she definitely wants to see.  There was also a preview for a thriller starring Clive Owen and, in what looked to be a very bit role, Naomi Watts.  Why cannot this woman ever get the kind of role she deserves?  She can really act, can’t Hollywood see that?

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

Various Odes to Summer

Ode #1:
Oh, weather that is hitting 100 degrees (all over the San Francisco Bay Area) and adding to the misery of the $4/a gallon gasoline: How self wishes you had come just a week later, for yesterday self spent hours digging planting holes for the following: passiflora and two five-gallon loropetalum. And now the plants’ leaves have shriveled as if they’d just been passed through an oven.

Ode #2:
Oh, Tony Shalhoub: How self loves to watch you as Adrian Monk, especially on a hot day like today when self is supine on couch because it is too hot to be anywhere else (though self did make an attempt to locate a book called Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs at the Redwood City Main Library, a few hours ago)

Ode #3:
Oh, T. C. Boyle (and self learned just yesterday that the “T” stood for “Tom”, which was a name self thinks is altogether too pedestrian for you), you and your black suit and your large stone pendant and your pouff-y hair and your piercing (but also somewhat vacant) gaze: How self’s heart beat in her chest when she accosted you after your reading at xxxx community college, while her two English 1B students could do nothing but stammer out their admiration, and you revealed that you wrote the story about Pakistan although you know very little about Pakistan and in fact have never been there, which only tripled self’s admiration

Ode # 4:
Oh Kokomo Colada yogurt smoothie from Yumi Yogurt on El Camino Real: How self adores your lambent blend of banana, pineapple, and coconut — the perfect antidote to this scorching weather. How self dreamed about you for hours and finally relented and stood at the end of a line that was 10-deep (the first eight like escapees from some techno-geek convention, Asian-Am males with short short hair and polo shirts and khaki pants. The only thing missing were the pens in the shirt pockets, dear blog readers)

Ode # 5:
Oh son who bothered self exceedingly yesterday with your last-minute decision to enroll in a college-level course in Spain that is delivered in Spanish (knowing very well your last Spanish was in eighth grade, with Mrs. Teresa C, who wasn’t a teacher, just a member of the Mother’s Club, and not even, herself, Spanish), and who had to get thrown out of the program by irate Mr. Martinez, who argued with self and then with hubby before finally stamping “Denied” on your application: How self wishes you would go somewhere else, Tel Aviv or Hong Kong, where one of self’s Dear Bros has that fab three-bedroom apartment and you wouldn’t have to pay a thing, no not a thing, only for your airfare, and wouldn’t that be preferable to spending four hours M-F sweltering in a classroom in the University of Valladolid?

Ode # 6:
Oh, Orhan Pamuk, who writes altogether too much of snow in the book of the same name (and not enough about the virgin suicides, pace Jeffrey Eugenides): How self wishes the blizzard would be over already, so self could discover who killed Ka.

Ode # 7:
Oh, man who loves Thom McGuane who excoriated self for her “feminist” reading of the great man’s work on xxxxxxx.com: How humbled self is by the knowledge that no one will ever defend self’s work the way you have McGuane’s.

Ode # 8:
Oh, students, you who chat about all and sundry after class, who offer to walk self to her car so that she will not be harassed by J & J: How self adores you, how self truly adores all of you.

The Future Is Here, and a Creature Sighting

It is a gorgeous day but it started out chilly and you sat in the living room reading the San Francisco Chronicle (an article about Navigenics, a Redwood City company that is directed at consumer DNA testing) and you thought: The future is here.

But apparently no one believed you, because no one looked at the post, and so you decided to go outside and see what was up in the backyard, see which plants were blooming and what-not, and you believe you saw the same squirrel you saw early this morning, stretched full length, its back legs on a branch, its front legs grasping the (supposedly squirrel-proof) bird feeder. The squirrel grabs mouthfuls of seed, and now you recall that the bird feeder is supposed to drop, closing its feeding spouts, whenever anything as weighty as a squirrel tries to jump on its little perches, but the squirrel just keeps grabbing mouthfuls of seed, and Gracie (who metamorphosed into an almost unrecognizably obese and slothful creature while self was in Tel Aviv) is not inclined to go outside, and finally you get very annoyed after watching the squirrel for about 10 minutes, and you shout something at the top of your lungs, and you go outside with your laptop, and you decide that what you really need to do is write more.

(Time passes)

In the afternoon, around 3 p.m., you began to feel an ineffable craving for a Keanu Reeves movie and/ or a coconut cream pie and, figuring that the Keanu Reeves movie would be cheaper (and probably better for your figure) than the pie, you wended your way to decrepit old cinema off Bayshore, there to discover that the 3:25 show had Spanish subtitles, which you found to be a terrible distraction, since the movie is practically one long F— you! rant, and so you decided to return at a later time, and now the problem was where would you find the best, the most delicious coconut cream pie on the Peninsula?

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

TV, Gardening: The 2nd Most Gorgeous Day

In keeping with self’s morbid pre-occupations this morning, self is now having dinner in front of HDTV, watching an MSNBC program on “Life Inside San Quentin.” Self expected all the guards to be brutish-looking, like walk-ons from “Deliverance.” But they aren’t. In fact, they look perfectly normal. (But, who would want to work as a guard at a state prison? Self thinks that would probably rank as one of the most depressing jobs, maybe just a step above strawberry picker).

Self landed on this program because she got tired of watching Fox News (strictly for the entertainment value, mind you), where the top news story of the day (notwithstanding killings at Northern Illinois University) was the murder of a Manhattan therapist, in her office, by an unidentified man. Man is still at large (with a suitcase apparently full of the following items, and self knows not how this information was obtained: rope, women’s clothing, and butcher knives), and self is sooo glad she does not live in Manhattan at the moment.

But it was a totally, totally gorgeous day! Self did not have to teach a class, so she spent most of the day in the garden, digging in the soil and weeding (manicure ruined beyond repair; self handy with the acetone and the cotton balls this evening). Today, she planted the following:

one “Leatherleaf” fern

one Helleborus “Courage”

two white Japanese anemones

one white “mophead” hydrangea

Yes, self was getting mighty tired of seeing all those bare spots underneath the trees and hopes that these plants will survive and propagate and make everything look lush and really beautiful. It was really quiet in the backyard because today self didn’t hear any of the neighbors: not the Baggetts, a family with three kids; nor Claudio who is from Italy (The third neighbor doesn’t count because the two men who live in that house never, ever go into their backyard, and the last time self peeked over the fence, she saw it was full of weeds almost as high as self)

Self also e-mailed Fr. Miguel Bernad, who sent her a very nice letter in January. This is a man who is 93 or thereabouts, and still has the energy to write and correspond with former students. What a treasure!

She was going to see a movie (either “Persepolis” or “The Bucket List” — she is saving “Definitely, Maybe” to watch with niece G, who is back at Stanford now, after spending the fall in Oxford, England), but spent all her cash at Redwood City Nursery, buying two beautiful, bronze-leaved Loropetum chinensis.

Hubby said he’d be home late, so self made herself dinner of tortellini with pesto sauce. She was inspired to cut oregano from a bush growing in her garden; this she chopped up with some red pepper. Then, she folded the mixture in with the tortellini and the pesto sauce. Mmmm, delish!

Life really can’t get much better than this, dear blog readers. Self fervently hopes this is only the start of what will be a loooong string of similar days, in 2008.