August 28, 2019 at 7:49 pm (Links, Lists, Places)
Tags: California, Events, festivals, Palo Alto, Redwood City, summer, weekends
Self loves whenever viveka of my guilty pleasures posts for a new photo challenge.
Yesterday she posted on Tuesday Photo Challenge’s prompt: CITY. She has pictures of Chicago, Seattle, Hong Kong, Stockholm, and several others.
Self took the picture below last Saturday, during the Palo Alto Art & Wine Festival.
Here’s a picture of Courthouse Square in self’s very own Redwood City:
Friday, Just before an evening concert, July 2019
Self gave a reading at Philippine Expressions in Long Beach in March 2018. The naval yards are huge. This is the marina at sunset. I have never seen so many boats gathered in one place, virtually stretching to the horizon. My feeling was awe:
Long Beach, California, March 2018
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August 27, 2019 at 6:20 pm (Artists and Writers, Flowers, Links)
Tags: Garden, inspiration, poetry, summer, The New Yorker
Self loves C. L. Odell’s poem in the 24 June 2019 New Yorker.
Geraniums, Front Porch, August 2019
PEONY
An excerpt
So let me have this now
before the blossoms
take my absence
from the yard
and I am again only one-sided,
a living thing responsible
to live, finding myself in tall grass,
whispering back.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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August 18, 2019 at 1:17 am (Flowers, Links)
Tags: California, Fridays, Garden, happiness, memories, photography, Redwood City, summer
Self LOVES still life. Taking pictures of things are a lot of fun.
So happy to join the Photo A Week Challenge this week.
Still Life with Reading Material: Home in Redwood City, August 2019 (Self brought that shell all the way from the Philippines)
More Redwood City: Dining Room, July 2019
And Still More Redwood City: Front Porch, July 2019
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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August 16, 2019 at 2:26 am (destinations, Links, Places, Plays, Traveling)
Tags: Cal Shakes, Cee Neuner, Cornwall, England, Fowey, Mendocino, summer
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge is TREES.
This is self’s second photo challenge post today. She spent a long time poring over her photo archive and came up, finally, with these three:
Early Morning Fog, Mendocino, April 2018
Cal Shakes Grove, Orinda, CA, September 2018
Monterey Pines in Fowey, Cornwall, England, May 2019
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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August 15, 2019 at 8:53 pm (Family, Links, Places)
Tags: inspiration, memories, photography, Redwood City, summer
Look at the beautiful set of lock photographs in viveka’s my guilty pleasures, one of the blogs self loves! There’s a little history behind each lock.
She was posting for the tuesday photo challenge.
And here are self’s pictures of the locks in her wee cottage/house, 1250 square feet, good enough for a couple, built in the best, the absolute best neighborhood in Redwood City, CA, in 1939.
The original owner was Jack de Benedetti, who died at 90-something, in this house.
A developer bought it for a song, worked on it, then sold it to us in 1991.
He added a half-bath, but kept all the original bones of the house, and that included lots and lots of windows.
The locks on the windows are much in need of refurbishing, but heck the windows won’t even open. The wood has warped. In a way, that’s good, because the house is very safe (no burglars will be creeping in through the windows)
Without further ado: window locks on an old old house
Lock # 1
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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August 15, 2019 at 12:55 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Memoirs, Places, Recommended)
Tags: English writers, environment, essays, London, natural history, nonfiction, reading lists, Redwood City, summer
from p. 118 of Landfill: Gull Watching and Trash Picking in the Anthropocene, “Needs”:
I’d read my Henry Mayhew on London’s waste workers and had been out at night on the Thames with the body-salvagers of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. I stayed away from Milton. My telescope wouldn’t have been welcomed by anyone and I don’t think I could have used it. The hunt for the body resumed in the late autumn of 2017 in a part of the landfill adjacent to the area already examined. After seven fruitless weeks the search was called off.
Redwood City, July 2019
Love Dee’s book. So much.
Stay tuned.
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August 3, 2019 at 10:31 pm (Books, destinations, Flowers, Links, Movies, Places, plans, Recommended, Weather)
Tags: California, Garden, inspiration, psychology, Redwood City, Saturday, summer, summer movies
Self’s current book, Mihaly Czsikszentmihalyi’s FLOW: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OPTIMAL EXPERIENCE is a very, very interesting book.
Her son and daughter-in-law were Psychology majors at Claremont, the school where the author taught. In fact, she read about him in the Claremont Graduate University alumni magazine, The Flame.
She is trying to practice Flow thinking (see graph below). She is trying to achieve “complexity” in her consciousness. This will be her project for the rest of the summer.
She thinks this goal is very much tied in with the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: TAKING A BREAK.
Today, she walked downtown, which she hadn’t done in two weeks. Courthouse Square was empty. Nevertheless, the trip was not in vain, for she saw a movie: Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Is this a ‘Flow’ experience? Self thinks it is. Watching movies is one of self’s most enjoyable activities.
Mid-Afternoon, Courthouse Square, Redwood City, CA
And, she spends A LOT of time in her garden, where her efforts are repaid with gorgeous blooms like this one, on her Sheila’s Perfume rose:
Sheila’s Perfume, last week of July 2019
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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August 3, 2019 at 5:12 am (Books, Recommended, Surprises)
Tags: Fridays, nonfiction, reading lists, summer, superstition
. . . the culture of the Dobu islanders, as described by the anthropologist Reo Fortune, is one that encouraged constant fear of sorcery, mistrust among even the closest relatives, and vindictive behavior. Just going to the bathroom was a major problem, because it involved stepping out into the bush, where everybody expected to be attacked by bad magic when alone among the trees.
Strange how self can relate to this mode of feeling, which is a form of “magical thinking” — the idea that one can actively seek to prevent future bad things, by taking inordinately neurotic precautions.
Stay tuned.
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July 23, 2019 at 3:52 am (Recommended, Surprises, Weather)
Tags: Mondays, summer
Self is soooo glad this little thingamajig from Manila still works. She found it in a desk drawer (she’s doing massive excavations of every single closet in her house). She has no air-conditioning so it is really handy. Amazing! All she needs to do is lift that thing right against her face. Heaven!
Cool!
She also JUST noticed that the thingamajig is shaped like a penguin. Must sell like hotcakes in Manila. Or other hot places.
Stay tuned.
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July 21, 2019 at 5:36 am (Books, destinations, Filipino Writers, Food and Drink, Memoirs, Places, Recommended, Weather, Women Writers)
Tags: Asian American Writers, English writers, Kepler's, memoir, Menlo Park, novel, restaurants, Saturday, summer
Bookstores are fine places.
Kepler’s Books, Menlo Park: That woman is very wisely dressed.
Staff Picks, Kepler’s Books
More Staff Picks! Leanne Shapton’s mother is Pinay.
The order line at Café Borrone, around 10 a.m.
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