stgulik

As May draws to a close, I look at my calendar on the sidebar and see that I *very nearly* achieved the goal of posting Something Every Day. I'm pleased. From now on, my goal is to post on LJ at least twice a week. It's entertaining, and now I can see by the number of comments which types of things the flist responds to most, and I can explore those some more. Being a nearly-empty-nester, I need new hobbies.

Speaking of hobbies, here's where I am on that Chinese (Japanese?) (Asian) tile piece.( Read more... )

Last winter, I bought this art piece at a thrift store. It consists of decorated tiles set in plywood with gold fabric glued down. I think the fabric is silk--it sure tears like silk. There is a plain frame, which I have removed for now. The whole thing looks like it used to hang in a Chinese restaurant.

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I forgot to do SED yesterday!

We went to an outdoor wedding, which was lovely, but there was no shade. This is California, people! Between April and October, we just do not subject people to mandatory attendance where there is no shade. After we congratulated the bride and groom and dropped off our present, we departed and went somewhere to rehydrate.

Actually, we went to the restaurant where our daughter works part-time. We made sure to be seated in her section, which we hadn't done before. She was excited to see us! We snuck peeks at the baseball game on our phones while we ate, then tipped her lavishly and went home.

This morning, everyone's still asleep. I think I'll get dressed and start on a garage project. The dogs can join me and get underfoot hang out.

Today we found out our office is getting a brand-new director. Our current boss, who has been Acting Director, will either be bumped down to Assistant Director, or bumped further down to Lowly Analyst, like the rest of us. He is Mr. Depressed right now, though he's trying not to show it. Meanwhile, the rest of us have been googling the crap out of the new director, hoping to glean insight into what her priorities might be when she comes aboard.

All this by way of saying, today was somewhat fraught. Still, I'm really looking forward to a new direction. Will she improve the place, polish it up, return it to its former glory? Will she take the place apart and sell it on Craigslist? I've been there eight years and frankly, either way works for me. I'm good.

At the drug store, I earned one free ticket to see Pitch Perfect 2. Do you think I ought to see the first Pitch Perfect, or would I understand the sequel without seeing the original?

Take the survey below!

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Tonight I get to show you how I usually marinate tofu ahead of cooking stir-fry. Most chefs on TV, you know, use Limoges bowls and cut-glass eyedroppers when they marinate tofu. Now for something completely different.

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Ready for anything!

Saw my mother yesterday. Normally, I wouldn't put myself through the 3-hour round trip two times in a month, but when I spoke to her on Mother's Day, I suffered a paroxysm of guilt and promised a belated visit.

Oh, well, it was necessary and we got a lot done. I took her to Home Depot to buy potted herbs for her garden. We parked in the handicapped slot and put up her brand-new placard to prove we belonged there. Next to our space, someone had left one of the store scooters. My 76-year-old mother has never ridden a scooter before! I knew she was in for a treat. So I helped her into the seat, showed her how to go forward and backward, and off she went. She loved it, I can tell, though part of her still considers such devices giving in. It did my heart good to watch her all carefree, toodling down the aisles, and not have to worry she might fall using her normal walker.

I worry about her more than she worries about herself. Some worries are legitimate, like ones for her health and safety. I arranged to have a helper come in three hours a day, and I keep an eye out for other useful things to do.

Many worries are not things I need to take on. For instance, one bedroom in her house is where my brother and his son lived for a while when they moved back to town. People, please understand, they basically lived like squatters in that bedroom together--mattresses on the floor, food wrappers everywhere, dirty underwear, cigarette packs, comic books, video games ... After they moved out, we even discovered dried snot on the walls. (Pray it was done by the younger of them, but who the hell knows.) Groom and I took the mattresses to the dump and washed out the room as best we could, but the walls are still a little ... streaky. I want to paint them, but Mom has had enough of that whole chapter of her life, and she forbids me to bring it up. Again, I don't need to take this on because the look of one remote wall doesn't directly affect her health or safety. But I keep a little inventory of low-level worries at the back of my mind, ready to trot out at odd moments.

It should be a lovely Sunday, back in my own little house. I'll watch some baseball this morning while getting laundry done. And I promised the dogs an extra-long walk!

My daughter and her friends made coffee cups for their mothers. Yesterday I received my belated Mother's Day gift! My camera absolutely can't do it justice, but here:
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Still trying to dig out a recipe I did not, strictly speaking, get from another LJ flist member.

In the meantime, I'll share a short parody from 2004, which I'm sure was around the time of the very first Nigerian bank scam emails.

( Oh, go on! )

For Mother's Day, my little family went out for Vietnamese at one of my daughter's favorite restaurants. When you're related to me, there'll be no elbowing through the crush of noisy families at Olive Garden, thank you. Too many restaurants on God's green earth for that particular torture. The place was called "Pho Hoc." The wait staff all wore t-shirts that took full advantage of puns on Pho. One kid's said "Pho King," another's said "What the Pho?" Now we know why my daughter got such a kick out of the place.

I ordered something called double mushroom tofu, which was really good, and a green tea milk drink, which is obviously an acquired taste. Groom, the only meat-eater amongst us, enjoyed pork, as well as an avocado milkshake, which sounded like unfortunate typo but actually worked.

Called my own mother and had a nice chat, and I promised to go see her next weekend. This year I have this whole mental list of the big and little projects to be done around her place. Next weekend is the car--we recently learned she hasn't had taken it out of the garage for over six months. (Well, we said "How long has it been? Six months??" and she shrugged noncommitally, so it might well have been longer.) It seems her IHSS helper squires her about. Lovely. The car will need a battery jump, fluid and brake inspection, tire massages, and I don't know what all. We'll see. This is how we adult kids say thank you to our mothers, you know: we educate them about ethnic food and run checkups on their cars.

Finally watched Season 3 of Sherlock tonight. So many in-jokes and gifs are now explained! Now I know the reason for this t-shirt.

Hey, we secured a vacation cabin today! And the crowd goes wild!

There's nothing like watching a scrappy Cairn terrier and a bad-tempered chihuahua going ten rounds when you're trying to watch baseball in peace.

They're loud, they growl constantly, and they take turns jumping on each other and bumping each other into the furniture.

Terrier: ::pushes the other dog with mighty force into the coffee table::

Chihuahua: ::growls ferociously, pushes back again the terrier, into ... my feet

Me: OUTSIDE, BOTH OF YOU

Dogs: ::ignore human in tandem::

If I can figure out how, we'll go to video some time this month.